AFC East Preview

The AFC East will always be Tom Brady’s kingdom until he decides to retire to a life of singing Huey Lewis hits while he sanitizes the kitchen after that rat he forced into that lady’s vagina ate through her entrails and just made a huge fucking mess and he’ll be damned if Gisele catches him, not because she would be angry but because he didn’t share with her.

And that is where the king of the NFL stands today, another year older, another psychotic training regimen and diet to keep him from decomposing like a ghoul. I am roughly the same age as Tom Brady, a year or two younger maybe, and I understand the ravages of time. I get it. I feel it, and I know he does too, but while I escape from my own disintegration in a haze of drugs and possibly illegal hormones that keep my testosterone where I want it to be, Tom Brady is in an entirely different universe of anti-aging techniques or wizard spells or whatever the fuck obscenely rich and powerful people do to slow the inevitability of decay. He could probably keep this up for several more years, only leaving on his own terms when he finally finds whatever the fuck kind of satisfaction a competition freak can find.

But that is the rub for Tom Brady. Dudes like him never find satisfaction. They are always chasing down more titles, more glories, more proof that they are superhuman demigods who can fucking beat time and death and the inevitability of a universe’s collapse, a pathological will that takes control of the meat puppet and forces it to win win win until it finally all just breaks apart in a horrid cacophony of injuries and a stubborn refusal to acknowledge that you cannot play quarterback until you are 90 years old. Michael Jordan had to quit, more than once, because of this sickness. It was either that or face the possibility that one day he would no longer be capable of being the best, physically or mentally.

But Brady lives in a different world than Jordan did. Brady lives in the 21^st century, in the fucking future, where every tiny little thing can be micromanaged and controlled and perverted to your needs. He can hire an entire team of dieticians and kill them all and then process their bodies, their marrow, into a tonic that no peasant could ever hope to taste. He can get gorilla cum flown in daily from Africa to lube his aged joints. He could purchase a child from some shithole and nourish himself on its brains, getting only the good stuff because he knows how to do that because he hired the top cannibals to aid him in his quest for more more more.

Brady will do this until one day something crazy happens and he becomes broken. And when it does, the entirety of the Patriots universe will collapse in on itself, Bill Belichick won’t be able to do a goddamn thing about it and Robert Kraft will end up dumping the team so he can move to Florida and hit up the rub and tugs every goddamn day. At some point they will simply all be too goddamn old for all this bullshit, and that is the only thing that is going to stop them. When that happens is anyone’s guess. I wouldn’t count on it happening this season. The Patriots and Brady are fresh off of conquering the world yet again. They have taken their slaves, raped the women and some of the children too. They are all conquering and you know that they will be there in the end and there’s not a damn thing anyone can do about it.

So, until that day comes, when even Tom Brady can no longer cheat the universe, the Patriots are the pick to win the AFC East. Nothing else really matters. The defense will ebb and flow, the running game will be featured more to allow Tom to protect himself from the horrors of age, but in the end it will all come down to that man, Tom Brady, winning until the universe finally kills him.

It helps that the rest of the division is largely a tire fire. The Jets might make a move since they picked up Le’Veon Bell, but in the end, the Jets are always going to be the Jets. I am not sold on Sam Darnold, the latest USC dream machine, echoing Todd Marinovich and Matt Leinart, old butt fumble himself Mark Sanchez, who lest we forget was also supposed to be the savior for the New York Jets. 

That’s how fucked up this team is. Their grand plan is a copy of a plan that already hilariously failed. That is not something that engenders a whole lot of hope and optimism from a fanbase who, uh, aren’t exactly calm and patient people. Darnold will wither in New York because that’s what happens in New York. It eats its own and then wonders why it can’t get a fucking quarterback to save the day. It’s been a long time since Joe Namath called his shot, but even Namath only lasted for that one year and flamed out. And that’s Joe fucking Namath. That is the most charismatic dude, a drunken swagger that fucks anything that moves and knows that he can get away with it. That dude broke in New York, so who the fuck else could handle it?

It’s always the same story with the Jets. They are a team perpetually on fire, and whether that fire just burns in a shitheap that goes nowhere or explodes spectacularly in an out of control run that inevitably still ends with the entire franchise being burned alive, they will be right back where they started, playing with matches and throwing young dumb cum machines into a madhouse of unreal expectations and absurd self importance. Fire burns it all down in the end, and it cracks the foundations and this is the world of the New York Jets in any given year.

