NFL Playoff Quarterback Power Rankings

My initial idea for this week was to rank the teams based on spiritual energies or whatever and by “my idea” I mean I got it from friend of the blog @LowFashionLover. The only problem, I decided, is that it would just be a rehash of my gibberish from the last 4 months or whatever. I mean, this is basically what I did every week with the Gambling For Sanity shit, so I decided I’d do something else instead of explain why the Cowboys are rotten soul ass for the 20^th time.

And lo, my playoff quarterback power rankings were born. These are based on a combination of factors – how good they were this season, how good they’ve been over their career, what they’ve won, what they’ve lost, and of course, the intangible Spirit Warrior quality which isn’t something I just made up but a vital component – perhaps the vital component – in any competitive endeavor or honest life.

12. Lamar Jackson - Baltimore

I assume Lamar Jackson is gonna start for Baltimore since Joe Flacco has finally been drowned in the Baltimore harbor or wherever the hell he fucked off to, and that’s a good thing for Baltimore since their offense only started to click with Jackson and his legs. The problem is, at least right now, there’s not much more to Jackson than those legs, and baby, that’s a hard way to win in the playoffs.

Of course, Lamar Jackson has never done anything either. Sure, he won the Heisman at Louisville, but we’re talking Advanced Concussion Ball here. One bad hit, one twist of the leg by some dirty asshole at the bottom of a pile, and Lamar Jackson is basically useless. So it’s the bottom of the rankings for him. At least for now. I like the dude, and I think he has Spirit Warrior potential, but the world is not fair, especially to Potential Spirit Warriors, who it enjoys snuffing out before they can realize that potential. I mean, shit, just look at me.

11. Dak Prescott – Dallas

Dak Prescott was sort of a sensation as a rookie, but no one has really liked him since. Sure, the Cowboys are back in the playoffs, but that has more to do with the NFL East collapsing en masse than anything the Cowboys did, and more specifically, anything that Prescott did. If Alex Smith had stayed healthy and The Eagles didn’t Philadelphia all over the fuckin’ place, the Cowboys would have finished third and everyone would want Dak kicked out of town. Jerry Jones would have had him buried in an oilfield or some shit or sold into slavery to some rubber tree plantation down in Brazil or Indonesia. They still do that shit, and you best believe Jerry Jones is involved somehow.

Anyway, that’s obviously a rotten spiritual situation, and it’s hard to see Dak Prescott overcoming any of that. Of course, there’s also the fact that the motherfucker is named Dak, which sounds like some futuristic lacrosse player. Just rotten energy all around for this dude. If he didn’t have Ezekiel Elliott to hand off to every game, this shit would get really dark really fast. Some would say that having to rely on a violent lady beater to go through life is already really dark, but shit, welcome to the NFL.

10. Mitchell Trubisky – Chicago

I don’t trust Mitch aka QB10 yet, and more importantly, I know that Bears fans don’t trust him. This is as much because of their woeful history at quarterback as it is anything to do with him personally, but those are the psychic environs he finds himself in. It’s not his fault that the Bears quarterback list reads Jim McMahon and then, uh, Rex Grossman? Kyle Orton? Erik Kramer? Fuck, man. Fuck!

Trubisky has made obvious progress so far, and probably just had the best Bears quarterback season in forever, but again, that’s more about the Bears than him. He is a number one overall pick, so the talent is there, but how the fuck are you gonna back a BEARS QUARTERBACK in the playoffs, especially one who has never won a goddamn thing? There are probably better years ahead for Trubisky, but for now, this dude is still out of his element.

9. Whoever the Fuck the Eagles QB Is

I’m still not sure if the Eagles are gonna go with wunderkind-turned-battery throwing target Carson Wentz, or the dude who won the Super Bowl last year, Nick Foles. This is partly because the Eagles don’t seem to know themselves, and partly because I’m not bothering to find out. Obviously, that means that this isn’t exactly an ideal situation.

