Armchair Linebacker

The Ghosts Have Company Now

2012-01-23T10:28:00.008-05:00

Sneak Preview of The Elder Scrolls VI: K'andl'stikk (look, I need the laugh right now)

To be a San Francisco 49er fan is to live in the past. Even this season, the first time in ten that living in the now has been worthwhile, and even kinda fun. But the past is sacrosanct. What the 49ers used to be is the cherished memory of this fan base, and the envy of all others [well, maybe not Pittsburgh and Dallas; they're pretty even]. So every fleeting success of the modern edition of the 49ers is invariably measured against 49er history, because they seem to exist concurrently. Even as Vernon Davis made his game winning catch against New Orleans last week, in the same north end zone of the same old relic that is Candlestick Park, running virtually the same route as Terrell Owens ran to beat Green Bay 13 years ago, a 49er fan could immediately see the phantom of Owens, running alongside him, grabbing the ball and taking the hit at the goal line at the same moment as Davis did, and Joe Starkey's radio call which consisted of him screaming OWENS! OWENS! OWENS! over and over again drowned out the FOX broadcasters of today (a blessing in its own right). And, as was proven yesterday, even the heartbreaking losses seem to be but echoes of what has come before.

Last Friday, January 20th, was 21 years to the exact day that the 49ers' bid for a Super Bowl Three-Peat fell agonizingly short. The Scene? Candlestick Park. The Game? NFC Championship. The Opponent? The New York Giants. The defeat? Roger Craig made a costly and uncharacteristic fumble late in a close game, which the Giants parlayed into a field goal that won the game. As a little kid, innocent of real problems in the world and knowing no worse cruelty than seeing a favorite sports team that happens to be the best team in its sport that you've come to expect to see win and depend on winning, losing, I cried. That loss felt apocalyptic, even in the moment. It got worse when the Giants went on to win the Super Bowl that year. It got worse again in the months to come, when Roger Craig and Ronnie Lott were not retained, making that loss their last game in a 49er uniform. It was also effectively Joe Montana's last game as a 49er, too; the injury he sustained at the hands of Leonard Marshall (may he rot in Hell next to Hitler, Tim MacVeigh, and the guy who invented telemarketing) caused St. Joe to miss all of 1991, forcing the team to commit to go forward with the younger Steve Young as QB. Montana would get one swan song at home in the 2nd half of the season finale, mopping up against a beaten Detroit Lions team in 1992. He would throw his final TD pass as a 49er to the otherwise unmemorable Amp Lee. He would sit unsummoned on the bench as they lost another NFC championship game, this time to Dallas, my pleading for him to enter the game and save the day, future be damned, may as well have been silent. He would be traded in April of 1993. I've forgotten who they got in return and I don't even care, anyway.

So really, yesterday could've been a lot worse. This year's 49er team was a pleasant surprise, an endearing overachiever that put a finger in the eye and a knee in the scrotum of nouveau football fans everywhere, who have no true soul-bond with any team but draw their knowledge of the sport from FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY and from fantasy football, who follow stats without understanding their deeper significance, and who wanted to watch Drew Brees play 60 minutes of pinball with Aaron Rodgers and put up a basketball score. The 49ers took that away from those people, and then lost narrowly to their co-conspirator New York the following week. This was not a shocking upset of a juggernaut, and it certainly wasn't the doomsday end of a dynasty. Still, I almost have to laugh at the absurdity of how yesterday's game played out. It was a conference championship game, at home, against the Giants, and it was lost on a fumble that led directly to a field goal. Kyle Williams is not as beloved as Roger Craig, and most likely never will be now, but now they will sit together on the ghost-bench that occupies the same space as the now empty real bench on Candlestick's home sideline. Roger possibly even has a consoling hand on his shoulder, reminding him to buck up, and at least he'll get a chance at redemption next season and that fumble won't be the last thing he did in the uniform (at least, it shouldn't be. Dire as his failures as backup Punt Returner may be, they truly can't afford to lose him as a wide receiver, as they are comically thin at the position and he's the one wideout who actually holds onto the ball consistently when its thrown at him).

Just not when its kicked to him, apparently.

21 years later, I'm a grown-ass man (mostly) and I'm not going to cry over a football game when there's real shit like taxes and death and debt and jobs that are underpaid and psychically unfulfilling. Not to mention the creeping corporatization of everything in America that threatens all our souls (in which the NFL is not only complicit but integral). Hell, I don't even hate this Giants team. There's no LT, or Leonard Marshall, or Bill Parcells, or any real villain worthy of contempt. There's just the Cruz kid who likes to salsa dance in the endzone and he's kinda fun to watch. And the good quarterback who plays well yet is forever overshadowed by someone who has QBed before him -- his older brother, in this case -- and really, we can sympathize with a guy like that. Once again, Then exists alongside Now and its hard not to see a sliver of Steve Young and what we 49er fans put him through even AFTER he finally won a Super Bowl. Besides, New York's opponent will once again be New England, Quarterbacked by a man born and raised in 49er Country who threatens a 4th Super Bowl ring, and to thus invariably draw comparisons to St. Joe, and with a 4th they'll start casting him as an equal. Some heretics will even start calling him better. The Giants only beat 49er present; the Patriots threaten to tie 49er Past and thus they must be destroyed. Kinda ironic to have to lean on the Giants as indirect defenders of that legacy -- again -- but there it is.

So, onto the goat, Kyle Williams. Predictably, 49er fans are pissed at the convenient scapegoat, and pinning the loss on him. He made the fatal fumble on a punt return, after all. He also caused momentum to shift the Giants way by muffing an earlier punt because he didn't think to get way the fuck away from a bouncing ball that he had already decided not to try and catch. He nearly coughed up the ball two other times, once was again as a punt returner as he made an ill-advised dive to catch one. Again, as WR, on a double reverse attempt that was pitched (poorly) by Kendal Hunter, although Williams deserves some props for wrestling that one away at the bottom of a scrum and preserving it. Williams also only had 1 catch for 4 yards that was wiped out when the 49ers opted to accept the Illegal Contact penalty called on the play and thus get one more yard. All in all, a shitty day for Kyle.

My Exact Thoughts Were: "Poor Kyle 'you stupid motherfucker!' Williams."

But its not his fault, really. Williams as Punt Returner has been a misadventure for a couple of months. He should not have been back there. Coach Jim Harbaugh, who otherwise has done a tremendous and un-reproachable job this season, can count this as his one failing. Williams had a muff against Pittsburgh that could've done to that game what it did to yesterday's, except the referee ruled he hadn't touched the ball (and there were 49ers in the area who fell on the ball just in case) even though again, Williams was wandering way too close to a ball he was letting bounce. He got injured and missed a game returning a kickoff against Seattle, and losing him as a WR hampered the already-challenged 49er passing game even further. Dude is star-crossed when it comes to returns, and he's the back-up to Ted Ginn anyway. Harbaugh and his Special Teams assistant should not have been married to keeping Williams back there, they ignored his struggles at their own peril, and that peril came at last. Kendal Hunter filled in when Williams got hurt. Delanie Walker was the return man under Singletary. Either of these guys could've gone into the game and while they wouldn't have gotten far with the ball, past performance suggests they'd have held on to it better than Kyle. Kyle's more valuable as a receiver, anyway. Hopefully next year they have him focus exclusively on doing that. Don't put him back their on punts anymore and for God's sake don't heed the idiots calling up sports talk demanding his release.

