Sell The Team

Funeral Music

I don’t want to write about the Lions this week about as much as I don’t want to watch them play whatever meaningless feeble game they manage to barf onto the field this week. This is a dead team, a dead thing, and the only thing left to do is look to whatever the fuck the future is supposed to look like, whether by some cosmic miracle the Patriot Way will win out or whether an entirely new gang of would be saviors is brought in by the Fords to try to turn what is the most ridiculous franchise in all of professional sports into something other than a theater of pain, where everyone is trapped inside and all the exits are blocked and someone is killing everyone else in the theater slowly and painfully and then the theater burns down and is haunted forever and even the ghosts are haunted and become shivering victims in the places where alive people won’t go anymore because our discontent became a bilious thing that burns our souls away one by one, nobody wanting even to cling to the last whispers of this wretched life.

That is the future that awaits us as Lions fans, and I don’t know what else to say about it other than that, so enjoy the game against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and ask yourself why you still watch this odious thing, and ask yourself why you think it will ever be anything other than this, and then huff some ether and forget your own name because that is the only thing left for us as fans of the Detroit Lions.

Tampa Bay 28 Lions 24

Gambling With Sanity Week Fuck It

Went 5-11 last week, which is bad news for anyone dumb enough to follow my idiot words about this idiot sport, which to be honest isn’t very many of you which must mean the world is smart, but that can’t be true, can it? Are we the idiots? I don’t know, fuck it. That’s the best I’ve got for you these days. Fuck it. It’s easy to do, you just have to fuck it. So . . . fuck it.

NY Jets (+14) at Baltimore

Lamar Jackson going full Death Star on the entire NFL is pretty amazing, especially because it blows up so much of the idiot philosophies of NFL diehards who think that a quarterback has to be a dude who just sits in the pocket and throws the ball to the fast guys and also is white which they won’t say out loud but it is the essence of their entire belief system which is fucked, but if you’re reading this, I imagine you know that the world is fucked. Anyway, Lamar Jackson turns these idiots into shaved apes, foaming at the mouth, hooting and flinging shit at each other because they can’t understand why this dude breaks their tiny thought models, which are really just a diseased rat chewing its own balls off for no reason other than it is hungry and stupid. That is the thought model that these imbeciles are malfunctioning about because Lamar Jackson is a young black quarterback who can run and throw all over the place and he isn’t getting broken in half like RG3.  At least not yet. Fuck, I have probably put the Failure Demons on him just by writing this. Sorry, Lamar, that’s just the way things go around here. But until those Failure Demons catch up to him, I love that he’s out there just obliterating everything. He’s already rushed for over 1,000 yards this season and is on his way to more than tripling that through the air and no one has been able to stop him, and these putrid New York Jets certainly aren’t going to be the team that does it.

Pick: Baltimore

Philadelphia (-6) at Washington

There’s a chance that the Eagles or the Cowboys gets into the playoffs by winning their division at 7-9, which is some ugly fucking football, but I don’t give a shit about any of that and neither should you. The NFC East is fucking terrible this season, which is fine by me because their fans are all fucking terrible too. It is the most obnoxious division in pro sports and they get off on it. They know that they’re awful and they just don’t give a shit. The NFC East is the Donald Trump of sports divisions, and it makes perfect sense that the winner of Division Trump will be some 7-9 team with the most horrible fans on earth. It doesn’t matter if it’s Philly or Dallas, it works either way. Whoever comes out on top will be a shitty football team and people will say that they shouldn’t be there, but you know that if it’s either Dallas or Philly, that game will be in the prime time Sunday Night spot and everyone of you will watch the goddamn thing. These are the teams that America deserves just like Donald fucking Trump is the president that America deserves. Anyway, fuck every team in this shitty division and their fans, except for Tosh and I won’t even post the pic of him all coked up this week. Or maybe I will. I just love that pic, just like I love Tosh.

Pick: Philadelphia

Chicago (+7) at Green Bay

Part of me can see this being one of those games where the Bears defense terrorizes Aaron Rodgers which they manage to do every so often. But the other part of me knows that the Bears this season don’t have whatever magic they sometimes manage to stumble upon, and that Aaron Rodgers is the devil himself and he’s at home for this one. Still, the Bears are kinda hanging in there and maybe, just maybe, they have some of that weird Bears magic left over from last season, but I doubt it and you never want to bet against the devil himself in December at his own house, frozen like Dante says in The Inferno, just waiting for these sinful Bears to come calling and to fuck up when they do.