Wentz is good, or at least should be good, but Eagles fans seem to be blaming too much of the team’s problems on him, which is probably mostly because Eagles fans are by and large irrational ogres. But this is how a dude’s spiritual energy gets ruined, especially a dude who spent his college years playing second tier ball in North Dakota. This motherfucker is like the farm stud with a big dick who gets off the bus all wide eyed and then gets fucked, both literally and spiritually, into oblivion by the big city pimps. He’s still got a hard dick right now, and he’s off buying muscle cars and making records with Reed Rothchild, but he’s only one year away from turning tricks in a parking lot for hateful Eagles fans that just want to jump him and leave him laying in his own blood to cover for their own self-loathing.

Nick Foles, on the other hand, has a mediocre dick, he’s spent most of his career as the pizza boy in fuck scenes who watches wide eyed as the real stars get the job done, and no one really expected much from him. But then Wentz couldn’t get it up, Foles had to step in, and shocked everyone by fucking good enough to win an AVN award last year.

That means he’s always gonna be hovering just over Wentz’s shoulder, which is not a good thing for Wentz’s spiritual energy or for the Eagles, for that matter. It may seem like a good thing, to have a backup who won the fucking Super Bowl, but it really isn’t. It just meant that the pressure was on Wentz to be fucking perfect this season, and when he wasn’t, Eagles fans tore him apart. They either had to ride with Wentz or Foles, and they chose neither and it’s fucked them.

The problem with turning to Foles is that while he may be the stud for the day, he still just has a mediocre dick. He just managed to have the fuck of his life at the right time. That’s all. Now when he can’t get it up or ends up splooging all over himself, or dribbling on a teammate’s thigh as they think “What the fuck?” Eagles fans are gonna turn on his ass HARD. And then what do they have? A small-dicked loser and a broken big dick that can’t get hard anymore. That’s life in the Big City, I guess. The only reason they’re this high on the list is because Wentz still does have a big dick and because of what happened with Foles last season. 9^th is a position of respect in this case.

8. Jared Goff – Rams

I like Jared Goff. He’s obviously good, and by this point on the list, they’re all pretty good. The problem is that I don’t know if you can trust him. There is just something missing, something indefinable, something ineffable (fuck you, Alex.) I don’t know what it is.

He’s never won anything, obviously, so it’s hard to give him any credit spiritually, and while he’s been good, he hasn’t been great. This is completely unfair, really. I just looked at his numbers again and they’re great, okay? But the thing is, is that I don’t know how much of that is him and how much of it is the Rams and Sean McVay. It feels like this is a system type thing more than a quarterback transcending himself and his team to be great. This doesn’t make any fuckin’ sense at all. I understand this. This is utter gibberish. But I feel like if you swapped Goff with, say, Matthew Stafford, you’d get the same result.

Now this is where we start arguing about Stafford, but I don’t want to do that. From one angle, that should speak well for Goff. I mean, Matthew Stafford is pretty good, right? But from another angle, Stafford is who he is, a talented dude who’s never won a goddamn thing. BUT THAT’S BECAUSE OF HIS TEAM, you scream at me, and that’s sort of the point. I feel like Goff might be similar. He’s a good quarterback, but he’s not a quarterback who’s capable of transcending his team. Just like Stafford. So, yeah, Stafford would do well in Los Angeles while Goff would lose with the Lions. That means they are good enough quarterbacks to win with, but not so good that they can carry you over the hump like, say, Brady or Russell Wilson.

Then again, maybe Goff is that guy. Who knows? That’s sort of the point. We don’t know right now, and we won’t know until he does the damn thing. Is this fair? No. Is it ridiculous? Yes. Will I look like an idiot when this is all said and done? Probably. But welcome to Armchair Linebacker.

7. DeShaun Watson – Houston

Wait . . . what? DeShaun Watson ahead of Goff? Yes. I know this probably doesn’t make sense to you, but here’s my rationale: DeShaun Watson won a Heisman and a national championship in college. The dude has done it before. Sure, not on this level, but being a winner is something that travels. That is good spiritual energy.

And, I mean, if you look at the numbers, he’s basically in Goff’s league there too. But he also runs well, and is a weapon that way. I’m ready to say that Watson is a better quarterback by just about any metric.