The Jets might make a little wild card push, but that’s about it, and they’ll have the Bills nipping at their heals, hoping that finally they get this goddamn thing right.

But they probably won’t. They are all in on Josh Allen, which I don’t think will work out. He is the sort of athlete that can allow you to get exotic with your playbook, but as a passer, he just isn’t good enough and I doubt he ever will be. The Bills will be better this year, just running the fuck out of the ball with Allen and LeSean McCoy and Frank Gore, who is a million years old but still gets after it better than most of the younger dudes.

But that is a pretty brittle house to trust to last through the winter. McCoy is getting older too and didn’t have a good season last year, and what happens when your two backs both break down, which will happen to Gore eventually because the universe is cruel and indifferent, and Josh Allen is left to save the day with a passing game that is almost an afterthought? The Bills will then revert to their base form and lie dying and twitching like a poisoned rat.

Defensively, the Bills will probably be pretty tough, and the hot new kid on the block, Ed Oliver, has the potential to be a dominant sort of dude. But he is also a dude who tried to throw down with his college coach last year because he felt disrespected or some shit. I think it had something to do with a jacket, which is ridiculous, but these are ridiculous times and these are ridiculous people. Whatever the deal is with Oliver, it’s obvious that this could go hilariously wrong. Then again, if those crazy energies are properly harnessed, the Bills might have something here.

But it won’t be enough, because it’s Buffalo, and its people are doomed to a life of slow decay, sitting fat and miserable under an avalanche of snow, trying to revive a heartbeat of a city that had a heart attack 100 years ago, when that part of America, that belt of Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Detroit was a goddamn furnace, making things and making hard ass people until one day people in China started making things cheaper and goddamn that aorta just fucking exploded and left everyone feeble and in need of a transplant that will never come. That sort of energy blankets the Bills. It is haunting and terrible, but that is just the way it goes in this fucked up world.

So, the Jets and Bills are both spiritually fucked and couldn’t topple the Patriots even if Brady suddenly combusted in a hell fire, demons clawing at him, dragging him down down down to pay the fucking bill. And that just leaves the Miami Dolphins, a team rooted in its own decay and misery, a swampland of the soul that they just can’t get out of no matter how hard they try.

For some reason, the Dolphins just can never get their shit together, and whatever vestigial glories remain from the 70’s when Don Shula and Bob Griese were turning out championships aren’t helping at all. In fact, they’re probably hurting the Dolphins, what with Shula and Griese and whoever is still alive infamously toasting themselves whenever the last undefeated team goes down. That sort of slavery to the past can only ruin the team in the present.

And this year, the Dolphins almost seem content to just say fuck it and run this thing into the ground once and for all and then maybe build something new from the wreckage. They’ve dumped a lot of salary and haven’t bothered to replace any of it, and they traded for Josh Rosen, who was kicked out of Arizona after only one year because a shiny Kyler Murray turned up. That’s not exactly a sign that Rosen is a real deal type.

I like Rosen. I think he’s got a weird sort of energy that is probably off-putting for some people, and if he could bend a team to his will, they could really have something. But he probably can’t, and that’s just gonna lead to a lot of hate in the locker room and then who knows what the fuck will happen because Miami is all out of options. They have tried everything and nothing has worked. Maybe they will get lucky with Rosen, but I doubt it.

And so that leaves the AFC East looking the same as it does every other goddamn year, with Tom Brady and the Patriots owning it so completely that the other three teams should just sublet their places and get the fuck out of there.

It’s possible the Jets or Bills sneak a wild card out, but they won’t go far. Meanwhile, we all know that in the end it will all come down to Tom Brady, who has conquered the NFL so thoroughly that there can be no possibility of an heir. He has killed them all, eaten them like Saturn devouring Cronos, and the only real intrigue is whether he does a Jordan and gets out before Time comes for him. Everybody hates him and the Patriots, but he doesn’t give a fuck. None of that matters. All that matters to Tom Brady is that he gets a chance to win one more time, no matter how small or petty the game is. He has to win it. It is the only thing about him that is real. It is the entirety of his being. And he will keep on winning until he is broken down and then he will pathologically crawl towards death and start gnawing its toes, gnawing and gnawing and gnawing until he gorges himself and chokes on it or until death separates his head from his body and buries his dismembered corpse in various places around the kingdom, each hexed and looked after by a witch so that no necromancy can bring him back.

