NFC East Preview

The Eagles are the defending Super Bowl champs, which makes them the obvious favorites in the NFC East, but the problem with that is this: the Eagles, as representatives of Philadelphia, are bound to fuck it all up.

Maybe that’s not fair, and maybe the Eagles win changed an entire city’s psychic energy, but I doubt it. That is a lot of history to have to change. I mean, this is a city that was basically replaced twice over as the preeminent American city: by New York, and then by Washington as the nation’s capital. It’s very history is an inferiority complex. The reason It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is such a good show is because it’s true. It’s the only real show that Philly could produce. Sure, The Cosby Show worked too but that’s because the universe already knew and understood that Bill Cosby was a wild rape-fiend.

All of this is to say that there is something inherent in the character of Philadelphia that causes everyone to fuck-up. Sure, they might transcend it for one beautiful moment, but that just makes the tragedy of it all the more acute. They’re like white trash who wins the lottery and then blows it all on bullshit before ending up worse off than before, being sued by multiple relatives, kids in jail for organizing bum fights or whatever bullshit they think rich people are supposed to do, horrible, horrible.

This transcends the actual football talent of the Eagles, which should be considerable. They have a burgeoning star at quarterback in Carson Wentz, but Wentz also tore both his ACL and his LCL, which famously opened the door for Nick Foles to win the Super Bowl. This seems like it should be a luxury – two good quarterbacks – but it really isn’t.

Start with Wentz, who really only did it for ¾ of a season. He’s not really proven in that sense, and who knows how he’s gonna come back from that knee injury. Foles, meanwhile, is a career journeyman who was ready to retire only a couple of years ago. Yeah, he won the Super Bowl, but that seems like sort of a miracle exception rather than the rule. Relying on him for a full season probably isn’t gonna work out. And then there’s this: Foles winning the Super Bowl means that there will be controversy here no matter what. There is no way to get this kind of psychic energy right. Wentz should be the man, but is he really? Foles was the man for a day, but is he really the man? Both believe they are, both have fans and surely players on the team and in the coaching staff who think they are, and that sort of thing is what leads to Mac, Dennis and Charlie bickering in the bar while Sweet Dee makes a fool of herself and Frank gets caught importing Vietnamese hookers. It’s Always Sunny indeed.

One more thing: no team has repeated as NFC East champion in 14 years. That’s pretty fucking crazy. The last team to do it was actually the Eagles, which sounds like a good omen until you realize that team was the one that ended with Donovan McNabb puking all over the field as they lost the Super Bowl. Now that’s Philadelphia.

So, who will actually win the division if not the Eagles? Well, that’s where things get tricky. The Eagles might still win this damn thing by default. The Giants are fucked. Let’s just get that out of the way immediately. They bottomed out last season in the sort of “let’s just burn this thing to the ground and start over” season that teams have to go through every now and then. It was a transition year, only the Giants insanely decided not to actually transition and kept Eli Manning around instead of drafting a new quarterback. This, uh, this won’t work. Not only is Eli shit from a butt now, but he’ll forever represent the Giants of the past, and as long as he’s around, the Giants will be stuck between two worlds, and in this purgatory there is nothing but misery and despair.

The one saving grace for the Giants is that they drafted Saquon Barkley, who I think is the Real Deal. He’s a physical freak who can do things on the field that are ghostly reminders of, yes, I’m gonna say it, Barry Sanders. Like Barry, he had games where he could never quite get going, but to be honest, I’m gonna blame a lot of that on Penn State’s horrid offensive line. I watched them enough times to know that it really wasn’t his fault. But, like Barry, he also had games where it was clear that he was in another league, that he belonged to a class of athlete that comes along once in a generation – if we’re lucky.