The problem, of course, is that he doesn’t have a huge body of work, an entire career to fall back on, to make people confident that he’s truly The Man. That’s really the only thing keeping him from being higher on this list. (And don’t get me started on people who think “higher” means like 9^th or 10^th instead of 4^th or 5^th, which they would call “lower.” They do this all the time when it comes to seeding in the NCAA tournament and it drives me fucking nuts. The argument is that, well, 10 is higher than 7 so should be called a “higher” seed or ranking. This is fucking preposterous. It should be called a “lower” seed or ranking because that is what the number signifies. In this case and in seeding cases, 10 is lower than 7. This shouldn’t be hard for people, but it is and it makes me SEETHE.) Anyway… uh, yeah. That’s it for this dude.

6. Philip Rivers – Chargers

Philip Rivers has had a long and productive career, and when it’s over, he’ll probably go down as being underrated. The problem with Ol’ Phil, of course, is that he’s a colossal asshole and a dude who always blows it in the end. I’ve compared him more than once to Matthew Stafford, and… yeah, that still holds true. Go back and read what I wrote in the Jared Goff section. That all applies to Rivers. The difference is that Rivers has a fucking decade and a half on Goff, and has proven over and over again that he is an upper tier NFL quarterback. Conversely, he’s also proven that he’s exactly what I fear both Stafford and Goff are – good, but not good enough.

In one respect, I feel like I should swap him and Goff, because Goff at least has a chance to prove me wrong. But in another respect, I feel like Rivers maybe deserves the benefit of the doubt. I mean, for all the shit I’ve talked about him, for as big an asshole as he is, you just can’t kill this fucker. He never goes away. And if he manages to win it all this year, all of that noise changes for him. I mean, I don’t think it will, but who’s to say?

If Jared Goff has Philip Rivers’ career, he should be ecstatic. But he should also be disappointed. This is a weird as fuck dynamic, but that’s sports, baby. In the end, I’m sticking Rivers here because it feels wrong to put him behind the two young dudes, but there’s no way that you can put him any higher than this, right? This is who he is. He’s number 6. That is Philip Rivers and it always will be. Jared Goff is number 8 right now. He has a chance to be number 1 someday, but probably not today.

5. Andrew Luck

This is probably too high. Fuck, it’s almost certainly too high, but here’s the thing: everyone kind of shit on Andrew Luck and wrote him off before this season. Some people even said he was finished, his career over due to injury. He responded by dragging the Colts to the playoffs and throwing for over 4,500 yards, with 39 touchdowns. That is a hell of an answer, and gives him some spiritual credibility that the dudes behind him just can’t match.

Maybe he is Rivers. I don’t know. But his career kind of hits the sweet spot between Rivers and Goff in that he’s done it more times than Goff, but hasn’t been ghettoized like Rivers. There’s also this: the Colts are not a good team. Not at all. Yet here they are, in the playoffs. If you swapped Goff with Luck, what would it look like? Luck would almost certainly be the golden boy as he led the Rams to the same sort of season they had this year, maybe even better. While Goff and the Colts probably would have a losing record. That’s my take and I’m sticking to it.

Sure, Luck may sound like Andre the Giant is fucking his throat every time he talks, and sure, he can’t grow facial hair without looking like he posts on Reddit, but you can’t deny that this dude rose up this season and proved something. People like to shit on him for never really earning all the slobbering praise he gets, but fuck it, I think he’s the real deal. He’s just on a shitty team, that’s all. The difference? He can actually transcend his team’s shittiness to drag them to the playoffs. Not many dudes can do that.

4. Drew Brees

Brees probably deserves to be a little higher, but fuck him. There is something spiritually rotten about him. People just never really notice because it’s balanced out by the spiritual richness of New Orleans. But the dude is a shit-smeared torture advocate. Torture advocates are dudes who live their lives in fear. They are cowards. So, yes, Drew Brees is a coward. He’s also a million years old.

Still, I’m not gonna deny that the dude is one of the best quarterbacks ever. He’s thrown for a million yards – check that, he’s thrown for the most yards in NFL history. That’s right. EVER. He’s also won a Super Bowl. The dude is a legend. I’m not gonna deny any of that. That should make him, at worst, second on this list. But I’ll say it again: fuck him.