3rd String Running Back Anthony Dixon, shown consoling his teammate. NOT SHOWN:
His internal monologue of "put me back to return punts, shiiit, I ain't doin nothing else
anyway and at least I can hold on to the damn ball."

11 out of the 12 best teams in the NFL have a shitty end to their season. Today the 49ers are merely one of them, sitting alongside Houston, Baltimore, New Orleans, and Green Bay, which is pretty good company all things considered. "How Far Have They Come?" and "How Far Do They Still Have To Go?" We have all off-season to answer.

Dolphins Watch: Fuck it, I'm hopping off the bandwagon

2012-01-19T03:50:00.003-05:00

Being a sports fan in Wisconsin who doesn't like the Wisconsin teams, picking favorite teams can be a difficult challenge. I'm here to say I picked wrong. And, since I am a sports fan nomad at heart, I reserve the right to change my mind. I reached a breaking point with the Dolphins today, and am officially jumping off the bandwagon. Let me explain.

The Dolphins announced the three finalists for their head coaching job recently. On the list is interim coach Todd Bowles, who may not actually be able to speak. Also on the list is Denver Broncos offensive coordinator Mike McCoy, who learned at the knee of Dan Henning and who is basically just riding the wave of Tim Tebow success to several job interviews, and Green Bay Packers offensive coordinator Joe Philbin, who is basically riding the wave of Aaron Rodgers being the best quarterback in the NFL and the team being just absolutely stacked on offense all the way around.

Not on the list is Cincinnati Bengals coordinator Mike Zimmer who, despite being friendly with general manager Jeff Ireland, was never considered a serious candidate, reports have it, because he is “too outspoken.” This is code for “if things go wrong, Zimmer is going to say something about it.” And, as we've learned from following the Dolphins lately, owner Stephen Ross and Ireland want a yes man more than a good football mind. Ireland has Ross completely snowed that he is doing a great job and it is up to the coach to put together a winning product on the field.

Reality is, what the Dolphins are is the worst thing you can be in sports. The Indianapolis Colts might be bad, but they have hope. You feel like if they draft Andrew Luck and add some pieces around him, that is a team that could turn things around rather quickly. What the Dolphins are is too good to be bad enough to get a guy like Luck in the draft, and too bad to make the playoffs and make any type of run at the Super Bowl. They are perfectly mediocre.

Which, that alone is no reason to abandon a team. The real problem is that Stephen Ross is the worst owner in professional sports. He is treating this ownership like just another business venture for him. For some reason, he's listening to Ireland and leaning on him, when reality is, Ireland is simply over his head and doing a mediocre job. This was a case where sweeping changes had to be made. What happened in Indy is what should have happened in Miami. Instead, they're going to hire McCoy or Philbin and we'll be right back to this same spot three years from now, with Ireland and the coach on the outs and the team in dire need of another change in direction.

But Ross couldn't really be bothered to care about that. He's more worried about stuff like Club Live. So when the very top of the organization doesn't care, why should the fan base? I see this not as being a fair weather fan, but rather making a statement about my dissatisfaction for the state of things. Everyone who goes to Miami treats it like a retirement home or a cool place to hang out. I happen to think sports are serious business, because I have asperger's and I am unflinchingly rigid about the things I believe being true. So fuck the Dolphins, and fuck everything I wrote about them on this here site in the past. I am still an idiot, but at least I will now be an idiot rooting for a team with some actual direction.

So I will take you through the thought process I underwent to find a new team. I examined my past sports loyalties and realized that the only sports team I do not want to abandon is the Los Angeles Clippers. I have been a Clippers fan since I was seven years old, because they have almost always sucked and I love rooting for teams that suck because if they ever get good you can say “told you so,” and if they never get good, well, no one can accuse you of hopping on their bandwagon just because they are good. So the Clippers had to stay.

So I sought out a town that has a football team and a baseball team, preferably a National League baseball team. That narrowed it down to Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Cincinnati and San Diego, right off the bat. Well, my friend Kevin DiFrango is a Pittsburgh fan, so they are out. Despite sharing a name with him, Dusty Baker is my least favorite person in baseball, so they are out. And St. Louis is coming off a World Series, and the Rams just hired Jeff Fisher, who I think is a weiner. So hello San Diego!

In baseball, I have always preferred small market teams who develop prospects and look for bargains to fill out their roster. My designated American League team is and always will be the A's, so the Padres definitely fit the bill since they are basically the National League version of the A's. But what of the Chargers? Let's take a look there.

Their owner, Dean Spanos, did something Stephen Ross hasn't done and will never do. He showed tremendous vision for the upcoming season. And the beauty part is, he did it by doing nothing. If Kenny Rogers taught us anything in this crazy mixed up world, it is that you need to know when to hold 'em, and know when to fold 'em. Spanos knew now was a time to hold 'em. He looked at his team and said, “We're not that far from contending. If we can get Antonio Gates and Malcolm Floyd to stay healthy, if we can add some playmakers on defense, we can maybe get to the Super Bowl.” Sometimes the right thing to do is nothing at all. I applauded the Texans last offseason for not firing Gary Kubiak and they proved me right by making it into the playoffs despite being on their 832nd quarterback. I think the Chargers mindset here is, let's give this one more shot, and then if it doesn't work, if we are mediocre again, then we can make the changes everyone is clamoring for.

They are in perfect position to make the playoffs next year. No one in the AFC West is really that inspiring. The Chiefs feel like a mediocre, 8-8 type team. The Raiders are in transition and paid way way too much for Carson Palmer, and that might end up crippling them and ultimately undermining their attempts to contend. And as for the Broncos, I can't help but feel the longer Tim Tebow sticks around, the more teams are going to figure him out and be able to stop him. He sort of strikes me as a better, much more hyped up religious Mike McMahon. McMahon had that great game against the Packers because the Pack had no idea what to expect from him, and then almost immediately thereafter McMahon became the second worst quarterback of the last 15 years behind only Ryan Leaf.

So the door is definitely wide open for the Chargers. And I feel comfortable hopping on their bandwagon since they are not *so * good that I will get snide looks from sports snobs who hate that I jumped ship in the first place. Philip Rivers is on the cusp of becoming an elite quarterback. I feel like he is at the very top of the second tier of quarterbacks in the league, right behind guys like Rodgers, Tom Brady, the Mannings, Drew Brees and whoever. As I said earlier, if the team can stay healthy, and they can avoid their notorious slow starts, they could very well make the playoffs next season, and we all know, anything can happen in the NFL playoffs, since it's just a bunch of one game sample sizes.

