THE QUEST FOR 0-17 - YEAR ONE, WEEK FIVE

[Archie Byron's depiction of the entanglement of Failure Demons and Spirit Warriors]

{also, support my patreon, where this type of shit happens everyday}

The week in NFL manufactured content has been heavily embroiled in screams of “CANCEL CULTURE!” by the mirrored sunglasses sect, all the while nothing really being awakened other than the NFL’s continued quest for dominance of the American marketplace. Token acts of sacrifice to help overlook the fact we all anxiously await watching athletic specimens of human men give each other brain damage in 11 minutes of actual movement during a 3 hour affair of commercialism and thus consumerism. The NFL knows it loses no fans when they scream “CANCEL CULTURE!” because lolol where are they gonna go? We’re the only nation on the entire planet stupid enough to worship this death sport.

But we still have two teams involved in the symbolic quest for 0-17, to help magically usher in the death knell of the American Consumer Empire, so I wanted to cover the two teams left briefly, last minute. But as empires die, and cultures fade into the rubble of their own doomed history, I thought this week I’d instead think positively on the men who give up their lives for this fucking self-destructive death cult we call American football. So this week is sort of a Tale of Two Byrons.

Detroit Lions (0-5; 10 pt average margin of defeat) – Even after I gave up the NFL, I kept two jerseys I had accumulated over the years of getting nice embroidered bootleg jerseys off Ebay in various color schemes, more for the color than the person. But two remained, due to the person. The first (which I still have) is a black bootleg Washington R-words Sean Taylor jersey. His death was impossible to avoid because he was too pure for American football, and yet perfectly geared for it. I often wonder what many of these spirit warriors could’ve achieved had they not been burdened by the sport, and been allowed other opportunities in life. The second jersey (which I gave away, maybe even mailed to Neil, I can’t remember to be honest) was a Detroit Lions Barry Sanders #20, as Sanders was one of the most unique athletic talents that came along in my lifetime of wasting weekends watching American football. There was an effortless magic about him that was unlike any of the other alleged G.O.A.T.s that have come along since, or before. Jim Brown had a similar aura, but his was a headfirst Black Power aura. Barry Sanders used his athletic genius to avoid the contact – key to surviving the modern hyper-accelerated version of the slow death sport. Sanders was burdened by being a Detroit Lion – the most amazing player to perhaps ever have existed in the position, trapped on a team with a culture of failure demons so heavy that even he couldn’t lift them beyond an occasional playoff appearance, even as the NFL playoffs expanded to allow more shitty teams to be involved. How did Sanders end up there? There’s multiple pieces involved in that process, but the NFL’s enforced parity through the draft has always meant the worst teams pick the best players, which curses far more souls than it blesses (word to Robert Griffin III). Sanders grew up in the non-football hotbed of Wichita, Kansas. You’d think a future NFL Hall of Famer would’ve been a natural from a young age, and Barry showed signs of that, yet he wasn’t his high school’s starter until midway through his senior year. Why was that? A young Barry Sanders has a brother named Byron about 17-months older who was ahead of him as starter, who overshadowed him through Barry’s junior year, and left him not a starter even during his senior year. Barry excelled once he was a starter, but that late blossom meant most major college recruiters never got a whiff of his existence, as his older brother wasn’t great enough to bring the recruiters out. Barry Sanders only got four scholarship offers, with only two being major-ish programs, in Iowa State and Oklahoma State. He chose Oklahoma State, but even there, was behind future NFL-talent Thurman Thomas his first two years. It was almost as if the world had this immensely powerful human sports car, just sitting in line behind a different car, that never really got opened up until his junior year in 1988. Sanders, once finally given the starting spot, destroyed every defense he faced, averaging over 200 yards a game. At the time, it was one of the greatest college football rushing performances ever over the course of a season, so him entering the NFL draft was a no-brainer. But that lack of longer history meant teams could talk themselves out of trusting it being more than a flash-in-the-pan. What if that one year was an aberration? Why hadn’t he started before in college, and what happened in high school? The statistics were misleading. The Cowboys went with Troy Aikman with the first pick in the 1989 draft, and the Packers – the Lions sort of rivals – chose Tony Mandarich with the second pick… one of the all-time draft miscues, as the other four men taken in the top five are all in the Hall of Fame now. That left the Lions picking third, who took Sanders, drafting him into the doom that is the Detroit Lions. The Lions themselves wanted Deion Sanders (which is hilarious to imagine how that would’ve turned out for his career otherwise; like would he have just dedicated himself entirely to baseball instead of dealing with the NFL?); but Lions head coach Wayne Fontes, a rare period of football acumen for the team, went to the wall, swearing they had to take Barry Sanders instead. So they did. And the rest was rare moment of glory of a long-doomed franchise, who has only made the playoffs a dozen times since the NFL/AFL merger, the majority of those times being a one and done wild card round loss, even in the expanded era of the past decade or so. But out of those dozen times, five came with Barry hauling the spiritual load of the team. Sanders’ third season, in 1991, saw them play further into the new year than ever before, actually being good enough to get a bye past the wild card round, and stomping the Dallas Cowboys, 38-6, at the Silverdome – perhaps the only playoff win the team ever had at that long-time home. They went to the NFC Championship game for the first time ever (and only time in retrospect), where the Washington R-words destroyed them, 41-10. Despite his brilliance as a player, Sanders never won another playoff game, and after the 1998 season, still performing better than most any other RB in the league (he finished fourth on the rushing leaders list, but with his yards per rush down to 4.3 as opposing teams knew all they had to do was focus on him, as there was nothing else to worry about), Sanders announced his retirement. He remains fourth on the all-time list, despite playing half a decade less than two men who moved past him, in Emmitt Smith and Frank Gore. And it’s interesting to think about the Lions and Cowboys, who are connected by their Thanksgiving Day games, and the what-ifs around how things could’ve been different if Byron Sanders hadn’t knocked his brother down the high school depth charts back in the mid-‘80s. If Sanders had played at a bigger university, and had more than one season creating highlights, might the Cowboys have gone with him instead of Troy Aikman? They drafted Emmitt Smith the following year, which set up the famous tandem that Jimmy Johnson (and Barry Switzer) won a number of rings with. I mean, in 1990, the top two QBs taken in the first round, though, were Jeff George (1st overall), and Andre Ware (7th overall). I don’t think a Barry Sanders/Jeff George combo in Dallas would’ve achieved the same results. So some things just aren’t meant to be. Sanders was supposed to be a Detroit Lion – the club’s lone highlight. And Ware – their high profile 1st round QB draft pick before Joey Harrington, and then Matthew Stafford – never amounted to much, as Wayne Fontes never started him all that often, despite having demanded the team draft him similar to what he did with Barry Sanders. Interestingly, Andre Ware’s last chance at an NFL roster was when he went to the Jacksonville Jaguars training camp in their first season in existence, in 1995, but he was buried behind Steve Beuerlein (whom the Jags got in the expansion draft) and Mark Brunell (who they traded for on their first draft day). He was cut in preseason, played in Canada and the World League, but never played prominently ever again.

Jacksonville Jaguars (0-5; 11.8 pt average margin of defeat) – As you see there, Mark Brunell came in as the Jaguars first designated-starter at QB, due to that big trade on the first day of their first draft. But by 2003, Brunell was getting older, so the club looked the future, and spent a 1st round draft pick on a quarterback for the first time in franchise history. The 1st Round Quarterback is a time-honored gamble in the NFL, where you stake the next decade of your franchise on the mystical determinations of whatever pack of scouts you’ve assembled at the time. Carson Palmer had already been taken with the first pick, and once it got the Jaguars at the number 8 pick, the top QBs left were major conference players in Florida’s Rex Grossman, Cal’s Kyle Boller, and then a wild card in small Marshall University’s Byron Leftwich, famously seen as such a gritty QB that he played while half-broken in a match, with his offensive linemen literally carrying him to the line of scrimmage for the next play. A few games into the 2003 season, Brunell was benched, and Leftwich took over. And though he seemed to develop into the QB the team hoped, he was snake-bitten by injuries, specifically his ankles, which always seemed ready to break, or twist. This led to splitting time at starter, due to injury, and finally being let go. Strangely though, being an intelligent QB-minded player, saddled by ankle injuries rather than brain damage, it allowed Leftwich to have some prominent back-up QB roles with the Falcons, Buccaneers, and Steelers, where Leftwich could be a competent player, and learn the various offensive systems, almost in tenure track as assistant coach. This led to only a few year break after his physical retirement before he joined the Cardinals under Bruce Arians as a quarterback coach, who was the offensive coordinator who taught Leftwich things at Pittsburgh. This is why Byron Leftwich ended up one of the league’s relatively young coordinator minds, reuniting with Arians in Tampa Bay as the team’s offensive coordinator, and winning a Super Bowl last season with Tom Brady. Arians even publicly complained before last season that he was surprised Leftwich was not at least interviewed for vacant head coaching positions, as he gave full credit to Leftwich for running the offense. So if the NFL can not be racist a little bit, Leftwich seemed destined to coach somewhere, the accidental benefit of a career shortened by non-cognitive injuries. Meanwhile, the Jaguars gambled on a 1st round QB again in 2011, with Blaine Gabbert, which went so well (lol), they had to try again in 2014, this time again gambling with a less prestigious university product, in Central Florida’s Blake Bortles. Bortles became starting QB by the end of that season, and was their only starter from 2015-2017 – the only three-season period they’ve had only one QB start. But by 2018, he fell out of favor, and was replaced by his back-up, which led to a couple years of scrambling to find stability in the position, that led to the team drafting Clemson wonderboy Trevor Lawrence with the 1st overall pick this past NFL draft. It was the 1st overall pick the team ever had, so time will tell if he’s destined to be a Peyton Manning, or Tim Couch.