There’s also this: the Saints have always been pretty inconsistent under Brees. They’ve had 5 losing seasons, 6 in which they never got above .500, and I’m gonna put it out there: it’s because Drew Brees is a spiritually bereft coward. Fuck him.

3. Russell Wilson – Seattle

I said before the season that Russell Wilson was a top 4 quarterback in the NFL. I also said that the Seahawks would finally collapse because they gutted their team and left Wilson hanging. All he did was lead them back to the playoffs. That shows me something. That shows me something huge.

He’s never been a huge OMG STATS guy, but his numbers are always good enough, he’s won a Super Bowl, should have won another if not for the most LOL WHAT ARE THEY DOING plays in sports history, and, again, he’s proven that he’s one of those extremely rare dude who can carry a shitty team all the way with him. I have nothing else to say here.

2. Patrick Mahomes – Kansas City

The dude just had a wild fucking year. 50 touchdowns. I mean, goddamn. He’s the MVP. He’s The Man. One problem: as a great man once said, to be The Man, you’ve gotta beat The Man WHOOOOOOOOOO!!!!

1. Tom Brady – New England

And Tom Brady is indisputably The Man.

For all the fun I’ve had with Brady this season, for all the American Pyscho histrionics, you can’t deny the dude. It’s easy to say that he’s spiritually corrupt because of all the obvious affectations and sociopath ridiculousness, but this dude is a wild OG Warrior deep at heart. He is that one in a million motherfucker who will sacrifice everything, including basic decency, to win. This is a dude who would fuck over his own baby to win a game of Old Maid. This motherfucker is a menace, a danger to society, but he is also who I would pick to lead Earth against an alien invasion.

You also have to remember this: the Patriots and Chiefs already played once this season. Who won? Brady and the Patriots. That’s right. If you come at the king, you best not miss, son. Until Mahomes can overthrow Brady, he can’t be number one on this list. Hell, even if he does do it, he’s probably still not number one. This is because Tom Brady is number one all time. He’s the Greatest.

Of course, The Greatest is also at an age where he’s starting to have to synthesize virgin blood in a lab in order to keep going without crumbling into dust in the light and being dragged shrieking to the hell that surely awaits him. Everything ends. Everything dies. And Tom Brady can see The End. The motherfucker can feel it. When he goes, and he’ll go soon, it will be an epic disaster, a noisy and dishonorable end. This is not a dude who will die quietly on his throne. This is a dude who will die raving incoherently covered in his own shit because he can’t control his bowels anymore while his servants loot the castle and his kingdom disintegrates into unholy ruin. It will be a goddamn scene, an utter fiasco that will leave all of New England dead, a ruined crater of human filth, their ghostly shrieks and wails reaching to the heavens, ignored by a disgusted god who will send them all to the gnarliest depths of hell.

That’s all coming for Tom Brady. But the thing is, is that he knows that. He feels it. And that’s just gonna make him even crazier and harder to beat. He’s gonna hang on with everything he’s got, and no motherfucker named Pat is gonna take that from him while he still has his wits, while he’s still Tom Fucking Brady. The man is a Force unto Himself, a spirit that defies things like morality, unbound by human measures of decency. He will absolutely kill Patrick Mahomes entire family if he feels threatened and he’ll get away with it too. Who’s gonna stop him? You with your petty humanity? No. The only thing that will stop Tom Brady is the inexorable erosion of Time itself, its humbling and dispassionate march which trods us all down, turning humanity into little more than a barren desert, unseen by the boots that keep marching, marching, marching . . . to Time, Tom Brady is nothing, the gods are nothing. To Time, even itself is nothing, an utter irrelevance, and in the end, it will crush itself too and we will all disappear, our very dust, our souls, into a black hole, and none of this will have mattered or have even happened. The universe is fucking wild. But the last voice to shriek in defiance as it bends and twists and is disintegrated by Time and that black hole will belong to Tom Brady. And that’s why he’s the Greatest. Now and Forever.