Projected Standings:

1. New England Patriots 12-4

2. New York Jets 9-7

3. Buffalo Bills 9-7

4. Miami Dolphins 3-13

AFC East Preview

Okay, here’s the deal: I’m gonna break down each division, starting with a broad overview and then giving a best case/worst case scenario for each time, followed by my Final Judgment. We’ll start with the AFC East and work our way to the NFC North, which is where I’ll finish in a storm of tears and fits of anger. Let’s begin.

Any discussion about the AFC East is gonna be dominated by the Patriots. It’s just the way it is. Since the Tom Brady era started they’ve won the division every year but twice – 2002 and 2008. 2002 was immediately after things started to get rolling and Tom Brady wasn’t “Tom Brady” yet but “the dude who replaced Drew Bledsoe” and 2008 was the year Brady had his knee taken out in week one. The crazy thing is that the Patriots still tied for the division title both those seasons and just missed out on tiebreakers. So . . . yeah, the fucking Patriots are gonna win the AFC East.

That’s a given. But where things get interesting is that The End is clearly on the horizon for the Patriots. It’s not a matter of if, it’s just a matter of when. I mean, Tom Brady and I were in college at the same time and I’m so old that I almost shit myself whenever I sneeze. Actually, Brady is a couple of years older than me. Of course, I’m a rapidly declining degenerate and he’s getting virgin blood flown in and transfused from special people farms in Thailand while a team of personal trainers and dieticians keep him alive like fucking Dracula or something out of some Nazi horror experiment wet dream, so he’s not as old as he should be in people years.

Still, there’s a limit to even what Nazi Draculas can do, and it won’t be long before Tom Brady, scourge of Carpathia and the NFL, eventually finds himself picked apart by vultures. And the thing is, is that when it all goes, it’s going to go brutally and spectacularly. This won’t be a soft landing, this will be a fucking crater that leaves the Patriots lost in a sea of despair for years. That’s because none of these dudes, Brady, Belichick, the whole damn gang, will know when enough is enough. They will cling to the last rotting piece of flesh as they cannibalize each other and then themselves before it’s all through. This is because they are insane sociopaths and that is what insane sociopaths do. They don’t retire comfortably to the country with their nice family.

When it ends – and like I said, it’s gonna end soon – it will end with acrimony and despair. Brady already ran off Jimmy Garappolo like a Karate Kid villain because he dared even try to stand in his shadow for a couple of years. He and Belichick have pretty much explicitly said that they are going to be the last ones standing and when they fall they won’t give a shit about who has to try to clean everything up. They are not in this for the Patriots, they are in this because of their own crazed sociopathy and extreme need to win at all costs.

The thing is, is that I actually respect naked sociopathy as an ethos, at least in a superficially sporting context, and let’s face it, this is all superficial and fake and meaningless. It’s fucking football. Who cares? I can respect that. There is no pretense here, no baby kissing and flag humping. Just unrestrained sociopathy and mania. It will be disgusting theater to watch it all collapse, to see Belichick become a broken alcoholic with no one who loves him and Brady trying desperately to cling to a ghost in fucking Arizona or wherever while Gisele fucks their nutritionist. It’s going to happen and it’s going to happen soon.

But not now. The Patriots can still squeeze another season or two out of this godforsaken thing, especially because no one else in the division is capable of stepping up and taking it from them. I mean, realistically, who’s gonna do it? Even if the Patriots start their descent into madness and despair this season, Brady is still enough even as a shadow of himself to hold up against this gang of losers.

The Bills finally made the playoffs again, and then immediately traded their starting quarterback, Tyrod Taylor, even though the Bills looked apocalyptically bad when they tried to bench him earlier in the season. It’s a bizarre choice given that Taylor, while not great or anything, has always been kinda underrated, especially because with his legs he fit the rushing attack that made the Bills just a little bit different than other teams in the league. Sure, the offense was never that good, but it was just enough to squeeze by. Take that away out of some ill-conceived desire to shoehorn in something more conventional, and the Bills have nothing. It’s actually reminiscent of when Rod Marinelli (shudder) ran Mike Martz out of town (with the blessing of a lot of fans, I might add) despite Martz’s air attack being the only thing that kept the Lions afloat. Martz was flawed, like Taylor, which made him an easy target, but “flawed” is still better than “stark, empty wasteland” which the Lions found out when they immediately went 0-16. Now, I’m not saying the Bills are gonna go 0-16, but they ain’t making the playoffs either.