So that’s the tale of two Byrons, and how great men get embroiled in the failure demons of doomed entities. Maybe one of these two teams will be ultimately doomed enough to finish this Quest for 0-17.

THE QUEST FOR 0-17 - YEAR ONE, WEEK FOUR

[Reva Freedman's depiction of how the doomed mind becomes Doomed]

{also, support my patreon, where this type of shit happens everyday}

I had already plotted out an angle for writing this week’s Quest for 0-17, involving first round drafted QBs, but then the Colts won their game, and both the Giants and Jets took games into overtime for slim victories as well, leaving us with only two teams left that have not won a game. And they’re two very different teams, stuck in the same position currently, and if I’m being honest, I think the chances of either of them even going 0-8 is slim, but we’re going to write this thing out as a manifestation of doom and curses upon the American Empire. But I’m left a bit shook by the two teams left, and their relation to failure demons, and Neil and myself to be perfectly honest. So this week’s going to be a bit more personal, because as Empire’s collapse, lords escape, and somehow survive to see another empire.

Detroit Lions (0-4; 9.5 average margin of defeat) – The Lions seemed to return to being the stereotypical Lions, with people retweeting clips of snappers hiking the ball to an unprepared quarterback in slow motion. That particular type of error is the most failure demon bad move of all, because it shows that not even your team is entirely ready to start at the same time. There’s literally only two people involved in such a thing, and often the only two people who touch a football in a live play. And yet they’re out of sync, because one’s hands is not on the ass of the other, where you are more closely connected, physically, less able to fuck up like that.

But I got to thinking about doom in more general sense, because let’s face it… Lions fans are doomed, whether this team finishes 0-17 or not. They were the first to go 0-16. And I actually think about that in terms of Neil, and myself, as when we first started Armchair Linebacker, there weren’t sites like that, with coverage across the sport but with dedicated individuals per team, written from that fucked up angle internet writing was developing, a sort of bastard child of Gonzo journalism as created by Oscar Zeta Acosta but popularized by Hunter S. Thompson, as practiced through the broken minds of those of us who were the early clinical trials participants of the world wide web’s deteriorating effects on critical thinking skills. Since those days, a bunch of shit has gotten more popular, creating “content” related to sports, much of it in a barely clever half-witted version of this gonzo style, that at this point is nothing more than a dragged net of a collection of relevant tweets compiled with a half paragraph of commentary that’s intelligent only if your mind is numbed by a steady intake of alcohol and Rogan-esque podcasts. The internet has become Barstool Sports.

And in this time, Neil and myself have seen people we actually know become “legitimate” journalists, though I probably could’ve used the scare quotes around journalist as well. They’ve compromised their souls enough to get blue checks, and be considered a part of the respectable mainstream, which has become far less honorable in the digital age, which is fine by me to be honest. But how does it become quirkier, yet still ruled by a connected caste system where blue checks are more valued than somebody who actually says wild shit because they’re wild, not because they’re pretending to be crazy for the clout and lols?

At this point, it’s important for me to clarify a thing I still struggle with, and Neil struggles with more than me – there never was a meritocracy. You don’t actually become successful by being good at something. It’s a matter of wealth, connection to wealth, and ability to navigate the wrought iron gates to larger access. Some idiot kid of a millionaire who mimics Hunter S. Thompson’s early writings for ESPN’s website (which were pretty bad, honestly; I was thankful he finally died, for his own sake) is more likely to become a “wildly” successful internet sports writer than some actual fucked up person who grew up using sports as escapism from their wretched existence, full of traumas, poor choices, and absorbing the self-destructive toxins of their native environment.

How does this relate to the Lions? Well, in the world’s football, a notable difference is supporters feel they have a claim to the club they follow that is deeper than ownership’s. We don’t apply this in America, because we’ve all been indoctrinated with this perverted notion of “freedom” that actually is subservient to the oligarchy. Shit, I’m the perfect example, for abandoning the Washington football team, and the NFL entirely, because their new (at the time) owner was wealthier, and likely to be healthier and live longer, than I could ever hope. It meant the rest of my life (and those close to me) was going to be torturous every Sunday until death. What’s the point of maintaining that self-destructive habit? None. But many of us do exactly that every day of our lives, simply because it’s all we know.

The Lions have been owned by the descendants of Henry Ford for most of their fans’ lifetimes. Henry Ford helped make Detroit a pre-eminent post-industrial American city. Those days are long gone though, and despite the downtown revitalizations we spoke of last week, the bulk of the city and even the older suburbs are a sprawling network of metaphysical tumbleweed, where those left behind carve out existences, despite there not being an encouraging environment for them to do so. If you think of it as a garden bed, most of the nutrients have been pulled from the soil, plus somebody dumped a bunch of five-gallon buckets of changed oil at the edges of the garden; but there’s folks left there told to fruit. And on top of that, they’re told, “If you work hard, you can overcome all that shit, and not only fruit but fruit amazingly well, with the healthiest and most succulent fruit that history has ever known, because America is unique as a garden bed of opportunity.” But lolol, me or Neil was never gonna be like the descendants of Henry Ford, ever. I could hit the Powerball and MegaMillions every drawing, for seven drawings in a row, and still be more fucked and poor than them. That is the nature of being Doomed. You are born in a poisoned environment, with a mind that has been genetically inclined to make poor choices, over the course of generations, positioned in a mine field of self-destructive choices, and when you get blown up, you are blamed for your own failings, by those who stand on top of a hill overlooking all this, free of mines, who mock you, saying, “It was so easy for me to stand on this hill of excellence… why did you fuck it up?”

So of the two teams, I think the Lions have the better chance of doing poorly for longer, even if they don’t go 0-17. The Lions will always do poorly, because the team is a faded artifact of Ford prominence, no different than if they’d bought a silver and blue Faberge egg, that they loaned out to a public museum for display every fall. That’s essentially what the Lions are at this point – a remnant of previous wealth, a piece of fucked up art since we don’t elevate actual art in America, that these wealthy bastards roll out year after year in autumn, for mark ass people – many of who are born doomed – to have some emotional investment in, which allows those frustrated masses to blow that emotional frustrations out during football games. It allows the Doomed to leak their explosive toxicities in safer ways for the wealthy as well, so that all their life frustrations of failed dreams and continued failure demons and “personal failings” of addiction and dysfunction sneak out their twisted intestines at the same time as them yelling “FUCK!” when the center tosses the ball against the quarterback’s face mask while he’s still barking out the rest of the play to the wide receivers sideways. It is a preventative mechanism, the synthetic opiate of the masses.

In thinking about how Ford’s great-grandchildren are still ruling over the Lions, it’s made me question how close to failure the American Empire is. These bastards can trick us for a long time, perhaps for generations. So I guess I’d love to see an 0-17 team happen, to sidestep that trickery, but I’m not sure it’s in the cards (though I will be checking the literal cards this week, the Appalachian conjure deck I’m fond of now). But the Lions are more doomed than any other club (except maybe the Browns, which oddly has been proven in the past), and there will be little salvation from that any time soon, for all the actual Doomed fans of them. The meritocracy has never been real either, so a few good drafts and a new coach like this tight end dude, who has the fighting spirit of a football player, it makes no difference. When you are doomed, it’s only a matter of time before you are Doomed. (And I guess regardless of whether somebody goes 0-17 for this symbolic death knell for the American Empire, I take solace in the fact we all can see this empire is doomed, which means it’s only a matter of time before it also becomes Doomed, and we can hope to build something next not ruled by these false meritocracies of exaggerated inequality.)