NFC West Preview

Like an abused wife who finally left her shithead of a man, the NFC West is a division in transition. By the way, after my dad left my mom many, many years ago when I was just a little Neil, my mom went to a place called Women in Transition for counseling, and they told her that love was a choice and that she could just choose not to love my dad anymore, and anyway that’s not relevant to anything here, I just have always thought that was impossibly dark and fucked up, and maybe helps explain why I’m still a Lions fan, I don’t know.

Ahem. Anyway, let’s start over. So, yeah, division in transition. This is because one team is basically starting over, another is close to having to do it, a third is trying to claw its way out of the ashes and a fourth improbably finds itself ready to take over. But all of this is fragile and unknown and there is a very real possibility that all four of these teams find their actual fates to be radically different, sort of like a woman who gets married and has a couple of kids and thinks her life is set only to have her husband decide he’s fuckin’ out of there and leaves her scrambling to pick up all the pieces, and also maybe it fucks up the kids pretty bad too, and . . . wait, what was I talking about?

Los Angeles Rams

Why They’ll Win: The Rams are that surprise team that improbably finds itself ready to take over the division. They went 11-5 last season and won the NFC West after not having a winning season since 2003, and they did it just after returning to the perpetually twilit insanity of LA, which would make people of a certain mindset suspicious that the whole thing was a work like pro wrestling, but we won’t think that way here, for this is supposed to be the positive section of the preview and I am nothing if not a law-abiding man who adheres strictly to the rules, especially when it comes to writing.

Anyway, the biggest thing the Rams have going for them is that they actually have a quarterback, and not just any quarterback, but one who looks like he’s on his way to being a true franchise quarterback in Jared Goff. The former number one overall pick, Goff made the Pro Bowl last season while leading the Rams back to LA glory. He should be good for a long time, and if he is, he gives the Rams a solid floor that may be higher than the ceilings for the rest of the division. This is a good situation to be in.

But it’s not just Goff. The Rams also have maybe the NFL’s best running back in Todd Gurley and just traded for Brandin Cooks, who should give them the number one receiver that they lacked last season. And on defense, they still have Aaron Donald, maybe the best defensive tackle in the league, and have decided to take their shot this season by adding Ndamukong Suh and Marcus Peters, all of which makes them one of the most talented and best – on paper, anyway – teams in the entire NFL only a couple of years after being the worst of the worst. Why does this happen to every other team, but not my own? Why Lord, why? Is it because I am a sinner? Yes, but what of divine grace? What of it, Lord? What of it???

Why They Won’t: Like I said, the Rams are only a couple of years removed from being utter shit, which is a lot of psychic misery to have to shed in a very short time. That is the sort of thing that usually requires years of failed reaching, of scratching and clawing and playoff heartbreak to truly overcome. The Rams have barely just begun and this could easily spin out of control on them.

Not only are they not used to it, there are a lot of warning signs that this spin isn’t just possible but maybe even likely. I already touched on the vast psychic reservoir of shit that they are sitting on, but add in the fact that they are in Los Angeles, which sucks and fucks men’s souls like some great insatiable street whore, and there is a lot that could go wrong spiritually here. I’m not saying that Jared Goff is gonna end up doing porn or Todd Gurley ends up trapped inside the vagina of a Kardashian like poor Jonah and that whale, but I’m not not say that either. LA is a strange and terrible place and nobody really knows how it will affect them. It’s glitz and it’s glamor with parties in the Hills with kindred souls, and it is the ocean and it is the West, the end of the Great American Journey, home to wanderers and dreamers and lost souls who went west and kept going west until they all ended up there because there is literally nowhere further to go without walking into the ocean and drowning yourself. LA is paradise and LA is hell, a chill place and a desperate place at the same time, a paradox of a city, of a people, literally straight out of a Bret Easton Ellis novel. In short, it is a horror story, a human horror story, which are the scariest of them all.

So . . . yeah, LA might fuck with the Rams a little bit. Even if it doesn’t, if somehow the Rams players are all able to resist turning around like Lot’s wife and being turned to pillars of salt as they gaze upon the burning madness of Sodom and Los Angeles, these sorts of super teams, built for winning Right Now, have a way of not working out. Especially when they’re built with Problem Cases and Rejects and Assholes like Suh and Peters, who both ended up in LA pretty much because their old teams were sick of dealing with their bullshit.