Pick: Green Bay

New England (-10.5) at Cincinnati

It doesn’t really matter if the Patriots aren’t killing everyone right now and you’d be an idiot to assume that this is the end, so calm down Alex and don’t suffocate your baby just yet because we all know the Patriots are still Dad, and everyone else in the AFC still lives under his roof. They still have Tom Brady, who is almost certainly doing things behind the scenes every day that would make your blood run cold involving immigrants, babies and god only knows what else. And they have the number one scoring defense in the league, which is when they are super dangerous unlike that year when Fat Matt Patricia made Tom Brady vulnerable to humans and also the Philadelphia Eagles. But Fat Matt isn’t there anymore. No, he’s here, with me, with my Lions, which is just the most disgusting fucking thing the universe has done yet to me, to all Lions fans. But this isn’t about me, this is about the Patriots of this season, who don’t have Fat Matt dragging them down into the abyss but do have King Tom and a championship caliber defense, and they are still Dad and someone will have to kill Dad to get to all his money, and yes, Alex, I have whispered to your baby daughter that “Kill Dad” is the only way to win in life.

Pick: New England

Houston (+1.5) at Tennessee

Not a lot separating these two teams, which makes it even creepier that Tennessee used to be Houston back in the day before the Oilers became the Titans and before Warren Moon became Steve McNair. But, yeah, there isn’t a whole lot to say here other than the Texans seem to be trending down a bit since JJ Watt went down with a torn pec and yes, I just googled that shit just for you.  Tennessee, meanwhile, has won four in a row, and seem to be sneaking up on everyone and might just rip the division away from the Texans, who deserve it on account of being Texans. Put two and two together and this seems like a pretty easy call for Tennessee, right? Of course, that is usually when I get my ankles cut or some horrible shit, but let’s not be afraid of the future just because the past has fucked us in the ass or cut our ankles or I don’t know what in the fuck I’m even talking about.

Pick: Tennessee

Seattle (-4.5) at Carolina

Carolina seems to be falling apart without Cam Newton or Ric Flair, both of whom I assume are waist deep in their own filth in some backwoods strip club which is just a pretty thin cover for a whore house, and while they are out running hos the Panthers are a team on the brink of anarchy, and poor young Christian McCaffrey’s tender flesh is out there for anyone to just come along and dirty up, which I suspect is what will happen when the Seahawks come to pay him a visit this weekend. Russell Wilson and Pete Carroll know all about stripper whores and fresh white meat, and sometimes that’s all you need to know when making these kinds of picks.

Pick: Seattle

Denver (+13) at Kansas City

Denver surprised the Texans and their falling apart team last week, but they won’t sneak up on Patrick Mahomes, who has the Chiefs rolling after walking into New England and beating the Patriots. He’s all set to rain down hell fire on the Broncos, who will continue to suffer under John Elway, which is always an awkward thing when the local hero is fucking up and nobody knows how to deal with it or get rid of him without causing pain for everyone. That certainly won’t happen to me with Stevie Yzerman and the Red Wings, no sir, oh god please don’t let that happen. You can take John Elway as a sacrifice, just leave Stevie alone.

Pick: Kansas City

Miami (+3.5) at NY Giants

I don’t give a single shit about either of these teams and I resent you for making me write even this much about them. Fuck them both and fuck you too. I’m sorry, I don’t mean that. I can’t afford to alienate any of you, who altogether could fit in a child’s classroom.

Pick: Giants

Buffalo (+1) at Pittsburgh

This should be one of those miserable December defensive slugfests that everyone hates but I love. Buffalo is still hanging in there, an improbable success, and the Steelers are surviving in a world without all their familiar stars on offense. But fuck all those guys because they have a new star in my man Devin Bush, who is about to make life very shitty for Josh Allen. Still, the Bills running game has been just good enough to survive and they don’t mind playing in the cold since they play in Buffalo which gets all that gnarly lake effect snow, which I get here too, and if you don’t know what that is it’s pretty self-explanatory. Basically, the Great Lakes cause a shit ton of snow to fall on the lakeshore, which is where I live and which is where Buffalo lives next to Lake Erie, one of the shittier Great Lakes, but we won’t hold that against them and to be honest that’s mostly Ohio’s fault. That’s right, we have deep blood feuds here in the Great Lakes States. Anyway, all of this gibberish means that the Bills are equipped to not only survive but thrive in these types of games. The only problem is, so is Devin Bush after Becoming A Man up here in Michigan, and I can’t pick against my fellow Michigan Man here, I just can’t.

Pick: Pittsburgh

Jacksonville (+4.5) at Oakland

Pick: Oakland

Cleveland (+2.5) at Arizona

My dude Baker Mayfield has kind of recovered from that early season shittering, which was probably my fault for getting my Failure Demons on him and Dan, but now he and Dan both seem to be doing better lately so hopefully this time me writing this won’t get them all fucked up again, Baker savaged on TV before everyone and Dan laid up in the hospital yet again, a victim of some mysterious malady that I am pretty sure involves the ass, but I’m not a doctor, although I wish I was so I could raid the Oxy bins until I got caught but what a great few weeks that would be and anyway what the fuck were we talking about? Oh yeah, Dan has a prolapsed anus and Baker Mayfield and the Browns aren’t so dead after all. This is actually a fun matchup because Baker Mayfield and Kyler Murray were both Oklahoma quarterbacks bred in the same system and I want to see them duel it out here with no pressure, just for the fun of it, and maybe, just maybe, it will all make up for whatever horrible things Dan was doing to his own asshole.