The Jets are the Jets, dysfunctional and spiritually wretched. Like the Bills, they just drafted their quarterback of the future in Sam Darnold. Unlike the Bills pick, Josh Allen, who’s basically a million years away from being an NFL quarterback, Darnold is probably expected to be along sooner rather than later. Of course, he’s just now ending a holdout which will no doubt endear him to the mouth-breathing imbeciles who call themselves Jets fans. It isn’t a good situation, especially for a team coming off back to back 5-11 seasons and with a psychic history filled with the moaning ghosts of Joe Namath’s knees and the frightened screeches of his liver. They aren’t winning shit.

That leaves the Dolphins, who are intriguing only because they actually have a quarterback in Ryan Tannehill and are only a season removed from going 10-6 and making the playoffs. Of course, Tannehill tore his ACL and missed the entire season last year, forcing the Dolphins to turn to Jay Cutler of all people. Naturally, that failed in hideous fashion, and now the Dolphins are left hoping that Tannehill can come back. If he can – and gets better – the Dolphins could be the team to sneak in there if the Patriots collapse sooner than expected. Of course, the Dolphins defense is still nothing special and even if Tannehill is healthy, he’s not exactly Aaron Rodgers either. Still, that 10-6 season the last time he was healthy gives the Dolphins at least a specter of hope, which is something neither the Bills nor the Jets really have.

Patriots Best Case Scenario: Winning the Super Bowl, obviously. Brady is still Brady and buys another year after purchasing an Indonesian boy and draining him of his precious life fluids. Belichick gets territorial and makes a point to build the defense into a monster in order to show that he doesn’t need Brady, the Patriots somehow find a successor to Brady to groom and Robert Kraft gets his dick sucked by one of his black servants.

Patriots Worst Case Scenario: Brady loses it and ages like he drank from the wrong cup at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Meanwhile, Gisele runs off with their dietician before shacking up with Garoppolo in San Francisco. Belichick is caught slapping around a hobo under a bridge overpass because it’s the only thing that can still make him feel, and Robert Kraft ends up sucking the dick of one of his black servants.

Patriots Final Judgment: Brady keeps Bradying, Gisele tells Garoppolo she doesn’t think Italians are human beings, Belichick manages to buy the tape of him slapping around a hobo, keeping it secret for at least another year, and Kraft jacks off to one of his black servants while the Patriots win another AFC East title and then make it to yet another Super Bowl because the AFC stinks like aged garbage filtered through Bigfoot’s asshole.

Bills Best Case Scenario: Somehow, Josh Allen shows that he can actually play quarterback in the NFL right away even though he could never be anything other than mediocre while at fucking Wyoming. The Bills manage to build on last season’s mini-run and win a shitty division when the Patriots fall apart. Gisele blows Josh Allen.

Bills Worst Case Scenario: The Bills don’t have a quarterback and Tyrod Taylor leads the fucking Browns to the playoffs while the Bills go 0-16. Gisele blows Rod Marinelli.

Bills Final Judgment: Josh Allen isn’t anywhere close to being ready, no one else can play quarterback, the defense crumbles under the pressure and the Bills go 3-13. Gisele blows me.

Jets Best Case Scenario: Darnold is immediately ready, and he finally gets the Jets headed in the right direction, a process which accelerates when the Patriots and Brady collapse, Gisele blows everyone, and a drunk Joe Namath is sworn in as President when everyone ahead of him in the line of succession is indicted for Discoursing.

Jets Worst Case Scenario: No quarterback, no fun. A drunk Joe Namath blows everyone.

Jets Final Judgment: The Jets are the Jets, man. They might hang around at 8-8, but then again, probably not. They’ll go 7-9, no one will get blown and Joe Namath will start appearing in commercials for erectile dysfunction drugs.

Dolphins Best Case Scenario: Tannehill comes back from his ACL injury, and comes back better than he was before. The Dolphins take advantage of a Patriots collapse, win the division and ride it all the way to the Super Bowl because the AFC stinks. Gisele blows Don Shula and the entire ’72 Dolphins, cocaine overtakes Miami once again, Michael Irvin reverse ages 30 years and leads Da U back to college football glory, Tony Montana comes to life, Miami Vice is still on the air and I disappear into a haze of drugs and Cuban women and . . . wait, this was supposed to be the Dolphins best case scenario. Either way.

Dolphins Worst Case Scenario: Tannehill can’t come back, the Dolphins have no quarterback and are damned to hang out with the Bills and Jets at the loser table while Brady fucks all their girlfriends, Gisele says she’ll blow them on the roof of the high school, only it’s a prank and they’re all left standing there naked on the roof in January and have to have their dicks amputated. I disappear into a haze of huffing paint and Armenian men who sell me to some rich Saudis.