That’s all well and good for the Giants, but here’s the thing: today’s NFL isn’t really geared towards allowing a running back to dominate like back in the day. It’s a passing league, and while Barkley is a great receiver out of the backfield, his impact is limited simply by what the NFL is now. The Giants are sort of like a dude who grows up in the country, say Montana, where there is nothing but open roads for miles and miles. All his life he’s dreamed of owning a Ferrari, of getting out on those roads and blasting off at 220 mph, of transcending the limits this world and society puts on him. He moves to the city, gets rich, and is finally in a position to buy that Ferrari. He does, only now he lives in the cramped city and can’t really drive it anywhere. His neighbors see it and go “Holy shit, that’s amazing!” but all he can really do is pull it out and shine it up for them. Maybe he can drive it to the corner store at 15 mph, but that’s about it and what’s the point? That’s the Giants with Saquon Barkley. He’s a beautiful Ferrari meant for a different place, a different age. He’s a tragedy and he hasn’t even played a game.

The Redskins are an insipid franchise. All name controversies aside – and I know you don’t want me to start Discoursing here – they’re owned by a dude who’s little better than a sleazy used car-salesman, a caricature of a rich dude who spends most of his time looking for ways to fuck over his own fans, most famously illustrated by that time he sued an old lady over her season tickets or whatever the fuck dumb reason it was. Dan Snyder has pissed away a culture, an entire psychic destiny, and replaced it with his own sleazy failure. Raven Mack, beloved founder emeritus of Armchair Linebacker, was completely chased away from football by Snyder. My boy Paul had the same thing happen. The Redskins are doomed as long as Dan Snyder owns the team.

They’re also changing quarterbacks this season. Out is Kirk Cousins, who I have my own hate-boner for, owing largely to tribal reasons. In is Alex Smith, formerly of the Chiefs, who I just said the other day is underrated. But doesn’t this kind of feel like a lateral move? I mean, the only real reason the Redskins traded Cousins is because they didn’t want to commit to him long term. So, they turned around and picked up Alex Smith and then committed to him long term. The only problem is that Smith is almost five years older than Cousins, so unless the Redskins really, really hated Kirk Cousins – certainly possible given my own feelings about the dude – this is a move that seems puzzling. And even if Smith is better, it’s likely to only be fractionally, hence the whole lateral move thing. And since the Redskins went 7-9 last year, a lateral move isn’t exactly a good thing. Maybe they go 8-8 now, but so what?

And then there’s the Cowboys. My God, the Cowboys. I was dreading writing about them – still am – because it’s really hard for me to encapsulate the full terrordome of feelings I have about the Cowboys. I’ll try anyway.

I have always hated the Cowboys. This is because I am a decent human being buried beneath the degenerate surface – hence my charm. This is because they represent a sort of America that is revolting to me, nakedly greedy and repulsive, hidden beneath a clean-faced salesman’s smile. The Cowboys are truly America’s Team in the sense that they have always been the team of the hidden ugliness of America. I know I said the Raiders were the true America’s Team, and I meant it, but to be honest, Las Vegas doesn’t really need the Raiders because it already has a team: the Dallas Cowboys.

The Cowboys are – and always have been – the Las Vegas of teams. They are a team of bright lights, luring people in with the promise and aching memory of the American Dream. But it is a twisted and perverted form of the American Dream. Beneath the bright lights and welcoming exterior, the glitz and the glamor, is a sort of mean, naked greed, the team of an oil baron. Hell, even their cheerleaders are basically just well-worn Vegas showgirls.

Even the team’s own history mirrors a sort of contemptible version of American history. They began small, as underdogs, and quickly rose to power and glory behind a sort of Puritan sociopathy embodied in the team’s head-coach, the cold and repressed Tom Landry. That sort of Grant Wood American Gothic dude appealed to the “plain”, “hardworking” and “clean” image that Americans long-loved to think about themselves. But there is a sort of cold ruthlessness beneath all that, the sort of clinical, almost viper-like way of viewing the world that is the true heart of the American Dream – you take what you can, and you don’t stop taking until you die, and you do it in a way that allows you to clothe it all in a sort of self-righteous missionary zeal. That was Tom Landry and that was the Dallas Cowboys as they became America’s Team.