Jacksonville Jaguars (0-4; 10.25 average margin of defeat) – The Jaguars are different though, even though all those blue check false-quirky sports media systems are in overdrive right now talking about Urban Meyer, and the scandals of this 0-4 team, proclaiming them both doomed, even though they’re not. Like not even close. They have a highly marketable first round draft quarterback, a beautiful white man with blonde hair, who is so “American” in all the coded racist ways the far right markets as being American, that he’ll never fail. Just as local big fish in small pond oligarchs are running as write-in candidates for local school boards all over rural and suburban America, to fight perceived threats of “critical race theory” and the replacement of Christians (which is just a quick switch of identity as the long-time racist white nationalist theories that white people are being replaced), Trevor Lawrence will win games. He’s too based Chad looking to not get a few beneficial calls, or rules verdicts, ala the creation of Tom Brady. (Let us never forget the “tuck rule” and it’s direct involvement in manufacturing the dominant aura of both the Patriots and Tom Brady, who – non-coincidentally enough – faced each other for the first time last Sunday night in the second-highest watched Sunday night game ever… a complete engineering of the collective psyche, over the course of decades.) So Trevor Lawrence is too beautifully American (meaning white, male, and submissively obedient but in alpha-presenting ways) to not win a few games. Shit, they were up last Thursday night before blowing it, which all could’ve just been more manufacturing of future legend for all we know.

On top of this, Urban Meyer is the Jaguars coach. And despite the fact he’s catching flak for having gone out drinking after their loss rather than flying home with the team, he’s still Urban Meyer. High profile college coaches have a learning curve when jumping to the NFL, because being a successful college coach is very much like playing a video game with all the cheat codes at major universities. You can recruit whoever you want, because you already have the history of success, plus you have boosters who come with big money, that improves facilities in the above-the-table ways, but also reward the best players in all the below-the-table ways. If you’re a halfway decent coach and get a gig at somewhere like Alabama or Ohio State and don’t do amazingly well, you’d be a complete failure in like managing a drywall company. Like you have to have NO SKILLS to fail at Ohio State as head coach. You’re pretty much given an expensive sports car, and asked to drive it 120 mph. Anybody could do it.

The NFL is not like that, as an actual capitalism-based meritocracy (like college football is, which doesn’t mean it’s a true meritocracy, but a model of that where wealth exaggerates possibility), but rather a socialist cartel of the extremely wealthy, who agree not to destroy each other’s investment by building in parity, or a guaranteed mediocrity. So you can’t just stockpile the best players, have the best facilities, and run away with shit.

The Jaguars though, are owned by a billionaire, who has already gotten involved in Urban Meyer’s behaviors, four weeks in. The reactionary fake-clever media of course has turned this into, “WILL URBAN MEYER GET FIRED? AFTER ONLY FOUR WEEKS?” and then they argue amongst themselves the fantasy scenarios of him either getting fired too early or being kept on when he obviously should be let go. It’s always highly dramatic, over-exaggerated, and ultimately two weeks later entirely pointless. It just occupies the minutes and hours of your life, to keep you dissatisfied and wrapped up in manufactured drama, which has to be sports-related for today’s modern American “alpha” male, who is a submissively obedient a medieval Serf. Urban Meyer is a huge name investment, not unlike Nick Saban when he went to the Dolphins, or Steve Spurrier when Dan Snyder brought him to Washington. It’s just marketing, so he’s not going anywhere.

The Jaguars almost beat the Bengals last Thursday, on a short week. Jacksonville is a growing market, on the coast, in the American South, but with a Pakistani-born owner. It’s the NFL’s crown jewel of young franchises, both completely traditional (in that it serves a predominantly white fan-base, in a conservative region) while having the necessary boxes checked to proclaim itself progressive (minority ethnicity ownership). The American Empire is currently going through a struggle as to how to best position itself for the next generation – whether to circle the wagons of white nationalism (as Republicans as tinged by Trump’s backers want to do), or switch our form of elitism to something less race-based, and built on a more diverse economic inequality, so that you can tell the growing mass of POC poor folks that they too could work hard and achieve greatness, even though it’s a lie, still. It’s a struggle to decide how to display the carnival game of the perceived meritocracy, and Shahid Khan is a wonderful piece of propaganda for neoliberalism, to move the NFL into another 40 years of being a social consciousness engineering program supported by the military-state.

Interestingly enough, this too relates back to Neil and myself, as Tony Khan, Shahid’s son, has executive positions with all of Khan’s sports possessions (the Jaguars, as well as Fulham FC in the English football system). He also is mostly occupied with running a wrestling promotion upstart called All Elite Wrestling, which is supposed to challenge World Wrestling Entertainment for dominance in that realm. Tony Khan was part of some of the same earlier internet wrestling message board culture as Neil and myself and others. Many of these people have latched onto AEW, as it feels to them like proof of their own merit, that somebody from the same background as them is having success running a major wrestling promotion. But Tony Khan was never the same as all us that were Doomed; he was born to be a blue check, whether those blue checks were on display when we all anonymized ourselves as much as possible in the chaotic message board culture of the time. It’s very much like Urban Meyer at Ohio State, in that there’s probably thousands of message board dorks who could have the same success running a wrestling company, if they had the tools. But they don’t, and never will. There is no meritocracy – never was.

So though the Jaguars are getting all the media hype right now, it’s all manufactured. They have an ideal owner, a name value head coach, and a smiling white QB that makes Tucker Carlson feel great. Both the white nationalist and neoliberal visions for continuing the American Empire are perfectly satisfied by what the Jaguars have in place. The chances of them going 0-17 are negligible. They’re not even close do doomed, much less actually Doomed.

THE QUEST FOR 0-17 - YEAR ONE, WEEK THREE

[Malcolm McKesson's illustration of the Jets negotiating to share

Giants Stadium with the Giants in the early 1980s]

{also, if you like how my brain is, support my patreon, which is full of this type of shit}

Two more teams were able to escape the possibility of being sacrificed upon the alter of the dying American Empire this past weekend, with both the Vikings and Falcons scoring their first wins of the young season. This leaves us with five teams still possibly able to establish the 0-17 mark necessary to drive a near final metaphysical nail into the coffin of this American football cartel experiment called the National Football League (a strangely fascistic sounding name, to be honest). Being America was manufactured from existing lands already inhabited by a plethora of peoples with a differing philosophy than the one that showed up, I figured it'd be a good idea to examine spaces this week, specifically the stadiums these last five teams play in. Football teams in America hold localities hostage for new home grounds every decade or so, because our culture is dependent upon this constant and unsustainable notion of newness. I mean, it makes sense according to our American mythology, as these lands - full of hundreds of thousands of indigenous people at the very minimum, likely more - was considered "The New World" when Europeans started probing the coastal waterways like syphilitic penises a half century ago. So let's begin...

New York Giants (0-3; 6 point average margin of defeat) - The New York football Giants are one of the two teams left who have a long history, in the exact basic area they still are. The Giants are four years away from their centennial. Upon their birth, back in 1925, they occupied the old Polo Grounds Stadium, which was actually the third incarnation of that named field, and the home of the original baseball New York Giants. That site was within the city proper, just north of 155th Street, along the Harlem River on the Manhattan Island side. But the city's population was booming, and an open space like that for a new stadium was hard to find, especially since the Yankees had previously built Yankee Stadium across the river in the Bronx already, in the 1920s. Land had all been bought up, and the former Polo Grounds site became land for the city to build another housing project on, which it remains to this day, erected in the 1960s to further segregate society and concentrate poverty into pockets of suffering strategically removed from the more economically booming parts of the city, where America's expanding whiteness had been busy establishing generational wealth as a cultural head start over those packed into the housing blocks of Polo Grounds Towers. The first Super Bowl had yet to be played when the Giants started sharing Yankee Stadium in the falls, for nearly twenty years, beginning in 1956, up until the master planners of America's actual shape decided in the early '70s that Yankee Stadium deserved to be a baseball-only stadium, and New Jersey designed the Meadowlands development entirely to lure an NFL team across the river into Jersey. In 1972, the Giants had agreed to the move, and ground was broke on Giants Stadium. The team was banished to the Yale Bowl in Connecticut for two seasons, and then spent 1975 cohabitating in Shea Stadium with the New York Jets, both of whom were leasing access to the stadium from the New York Mets, who were fleecing the fuck out of the teams. 1976 saw Giants Stadium's astroturf spectacle to suburban sports complexes, even if in the already dense environs of New Jersey. America's racial problems saw a number of "riots" in throughout the 1960s, which - along with media propaganda about the criminal nature of the non-white parts of U.S. cities, and that generational wealth mentioned before - helped contribute to white flight from America's cities. Suburban development and car manufacturing and credit systems whom only part of America's population could access created these highway-dependent zones of sprawling influence. The New York Giants were in New Jersey, at a football-specific creation of a stadium, with one locality building it, absorbing much of the cost, to lure an NFL franchise away from a competing locality. The NFL's growing stature would make this the league's basic methodology for new stadiums moving forward. the Giants won three Super Bowls with Giants Stadium as their home. After a few decades though, Giants Stadium had lost its luster, and was no longer the newness needed to keep America's economic dick hard. So a brand new, younger and more attractive stadium was built like an enormous vagina, near the old wore out whore of a structure, and MetLife Stadium was opened in 2010. That very first season, the Giants amazingly won a fourth Super Bowl title, almost as a reward, as by this time the NFL's cartel of owners operated much more like the old pro wrestling National Wrestling Alliance did in many of their practices, including the blacklisting of someone like Colin Kaepernick for not towing the company line properly. The NFL doesn't yet acknowledge itself as sports entertainment rather than competitive sports, because it's easy enough to make it appear authentic, through the use of modern television, efficient and practiced commentators on broadcasts to echo the perceived realities of the sport, so that all that's necessary is selective enforcement of a burgeoning rulebook, and the cooperation of a few key players to keep the marks watching at home, and filling stadiums locally, so long as they remain new enough to justify the meccas from various suburbs metastasizing in every possible direction from old city nucleuses. The Giants will remain at MetLife Stadium, named after the life insurance company that pays a large sum of money annually to have it named so, for as long as the luster has not worn off the building, perhaps a couple decades if developers are lucky, before some other strategically "renewed" area is developed, once the poors are driven into some other nether metropolitan region, to allow for a newer newness to be manufactured out of old rubble full of ghosts silenced by "progress".