Dolphins Final Judgment: Tannehill comes back roughly at the same place he was before, the Dolphins finish second in the AFC East, sneak into the playoffs as a Wild Card, lose in the first round and nobody really cares. I sell myself to some rich Saudis because at least they’ll keep me high and have you seen some of their yachts?

AFC Final Standings:

1. Patriots 12-4

2. Dolphins 10-6

3. Jets 7-9

4. Bills 3-13

Loving the Bad Guy

The NFL needs villains. It always has. Those Raiders teams of the ‘70s are as big a part of the fabric of the NFL’s identity as any other great team, from that era or any other. They were mythic biker renegades from the grungy part of Valhalla, sent to terrorize mortals and pistol whip squares. They were glorious, and they perfectly captured an era – dirty, long hairs with drunken love in their hearts and iron hate at the end of their fists. They were the ‘70s in all its savage, ugly, stinking beauty – decaying monsters dying even as they fought like hell to live for just one more frenetic, glorious second, human supernovae at the heart of a cultural supernova.

I’m starting to get carried away here. The point is that the NFL needs villains almost more than it needs heroes, and if you can’t tell by my rapturous intro, to some people - a lot of people – those villains are actually the heroes of the story. After all, the Cowboys were America’s team. But those Raiders were America’s team. I won’t explain what that means because you either understand completely what I’m saying, or you don’t and not even God can help you sort it out.

These days, the heroes and villains of the NFL are more sordid than ever. And that’s only all too appropriate given the strange and terrible times in which we live. No one knows who’s evil and who’s good until someone gets tossed out of an elevator unconscious. Everything is magnified and under the magnifying glass everything gets distorted, myths are laid bare and all we’re left with are bullshit narratives. It’s easy to vilify someone like Ray Rice, but it gets harder when someone like Ndamukong Suh gets busted by the Great Eye In The Sky stomping – or gently stepping, depending on your perspective and rooting interests – on a fallen Golden Boy.

Everything becomes slippery then, and that word – perspective – becomes all that matters, and when that happens, nothing really matters. You pick your sides based on what you want to believe, and really, nothing could be more fitting in this twitter age of deep tribalism and outrage for outrage’s sake than that.

But it also reinforces that weird NFL world in which heroes are villains and villains are heroes and nobody really knows what the hell is going on. That is when the NFL is both at its best and its nauseatingly worst. The noise gets turned up, Joe Buck starts hooting like a chimp on angel dust, and the only thing you’re left to conclude is that everyone is secretly an asshole or a monster, and in that decayed wasteland of the human condition, you just pick whichever monster you like best and hope he doesn’t embarrass you by maiming a loved one or, you know, deflating footballs like a coward.

And that brings us to the strange case of the New England Patriots, who exist in that sort of zombie purgatory between good and evil. Everyone hates them, and why not? They do scandalous shit that isn’t even cool, they win all the goddamn time and they have a quarterback who seems like some sort of golden ice king, untouchable and terrible, both easily mockable and somehow infallible. And the whole thing is led by some ogre in sack-cloth who holds everyone in the world, from the media to the fans to his players to his own family, in open contempt. It is a weird situation and I understand why people don’t like it. The Patriots are easy to hate, and so most people do the easy thing and hate them.

But the Patriots are fascinating to me, and I don’t hate them. I am totally biased here, largely because I am a huge Michigan dude and thus for tribal reasons, Tom Brady is my guy. That is the easy take, and you’re not wrong. But where everyone else sees a model-boning, Uggs-wearing, frost-prince, I see a dude with an almost sociopathic need to win, a heart of fire beneath the frozen surface that never stops beating, burning him up from within and making him into a psychotic jackass on the field. But he’s the good kind of psychotic jackass, I think, the kind that wins and the kind that wins simply because he has to, because he can’t not. I can respect a man like that even if nobody else does. I get it, I do. He is not an easy man to love because he looks like everything you’re supposed to hate these days and he’d rather chill in a wine bar in Aspen than hang out at Lowe’s with Peyton Manning.

But he’s also a dude who wins and keeps on winning even though the Patriots seem less and less talented every year. Every year seems like the End for the Patriots, doesn’t it? Everyone licks their chops, sneers and waits for Brady to meltdown or get his knees chopped off by some crusader of justice, but it never happens, and every year that he survives, that he thrives, it seems like he gets crankier on the field, both his sneer and the fans’ sneer grows and everyone hates him even more. But I can appreciate and respect a man like that, a man whose sneer says “Fuck you, come at me, bros . . . you will miss.”