Plus, I get to root for a team coached by Norv Turner one of the most notorious coaches in football. It seems like he is always on the hotseat, but he manages to keep his job year after year. I think he's actually a good coach, and I think the team has an actual vision for success, both for this year and into the future. If they miss the playoffs again, then they can fire Norv and hit the reset button. I appreciate the thought that stability matters in this league, since I'm not a big coaching guy in the first place. I don't think bringing in Savior Guy, whether it be Jeff Fisher or Jon Gruden or whoever, is the answer. Having a well run organization with true vision is what matters the most.

The Dolphins? They don't have that. If ever there was a time to fold 'em, to make wide sweeping organizational changes, this was it. Instead, they were content to make Tony Sparano the fall guy and otherwise maintain status quo. How are McCoy and Philbin any different than Cam Cameron? He had a pretty impressive resume as an assistant coach too, and that led to one of the worst seasons in NFL history. This is a team that is not only going nowhere, but seems perfectly content to continuing doing so. So while I will continue to listen to 790 The Ticket podcasts and be Dan LeBatard's biggest fan, I can't stand being a Miami fan anymore. So fuck you if you think what I'm doing is wrong and breaks the sports fan code of ethics. I feel like I'm making a stand here by doing this, and besides, I was going to swallow a bullet if I had to put up with that nonsense any longer. So goodbye Miami, hello Norv Turner and San Diego, and yes, I'm sticking with this. God help me.

PS. Return of the Killer Tomatoes was filmed in San Diego, and that is the best movie ever made. So, fate.

Dolphins Watch: In lieu of actual vision, steal someone else's

2012-01-18T02:56:00.003-05:00

It's been a while, but I'm back with style...

When I last wrote for this here site, the Dolphins were well on their way to sucking for Andrew Luck. Boy how things change. By the end of the season, they revealed themselves for what they were: a mediocre team with some good pieces who isn't going to go anywhere as long as Chad Henne and Matt Moore are stationed at quarterback.

So how do they turn things around? Well, Matt Barkley did them no favors by staying in school. By the time it comes the Dolphins turn to pick in the upcoming draft, Luck will be long gone. Robert Griffin III will likely be gone as well, since with Barkley gone, he's the clear number two guy and is worth taking a shot at if you are, say, the Redskins or whatever. Once again, it seems like the Dolphins will be left out in the cold in the never ending hunt for Dan Marino's replacement.

What they really need to do is get bold. They should go out and get Peyton Manning. See, everyone likes to say, “Oh, how great will it be for the Colts, they can draft Andrew Luck and have him learn under Peyton!” The problem with that is, Luck is the most starting-ready quarterback to come along since Peyton. So they'd really just be wasting their time operating under that scenario. They should focus on trying to get what they can for Peyton and moving on from there.

Now, if I'm the Dolphins, I'd be willing to give up a king's ransom to get Manning. And yes, I understand saying “king's ransom” makes me the most elderly person in the history of ever. This is a team that cannot develop their own quarterbacks. They don't have the vision to go out there and draft one, and they historically don't have the coaching to build one from the ground up. The Dolphins never show any true vision, so why not steal someone else's vision?

They just got made to look like fools (for the second year in a row) by helicoptering Jeff Fisher in and then not getting a deal done with him. My problem with that from the beginning is that Fisher was a bad choice. He only had six winning seasons in 17 years for the Titans. What gave him the right to want personnel control in the first place? He's just another in a long line of Big Name Guys that the Dolphins wanted to bring in, which would have led to the same inevitable mediocre result. But I'm trying to get over Bill Parcells, so I won't mention him by name here. Oops.

I am advocating hiring Jim Caldwell to be the new head coach, and trading for Peyton Manning to be the new starting quarterback. Why not? How is it any worse than any of the past ten years, barring perhaps the lonely singular playoff year they had with Chad Pennington at the helm before his arm fell off? I'm one who thinks that coaching is a very overrated cathedral. Bill Belichick was a terrible coach in Cleveland. He didn't suddenly get better when he went to New England. He suddenly got Drew Bledsoe and Tom Brady. What we've seen lately with the Patriots is a team that has won one playoff game since 2007 because Genius Belichick has failed time and again in building up a proper defense. This weekend you're going to see wide receiver Julian Edelman and a man in a wheelchair line up at cornerback for them.

So if coaching doesn't matter all that much, why not Caldwell? He looked like a pretty darn good coach up until his quarterback went down. Plus, he's black and the NFL likes it when you hire minorities. But more importantly, if you're going to acquire Peyton, he's the head coach anyway. Just as Michael Jordan was the head coach of the Bulls all those years they were winning championships. You think Phil Jackson was really giving him orders, other than like, “Yeah! Dunk that basketball!” I think not. The benefit here is, you're grabbing someone Peyton is already comfortable with, to help ease the transition of him going to a new team.

Because Peyton Manning, at 36 years old, isn't going to want to go to just any scenario in the NFL, just so he can keep starting football games. He's not Brett Favre. But he likes it in Miami. Dan LeBatard said he once spotted Peyton riding a ten speed around downtown Miami. It's a hella good place to retire, too. And you gotta believe someone like Peyton, if he does indeed land somewhere else for next season, that's it for him. This is his final team. So why not acquiesce to him and make the transition as smooth as possible. Don't force any old coach on him. Get him one he's used to working with. Like I said, he's calling the shots anyway.

Oh, and that king's ransom I mentioned? How about this as a starting point: Your first round pick, $20 million to cover that gigantic signing bonus you promised him, and the Colts' choice of Jake Long, Vontae Davis or Cam Wake, the three biggest difference makers the team has right now. Any of them are worth losing in order to go out and finally get that quarterback. And even if it is only a couple year rental, it's worth every penny. Getting Peyton Manning would finally represent some measure of hope for a stagnant franchise. Keep in mind, I'm not in favor of making changes for change's sake. I don't believe bringing in, say, Matt Flynn of the Green Bay Packers just to say you brought in a new QB would be an effective decision. Flynn is very much like Elvis Grbac in my mind. He played on a team where all the pieces worked together like a well oiled machine, and if you plug him in there, of course he's going to look impressive. Put him on a lesser team and he's not going to be as good.

But if you put Peyton Manning on a mediocre-to-decent team like the Dolphins, all of a sudden there is hope. All of a sudden they are a playoff contender. There are enough pieces on this team right now where adding Peyton would make them legit. Reggie Bush had his best year as a pro, and Daniel Thomas looks like a solid runner as well. Brandon Marshall and Davone Bess are at least as good as Reggie Wayne and the shopping carts with mannequin arms Manning had to work with in Indianapolis. If the Phins could draft a tight end in the second or third round, that offense would really be cooking.