It is an Americana that I find personally distasteful, ugly and destructive, but eventually the American Dream itself became ragged, frayed by reality, by the Truth that it is rotten and ugly inside. And so Tom Landry gave way to Jimmy Johnson, a sort of slicker, more nakedly ambitious version of America. He fit perfectly with the times. Once the Holy American Mission was exposed for what it really was, the hucksters and the self-righteous, the hypocritical holier-than-thou types simply dropped the mask and became Gordon Gecko, they became Wall Street, and that was Jimmy Johnson. He was just nakedly ruthless, cruel and greedy, and the Cowboys rose again in a sort of corrupted version of the American Dream. It was always bound to end badly, and ugly, because without that “clean” façade, you just had the naked truth, horrible and macabre. And like Gordon Gecko, the need for the veneer caught up with Jimmy Johnson and he was run out of town.

And who replaced him? Barry Switzer, a degenerate hillbilly, corrupt in his own way, who rode the excess of the dying last burst of the American Dream through the 90s, inhaling its fumes and careening without care or understanding that things had gotten Too Fucked Up to further glory. But good times don’t last forever, which should be the lesson of the Clintonian era. Back then, we were just careening towards oblivion with a smile on our faces, without a care, because we were America and America – and America’s Team – has to live forever, right? Nobody cared that it had already been corrupted years earlier, hell that it was born corrupt, and that over the years, the carefully crafted veneer, the con that we played on ourselves forever and ever was stripped away piece by piece until finally it all collapsed, weighed down by naked greed and a fatal misunderstanding of the real thing that made it all great in the first place: regular, hard-working people who were willing to believe the con because it allowed them to dream something greater than themselves, allowed them to imagine a world in which they too could be Tom Landry, rich and clean, strong and powerful, righteous before God and the world. It was a con that said you could have it all without sacrificing your basic decency, your human dignity.

But that’s just not real, at least not in the America that we have collectively built for ourselves, and it’s not real for the Cowboys either, who exist after The Fall as sort of a grotesque caricature of America and themselves. Jerry Jones is the perfect man to own the Cowboys. He is grotesque, a carnie’s version of a success, a slick manipulator who uses his own wealth, his own oil money, which these days is almost literally blood money, to remain in power. It is a gross cartoon of power, though, a poor man’s version of a rich man, a stupid person’s version of a smart man, loud and crass, ruling through naked fiat. Sound familiar?

The thing is that Jerry Jones doesn’t just own the Dallas Cowboys. He owns the NFL. It is his league. He is the most powerful owner – and thus the most powerful man – in the NFL. Roger Goodell is his useful idiot, an instrument, a lever of power that Jones can pull without having to look Trumpian himself. But just look at the NFL. Look at how obscenely gross it has become over the years. Look at how it treats its own players, treats the fans, treats everyone. It is a debased league run by con men, a Las Vegas of a league designed with nothing other than taking your money in mind. It is a Las Vegas of a league run by a Las Vegas of a man in a Las Vegas of a country. This is America now. It is the country of Donald Trump, the country of Jerry Jones, the country of the Dallas Cowboys. After all this time, they really are America’s Team.

Naturally, they’re also losers. They haven’t really won anything in over twenty years – again, sound familiar? – despite all the bellicose thundering and the shrill bleating which only serves to underscore their own failure. Jerry Jones, for all his power, for all his bullshit swagger, is a Failure. He fired Jimmy Johnson because he had to prove that it was all about him, that he was the one who built the Cowboys. And he’s failed. Jerry Jones ain’t shit, and nobody should be afraid of his old, hillbilly ass. Fuck him.

Under Jason Garrett, who is little more than Jones’ boy, the Cowboys have only had three winning seasons, only two playoff appearances, and have won only one goddamn playoff game. Naturally, that win was the game against the Lions – sigh – but even that travesty, in which the Lions were gangbanged into a sort of feral stupor by the NFL’s secret police, AKA Jerry Jones’ secret police, only highlights how pathetic and flimsy that single victory really was. The Cowboys are a team of nothing, ruled by men of no worth, no account, swaggering their way through the world as if they are supposed to matter. The only problem is that no one really believes it anymore.