Pick: Cleveland

Atlanta (+11.5) at San Francisco

Atlanta has at least found some life in the second half of the season. It’s not a very good life, one spent on the margins, making Poor Choices one after another like a gambler let loose in some Vegas Valhalla until it all comes crashing down on you and you end up with a broken tail bone and you wake up in strange places that you didn’t remember going to in the first place and I’m totally fine, you guys, I promise. Anyway, the Falcons seem to have rediscovered some semblance of pride, at least on offense. But the 49ers are rolling on offense like the Ravens are in the AFC and they just had a ridiculous game against the Saints last week that ended up like 48-45 or something like that and I just checked because I am a slave to certain OCDish tendencies and okay it was 48 – 46, and anyway, they are not a team you want to be dueling with at high noon right now. So, sorry for getting your hopes up Falcons fans, Adrian, Fake Larry, Andy wherever the fuck you are, this one will go to the 49ers.

Pick: 49ers

LA Rams (+4) at Dallas

The end has pretty much come for Jason Garrett in Dallas, right? I’ve never really understood Jerry Jones’ slavish devotion to Garrett in the first place so I wouldn’t be surprised if he somehow survived yet again.  I mean, like I’ve already said, one of those shitty NFC East teams is gonna come out of that division at 7-9 and then who knows what happens in the playoffs. Still, things aren’t looking too good for the Cowboys these days, and now they have to play the Rams, who maybe aren’t the Rams of last season but are still good enough to cause a panic stampede sort of beatdown situation on a team that is coming off the rails like the Cowboys who have lost three in a row and Jerry Jones is up there sucking on his false teeth and doing blow off the fake titties of the Cowboy cheerleaders and this could be a fiasco, some old boy might have a heart attack kind of thing is what I’m talking, and good, I hope the whole goddamn lot of them goes out ugly as fuck, naked and disgraced on national TV. But you and I both know that I won’t get what I want, and in real life the bad guys always seem to fucking slither their way out of trouble, and no one slithers like Jerry Jones and his Cowboys and he’ll be goddamned if his Cowboys aren’t on primetime once the playoffs come along, where they will lose like they always do because Jerry Jones is a dumb old asshole, but still, he’s got enough power to drag them to that spot year after fucking year.

Pick: Dallas

Minnesota (-3) at LA Chargers

I’ve written more than enough about my disdain for Kirk Cousins and it sure was pretty shitty to watch him win against my Lions last week. I really don’t have much else to say here other than fuck Kirk Cousins and fuck the Lions for making me watch him play football. I’d love to say that Philip Rivers could take care of things for me, but fuck him too because he’s a jackass and a fuckup and I don’t want him helping me in any way. So I guess all that’s left to do is reach for the ether and make some more Poor Choices as Kirk Cousins gets away with it all.

Pick: Minnesota

Indianapolis (+9) at New Orleans

The Colts have lost three in a row and the Saints are fresh off of the losing end of that wild game against the 49ers, and I suspect this game will be a shootout too, but the Colts aren’t the 49ers and the Saints are who they always are, so I expect them to win. But more than that, I’m always happy when the people of New Orleans have something to cheer for because that is a city of my heart, debauched and lurid, and I also always like it when the people of Indiana are fucked over because Indiana is the secret shittiest state of them all, just a hateful ignorant bunch of people, more Klansman there than in Mississippi and everything ugly about America can be seen in their haunted faces, those faces that tell the tale of decades of losing, of being the wretched and useless. These are mean, angry people. Small people. Petty People. Fuck them and their goddamn corn and soybeans. Fuck Mike Pence, who is as Indiana as it gets. Fuck Bobby Knight, that rotten old asshole. Fuck Larry Bird. Fuck Hoosiers. Fuck Notre Dame. Yeah, they’re in Indiana too, they’re just too embarrassed to remind people of that. Fuck all of them. Indiana is the heart of MAGA America. It is the last hellhole before actual hell, and the people in hell are better people than the people of Indiana. Fuck it all.

Pick: New Orleans

It's All Good Baby

On Sundays, I like to watch the games on the NFL Redzone thing, where they just dart back and forth between games. That way, I don’t ever have to watch any of the insipid commercials which rot the brain and the soul. I flip between this and the Lions game every week and anyway, this week I’ve been following the 49ers and Saints shoot it out in the Superdome, and it’s late in the 4^th quarter as I write this and both quarterbacks are dealing and meanwhile I flip back to the Lions who just threw an interception to close out another rancid day and our quarterback right now is a dude literally name Blah and that about sums things up.