Indianapolis Colts (0-3; 8 point average margin of defeat) - The Colts history is more complicated than simple white flight from urban to suburban, as it took the larger shape of cultural shifts in the larger American map. The team was founded in Baltimore in 1953, where it lived for over three decades. In 1953, Carroll Rosenbloom became majority owner of the new Baltimore Colts franchise. Rosenbloom, the son of immigrants, had amassed the wealth to run a football team, having been sent to sell off a Blue Ridge Overalls Company, in Roanoke, Virginia, not far from me. (And man, do I fucking love overalls; it's in my blood.) Rather than sell off the business, he decided to run it, getting distribution through larger department stores like Sears-Roebuck and J.C. Penney, and acquiring other clothing companies along the way. Rosenbloom was once called "America's Overall King" in the media, though he himself would never be caught in anything less than a suit publicly. The Colts became remarkably successful, with much of that attributed to Rosenbloom's ownership style, and business acumen. The team won three NFL championships before the Super Bowl began, and won the fifth Super Bowl as well, in 1970. By that time, Rosenbloom had become frustrated with Memorial Stadium, and Baltimore city officials' lack of desire to renovate the aging stadium, and Rosenbloom wanted to leave the city. At the same time, Robert Irsay had become wealthy through inheriting his father's heating and air conditioning business. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Hungary, with the surname Israel, which became Americanized as Irsay, allowing for the family to be baptized in America's concepts of whiteness. Irsay bought the estate of Los Angeles Rams' owner Dan Reeves after Reeves' death, and immediately swapped franchises with Rosenbloom, allowing America's Overall King to head off to California to enjoy his twilight years. Irsay was not seen as tactful as Rosenbloom, and his belligerence with Baltimore city over stadium issues was much more heavy-handed. The city refused to spend a lot of public money on renovating the stadium, due to low attendance, and state of Maryland actually teased passing laws allowing the city to seize the Colts under an expanded view of eminent domain (used more often now in order to justify economic development which doesn't necessarily benefit the public so much as key invested members of the public). With fears of this, Irsay accepted a deal to move to Indianapolis, and the club moved in the most overnight-like scenario of a franchise relocation the NFL has ever seen. Indianapolis had built the giant Hoosier Dome (later more commonly known as the RCA Dome, after the electronics giant purchased naming rights) exactly towards the purpose of luring an NFL team away from more established metropolitans to fucking Indianapolis, the only major cluster of concrete and steel beams in the extended corn field that is the state of Indiana. Indiana is not a bastion of diversity, with a large white populace through most of the state (though Indianapolis is an anomaly in that sense), and not even diversity of crops, as America's subsidization of corn crops made the state closer to mono-crop than traditional farming would necessitate in order to support a normal human diet. But most of the corn grown in America is for the manufacture of corn syrup, or for feeding cattle on giant feedlots run by the beef industry. Jim Irsay was 12 when his father bought his way into the NFL and became owner of the Colts. He joined the family business of running the team after graduating from Southern Methodist University in 1982, the family's Jewish roots further laundered into Americanized whiteness, having been raised Catholic, and not even knowing his own Jewish roots until two years after his dad bought the Baltimore Colts. After the club moved to Indianapolis, Irsay became Vice President and General Manager. He took over operations after his dad had a stroke in 1995, and when Robert Irsay passed in 1997, a heated legal battle developed between Jim and his stepmother over his father's estate, with the end result being Jim Irsay became the NFL's youngest owner ever at the time, at the age of 37. And despite Indiana's conservative bent (Mike Pence famously wasting taxpayer money to act indignant about NFL players kneeling during the national anthem there), Jim Irsay donates to Democratic candidates, and even bought the original copy of Jack Kerouac's On The Road. Of course, he's also an extremely wealthy man, who grew up amidst that wealth already established by his father. But after 25 years, the shiny new domed stadium that lured the Colts from Baltimore was outdated already, and needing replacing. Indianapolis knowing full well how this hustle worked, built a new stadium just south, across the railroad tracks, and Lucas Oil Stadium opened in 2008. Interestingly enough, ground was broke on the new stadium in September of 2005, and the Indianapolis Colts won their very first Super Bowl in Indiana that following winter. Another interesting side note is the largest crowd ever in the history of the RCA Dome when it was demolished was WWE's Wrestlemania VIII in 1992. But Jim Irsay's story is also the tale of the ugly side of American whiteness, and wealth and success leading to decadence and dissatisfaction. The grandson of Jewish immigrants, and the son of an industrial heating and cooling tycoon in the midwest, Irsay struggled with alcoholism and alleged drug addictions as well, with a mistress of his overdosing and dying in a house he'd discretely purchased with Colts' money. Irsay went to rehab in 2014, with his daughter Carlie positioning herself as heir apparent of his three daughters, and operating the team in his absence. He is now 62, and that's been a self-indulgent six decades, and once he dies, his three daughters will likely struggle to divide up the franchise into ownership or liquidation into cash through selling it to others who are newer marks in America's great pyramid scheme. Being the team is in Indiana, it's impossible not to note the similarities to old farms which have more value in the land they occupy than the crops they cultivate, and when family elders pass on, the children and grandchildren opt to sell off the land for the money rather than continue to work in the dirt. They might lease the farm to large agribusiness to operate on (which run more farmland in America, by far, than any actual families do, though most of these large corporate agricultural businesses grew from some actual family farm, and maintain the illusion of being "family-run" for marketing purposes. But inevitably, the newer generation wants the cash to indulge themselves in, and the land gets sold off to create more sprawl further outside of cities, where men in $80,000 trucks ride back and forth to office jobs blasting "country" music about dirt roads which no longer actually exist.