Dolphins fans have been saying all year they are a quarterback away from being a playoff contender. Well, that's easier said than done. There aren't that many elite quarterbacks out there right now. Aaron Rodgers, Drew Brees, Eli Manning, guys like that. And as I said, with the two best available guys in the draft almost certain to be gone by the time they pick, that isn't really an option either. But Peyton is absolutely one of those guys, and when the opportunity presents itself to get one of those guys, you have to go all out and do everything you can to make it happen.

The alternative is starting the season with Matt Moore behind center, and the eighth pick of the first round lining up at right tackle. Same as it ever was, as the Talking Heads might say.

By the way, I hope the Jets fans enjoy Tony Sparano. He is a good person, with a tremendous accent and an affinity for the word “hey,” but if you think he represents any sort of improvement over Brian Schottenheimer, well you are taking a long walk off Shorty Delusion Cliff. Or something. I have no idea what I am saying at this point.

2011 Chicago Bears Post Season Awards - The Bad.

2012-01-16T14:00:00.000-05:00

The Showcase of the Immortals.

The Fruit Stripe Gum Award for Biggest Disappointment goes to...

Chris Harris, S. Man, up until Jay Cutler's thumb injury sending the team on an excruciating death-slide, this had to be the most heart-breaking part of 2011 for me. Last year, Harris was the man, the most clutch of clutch players, and the secret reason for the Bears defense actually earning their big reputation for the first time in years. This year? He was injured, then he sucked, then he became a Detroit Lion, then he presumably kept sucking over there. And all of this lead to at least a week or so of the kind of godawful safety-reshuffling that he came in and put a stop to in 2010. So instead of having at least one spot locked down in a solid-ass way for the next three-to-five years, it's back to more trial-and-error with and endless string of rookies. From Mike Green to Todd Johnson to Brandon McGowan to Chris Harris to Adam Archuleta to Kevin Payne to Al Afalava to Chris Harris to Major Wright and it goes on and on and on, it's Heaven and Hell.
Honorable Mention: Gabe Carimi, OT.
Past Winner: 2010 - Devin Aromashodu, WR.

The Jerry Angelo Memorial Award for Biggest Stupid Waste of Money goes to...

(TIE) Roy Williams, WR and Brandon Meriweather, S. I had to make up a new award for these two guys, because I was going to just throw them up in a tie for biggest disappointment, but really, can you actually be disappointed by two guys whose failure was basically a sure thing from the start? Roy Williams hasn't been any good since 2006, and he really never was all that good before that. He was a disappointment in Detroit, a joke in Dallas, and not much more than an annoyance in Chicago. I know I've beaten that dead horse into an indistinguishable pile of horse-dust at this point, but for Christ's sake, the Bears had to pretend that he was a starter all year, putting him in on the first snap and then yanking as soon as possible, to keep their stupid, soon-to-be-gut-punched offensive coordinator happy. He was just a symptom of every Larger Issue, ever. As for Meriweather, anyone who knew anything could have told the front office that this guy wasn't going to work out. I mean sure, he did make two Pro Bowls, but then again, Deangelo Hall had just made one, so how much does that mean anymore? If they had just stopped and thought maybe the Patriots - an established winning team for like a decade now - might have had some reason for cutting the dude loose after watching him for four years and one full preseason, this could have all been avoided. But no, he got a few more million dollars, and the Bears got a shitty head-hunting safety who couldn't even hunt heads well. But he sure did provide big-name depth as the number five safety behind Winston Venable and Anthony Walters, I guess.
Honorable Mention: Chris Spencer, C/G.
Theoretical Past Winners: 2010 - (TIE) Brandon Manumaleuna, TE and Chester Taylor, RB. 2009 - Frank Omiyale, OT.

The George Blanda Award for Ex-Bear of the Year goes to...

Greg Olsen, TE, Carolina Panthers. So, you fancy yourself having a high-powered, fancy passing offense. Alright, so who are your receivers? A bunch of kick returners, Earl Bennett, a bunch of bullshit, and Roy Williams? Wait, so your top receiver is a running back who's also going to have to carry the ball twenty times a game? Ooh, not good. Oh, but don't forget, this is 2011 in the National Football League, and this is the Year of the Tight End. This shall be a full seventeen week festival of records being broken and games being won by the new breed of fast, athletic, sure-handed tight ends. And you've got one right there in Greg Olsen, primed and ready to take advantages of mismatched linebackers and cornerbacks a full foot shorter than he is. Wait, what's that? Your offensive coordinator who's already turned down a contract extension doesn't like tight ends, because they're not what he used in 1999? And you traded him to the Panthers? Ha ha, oh man, ha ha hahaha, that's a good one, ha ha ho ho, haha ha. Wait, you're serious, and that really happened? Fuck.
Honorable Mention: Mark Anderson, DE, New England Patriots
Past Winner: 2010 - Brandon Lloyd, WR, Denver Broncos.

The Brian Piccolo Memorial Award for Gritty, Hard-Working Fan Favorite of the Year goes to...

(TIE) Dane Sanzenbacher, WR and Tyler Clutts, FB. This was a banner year for the white man in Chicago. Not only did the team decide to continue their "eh, just throw whoever's cheap back there" policy at fullback with Aryan warrior Tyler Clutts, but they also grabbed a slow, shitty white wide receiver - the ultimate kind of football player in the eyes of the Chicago fan base - and even let him play in actual games this time. Sanzenbacher was the sensation of the first quarter of the season, with his habit of constantly dropping passes and not having a chance in hell of seeing any major playing time once Earl Bennett was back being completely ignored, as pork-fed Type 2 diabetics everywhere found their new Tom Waddle. Meanwhile, Clutts was possibly even worse than the bullshit fullbacks this team has had to endure over the last decade or so, (although oddly enough, the closest to an actual good one was Greg goddamned Olsen) and used his stunning accidental elusiveness to funnel defenders directly into Matt Forte and Marion Barber more often than not. Sometimes, you have to just look past "grit and determination" or whatever, and just use guys that are actually good at football, no matter how much it pisses the fans off.
Honorable Mention: Chris Conte, S.
Past Winner: 2010 - Patrick Mannelly, LS.

The Alonzo Spellman Rampage Award for Controversy, Off-the-Field Issue, or Other Distraction of the Year goes to...

Sam Hurd, WR/Drug Kingpin. Man, Sam Hurd being busted for huge amounts of cocaine was a thing no one could have ever seen coming, unless of course they had noticed that a buddy of his had been busted with $70 grand of Hurd's money in Hurd's car on the way to buy a huge amount of cocaine like a day before the stupid Bears signed him. So yeah, score another one for Mr. Angelo. I guess the craziest part is that he seemed like the least likely dude on the roster to be the NFL's answer to Nicky Barnes. The textbook backup wide receiver/special teams contributor, he was a completely unflashy dude without a huge criminal record or a diamond encrusted Rolls Royce or anything like that; just your typical "good teammate." And the dude was selling coke by the goddamn pound. On the other hand, he was a former Dallas Cowboy, so there you go.
Honorable Mention: Angelo refuses to negotiate with terrorists, Matt Forte spends breakout superstar season making close to the league minimum.
Past Winner: 2010 - Jay Cutler NFC Championship Mannerismgate.