This season, the Cowboys are relying on Dak Prescott to prove that he’s not just another flash-in-the-pan after spending over a decade watching Tony Romo try to prove the same thing. Not Quite Good Enough is a terrible phrase in the NFL, a painful phrase, and it will kill you. They’re also hopeful that Ezekiel Elliott comes back and runs wild after being suspended for being a piece of trash and beating the shit out of his girlfriend. This is dark, but I suppose fitting for America’s Team in the Year of Our Lord 2018.

If they get both Prescott and Elliott rolling, then the Cowboys will probably win the division. But it will be a hollow victory, owing as much to the Eagles own psychic despair as anything else. And it will be a victory that probably won’t mean anything given the Cowboys inability to do anything at all in the playoffs since Troy Aikman could still read. In the end, the Cowboys will be just good enough, just powerful enough, just rich enough to still pretend. But you have to remember, pretending is all they have left. And everyone knows it.

Final Judgment:

1. Cowboys 11-5

2. Eagles 10-6

3. Redskins 7-9

4. Giants 5-11

AFC West Preview

Rather than doing a “best case”/”worst case” for the AFC West I’m gonna change it up and tell you why each team will win and why they won’t. These things happen here at Armchair Linebacker, which isn’t exactly a finely tuned race car. It’s more like a stolen rickshaw being driven by a junkie who was just kicked out of an opium den. Things frequently don’t make sense until they do, or they don’t and you go read something else or watch a Youtube vid of a dude opening packages of vintage action figures or whatever the fuck people do in this post-literate age, strange and terrible as it may be.

Shit. Anyway, I suppose I should actually talk about the AFC West, which is a division that’s almost impossible to really call this year. I know, I know, I just said the same thing about the AFC South, but you have to understand that, one, the AFC is a wretched ass of a conference, and two, I’m not any good at this, which begs the question why I’m doing it, but lol look at that junkie pull that rickshaw!

But, really, each team in the AFC West has legitimate reasons to think they can win (or at least semi-legitimate, okay fine, delusionally legitimate in the Raiders case, and also my spell-checker says that “delusionally” isn’t a word but we won’t crumble before the artless lies of that fascism) and also legitimate fears that they may fall completely apart and finish last and consigned to the depths of football hell. Hence the “why they’ll win”/”why they won’t” changeup I’m throwing you. That’s a baseball metaphor in a football blog because I’m just that brilliant.

The Raiders

Why They’ll Win: The Raiders are only a season removed from winning the AFC West and Derek Carr was at least on his way to being an elite quarterback before his inner David Carr, who you’ll all remember or maybe not as the former number one overall pick who was stuck in the spiritual morass of Houston and then slowly eaten to death by giant horseflies and also as Derek’s brother, and by that I mean David is Derek’s brother, not that Derek’s brother ate David like the giant horseflies and yeah, I could have been clearer about that but lol that rickshaw just crashed and now that junkie is pissing himself in the street and these things happen and I just hope that one chick who used to chide me about run-on sentences isn’t reading this.

Why They Won’t Win: No team in the NFL should have as powerful a spiritual and psychic energy as the Raiders. They are the team of Kenny Stabler, of “Just Win Baby”, of a million and one Spirit Warrior psychos channeling their inner Willie Young, and of a fanbase made up of biker degenerates and Mexican tow-truck drivers. They are the motherfucking Raiders and that should mean something. But Kenny Stabler is dead (at 69, naturally), they haven’t won baby in roughly a million years, the odd playoff appearance aside, all those Spirit Warrior psychos are being chased out of the NFL by Sheriff Goodell and his posse of gentrifiers (again, spellcheck is being a little bitch here, which proves that it too is a gentrifier) and that passionate fanbase has been jerked around to the point that they simply don’t give a shit anymore. It’s dark, dudes and lady dudes. It’s real dark.