And everyone does miss and Tom Brady goes to another Super Bowl. I think I like him the more people hate him, tribalism aside, probably because I’m a contrarian, but also because people are dumb. Tom Brady is great because he wants this shit more than you’ve wanted anything in your lives. I see him and I see those Raiders teams of the 70s. Beneath all the noise, beneath the biker gang mystique, beneath the Uggs and Giseles, there is an almost psychotic need to win, and for me, that trumps everything else. Because they don’t care whether you love them or hate them. You are beneath them, and they are just there to win. Get with the program or get the fuck out of the way.

But it’s not just Brady. It’s also Bill Belichick. Together, they are what make the Patriots truly fascinating, fitting villains for our times. Brady is the golden, smooth exterior, the rich veneer hiding a decaying interior, dragging the Patriots to glory even while the rest of the team struggles to rise above the barest mediocrity, living off the reputation of those that came before, depending on Brady to carry them through one more game, one more season. And Belichick is the ugly, Dick Cheneyish ogre behind the scenes, keeping things going with ruthless and grim precision. He is a monster, a human being utterly without redemption, shuffling along in his hobo sweatshirts, scowling at everyone and everything, from the media to the sun and the moon and down to his own shriveled heart. He is easy to hate, and he doesn’t give a fuck.

There is something admirable in that, though, isn’t there? It’s easy to hate people who don’t care if you hate them. It’s easy, but who cares? There is no worth in despising people who actively ask for it.

Compare that to someone like Peyton Manning, a dude who desperately wants to be seen as both a winner and a good guy, but whose true colors come out whenever he fails. He’ll throw anyone and everyone under the boss – remember his “our liquored up kicker” line when he was with the Colts? – and then he’ll go right back to shaking hands and doing his middle-manager at Lowe’s routine that the Nascar masses lap right up. That is the sort of dude who is easy for me to hate.

And then you have dudes like Ndamukong Suh, who end up neither deserving my hate nor my love, because they become almost tragic figures, deserving something closer to pity. They can’t decide whether they want to embrace being the hero or the villain. Suh seems like he wants to embrace his villainous nature, but he can’t let himself truly run with it, and so he sort of vascillates between that “Fuck you, so what?” attitude and the “I’m really a good guy, I swear…” attitude, and the result is a sort of mushy incompetence, an ass-kicker who never really embraces the “Win or Die” attitude that is so essential to becoming a truly successful NFL villain.

I’ll take dudes like Brady and Belichick, who understand they are the villains, but don’t give a fuck. That’s what those old Raiders teams used to do, and that’s what these Patriots do.

I know that comparison sounds ridiculous, but think about it. The Raiders used to do all manner of petty shit to gain an edge – remember Fred Biletnikoff’s stickum? – and that’s what the Patriots under Belichick have done.

The Raiders used to grease their jerseys. They had bowls full of amphetamines in the locker room. Their trainer shot dudes up with adrenaline extracted from the glands of corpses (!!!) They did whatever they had to win, no matter how petty or crazy. Sound familiar?

Sure, Belichick isn’t shooting his dudes up with corpse adrenaline (probably not, anyway) but he will deploy spies, he will deflate some footballs. They are schemes that seem almost hilariously incompetent, almost Austin Powersish in their parody of super-villainy, and who knows if they actually help? But Belichick doesn’t give a fuck. He does it anyway because even if there is only a .00001% chance that they help him, it’s worth it to him. And why not? After all, he doesn’t give a shit if he gets caught. The NFL will slap the Patriots with some symbolic penalty, Belichick will shrug and shuffle back to his lab to cook up something heinous with Brady. They just don’t care. Either what the NFL thinks or what you, the fan, thinks.

I, for one, actually find that refreshing. The NFL sucks. It is a horrible organization and anyone who tells it to fuck off is okay by me. The enemy of my enemy and all that. And most fans are drooling idiots, obsessed with horse’s ass talk-radio bullshit. Always remember, the Dallas Cowboys are the most popular team in all the land. Fuck what the fans think.

The Patriots are cheating jerks, but they own that shit. All they want to do is win. Everything else is just noise, and I’m good with anyone who understands that. That’s what those old Raiders teams knew, and that’s what Brady and Belichick’s Patriots know. That’s why I’ll be rooting for the Patriots in yet another Super Bowl and why, damn it, I’ll say it . . . I’m a Patriots fan. Fuck you.