While all this is going on, we’ve also got Chris Spielman, football hero of my youth, yammering on about patience like a fifth rate Axl Rose and I am reminded that before he was a football hero of my youth he was an odious Ohio St. Buckeye and thus my eternal enemy. It is a good thing that I was a little too young to hate Spielman because I like loving him as a football hero of my youth as the Lions linebacker who was the backbone of the best of those Lions teams of my said youth. Anyway, he keeps preaching patience for these buffoons and every time he does that Lions hero thing starts to slip and I start to see that Buckeye red and it is too fucking terrible to deal with and this is what happens to you when you believe in flawed heroes and choose to follow a shitty football team that beats the shit out of you year after year.

What else is there to talk about? Oh yeah, we can stop blathering on about leading in every game this season. That’s done now. The Lions are 3-9-1 now and never were in this game, which sucks because it means Kirk Cousins got to win which I just wrote about this morning, you know, how much I hate him and all, and now here I am, only a few hours later, forced to watch him lead his team to victory while mine stumbles in miserable defeat yet again. Terrible. Just terrible.

The Saints have now retaken the lead on the 49ers, 46-45 with like 45 seconds left and this game is enthralling in all the ways the Lions aren’t this year or any fucking year and it’s all too much to deal with. During the Lions game, Spielman was talking about the ’93 team which was a pretty good team, but he of course was forced to mention that it ended in the first round of the playoffs when Bret Favre hit Sterling Sharpe for a touchdown in a game that I remember watching at home as a 14 year old Neil, back when I still had hope in this shitty team and in myself.

Today I am 40 and I have no hope in this shitty team, and I manage to get by as a writer and doer of despicable deeds and other assorted chicanery which has left me as a known villain, which is fine because I am that dude in black who likes to walk the streets in the witching hour and make poor choices, but I know that at some point I have to clean up and find Jesus or this whole thing is going to take a nasty turn. I am a loveable rogue, it’s true, but it’s only a matter of time before I end up frozen in carbonite.

Still, of all my poor choices, none is poorer than continuing to be a fan of these goddamn Detroit Lions, who have left me embittered yet again on a cold December day, a day like all the others, which sucks because I love not being one of the others, but my football team is just like all the other wretched and shitty things in life, too depressing to truly love, too parasitic to ever get rid of. That is life as a fan of the Detroit Lions, much as it is life as a loveable rogue.

But at least there is freedom in being a loveable rogue, the kind most of you don’t ever get to experience. There is no freedom in being attached to this miserable football team, who will leave me naked and missing a kidney in a low rent motel room after hooking up with a Poor Choice with a pretty face and a nice ass. But even that Poor Choice is better than the Lions, who don’t have a pretty face, only a fat sweaty bearded one, and who don’t have a nice ass, only the husky boy ass of a man who probably raped a girl back in the day, just oozed into her room late at night and crawled on top of her like the worst Jabba. This goddamn team has got me down in a way that my Poorest of Choices can’t even compete with.

The only thing left to do is make some more Poor Choices and numb myself to this misery that is Lions fandom, maybe rustle up some work, which is coming fast and furious at me of late, which is good because it means more money for me, and maybe look to my network of fellow villains for some extra lucre in these strange and terrible times where we all have to do what we can to get by.

I am not a bad guy. I am a good guy. It’s just that I am a rogue and a villain in a fucked up world with its backwards ass priorities. I wish I had a football team that matched my own Spirit Warrior tendencies, one like those 70s Oakland Raiders teams I have so fondly written about before, but I don’t. Instead, I have a perennially shitty football team that is trying to remake it itself in some sociopathic corporate Patriot Way image and it is too much to bear sometimes, just too fucking much.

And yet, I’m still here, and I’m still writing about these goddamn Detroit Lions, with their quarterback named Blah and with heroes who are either tragic, like Barry Sanders and St. Calvin Johnson, or who wear Buckeye red when you peel away the façade, and it’s no good, man, it’s just no good. But I still enjoy writing about them because as I have mentioned before, they are a cipher, a way to dig into the darker parts of my own psyche, a way to deal with it all, a way to come to some sort of catharsis and be okay with myself, because I love myself, I’m pretty goddamn great, and even my dark parts just serve to spark the fire that is me, and I am always a man on fire and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Still, it would be nice if I didn’t have to be a fan of a football team that is 3-9-1 and run by a sociopath and a rapist, but we don’t always get what we want and fuck it, the theater of pain which we endure as Lions fans breeds its own special sort of toughness, a way to laugh in the broken places, a way to defy the boring “good” people of the world. It’s all fucked up and so am I, but that’s okay because I am strong in the fucked places and I love to fuck so it’s all good. It’s all good, baby.