But that’s what happens when your team is run for decades by a megalomaniacal literal vampire who moved the team to Los Angeles (this is where the spiritual rot began) and then back to Oakland because he was a selfish and capricious old man, which killed that degenerate psycho backbone of psychic energy. And that’s what happens when that vampire is finally staked in the heart, only his even more monstrous son, who is like some horrid hybrid of Donald Trump and a shit-tier Will Ferrell character, takes over and thinks he knows best. Now the team is on its way to Las Vegas, the most spiritually empty and profane place in the world, where no one will care because no one is actually from Vegas and those who are will just spend most of their time trying to con and destroy the Raiders players because that is what people from Vegas do to outsiders, even the wealthy and powerful, especially the wealthy and powerful. It is a blackhole of despair, built on greed and grift, a con of a city. That’s who the Raiders are now, that’s what the Raiders are now. And worse, what’s left of their fans know it by now. My boy and yours, the esteemed Harpo Garza, told me he doesn’t even give a shit anymore. They’ve killed Harpo, one of the Armchair Linebacker OG’s.

Of course, the few remaining Raiders diehards will tell you that it’ll all be different now that Jon Gruden is back, but lol come on man. This is a dude who hasn’t coached in a decade. I mean, at all. He’s spent that time being a dick on Monday Night Football. Shit, why not dig up Howard Cosell and name him coach? Also, and people forget this, Gruden’s reputation as a coaching genius is, uh, somewhat inflated. In 11 years as an NFL coach, his teams won 10 or more games only 4 times. Yes, he won a Super Bowl with the Buccaneers, but he did so after taking over a team already built and brought to the doorstep by Tony Dungy. Afterwards, he basically tanked the Bucs.

But Raiders fans don’t care about that. They’ll tell you that they remember that he was the guy who built the Raiders the last time they were any good, and yeah, maybe. But even then, he only had two winning seasons with the Raiders, and also, that was almost 20 years ago now, which in NFL terms is about the same as having coached 200 years ago.

This is a desperate and terrible gamble, which is fitting given the whole Las Vegas thing. Mark David is a dude on his final throw at 4AM, who’s lost the family fortune, trying to win it all back at once. He’s a literal Mark. He gave Gruden a monster contract, gave him dictatorial powers, and this either works (it won’t) or Mark Davis is going to be sitting in some dark back room having his thumbs broken with a hammer.

The Raiders are a dead team, spiritually and in every other way. Gruden is just robbing them blind before the buzzards in Vegas can pick their corpse clean in the desert. There are no fairy tale endings here, no happy redemption stories. The Raiders were always the true America’s Team, no matter what the soulless corporate whores in Dallas say, and so it’s fitting that they die along with the last ragged and pathetic gasps of the American Dream.

Kansas City Chiefs

Why They’ll Win: The Chiefs are the defending AFC West champs, and they have a ton of young, badass weapons on offense like Tyreek Hill, Kareem Hunt and Travis Kelce. If new quarterback Patrick Mahomes is ready, they should win it again. Mahomes has a monster arm, and with Eric Berry returning from injury on defense, the Chiefs are supposed to be even better than before.

Why They Won’t Win: “Supposed to” is one of the most dangerous phrases in the English language, especially in a sporting context. It is where False Hopes are born and with them the Failure Demons who hook themselves like parasites to the brand new baby. Trust me, I’m a Lions fan. I understand these things.

Mahomes replaces Alex Smith at quarterback, but the truth is that Alex Smith has always been really underrated. Yes, he was a bust when he first entered the league, but he basically taught himself how to be a good quarterback, which is a mental game as much – if not more than – a physical one. He mastered the mental part of it and learned how play the position instead of trying to brute-force it like some young, dumb big-armed kid, which is what Mahomes is. Smith’s been to back-to-back Pro Bowls and led the Chiefs to the playoffs 4 of the last 5 seasons. That is not a dude you just easily replace.