Detroit Lions (0-3; 9.33 point average margin of defeat) - The Lions are another old school team, and one that has actually seen two phases of America's wealth movement through spatial relations, with the entirety of that happening while still owned by the same family. the team began as the Portsmouth Spartans in 1930, but struggled, and moved to Detroit, rebranded as the Lions to pair with baseball's Tigers, in 1934. Portsmouth, Ohio, is a neat but desolate little city along the Ohio River, across from Kentucky. There's a couple nice rail yards in that area I like to fuck around in, so I've found myself wandering through Portsmouth about once a year, and it's impossible to imagine the behemoth entity of the NFL giving a fuck about a place like that ever. The Lions played at University of Detroit Stadium for a while, before cohabitating with the Tigers at old Tiger Stadium. Baseball was by far the more popular sport then, so in many cities, football teams leased from baseball teams to play their home games in the fall after baseball season was done for the year. As the NFL grew in stature, absorbing the American Football League, and launching the Super Bowl in the late '60s as a championship game that became an annual cultural event for America, sharing homes with baseball stadiums made less sense. But there wasn't space in cities for giant stadiums, so suburbs were played against major cities to build stadiums. For the Lions, that meant Pontiac, a large northern suburb of Detroit, built a domed stadium, called the Pontiac Silverdome, to pull the team from its namesake city proper, from 1974 up through the turn of the century. William Clay Ford Sr. had purchased the team in 1961, and was instrumental in this political play. He was the youngest son of Henry Ford's only son, Edsel, so fabulously wealthy from his grandfather's automobile manufacturing innovations, which the city of Detroit was built upon. William Clay Ford Sr. actually married the granddaughter of Harvey Firestone, another car-related tycoon, in an American version of royal lineages combining. The Lions were never better than mildly successful though, throughout this entire existence, and the Pontiac Silverdome was the scene of a lot of comical lowlights over the years (outside of Barry Sanders' time there). Like the RCA Dome in Indianapolis, the largest crowd ever at the Silverdome when it was abandoned and fell into disrepair was Wrestlemania III in 1987. And yet, by the end of the 20th century, Ford was able to go back to the city of Detroit, a quarter century after abandoning them, to help convince them of a downtown revitalization project built around a new stadium for the Lions. This was the next phase of American urban development we're currently living through, where after real estate plummeted due to white flight into the suburbs, which continued to sprawl further out, getting too far from the city core, and speculators began buying up urban properties, re-gentrifying them, and displacing whatever poor folks had survived decades of decline and neglect, either through rising rents, property taxes, or just outright evictions to make room for the petit bourgeoisie hipster class to return first, followed by normal bougie types, creating the illusion of revitalization of space, when in actuality it was all just a long land-based speculation game played out at too large to see easily scale. Detroit built Ford Field, right near and not long after building Comerica Park for the Tigers, with both stadiums not far north of the long-neglected downtown and Detroit River riverfront. If you only go downtown, the illusion of progress has been successful, but you best stick to the interstates in and out, to bypass the still abundant poverty in the less glamorous real estate zip codes of Detroit, many of which have become so abandoned and derelict over the decades that entire acres have been demolished and turned into vacant fields lacking city services but still having the gridlock of roads and crumbling sidewalks as reminders of what once was in those spaces. The revitalization has not happened for the football team though, with two of Ford's daughters taking over the team after his death in 2014. The Lions infamously went 0-16 in 2008, the first NFL club to ever do so, thus them still being on this list of non-winning clubs makes them feel like a favorite to go 0-17. But it doesn't seem fair to the fanbase, which includes Neil. And yet, here we are, watching a club spiral through cycles of incompetence, with the same ownership structure for well over half a century, and somehow being able to convince mark ass municipalities to build them giant ass new stadiums every 25 years - the NFL standard. Ford Field opened in 2002, so is a short five years away from that alarm clock starting to buzz with anticipation of something new. And in that time, what have the Lions done to deserve it, if we pretend the meritocracy is real, and what makes America unique? Nothing. But it won't matter. It's not a meritocracy, nor an actual sport, but a shell game for the extremely wealthy to embezzle profit from public funds and manufacture abstract wealth not unlike the way Sheila Ford Hampton's great-grandfather Henry took raw physical materials and built cars, altering the American landscape. But physical materials require physical workers, who at least share minimally in the growth of wealth; abstract manufacturing of wealth, which is the basis of America's prosperity currently, doesn't trickle down, because it doesn't require physical bodies to involve in the process. Thus the underclass grows, larger and hungrier, and one day that rumble of empty bellies is going to be too strong to be silenced when it angrily starts voicing its displeasure, no matter how many private prisons get built at the same time as Ford Fields, and Lucas Oil and MetLife Stadiums.

Jacksonville Jaguars (0-3; 12.67 point average margin of defeat) - The Jacksonville Jaguars are one of the NFL's youngest franchises, only awarded in 1995, to an ownership group led by Wayne Weaver, a shoe company owner whom the NFL had recruited as an owner before, hoping he'd set up a new one in St. Louis, to replace the Rams, who moved back to Los Angeles once their stadium in Missouri wasn't shiny enough anymore. Weaver felt St. Louis was a baseball town, and preferred to locate his franchise in football-mad SEC country, thus Jacksonville was an ideal location. In fact, the city of Jacksonville was location of an annual Florida/Georgia rivalry game, as well as The Gator Bowl, at the stadium named after the bowl game (now called, as dystopianly as possible, the TaxSlayer Gator Bowl). The Citrus Bowl, stadium and bowl game, located in Orlando, had offered a bigger payoff to the two universities for the annual rivalry game. So Jacksonville developed a plan for a major renovation and overhaul of the Gator Bowl Stadium, to keep the game. At first, Georgia didn't care, so the city expanded renovations even further, to get the two schools to agree to continuing the contract from 1997 through 2002. Additionally, the city got more public money involved to woo an NFL team to the city, which had no major sports franchises of that level. Weaver agreed, and the Jacksonville Jaguars were born. The team has played at this Jacksonville Municipal Stadium ever since, though it's not been known as that for most of that time, due to naming rights conventions in American stadiums. In fact, that in itself is a good slice of American economics, as rising cell phone company Alltel purchased naming rights from 1997 to 2006, spending their growing fortunes from a changing telecommunications world. The company actually no longer exists, dissolved by AT&T in 2016. EverBank, a financial services corporation which provides banking services, thus also mortgage loans, which are packaged together as investments as part of their investing services, took over naming rights in 2010. The packaging of home ownership loans as an investment product has directly contributed to previous housing bubble collapses, and is involved in America's currently out of control real estate market, just waiting for something to crash the entire thing. EverBank was based in Jacksonville, but had outgrown that regional footprint due to its investment strategy successes, thus got purchased by TIAA, which technically a non-profit corporation founded by Andrew Carnegie over a century ago, but is structured in such a way that it can own for-profit subsidiaries, which is basically what it does at this point, hence the acquisition of EverBank in 2017. Similarly, Wayne Weaver sold his stake in the NFL, after its value had been firmly established over the course of 15 years, to Shahid Khan in 2011. Khan was an immigrant from Pakistan, born to a middle class family there. Both Shahid's parents were educated, intelligent people, with separate professional careers. Shahid came to America at age 16 to go to college in Illinois. He got a job working in a automotive manufacturing company at the time, studying engineering, and becoming the engineering director for the company after graduating. He saved up money to start his own car parts business, ended up buying his old employer's company, as well as many others, eventually getting a stranglehold on being the primary manufacturer of bumpers for first Toyota trucks, then all Toyota models. So not unlike a later version of Henry Ford, Shahid Khan streamlined business practices to grow his company from $17 million back in the '80s to well nearly $9 billion in sales last year. It was this fortune he used to purchase the Jaguars in 2011, becoming the first ethnic minority to be an NFL owner. This tale fits the neoliberal vision of the American meritocracy, where one doesn't have to be white-appearing to achieve billionaire status and extreme wealth. Of course, this diverse capitalism still doesn't stretch the benefits of wealth across society, with there still being a large amount of underclass required for a single family to hoard so much wealth, in order to have so much laying around they can buy American football teams and English football clubs, and whatever else they want. Going back to wrestling again, for some fucked up reason, Shahid Khan's son - his Jim Irsay - is Tony Khan, who has executive positions with his father's football teams, both American and English, but also has the pet project of starting a wrestling promotion to compete with World Wrestling Entertainment as a brand. This is a much riskier move, because there aren't as many marks out there willing to sink money into a wrestling franchise, which has no expectation to hold its value like a football team would. Both Neil and myself circulated on various wrestling message boards in the earlier days of the internet, and Tony Khan actually apparently was also in those circles, so many of the smart marks who are too extremely online still feel an affinity for All Elite Wrestling, because they tell themselves Tony Khan is one of them. But he's the heir to a billionaire, not some dork from Anywhere, USA. Shahid Khan seems intent on letting his son have whatever he desires though, and Shahid also has the business sensibility to hold onto the Jaguars, just like he has his auto parts business, because he knows it will only grow in value. An NFL franchise is not like the WWE or a wrestling promotion, at least after the NWA was busted up by Vince McMahon in the '80s, because a football team, even if it loses money every season, grows in value, not unlike how the average American family with access to credit and wealth is taught to treat real estate investments. Someone will come along later in the chronological pyramid scheme to buy you out, and you'll get all that you put into it back, plus some.