The John Thierry Award for Defensive Least Valuable Player goes to...

Zackary Bowman, CB. Of all the stupid, no-brained goddamned nonsense. Look, Tim Jennings is a small dude, I get that. But he was solid as hell all year long in spite of all this, but stupid Lovie Smith benched him after he had one bad game. Even though he had to know that this guy was the next guy in line behind him, and even though he had just got done blowing several huge plays against the Broncos to help keep Tebowmania on life support for another few weeks. And he's awful, and aside from that one game he had a a rookie, he's always been awful. Oh yeah, he had a bunch of interceptions in '09, but when quarterbacks throw your way constantly because they know it's the safest bet on the field, eventually a receiver is going to have one ricochet off his hands and into yours. Law of averages. For goddamn real, it even got so bad that you could see Aaron Rodgers's eyes get huge and a half-smile show up on his horrible face every time he'd see Bowman lined up against Jordy Nelson or Donald Driver, and every time, he would stare his receiver down like a shitty high school freshman, all but shouting out to the defense, "HEY GUYS, I'M GONNA THROW IT OVER WHERE NUMBER THIRTY-FIVE IS! YOU KNOW, ZACKARY BOWMAN'S GUY!" But every time, the ball would be caught for a huge gain, because Zack Bowman is bullshit. But they just never have wanted to give up on the dude, and it would not shock me if he's the one back on the Bears next year instead of Jennings. Unbelievable.
Honorable Mention: Brandon Meriweather, S
Theoretical Past Winners: 2010 - Tommie Harris, DT, 2009 - Zackary Bowman, CB.

The Ron Turner's Playbook Memorial Award for Offensive Least Valuable Player goes to...

Caleb Hanie, QB. Oh man. You poor, poor bastard you. After an NFC championship game where people were to busy shitting all over Jay Cutler to notice that Hanie was kind of awful, this guy was poised for big things, at least in terms of finance. He was going to be a free agent in 2012, Mike Martz hated him, and the Bears weren't going to bring him back, and it was heavily rumored that some poor GM was seriously going to pay him starting QB money to hopefully be a starting QB someday. And then, Cutler went down, and Hanie had his Date with Destiny. And Destiny, she's a girl with high standards, so you better make damn sure you make a good first impression, because sometimes, there are no second dates, you know? But this guy, he took her on this date, man, and he ordered a cheeseburger at the fancy French restaurant. He spent the entire meal telling dead baby jokes and filling her in on every aspect of his Pokemon card collection, loudly announced at one point that "I gotta go take a piss," made her pay for the meal, and when dinner was over, he took her to the shitty dollar theater to see Saw, part 6. But even then at the end of the date when he had her drive him back to his mom's house, Destiny, she decided that she pitied him enough to give him one kiss before she left, because hell, it might be the only one he'd ever get you know? And when she did, the dude sneezed right into her mouth, blowing snot all over her face, sneezing so hard that he not only shat himself, but decided to let her know that this had happened, as though it was information she wanted. Of all the dates Destiny has had, no one has had a more utterly disastrous Date With Destiny than Caleb Hanie.
Honorable Mention: (TIE) Roy Williams, WR and J'Marcus Webb, OT.
Past Winner: 2010 - (TIE) The Doom of 2010, (Kreutz, Garza, Williams, Omiyale, Webb, etc.) OL.

NEXT TIME - THE GOOD.

Exhiliration

2012-01-15T11:26:00.005-05:00

I don't know if I'll ever have the right words to describe how I felt at about 5:20 pm local time yesterday. I'm going to try.

Yes, that's Alex Smith. That's the hero of the game, Alex fucking Smith, sprinting to the end zone on a designed QB run from 30 yards out.

And that's Vernon Davis, crying his eyes out after scoring THE MOTHERFUCKIN' WINNING TOUCHDOWN.

I thought they could win this game. I hoped it but I did not dare predict it. I figured they would need close to a best case scenario which, for the first 20 minutes, they did. Turnovers flowed like Napa County Wine. Donte Whitner looked like he had become the new host body for the soul of Ronnie Lott, blasting Pierre Thomas on the 2 yard line on the Saints' opening drive, knocking the ball loose by literally knocking Thomas out with what Ronnie would call a OOOO hit (because everyone watching the game says OOOOO when they see it). Thomas did not return to the game. Dashon Goldson picked Drew Brees off. Special Teams blasted the ball loose on a kickoff. Terrell Brown grabbed an interception. 4 first half turnovers. Even when they punted, Andy Lee flipped field position as he has done all year long. The 49ers D ascribes to a bend don't break approach, enhanced by Lee forcing the other team to have to go 90 yards repeatedly to score. The odds are, in covering all that territory, the offense will eventually make a mistake. Miss a block, drop a pass, slip on the turf. The 49ers made their breaks in this game and got some others. Marquis Colston, for instance, dropped the ball on that deep post pattern he likes to run where he out leaps everyone at the goal line. Carlos Rogers stuck to him like flypaper, knocking balls down, wearing #22 and looking for all the world like Dwight Hicks (or Darell Revis, for you younger folk out there). Ahmad Brooks and The Smiths -- Aldon and Justin -- recorded sacks, and when Justin couldn't get to Brees, he bull-rushed the lineman blocking him back into Brees, then reached over and around the lineman to grab a hold of Brees, shaking him enough to make a 3rd down pass wobble harmlessly.

But the best case scenario never lasts. Turnovers must become like a squirrel's foraging; stowing acorns in bundles of 7 for the upcoming winter of bad breaks and the other team making plays.

5 total turnovers in the game, and the 49ers only scored 13 points off of them.
The Saints converted 3rd downs regularly, even a couple on the ground.
Once again, a drive started in the red zone and ended in a field goal.
Andy Lee punted 4 times in the second half.
The Saints won the time of possession battle.
An injury to center Jonathan Goodwin forced someone else to slide over, and temporarily forced the Abominable Turnstile, Chilo Rachal, into the game. Predictably, sacks followed.
Michael Crabtree started dropping balls again.

All these were things I thought would spell the 49ers' doom before the game. I thought a win would mean those things Could Not Happen. That goes double for this next one: the 49ers surrendered 30+ points for the first time all season. Anything above 21 sounded like too much; 32 would mean the offense didn't sustain long clock-eating drives (sho' nuff, they didn't). 32 points meant the bend but don't break defense finally broke under the strain of the offense kicking too many field goals. And, really, in the last few minutes of the game, the defense did at last start to fracture. 2 long catch and run TDs by the Saints as Goldson came up to make the hit, rather than the wrap, on Darren Sproles and then Jimmy Graham, who both evaded him. Even the shining light of the defense for years, the mighty MISTER PATRICK WILLIS, missed a tackle on Graham, after being unable to cover him. When PATRICK WILLIS misses a tackle, we have learned as fans that it is just not our day.