Basically, in sex terms (look, you know what you’re getting here, don’t complain), Smith is that veteran dude who might not be the most physically gifted but who has learned how to work with what he’s got. He knows how to get you off, knows how to make it last, knows how to play the fucking game (literally), and in the end, isn’t that the point? Meanwhile, Mahomes is the rocked-up young dude who pulls just based on his look and then gets you home and ends up dribbling all over your thigh before anything even really gets going. He doesn’t know how to use what he’s got yet and you’re just gonna end up frustrated while he takes the long uber ride home.

And really, the Smith vs. Mahomes thing is what this whole thing boils down to for the Chiefs. I could talk about Eric Berry or the offensive weapons, but in the NFL if you don’t have a quarterback you don’t have jack-shit. It doesn’t matter if Berry can return at 100%, which he probably won’t because Achilles tears are the secret worst injuries, and it doesn’t matter if Hill and Hunt are for real if Mahomes is out there dribbling all over thighs and then mumbling an apology.

Denver Broncos

Why They’ll Win: The Broncos have a new quarterback in Case Keenum, who improbably led the Vikings to the NFC Championship Game last season, and they still have Von Miller on defense. There is just enough residual spiritually and psychic energy from the last time they were good lingering around. And in an open division in which every team has questions, if they can stabilize the quarterback position, they can steal this one.

Why They Won’t Win: John Elway is on the verge of ruining this thing completely. He’s basically like almost every other superstar-turned-exec (Michael Jordan, Isiah Thomas, etc.) who got the job simply because he was so good as a player that he must know how to build a team, right? Only he finds himself in over his head, reveals that his innate talent is an instinctive physical one and not a deliberative mental one, and everything falls apart like that junkie who crashes the rickshaw cart.

The Broncos have gotten progressively worse and worse, Elway hasn’t been able to find a quarterback, and meanwhile, the defense, who really carried the team when they were winning, has become more and more ordinary. Von Miller isn’t really “Von Miller” anymore, and this is how 12-4 becomes 9-7 becomes 5-11 becomes whatever shitass record the Broncos have this season.

Keenum did a good job for the Vikings last season, but you have to remember, this is a dude who’s been a journeyman his whole career. Last season was the aberration, not the rule, and so counting on him to resurrect things and save Elway’s reputation is perhaps maybe dumb as fuck. I’m not saying that it can’t happen, just that it probably won’t.

I wish I had more to say here, something clever perhaps, but really, it just comes down to whether they get Career Renaissance Keenum or Journeyman Keenum. One gives them a chance to win a division in flux, the other will get them last place.

San Diego Chargers

Why They’ll Win: In a league full of questions and turmoil, the Chargers have one important thing: Philip Rivers. I know, I know, holding Rivers up as a pinnacle of stability seems lol as fuck, but Rivers has been consistently good for more than a decade now. No, he hasn’t been the A+ dude he thinks of himself as, and yes, he’s still a tremendous dick, but what he has been is a solid B to B+ dude and let’s face it, being a tremendous dick is not exactly a disqualifying trait for an NFL quarterback. Lions fans will absolutely hate me for this, but he is basically the AFC version of Matthew Stafford, only he’s been doing it longer.

The sad reality is that is not a quarterback who is going to lead you to the promised land all by himself like a Tom Brady or an Aaron Rodgers. And relax, you jackals, Stafford could still up his game and get there. Rivers, though, won’t. He is what he is, and worse, he’s on the downside of his career. But, this is the “Why They’ll Win” section, and in a division full of more questions than answers, he’s the one safe bet. If Mahomes is dribbling on thighs and Keenum goes back to being, well, Case Keenum, while the Raiders dig their hole in the desert, then Rivers and the Chargers are going to win by default. They’re the team with the least amount of questions, and sometimes that’s all it comes down to.