New York Jets (0-3; 16.67 point average margin of defeat) - The Jets are relevant to that stability of the NFL, at least now, where things are leveled out at 32 teams, and as far as I know, there's no talk of expansion. A dying empire does not expand, it contracts, and we've yet to see that in the NFL. A random google search (since I am not "tapped into" sports radio, thank fucking god) suggest the NFL might expand by two teams, but this seems risky to me, as they've got a pretty good gig right now pitting upcoming cities against former NFL cities and current stadium deals with franchises relocating when necessary. Seems like somebody skips town every couple seasons now, and the places with two teams - Los Angeles and New York - would seem to be the most likely to lose a team should it ever come to it. But not the Jets, or the Giants, right? They've both been there forever. Well forever is not as long as it might seem, and the Jets, to some extent have always been secondary, having been formed as the Titans in 1959, but suffering near failure early on, only to be bought out by a syndicate led by Sonny Werblin, who rebranded the team as the Jets, spent big money to bring Joe Namath to the team, which triggered the Jets winning Super Bowl III, after the AFL/NFL merger. After that merger, and the Super Bowl ushering in the modern era of NFL, the idea of a team collapsing financially has been kicked aside, as other cities or ownership groups are always found to buy into the cartel. One of Werblin's partners, Leon Hess, was part of a group that fell out with Werblin, and Hess ended up using his gas station fortunes to become majority owner. Werblin helped launch the group that built Giants Stadium though, having suffered under the lease conditions of the Jets paying the Mets to play at Shea Stadium beginning in 1964. Even with Giants Stadium opening, the Jets stayed at Shea, until the 1984 season, when they jumped across the river to New Jersey, and shared the stadium of their metropolitan rivals. And when the same complex was the site of a new MetLife Stadium being built, the Jets remained roommates with the Giants, with at least the stadium not bearing the other team's name no more. Perhaps this second class status, which I'm sure Jets fans would argue with me about, might be enough to have the team thrown to the gods of metaphysics, to suffer an 0-17 season, plucking over the first domino towards contraction, and failure of the NFL. But in looking at these stadiums going up whenever some wealthy fucker decides he needs a new playground for his enormously-valued football team, it seems unlikely. The league's financial success is built upon fleecing local governments for as much as it can, and thus when the government of America begins to fail, the foundation for the NFL is quickly removed. Ultimately that's why the NFL won't continue to exist as America goes into decline, because it's entirely dependent upon the pyramid scam of eternal economic growth that all these people's abstract wealths are grown upon. Very little of it is real, though actual physical spaces are developed using government monies of one sort or another, to anchor development projects others jump onto, to spike real estate values in spaces where those values had been sunk previously. It's all a really brilliant way to remain exorbitantly wealthy if you're the great-granddaughter of Henry Ford, or the son of a billionaire like Tony Khan, or heirs to the Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical company fortunes like the two brothers who own the Jets are. And should it ever come to it, at least now, as the American Empire is propped up by a good cop/bad cop two-party system that desperately wants to maintain that empire, there's always some newer billionaire looking to take their wealth and put it into something that's seemingly going to hold its value, for a generation or two. What a fucking scam. I look forward to it all crashing - not the homes you and I pay a mortgage on, or rent; but the big crash, of these people who live in hidden secure locations and control giant swaths of land in the middle of populated areas where these stadiums are put, the Medieval Churches of our post-modern era of gluttonous consumption of things we have no control over. Gobble it up, you fucks who have your brains fattened with the nutritionless information of professional football minutiae. 

THE QUEST FOR 0-17 - YEAR ONE, WEEK TWO

[Wisconsin artist Norbert Kox's painting of Sheila Ford Hamp inheriting the Detroit Lions]

After two weeks, we're down to only seven NFL franchises left who have yet to win, with a long 15 weeks ahead of us. Is this Quest for 0-17 even possible, in the first year? The NFL has no actual meritocracy, like all American sports leagues, with no lower leagues to get dropped to or to have better thriving clubs to come up and replace the dregs. So they've built in this notion of "parity" - a false construct of equality built upon everybody having the same financial possibilities, and shared revenues, which completely overlooks the fact many organizations are just doomed, and completely poisoned by inefficient egotistic fuckwads at every corner office. So yeah, maybe it can happen, but the NFL knows America is a rigged system, and does everything in its power to ensure and enforce "parity", so that the marks who waste their Sundays for lesser teams, and more importantly the wealthier marks who shell out actual money for overpriced jerseys and merchandise and seats in actual stadiums will all believe they have a shot. Keep the marks with enough believe they never get up from the table, and they'll sit there eating your shit sandwich full of American militaristic propaganda until the day they die.

Anyways, here's the seven teams left in our quest...

Minnesota Vikings (0-2; 2 pt average margin of defeat) - There is no better QB for a potentially sinking club than Kirk Cousins, of inflated on-field value, culturally as white as a fuckin' Klan sheet, and believing he's done "the independent research" to avoid getting a covid vaccine, even though the league has mandated it. Well, they mandated it, and he was still going to refuse, and somehow that fell off the news radar the past three weeks, without clarification he took it, or the league put some other protocols in place. Of course Cam Newton got released for the same reasons, but he's black. Kirk Cousins is just a good ol' midwestern whiteboy, with that "all-American" smile, meaning his headshot reinforces the imagery we've been fed as to what being an American man means. In reality, Cousins is an unintelligent piece of shit, of mediocre ability, but elevated because of the American mythologies heavily rooted in white supremacy we've all been fed. Hitler would've loved Kirk Cousins. Maybe Cousins' preferred #8 is just halfway to 88. I don't know. But I do know if I were to be pulling for a good symbolic 0-17 to crush the spirit of the brainwashed white suburban comfort class that pretends it's a "working class" even though it drives a $75k customized truck on its daily commute to a suburban office park, then the Vikings and Kirk Cousins is a good fit.

New York Giants (0-2; 7.5 average margin of defeat) - I had scattered burgundy and gold sigils (found bottles, mostly Miller High Life pony bottles) with little intentions for Washington Football Team failure last week in the abandoned quarries behind where I live. I desperately hoped Washington to be the first (and only, and last) 0-17 team in NFL history. But I didn't get them out there until Wednesday afternoon, overlooking the Thursday night game (because I overlooked the entire schedule, on purpose), and the dark magic hadn't had a chance to swirl upward and float that direction just yet. So the Giants lost by one, to remain unbeaten, while my nemesis franchise Washington, whom I hold much bitter resentment towards, snuck out of the 0 wins column. Fucking Dan Snyder.

Indianapolis Colts (0-2; 7.5 average margin of defeat) - Most of what was said about Kirk Cousins could be said about Carson Wentz as well, though he is certainly a more raggedy and dirty version, which is why Philadelphia loved that dude. The state of Indiana desires levels of white purity impossible for most humans; that's why they revered Peyton Manning. Andrew Luck wasn't good enough for them. Of course Wentz has been injured, and some young fucker named Jacob Eason might get thrown into the mix. A good 0-17 run will require at least three quarterbacks, in my metaphysical opinion, with at least one of them having their spirit eternally crushed by the season. Wentz (from google searching) only has a pair of sprained ankles. That's not eternally crushing, so hopefully he'll be forced to get back out there this week and something psychologically horrific can happen. Or maybe Eason throws 9 interceptions. But a QB must be sacrificed on the way to 0-17, that is for certain.

New York Jets (0-2; 12 pt average margin of defeat) - I've been rewatching The Sopranos, mostly because I want to look at tracksuits. They have such amazing tracksuits throughout the show, specifically Fila color block ones. These are impossible to find, because assholes buy up all that shit and put them in vintage stores. I've noticed some Sergio Tacchini ones too in the show, which is a dream score. I'd love to come upon a whole slew of old xl Sergio Tacchini combos in an assortment of colors, so that I could have a whole fuckin' closet full of them, to mix and match with Polo crew socks, for the rest of my life. Anyways, in my search for vintage soft shell windbreaker tracksuits, I almost pulled the trigger on a $23 New York Jets one this past week. I didn't, because it was just green with white piping... if it had been color blocked in some obnoxious way, I would've jumped at it. But Jets green is a dark Earthy green too, very contradictory for the upper Jersey location they inhabit. Nothing Earthy about that sprawling shithole. But I guess that's important, that we create distractions which give us balance, in order for sports to be a solid opiate for us dumbass masses.

Jacksonville Jaguars (0-2; 13 pt average margin of defeat) - I have mixed feelings about the existence of Jacksonville, not only as an NFL team but as a real life metropolis. There's very strange energies in that area - swirls of southern whiteness but also black southern culture, all with the fermentation factor accelerated by Atlantic winds. I'm not gonna talk on Jacksonville because of that, not this week, because I'm not sure how I feel about it all. I sat at the Atlantic the weekend before last, watching dolphins and cargo ships and thick American asses in panty bikinis, and it's left me confused about where Jacksonville might fit into all this quest bullshit.