Yet they won, because the unforeseeable happened. No one could have dared dream, let alone predict, that the 49ers would win a game because Alex Smith put the whole damn team on his back in the last 4 minutes and fucking willed the team to victory like real quarterbacks do. You just can't account for shit like that in a pre-game analysis. Its like aliens landing to give an intergalactic message of peace during half time. Real Aliens, not bullshit dudes in foil jump suits pretending to be aliens like that one Super Bowl half time show in the 70s or whatever.

Alex Smith: Hero. I never thought I'd type that. Even this year, improved as he is, he's been the sort of QB derided as a Game Manager. They won because Alex Avoided The Big Fuck-Up, only throwing 5 interceptions all year (and fumbling a couple times). After not-losing 13 times, Alex had to play to win the game. And he DID.

After Sproles sprinted to 24-23 and the Saints' first lead of the game with 4 minutes left, the 49ers moribund second half offense took the field behind their own 20. Then suddenly, the swing passes to Kendall Hunter were open. Crabtree remembered how to catch. And then, the 49ers encountered the Yellow Card to their Green Lantern; the red zone. 3rd and 2 quickly became 3rd and 7 when Bruce Miller joined the huddle too quickly, becoming the 12th man in it. I hoped for a field goal. I dreaded a sack and an interception. Instead, I got a fucking designed QUARTERBACK SHOTGUN SWEEP around the left side as Alex Smith loped like a gazelle for the first down. And then he kept going. And going. He balanced perfectly down the sideline. He lept over a dude.

And Ancient, Decaying Candlestick's foundations creaked their approval.
Even the ghosts of past glory shrieked in joy.

Alex has been on the team for 7 years, and this sort of thing has happened like 3 times. Bear that in mind, because this score came with just over 2 minutes left. Or in other words, after a failed 2 point conversion, the 49ers gave Drew Brees the ball back with over 2 minutes left. Now all of you are no doubt thinking what I was thinking; "that's way too much fucking time to give Drew Brees." As described above, Jimmy Graham scored again, the Saints hit their 2-pt play, and the 49ers were down by 3 with 1:39 left. 2 minutes? Brees barely needed 2 plays.

And that is the final, unpredictable irony of the upside down ending to this game. As it turns out, Drew Brees left too much time on the clock for Alex Smith.

1 time out left and the 49ers never used it. They came to the line agonizingly slowly for the hurry up offense as Gore caught short passes. The clock bled under a minute in just two plays, and just as I'm getting ready to bad mouth the offense's futility, Alex hits a bomb to Vernon Davis, who gets 40 yards and the sideline. Frank Gore explodes for the one and only time in the game, as he gets 30, and the 49ers clock it. And then, with 9 seconds left, Alex hits VD on the goal line. Davis leaps, plows over Roman Harper, left crumpled in a heap, and scores the winning touchdown.

You could almost see the phantom image of Steve Young to Terrel Owens in January of 1999, more so with it being a shorter version of the same route, the same play, into the same North End Zone of the park. And, two failed attempts by New Orleans at running the Cal Rugby Play later, the first playoff game in 9 years ended in triumph. After taking 7 years to get 2 4th quarter winning drives, Alex essentially did it twice in 1 game, which technically is a mathematical impossibility. But what sums up doing the impossible better than Alex Smith being the reason the 49ers won a playoff game?

[By the way; he's an unrestricted free agent at the end of this season.]

There are new heroes. There will be a new generation of ghosts to sit in the faded orange plastic seats of Candlestick here in its final years. And for the moment, there even seems to be a new The Catch. How many fan bases even have one "The" play to look back on fondly? We have more than our fair share, and win or lose next week, we just got richer yesterday. Let us never forget to appreciate it.

NFL 2011: Week 19 – Divisional Round (OT)