That sort of personality dynamic has a way of taking over like a virus if the team they’re coming to doesn’t already have a strong culture of its own. And as we’ve talked about, the Rams culture is basically a newborn baby lamb struggling on shaky legs to stagger out of the town dump. There is no chance that Suh or Peters respect Goff. No chance. One or both of them will act out at some point and cause this whole thing to collapse in on itself.

And then there’s Goff himself. Yes, he was the number one overall pick, and yes, he was a Pro Bowl quarterback in his second season, but let’s not forget that his rookie season was a rancid butt. It was cut short after only seven games, but in those seven games, Goff was awful. One metric that I looked at – I won’t name it or link it because I am both lazy as hell and I can’t remember exactly which one it was, I’m very professional – shows that Goff had negative value as a rookie, meaning the Rams would have been better off replacing him with a drunk Jim Everett or James Vanderbeek based on his performance in the award-winning Varsity Blues. Yeah, things got better – waaaaay better – last season, but this is as about a shaky foundation as you can get.

San Francisco 49ers

Why They’ll Win: Like the Rams, it looks like they finally have a quarterback. After trading for Jimmy Garappolo, the 49ers looked like an entirely different team than the one that has gone 13-35 since throwing a baby fit and walking away from Jim Harbaugh.

Garappolo seems to have that cocky dick mentality so necessary to being a winning NFL quarterback. His very presence famously threatened Tom Brady in New England, who ran him off like a Karate Kid villain, and then he immediately started winning after landing in San Francisco. Add in his cover boy looks and you have a dude that the NFL will be determined to make a Star, and when the NFL wants something, the NFL usually gets it.

Why They Won’t: There’s that whole 13-35 thing. That’s, uh, that’s pretty tough to turn around right away. Plus, the NFL’s history is littered with dudes who make a meaningless mini-run at the end of a season and convince everyone that they’re going to be The Next Big Thing only to crap out the next season when the games actually mean something.

But really, it’s all about the culture here. I already mentioned the 49ers are only 13-35 post-Harbaugh, which is only natural because they hadn’t made the playoffs in the decade before he arrived. He led them to three straight NFC Title Game appearances and a Super Bowl against the Ravens and his brother. Getting rid of him was fucking nuts, and yet here we are.

But it was only fucking nuts out of context. In the context of the 49ers overall culture – and the dude responsible for it, owner and CEO John York - it makes perfect sense. This is because John York is a spoiled megalomaniac, the sort of idiot born into wealth who inherits his team like a toy and then throws a hissy fit if anyone tries to tell him how to play with it.

York couldn’t stand the 49ers being Harbaugh’s team. Like Daniel Snyder or Jerry Jones or the Davis vampires, York had to make sure everyone knew this was his team and no one else’s. The only problem with that is that York is an incompetent bozo. He’s the sort of dude who holds stupid wine tastings and then spends hours bloviating about shitty wine facts that no one cares about and that are blatantly false. Meanwhile, all his sycophants nod along and sip their wine and smile their fake botoxed smiles, almost literal Halloween masks, and wait for this empty-headed asshole to finish his bullshit. And then when he’s done, he smiles like a Good Boy who just got an A on his presentation and waits for the Halloween Masks to tell him how smart and interesting he is. Meanwhile, he doesn’t know that the people hired to cater the event pissed in the wine because he was a dick to them. That’s John York. That’s who he is, and as long as he owns this team and continues getting in the way, that’s what the 49ers will be too.

Maybe Garoppolo can salvage that, but also, maybe Garoppolo is a dude who’s only started five games in his entire career – all of them meaningless, after the 49ers were long eliminated from contention – and also, maybe he is not just a confident dick, but a problem dick, the sort who insists that he was about to take Tom Brady’s job. That is not confidence. It is delusion, which makes me think that maybe Jimmy Garoppolo is a dude who fits right in with John York’s wine party of a world.