Detroit Lions (0-2; 13 pt average margin of defeat) - There would have been no more perfect failure for America than an 0-17 Green Bay Packers helmed by Aaron Rodgers (who, if you remember the old Armchair Linebacker, looks too much like the guy who once tried to kill my youngest sister). So of course it couldn't happen, and the Detroit Lions got punked on Monday night football in front of a bunch of future heart attacks wearing cheese paraphernalia. I guess that's the Lions. I feel for Neil to be honest; he has had many battles over the past few years, and being I know how that is, coming from similarly doomed beginnings, all those battles are intertwined, so that the self-medication and favorite sports teams and family member who won't talk to you and too many fried foods and all of it just weaves together, to become this psychic canopy hiding any light in the universe from reaching your outlook all that easily. I worry about Neil, because he is as close to an e-brother as I've ever had, and I've tried to convince him for years to give up the Lions, at the very least, poke one hole in that wretched canopy, try and let a little light through. Breaking my unnecessary obligation to the NFL franchise in Washington helped let a little light into my life, and then I poked more holes, and I'm a completely different man than the one who watched Robert Griffin III's first games, deluding myself (like all addicts do) that great successes were on the horizon. I'd never wish for the Lions to go 0-17, because that would hurt my brother Neil, but I hope each week's further plunge into the possibility is a chance for him to re-evaluate his relationship with the universe. None of you give a fuck about Neil, you just consume his incredible ramblings and move on. How many of you have venmo'd him a couple dollars? How many of you actually care about Neil? He'd be better off without football, and the selfish thoughts of you mostly miserable content consumers should never cross his mind.

Atlanta Falcons (0-2; 24.5 pt average margin of defeat) - I feel the south is an amazing place when it has a good mix of poor white southerners, Black culture, and Latino immigration. My entire life philosophy is called Southern Gothicc Futurism, and based upon this, that the American South is a unique place culturally, well conditioned to spring forth with whatever comes next. So I don't wish for a cultural capital of such a place like Atlanta to be sacrificed to the 0-17 gods, but if it must, it must. We'd all be better off (eventually) if America finished declining. And if the metaphysical gods have to burn Atlanta like Sherman did in order for it to happen, then so be it. Beautiful things must get destroyed in order to survive the ugliest of times.

THE QUEST FOR 0-17 - YEAR ONE, WEEK ONE

[Howard Finster's depiction of John Riggins SB XVII TD run]

I guess it has been 5 years since I gave up the NFL due to a combination of feeling complicit in the concussive exploitation of marginal poor folk of the rural south, feeling uncomfortable with the further rising tide of fascism present in the league, and just being cursed with Dan Snyder as the owner of my childhood favorite team, knowing he would outlive me, and make life miserable. I’m not even sure how much I actually watched of that last season when Kirk Cousins had taken over from RG3. I remember seeing some games where he was QB, but I was disgusted and disinvested by then. When I quit drinking sodas, I played this mind game with myself that when I took a swig off a newly purchased bottle of Pepsi, that the sweetness was actually from dead honeybees. It got to a point where I’d drink no more than half then throw the rest away, and eventually just stopped altogether. That last season I watched the NFL was similar in I’d note the concussive incidences in every play, and verbalize within myself, “Well, he probably got a bit of brain damage there,” and it made it so I could hardly watch the game, also due to the fact I’d started watching the world’s football, which is incredibly more constant and way less commercial filled. So watching different guys concuss themselves, but in undiagnosed ways, then sitting through endless commercials every time somebody switched who had the ball, well it effectively killed the joy of even trying to pretend it was anything other than a sad militarized spectacle of enforcing American fascism during the declining days of this doomed empire. They would squeeze every penny of American flag waving profit they could off this CTE dying horse.
Thus, I was not surprised at all when I saw the NFL was moving to a 17-game schedule, already taxing the limits of the human body, compounded by the realities of covid’s existence, so what the fuck? Let’s make the idiot cotton pickers play an extra one to boot. I recalled fondly as well Neil’s coverage of the Detroit Lions infamous realization of the first 0-16 record, and I guess in the time I had left the NFL, the Cleveland Browns similarly achieved the high pinnacle of doom. But now, those greedy fucklords of the NFL have decided to up the ante, make it a little more exciting as so many realize our entire existence is fucked up, unequal, and built on lies, they can get drawn back in. Of course this will achieve the desired effect of more profits, at the expense of more human cannon fodder. And yet, it is impossible to deny the curtain has been pulled back on our western culture, and the sun is setting on the way of life as we know it. Thus, I’m popping back into the Armchair Linebacker fold, briefly, for as long as I can, as a simple verbal séance towards the pinnacle of doom to mark the end of America – an 0-17 National Football League team.
Until every team has won a game, I’ll list out the remaining possible pinnacles of failure, necessary to usher in our final days as America disintegrates into chaos and bloodletting. And though the American football fan loves to claim the sport’s superiority over the world’s version of football, make no mistake about it, unlike that sport – which has survived regime changes and world wars, the NFL will absolutely shut down and disband if America ceases to be. It has no life of its own outside of the blind patriotism of believing America is special, and unique, because we run full speed into each other head first and don’t cry about it when our vision goes black and white and we can’t hear sounds momentarily nor remember our spouses or children’s names. And after one week, of course, there are still sixteen candidates for this possibility. Let’s list them…

New England Patriots (0-1; 1 pt margin of defeat) – The Patriots lost by a single point, and I’ll just tell you now I won’t be watching shit to add to these blurbs. I’ve poisoned my mind quite enough with this shit already, but I know Bill Belichick is still coaching New England, and the rise of the Patriots coincided with post-9/11 xenophobic fervor, and with Tom Brady’s rise as a Republican Party darling, it’s more and more likely this was all a covert operation from the beginning, and the New England Patriots multiple Super Bowl titles during the Belichick era is about as impressive as the Harlem Globetrotters win streak over the Washington Generals. Tha being said, the Patriots (that name) are still a powerful symbol of American mythology, specifically located to a region, though it’s a Boston team, taking on the name of the entire area. It is doubtful to think the Patriots would ever finish 0-17, even with the universe deeming it necessary as counter-symbol of America’s fall. Tom Brady wasn’t fucking Laura Bush on the down-low all those years for that to happen.

Dallas Cowboys (0-1; 2 pt margin of defeat) – The same thing can be said of the Dallas Cowboys, to be honest. Jerry Jones is a bastard remnant of a previous era, and Texas itself is a strange concoction where you somehow combine the rampant collective don’t give a fuck white ignorance of the South with the belligerent mocking patriotism of New England meatheads. It’s a strange combination, but very important in feeding the American War Machine. It’s no coincidence high school football borders on religion in Texas, because those young bodies that get brain damaged enough for the propaganda poisons to seep deep into their brains, leeching into their hearts, that aren’t good enough for a D1 scholarship, or even D2, can fill the ranks of the enlisted, and learn technology to steer drones to drop explosive tonnage on brown people who don’t speak English, or Spanish, which is partially acceptable, but only if they wear cowboy hats.

Minnesota Vikings (0-1; 3 pt margin of defeat) – Is that bastard Kirk Cousins still QB at the Vikings? Didn’t he refuse to get vaccinated at one point as well, and got his teammates sick or some shit? Nothing is real anymore, including Minnesota, and the likelihood of the metropolitan area where George Floyd was murdered, triggering nationwide protests, being the site of an 0-17 team is very small. They will want them boys in purple standing for the national anthem in prominent positions of respectful obedience to encourage the most respectfully obedient form of masculinity they can. A hateful masculinity that backs the blue… what a wretched piece of shit culture we truly are.

Washington Football Team (0-1; 4 pt margin of defeat) – Ahh, my childhood football team without their racist nickname. I still have a black bootleg Sean Taylor jersey in my closet, way too big for me, which I keep, shamefully, as a remnant of all those years spent giving a fuck. It would be perfectly fitting for the football team in the nation’s capital with the horribly racist history to go 0-17, on a larger level but also on a personal level. I would take contrarian joy in them being the absolute worst American football team in history, locked in for eternity once the league is abandoned as roving gangs of Three Percenters begin their ethnic cleansing expeditions in our larger more affluent suburbs. And I’ll be conjuring that with magic and sigils, attempting to invoke various curses and shadow people weighing heavy on their best players. It might be a bit tougher this season, because Ryan Fitzpatrick is a weird one. Using black magic to crack Alex Smith’s leg in two was easy – a simple hand-carved wooden talisman conveniently snapped at the joint under a new moon around the barrel fire, and he was toast. Dwayne Haskins even easier – casting the intentions of naked women into a young new millionaire’s lust zone happens in the NFL even without Greater Appalachian conjuring. But my efforts helped push it along faster. But Fitzpatrick is Harvard educated, a seemingly intelligent man, yet also a falsebeard. I’ve yet to figure out the way to weaken his spirit on the astral plane, but I’ve been visiting the Potomac River further upstream from DC more often, studying Piscataway creation myths, and writing small prayers on the trains parked in freight yards on both sides of the Potomac, both in Maryland and West Virginia, for those to move east. I’m hopeful the Washington Football Team might could be that 0-17 abomination, but to be honest, there’s personal bias there as well.