They also have Joey Bosa and Melvin Ingram to rush the quarterback. Both are Pro Bowlers, and along with Casey Hayward at cornerback, give the Chargers a great foundation on defense. Take them and take Rivers being Rivers and the Chargers probably have enough to steal the AFC West.

Why They Won’t Win: Rivers is a huge dick, and “winner” is not exactly the word people would use to describe him. Even if he can lead the Chargers to an almost flukish division title, that’s about as far as they’re gonna get with him.

Meanwhile, the Chargers have been hit hard by injuries already and the goddamn season hasn’t even started. Hunter Henry, the heir to now-retired Antonio Gates, is out for the season and Jason Verrett, Casey Hayward’s CB partner, is out now too. This is not how you want to start things.

The Chargers also have maybe the NFL’s worst home-field advantage. No one cares about them in Los Angeles. I mean, nobody in Los Angeles really cares about anything, but they almost go out of their way not to care about the Chargers. This creates two problems: the NFL is so competitive that any sort of disadvantage could cripple you, and two, it creates a sort of spiritual and psychic energy void for the Chargers and you know how I feel about that. Am I a ridiculous idiot? Yes, of course. But you’re the one reading this so what does that make you?

Shit, now I’m attacking you for no reason, so this is probably a good place to stop.

FINAL JUDGMENT:

1. Chargers 10-6

2. Chiefs 9-7

3. Broncos 6-10

4. Raiders A Howling, a Mad Void of the Soul filled only by its own Emptiness and the Failed Dreams of the Damned

AFC South

I’m pretty sure I have pinkeye from either getting farted on by a young lady or general Reckless Living, so if this is a little short, don’t blame me. (That’s also what I told her, by the way.)

Anyway, the AFC South is a spiritual shithole. This is because of two things: one, it is basically made up of the castoffs from the other three divisions, teams that no one else wanted and that didn’t really fit anywhere in terms of rivalries because in order to have genuine rivalries you must have history and passion and all of these teams are spiritual autists. And two, all of the cities involved are basically empty wastelands of the heart, home to a sprawling soullessness that just grows and grows like a cancer, which I guess makes it the most American of divisions. This is already getting dark and depressing and my eye might be bleeding, so let’s just get this going.

Wait, I’m not done. Jacksonville is basically the worst place you’ve ever been only if someone took that place and multiplied it by 100. I’m talking in sheer size. It is fucking huge, just miles and miles of sad North Floridians too cowardly to be Georgians. The only good thing about Jacksonville is that my boy Al lives there and I’m pretty sure he’s gonna drink himself to death.

Houston, meanwhile, is basically an even bigger Jacksonville, the asshole of Texas, and can you even imagine how miserable you have to be to be called the asshole of fucking Texas? It is a massive city, a city devoid of character or soul, just a metropolis of doomed humanity waiting to be carried away in The Lord’s next flood, and they almost were. I’m allowed to say such things because my aunt lives there.

Indianapolis is Midwest Jacksonville, a worthless city in the middle of a worthless state, so devoid of character and self that it’s lazily named after the same state. There is literally nothing interesting to talk about here. A car race? Fuck off.

And finally, there’s Nashville, which actually has character, only that character is a warped cartoon of the hillbilly underbelly of America, but a cartoon stripped of the hardscrabble humanity and genuine life of that underbelly. Hillbillies will fucking cut you, man, and they’ll do it with a sort of haunting singularity of purpose in their eyes. That purpose is “Fuck You All,” a ferocious rebellion against the outside world that tries to tell them how to live, a world constantly encroaching upon their “simple” beautiful world.

Nashville takes all that and twists it and contorts it until it is all just an ugly Hee-Hawed cartoon, Disneyfied and stripped of anything Real, anything True. It becomes a bucktoothed farce, full of pickin’ and grinnin’ Uncle Jebs dancing for their clean masters. Shinefaces as your boy and mine Raven Mack calls them.

I could turn this whole thing into a 5,000 word annihilation of Nashville, but the Pink Eye is moving into my brain, like late-stage syphilis and I have to move on.