2012-01-14T00:21:00.007-05:00

So I have to warn you going into this week’s NFLuminati Index of a few things… Namely, this time of year it usually becomes painfully obvious to me (as I am ultra-aware) that the NFL is fixed. And it’s important to remember that this means “engineered” typed fixed and not “choreographed” type fix. It’s hard to find smart employees nowadays, regardless of the industry, and there’s no way you could actually have like 45 dudes per football team truly understand a full script of a game, memorize, and actually perform their roles well. But you position a few key insiders into key roles and the whole affair is easily pushed in desired directions. I also feel like that the feeling of this is not so strong during the regular season because at that point, a lot of it is wide open at times. The NFL does not need to engineer every detail, or else it would become obvious. But come the playoffs, a lot of it does seem engineered, and has seemed so to me for over a decade now. Can’t help it… I’m naturally distrustful of things.
This is because most of my life has felt like me vs. the World, and it is only the past couple months that I think I’m finally ready to say the World has won. I’m whooped. My dreams are dead. There will be no great future for me; I’ll be lucky to die where I’m not too far in debt that my shitty budget life insurance policy can pay it all off. Some dude sent us a $50 donation, specifically for Neil, I used it for gas, then out of this paycheck became overwhelmed by my financial drownings, and didn’t even paypal that shit to Neil. $40 fucking dollars. (He was gonna pay to renew the domain for the year out of his donation.) What a pathetic piece of shit I am. But that’s the row I’ve hoed, and I’ve hoed it well, albeit halfheartedly at times.
And then I get mad, because I feel like I’m saying strong shit inside this interweb, maybe not on the prolific level Neil has kicked the past couple years, but fuck man, I’m nearing 40 and realizing MY DREAMS ARE FUCKING DEAD! There is work, sleep, die in my future. That’s it. All the Real Man shit that’s been written, it means nothing. But little weasel-faced halfwits get paid blogging gigs or shine from false witticism dens like Grantland, and we just sit here, nonsense gibberish which is actually perfectly sensible dissection of the world around us, yet we don’t pretend to be so holy and righteous about sports. So we don’t get shit, except older and weirder. And then one day you wake up and look in the mirror and realize the Great Dream was all a fucking lie to distract you from the day-to-day, and once the haze clears and you see the day-to-day, there’s really nothing left to do but fucking wish for a hollow point to bore a hole through your head.
This is where the NFL comes in, and most great cherished forms of mass entertainment. It was Stanislav Zizek who said, “religion is the opiate of the masses” and he was right. But of course, no one cares about religion anymore because our god is now the Shine of the New as ordained by Science & Technology. (It should be noted that I am technically a scientist by trade, and through extensive personal research will tell you that actual opiates make a much better opiate than religion.) But the great sports entertainment is a distraction/opiate for us to forget our real lives we are uncomfortable inside of on a full-time basis, and at this time of year during the playoffs, important psychological memes are driven home, whether we realize it or not. But it is happening.
I am against engineered reality. I’m against reality to be honest with you, and frankly with the depressing realization that this is it, I am against all things. Blow up the world for all I care. Unleash Cormac McCarthy’s worst nightmares as filtered through the minds of a thousand primates poisoned by Philip K. Dick-style angel dust. Let it fucking go. Which I would imagine is a popular unconscious sentiment in this world right now, festering just below the surface of the electrosmog, which just like Kesey laid out in the first few pages of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, they will cut up, this weekend, as what I heard the stupid AM radio call “the greatest football weekend of the year” goes into full press on our collective brains.
Now I’m sure many of you are like, “Man, football isn’t fixed, and this is a bunch of jibber jabber bullshit.” But be open-minded friend, and watch this weekend’s game with even just 10% of your thought stream thinking of these things. Note the strange ways things play out during the games. (And somebody paypal $50 to neilabfree at hotmail.com, to bail my shitty ass out, or else Neil can get in line with the collection agency from North Carolina and the hospital bills from last year’s Super Bowl and the creepy gypsy Jew lady who hovered back into my life to try and reclaim my trailer camper from the past this last month. I promise, I’ll square everything up when I do my taxes – the Earned Income Credit: a poor man’s grant to buy off another year of life.)
Fuck it, let’s just jump into this…
#1: GREEN BAY PACKERS (15-1, 1st overall, 10.0 rating on a 10-point scale) – A good example of how the NFL engineers things is this Giants at Packers game, which echoes the great storyline from a few years back when the Giants beat the Ol’ Gunslinger himself in Green Bay in weather so cold that your face could freeze and your nose break off which is what they used to do in the old days, Packers breaking off the noses of opposing RBs in the bottom of the pile. But this is the new NFL and what they didn’t tell you is the Frozen Tundra actually has heating coils going underneath of it, so the ground is warm and supple, like a vagina, and for as cold as it was, the players only really suffered briefly, like walking from your warmed car to the entrance to Whole Foods on a winter day.
But the Giants Super Bowl win that year, as well as the Packers win last year, as well as a lot of Super Bowl victors of recent memory, have come from the wild card ranks – the all-American tale of coming up from below championship level, working together, peaking at the right time, and being the best. That is the illusion of the American Dream right there, that patience is a virtue and you will overcome, even if not as ordained great as others around you. But last weekend, that was shot, and no wild card team won at all, so we are left with nothing but the eight division champions. I am not entirely sure what this tells us about the future direction of the American Economy, but I am sure it’s not a good psychological conditioning we are undergoing right now. The Republicans are shaving retards off the fringes of their mock nomination process, and Obama is cooking up his very own war-mongering October Surprise with Iran, and between Bush’s Executive Orders and the powers granted Obama over the past 12 years, straight dictatorship has been given legal backing for the position of President, if necessary by emergency (but who decides the emergency?), and the economy certainly still seems to be teetering not settling. I have been looking for a schoolbus on govdeals.com to buy for cheap and turn into our own Joad family jalopy. Times are weird, and uncertain.
So yeah, all home teams won last weekend – all champions. And yet somehow the storyline is being pushed that the Giants are this year’s “peaking at the right time” football team that could go into Green Bay and pull off the upset. At least that’s what the TVs and radios were saying this week. But it was only a few weeks ago that everybody was like “lolol one of them has to win I guess” about the Giants and Cowboys. And the Packers were, by far the best team this season (as displayed by my NFLuminati Index rating). There’s no one even close.
Thing is, like with the wild card teams of note in previous postseasons, the NFL does not like to crown the King come playoff time. The most notable example of this was when the otherwise perfect Patriots dropped that Super Bowl to stupid Eli Manning and the Giants. The NFL just does not make the supposed King be the actual King. It’s bad for business.
I have not decided whether this will play out like that again, or if the NFL is looking to crown Aaron Rodgers our new Brady Manning, as we don’t really have one right now. One Super Bowl championship does not do that. But supplanting the Ol’ Gunslinger, and then winning back-to-back titles? That would seal Aaron Rodgers.
I don’t know. It’s hard to say what the NFL will push upon us. But I do not see them pushing the Giants over the Packers this weekend. This was an elaborate ploy to build up an alleged top-flight opponent for the Packers to dispatch of in their opening playoff game. There will be some highlight-ready Lambeau leaps, and Eli Manning will do his frustrated Manning Family Yuckface at some point in the second half, and then we will see how the unspoken plans develop in regards to the Packers in the next week or two.
#2: NEW ENGLAND PATRIOTS (13-3, 2nd overall, 8.5 rating) – The Patriots being pushed to high heaven as the greatest thing ever, right around 9/11 when we were all encouraged to “let’s roll” against Islam and fixed rate mortgages and things like that, that was when I started to really distrust all of this NFL madness. How could a guy like Tom Brady – a failure to some degree as a collegiate starter – become the Greatest QB of Our Generation? Sketchy tuck rules and snow games and all sorts of bullshit contributed to the process.