Cleveland Browns (0-1; 4 pt margin of defeat) – It would not seem fair to the Browns, after having achieved 0-16, and being rewarded with that Baker Mayfield character, to have to suffer a worse record. Like most teams that have failed to such a level, who have their fans’ hopes restored upon the false promise of a fun-loving gunslinger like Mayfield, they have to be middling for a while, to tease the marks back into believing. The NFL is masterful in working the marks – far better than Vince McMahon could ever dream of being – and that means there will be no 0-17 Browns.

New York Jets (0-1; 5 pt margin of defeat) – The Jets have too many implications in professional gambling, both legal and illegal, to ever go 0-17. There are too many organized crime figures who feel partial to the Jets for them to ever suffer such a fate.

Baltimore Ravens (0-1; 6 pt margin of defeat) – The Ravens would never go 0-17 either, as they are testament to the NFL’s ability to pimp anybody out – city, fanbase, or otherwise. They were an abomination to old Baltimore Colts supporters, as well as to the original Cleveland Browns franchise that relocated to Baltimore, and yet despite all the complaints, the NFL laughed, got Baltimore to build them a shiny nice stadium in a gentrifying area near the harbor, and basically said, “You fucking marks will learn to love it.” And everybody did. The Colts are exiled to fucking Indiana, there’s a new Cleveland Browns, and the Ravens have won a Super Bowl, and my friend who had never watched a single game of the NFL the entire time I knew him has since become a Ravens fan the same time I gave it all up, even owning jerseys, which is hilarious to see since he used to make fun of that shit. The NFL is proud of things like the Ravens, which it can concoct out of nowhere and force upon the public, who begrudgingly accepts it, then falls in love it, then gets mad at anybody who dare question the integrity of the Baltimore Ravens.

Buffalo Bills (0-1; 7 pt margin of defeat) – I do not understand how the Bills continue to be relevant as glorified jobbers of a football team, for so many decades, despite being a dying city with no other major sports teams (hockey doesn’t count). And yet here they are, still.

Detroit Lions (0-1; 8 pt margin of defeat) – Ahh yes, Neil’s beloved Detroit Lions. I have followed Neil’s writings even as I gave up the NFL, worrying over him similarly to how an addict in recovery frets over his old road dog partner in crime, hoping they are able to find salvation the same way you did, and escape the affliction of self-induced suffering. But Neil can’t – he may be a lost cause, too many childhood traumas and not the same level of support I’ve stumbled into in life. I’m thankful for that, for people who made me feel safe enough to go, “Wow, this is fucking stupid to sit around for 8 hours all day Sunday, on a beautiful day, and get mad at the television.” Detroit the city is half abandoned now, public services just cut off in certain sectors where what used to blocks full of houses is now vacant fields overgrown with weeds and rusty trash. It doesn’t deserve to go 0-17, and I doubt it will, to be honest, not after being the first to 0-16. The NFL, or the Universe, or a combination of the two couldn’t be that cruel to one place. Could it?

Indianapolis Colts (0-1; 12 pt margin of defeat) – The Indianapolis Colts would be a great choice to go 0-17, being situated in Indiana. There is no worse borderlands in America than the Ohio/Indiana region, two of the absolute shittiest states in terms of vibes and feeling doomed. Ohio is a wretchedly awful place, but there’s a lost soul soullessness to it, where you can see maybe soul once existed, but was vanquished by failure over generations, and turns into an ugly desperation. Indiana however is just vacant of soul, and it’s pretty fitting Mike Pence is from there. Just a blank-brained, soulless entity that has filled its heart with empty spiritual nonsense about hard work and god but is devoid of any actual spirit, not even an ounce of burning bush fire to it. It’s not even fair to call it vanilla, because even vanilla has sweetness. It is just… Indiana. And though they’ve squeezed all the Black people in the state into Indianapolis, it doesn’t trump the fact it’s still Indiana. It’d be wonderful for them to go 0-17, but the gods of war would have to be distracted to neglect those farmboy twinks they so dearly love.

New York Giants (0-1; 14 pt margin of defeat) – We just had 9/11 celebrations of the mythologies built from the ashes of those buildings, and the New York Giants are as close to ground zero as the NFL can get. Seeing both country music and the NFL become patriotic frenzies of bias and hatred hidden behind red, white, and blue bunting was fucking gross this past twenty years. That being said, there’s a zero percent possibility the New York Giants end up 0-17.

Jacksonville Jaguars (0-1; 16 pt margin of defeat) – It would be funny to see Jacksonville go 0-17, but that city is one of the weird realities of America’s make-up today that not everybody realizes – that there’s gigantic ass sprawling metropolitan areas full of motherfuckers who spend $75,000 on a truck that never carries a single goddamn thing, and only gets 15 mile to the gallon, if they’re lucky, but those fuckers will gladly drive it on the 45 minute commute through that sprawl, each way, without ever giving a single solitary fuck, unless they have to wait too long for some goddamned Chik-Fil-A, or Raisin’ Cains, or whatever afterschool children’s snack chicken fast food chain is the latest rage in those communities. The NFL thrives on those types; that’s their bread and butter (which is now replaced by chicken tenders and special sauce), and the NFL would never alienate its chicken tenders and special sauce.

Chicago Bears (0-1; 20 pt margin of defeat) – Our last four teams, with the largest average margins of defeat thus far after one week, are a pair of southern teams, and a pair of old black and blue division NFC Central teams. It is the dying working class of the Midwest, and the dying working class of the American South, except both of those regions are still heavily populated with a large angry suburban class that can live off the diminishing returns of the previous generations for at least another decade. These are the ones who believed the “Make America Great Again” promos, because all it took was a return to the ways of their great uncles to once again enjoy the full fruits of freedom. Obviously, that overlooks all the poor brown people whose necks had to be kneeled upon to achieve that. It would be something if the Bears went 0-16, such a huge symbolic entity in the NFL. But I’m also pretty sure Jim McMahon has dabbled in time travel, and it wouldn’t happen.

Tennessee Titans (0-1; 25 pt margin of defeat) – Tennessee in general, and Nashville in particular, is a great example of the strange dichotomy of many American South spaces, simultaneously populated by the most aggravating privileged racists, but also some of the sweetest most beautiful simple souls you could ever meet. How does that happen? The Titans logo has always been questionable though, some sort of magic symbol of a crashing cluster of stars, and perhaps accidentally conjuring the end of the empire. Graphic designers are like 12-year-olds with a Tarot deck – they don’t think about the implications of what they’re doing, they just slap some shit down, make up some meaning behind it, and move on to the next thing that captures their fancy. But there’s real implications, and that Titans logo has always been one of the darkest logos in the NFL.

Atlanta Falcons (0-1; 26 pt margin of defeat) – Matt Ryan appears to still be playing, and I always hated that guy. And despite the Falcons getting blown out apparently in their first game, I will pass on any mean commentary, because I love so many rural parts of Georgia, wandering along those back roads, scribbling on idle trains. And to be honest, one of the great spirit warriors of my childhood football watching was Billy “White Shoes” Johnson, so I will give the Falcons a pass in his honor.

Green Bay Packers (0-1; 35 pt margin of defeat) – Aaron Rodgers entry into Green Bay a thousand years ago was covered in the drama of Brett Favre’s exit, and now that it is time for Aaron Rodgers to exit as well, he is doing so no less ungracefully. Trapped in Green Bay, it seems his heart has turned darker than it already was, and they were destroyed in their first game. Could it go for 17 weeks? You’re talking about the only small town football team in the NFL, owned by the fans, whose name actually goes back to the working class roots of the team’s beginnings. Brett Favre was always just an ol’ gunslinger, playing like a kid in the back yard, leading the team to renewed glory in this modern age. And Aaron Rodgers seemed like that too, for a while. But things have turned sour. On top of this, earlier this year, he married Shailene Woodley, the actress noted for her support of the Bernie Sanders movement. The American Empire has not embraced Sanders’ shtick, and in fact denies the validity of it. Where does this put Rodgers, and the Packers? Are they still a symbol of American greatness? Or have they betrayed the true spirit of American football, and destroying yourself entirely for the momentary glory of televised success, worshipped by the unthinking masses? This will be an interesting story to watch, on the metaphysical level, and I hope to have to think about this for a few more weeks in terms of the Packers.

So there’s your first week wrap up of who can still go 0-17. I don’t know who is playing whom next week, nor do I give half a fuck. I did see the Washington Football Team is playing on Thursday night, which I guess is a regular thing now, but I’m not gonna subject myself to three-and-a-half hours of Army and beer commercials to try and find some excitement in 12 minutes of actual game and 48 minutes of replays.