Seattle Seahawks

Why They’ll Win: Russell Wilson. Really, that’s about it. I know it gets boring with me constantly citing the quarterback, but that’s the NFL these days. If you have a quarterback, you’re probably gonna win. If you don’t, you won’t. Exceptions exist, obviously. Like say having a quarterback but constantly getting fucked by the NFL’s Necronomicon of a rulebook when Sheriff Goodell and his spokesman, the Lizard Man Pereira, find some dark passage and demand its recitation on air so the Lions, er, I mean, some random team have to take it like they’re Goatse (google it.) Let’s just move on.

Why They Won’t: The Seahawks are sort of like the Patriots in that having a legit killer at quarterback has caused the rest of the team to degenerate. Let me explain what I mean. When you have a dude like Brady or Russell Wilson who’s capable of winning games all by themselves, it’s easy to give into the temptation to cut corners elsewhere. After all, the NFL is a hard-capped league in which teams are constantly being asked to make choices about who to keep and who to throw to the wolves despite still having value. And so, year by year, coaches and execs break apart the team around their franchise quarterback, forcing him to assume more and more of the load. And if he’s like Brady or Russell Wilson, he does, which only encourages further whittling until finally you find yourself in the Super Bowl throwing for over 500 yards like Brady and still losing because the rest of your team is pulled from the Arena League.

This is what is happening to Russell Wilson now. The Seahawks aren’t the same Seahawks, with their badass defense and Beast Mode running game, that they were when this whole run started. It’s almost a mirror image of what the Patriots under Brady went through. Remember, when Brady started, he wasn’t The Man. He was just the man who filled in for Drew Bledsoe while the Patriots kickass defense and running game carried the team. It is an eerie parallel, only the Seahawks haven’t been there for as long, and Russell Wilson isn’t quite Tom Brady.

This is not a good situation. Richard Sherman is gone (to San Francisco, by the way, which I should have mentioned, especially because it will turn out hilariously brutal given that Sherman is already old in NFL terms, had already lost a step, and is coming off a fucking torn Achilles, and given that he’s Richard Sherman, he’s not exactly going to slow down with Grace and Dignity) along with a lot of the other Names who made the Seahawks what everyone thinks of them as. If Wilson goes down, or struggles at all, then this will get ugly fast, and it’s all too easy to see Pete Carroll just saying fuck it and heading back to college, isn’t it? He doesn’t need this. He’s already proven himself. He’s not gonna stick around for a rebuild, even if he’s the dude responsible for it.

Listen, even Tom fucking Brady couldn’t do it all completely on his own – he almost did, which is incredible – and I doubt that Russell Wilson can do it on even a smaller, divisional level. Then again, maybe he can. That is the power of having a truly elite quarterback. But the Seahawks have basically signaled that they are trying to cheat, that they want to rebuild but want to use Wilson as cover to do it without too much pain. My bet is that Wilson gets this, resents it, and that is not a good place to be in. My bet is also that this is it for Pete Carroll with Seattle, and Wilson or no Wilson, the Seahawks are in that shitty, terrible, no good place of needing to bottom out before they can recover and rebuild, only they aren’t to that place yet and everyone knows it. That is a sort of horrible purgatory that can feel worse than the actual bottom. I’m a Red Wings fan. I understand these things.

Arizona Cardinals

Why They’ll Win: Fuck if I know. Maybe all the other teams collapse, Jared Goff does get into porn, Wilson says fuck this and takes the season off and Garoppolo ends up drinking piss wine while mutually jerking off John York. That is about the only thing that will give the Cardinals a shot here, and even then maybe not.

Why They Won’t: The Cardinals are in full transition. That means that they stink. They don’t have a quarterback unless you count Sam Bradford, but who would do such a thing? Josh Rosen is the hotshot rookie, but he’s supposedly an asshole who no one likes, so what do you do without a quarterback and a new head coach? Nothing. You fucking lose. That’s all there is to do and hope that the draft fortunes smile upon you. Go with God, Cardinals fans, because no one else is gonna go with you this season.

Final Judgment

1. Rams 11-5

2. 49ers 7-9

3. Seahawks 7-9

4. Cardinals 4-12