Okay. Anyway, got a little sidetracked there, haven’t even mentioned football once, but these things happen here at Armchair Linebacker. The reality is that I’m not even sure what to talk about football-wise, owing both to the spiritual and historical emptiness of all these teams and because, honestly, all of them could realistically win the division or finish dead last. There’s no real way to know.

The Jaguars are the presumed favorite since they won it last season and almost went all the way to the Super Bowl. They also have a dominant defense, with stars on each level, from Calais Campbell to Telvin Smith to Jalen Ramsey and AJ Bouye. But the NFL is a league in which consistent winning is achieved only by teams that have a true franchise quarterback. And is anyone about to call Blake Bortles an elite franchise quarterback? Of course not.

The NFL’s history is littered with teams like the Jaguars, who are good one year and then utter shit the next. Hell, the Jaguars own history is one filled with season-to-season rises and falls like that. At least it was for a while, anyway. The last six seasons before last year were all double-digit loss seasons played before perhaps the worst, most passionless fanbase in the country. Seriously, the Jaguars have, like, six fans total. Nobody cares and why should they?

Maybe they’ll be good, maybe they’ll be bad. Who fucking knows?

The Texans probably should be the best team in the division, but that is all based on conjecture and a ghost. That’s because none of their stars can stay healthy so no one really knows what’s there. It’s just a phantom that’s chased every year, usually right into a wall.

The defensive front should be terrifying, with JJ Watt, Jadeveon Clowney and Whitney Mercilus terrorizing opposing backfields, but Watt has basically missed the last two seasons, Mercilus only played five games last year and Clowney struggled to stay on the field until last season. Counting on them seems like a fool’s choice. Everyone still thinks of Watt as this monster destroyer who can dominate games all by himself, but even if he comes back healthy, how many dudes have basically missed two years and come back as badass as ever? Yeah, not many.

Offensively, DeShaun Watson looked like he might be The Man at quarterback, but he got hurt seven games into the season. So, basically, the Texans are relying on the hope that Watt and Mercilus come back better than ever (unlikely) and that they have their franchise quarterback and offensive identity sorted with a dude who’s played less than half a season. This is just too goddamn much to put your faith into. Perhaps it is fitting that the Texans wear red, white and blue. They are a team of broken promises and failed hopes, gambling on an increasingly unlikely future as they fall broken into the abyss. They should be the best, they should lead the entire AFC South, but they’re not. They’re just a ghost of what could be, a failed dream.

The Titans have a new coach, which is weird given that they actually made the playoffs last season. I mean teams don’t usually fire a coach who finally breaks through to the playoffs. On the other hand, that speaks to how much of an illusion the team itself felt that playoff run to be. They didn’t have faith in it. I mean obviously. If they did, they wouldn’t have fired their coach. How do you size up a team like that? In the end, I suppose they’re gonna go as far as Marcus Mariota takes them, and who can say what Mariota will do with a new coach? Again, they could win the division or they could finish last. Who fuckin’ knows?

The Colts, meanwhile, are probably the most boom or bust team in the division. It all hinges on Andrew Luck. If he can actually play – and play like Andrew Luck is supposed to play – he can carry the Colts to the division title. That’s what a true franchise quarterback can do. If he can’t go, or even if he can but is only a shadow of his reputation, then the Colts are gonna finish last. It’s that simple, probably the starkest and simplest situation in this entire godforsaken division. This is a depressing wasteland and my eye hurts. Fuck this. I’m not gonna do best case/worst case because I pretty much already told you. The best case for every team is a division title, the worst case is a last place finish and I get farted on again. We’re all gonna die in the end anyway, and everyone who lives in these cities or who roots for these teams already has a dead soul anyway. Vaya con dios, motherfuckers.

Final Judgment:

Everyone finishes 8-8 except for the Colts, who finish 3-13. We all die and I am sent to hell to be farted on for eternity.