But it’s been a few years. And one thing to remember as I talk of these shadow conspiracies is that the entire network of Illuminatis is not a well-organized, streamlined machine. It’s a great bureaucracy. This is why you can’t have every player know how things must play out. This is why local dudes joining the local Freemasons look at it as a fraternal organization where they do charity work. Because it is. So it’s hard to understand if one tentacle of the beast can easily tap into the other tentacle of the beast and be like, “You know what Brother Goodell? It’d be great if we could have people rally around the term ‘Patriot’ one more time.” The bureaucracy is large and inefficient, which ultimately will be what enables its demise.
Oddly enough though, the Patriots find themselves against Tim Tebow and the Broncos, in a rematch of a game that was a blowout a few weeks back. Tim Tebow is the Jesus freak guy – homeschooled born again super athlete. And think back on America’s historical origins, where Christ-based fringe churches were willing to float across a seemingly endless fucking ocean to find freedom from the oppression of the Catholic church. That religious freedom was mostly for religion about Christ, sure, but not the fancy gilded brutality of Catholicism. And yet you can’t throw a pissy snowball in the greater Boston metropolitan area without hitting some alleged Catholic. Tons of grandsons and daughters of immigrants who hold onto the Catholic ways, despite the torture and molestations and obvious historical hypocrisies.
And here comes the homeschooling lover of Christ spirit, who feels a Jack Chick pamphlet tucked into a phone booth is just as righteous a path to the Good Lord as fancy sacrament in satin robes. And the Brady/Belichick genius machine is certainly the football kin to the Catholic church – as respected an entity as there could be. And the ragtag Tebow option offense/wacky Bronco defense is as perfect a pagan church to that football tradition as you could conjure up. The fucking option, in the NFL. Long fucking pass plays off the option, against the vaunted Steelers defense last week. (It should be noted, for those that still refuse to believe the engineered NFl talk I talk, how the Steelers/Broncos game last week conveniently went long, into primetime, for an almost perfect at 8 pm exciting overtime finish, where Tebow dropped to a knee in celebration to his Lord. You couldn’t have timed that shit better if you taped it beforehand and edited it to fit. And of course, it was the highest rated wild card game in nearly 20 years. Which means the NFL can now ask for even higher rights fees next time around.)
I can’t cypher the tea leaves on this game. You have to figure the Brady/Belichick machine will get one last hurrah at some point, being it is the most illuminated chapter of the NFLuminati process’s recent history. I mean they fucking got the former Broncos head coach as their assistant in the past two weeks. What kind of bullshit is that? But also I did not think the NFL would push Tebow past last week, and they did. I feel like there may be more to this Tebow thing underneath the surface than meets the eye. Perhaps somewhere in Alabama they have finally bred the flawless red heifer and there are those who are ready to rebuild the Temple of the Mount in Jerusalem to usher in the final days of conflict, thus the build-up to war with Iranian Shi’ites (essentially the Catholics of Islam), and Tebow is all part of our conditioning. Divine intervention, on the football field, to a level never before known. Even wonderboy Brady was forced to bow to His Greatness. I don’t know. I feel like the Patriots will win, as they are the second best team in the NFL, despite their defense, but it really seems hard to say with this strange Tebow factor. And John Elway is no stranger to the secret halls of the NFL hierarchy. I know it will get big ratings though.
#3: NEW ORLEANS SAINTS (14-3, 3rd overall, 8.3 rating) – The Saints are this weekend’s big question mark game, as you will see from the ratings, they are the 3rd and 4th best teams in the NFL. But as we move into the real NFLuminati mode, it’s important to remember that the Saints are not a powerful franchise. In fact, they’ve been shit for most of their existence, and were only given a Super Bowl in order to regenerate the tourist economy of New Orleans. And sure, they’ve got this Madden Bowl style of new school NFLineering down pat, but they also lost to the fucking Seahawks last year. It is also of note that the two games they played on real people grass this year were two of their lowest scoring games. And the 49ers have an opportunistic defense. Actually, fuck that, as “opportunistic defense” is one of those chump ass phrases; the 49ers are an odd collection of man-beasts, the type of man-beasts that could pressure past that Saints O-line and get an INT or two to break up Brees from “Drew Brees great dude” to “Drew Brees, every now and then he has a game like this.”
The real test is the throwback 49ers offense that leans heavily on a RB. If they can beat up the Saints defense, could be a great game. But if they fall behind even slightly, you can’t do the “let’s let Frank Gore fuck shit up long enough for Alex Smith to make a couple passes” thing. It should be an interesting test, though just as the Saints are not a great NFL franchise in the powerful sense, the 49ers are one of the big ones. Shit man, Bill Walsh practically took over the NFLuminati for about 20 years. Seems to me the NFL would probably set up a Saints/Packers rematch like the opening kickoff, but they like to not do what you would expect.
#4: SAN FRANCISCO 49ERS (13-3, 4th overall, 5.9 rating) – Actually the real key, underneath the surface, to this game is how high shall the NFL push the Jim Harbaugh star? He’s gotten the background hype, ordained as the new Ditka due to his Bears ties, and ordained as the new Bill Walsh because he’s in San Francisco. Do they hotshot this asshole straight to the Lombardi Trophy stand? I don’t see that happening just yet, and the 49ers haven’t had a playoff game in a few years, so it would be completely respectable – in both an NFL is real sense as well as the engineered way – for them to lose out this game and still be strong as fuck in the psychic mind of the masses. That defense look hongry at times.
#5: BALTIMORE RAVENS (12-4, 5th overall, 5.0 rating) – The Ravens/Texans game is the worst game of the weekend, because neither is a realistic contender. The Ravens get media hype like they could be, and if every game was played in Baltimore, then they might be, because at home they are a dominant NFL team. But on the road, they are like the fifth member of the AFC West. They did win the AFC North to get a long-wanted home game, so I would imagine things go well for them this weekend. But as soon as they end up playing somewhere else, they will be exposed as the fraud that they are, even though we’ll get 39 stories about “the last run for Ray Lewis”. Man, fuck Ray Lewis and his stupid fucking pre-game dance. And don’t get that twisted, because I have never in my life ever thought negatively of a man who would wear a full length white mink coat and get caught up in a stabbing death. In fact, I generally respect people with that type of back story. But somehow Ray Lewis, despite those facts, has shown himself to be a shitty and false human being. Let’s not forget that even though he wore a full length white mink coat and was caught up in a stabbing death, he testified against those who actually done did the stabbing. And also let’s not forget that stupid pre-game dance.
Anyways, the best hope for the Ravens is that the Broncos win so Baltimore can have another home game and not be exposed until the Super Bowl.
#6: NEW YORK GIANTS (10-7, 8th overall, 3.6 rating) – Eli is the only stupid member of the stupid Manning family cluttering up my goddamn January football. I can’t stand the Manning family, ever since that dog rape story got buried by the media. Sure, Mike Vick punishes a couple of underperforming pet athletes and gets sent away to federal prison and becomes public enemy number one, to this day, for a lot of folks, who respect the lives of dogs more than humans. “I hope they throw him in a cage, like an animal, to punish him for treating dogs like animals, because that is wrong.” I always loved the hypocrisy of that thinking, that by treating animals badly you should be treated like an animal. That’s like the thirtysomething hipster’s version of the “against abortion but for the death penalty” thing Republifuck candidates do. But nobody gave a shit about an actual incident of bestiality. I don’t know; maybe we’ve progressed. I would be happy with that, because we have two pygmy goats, one white named Sugar and one brown named Nutmeg, and with their fluffy winter coat, I kinda want to fuck them sometime. They’re just so damned cute, and usually when I see cute things I want to jam my penis into it.
#7: HOUSTON TEXANS (11-6, 11th overall, 2.4 rating) – I was surprised the Texans won last weekend, not because of any rookie QB factors or none of that “let’s pretend this is real” bullshit. I just didn’t think the NFL would allow such a shoddy franchise with such shoddy unmarketable uniforms. But they did. Really, this Texans/Ravens game is gonna be an uninteresting foreplay into the late game on Sunday. I don’t even really want to talk about it, though it should be noted that despite their crappy uniforms, I am probably even more disappointed in the Ravens uniforms when they started. My birth middle name is Raven, so I expected in my honor something chill as fuck. Instead, black and purple, and yet somehow screwed up. How do you screw up the colors of malevolence and codeine cough syrup? You be from Maryland, and thus retarded, that’s how.
#8: DENVER BRONCOS (9-8, 15th overall, 1.3 rating) – I am rooting for Tebow at this point, because I am rooting for End Times. Like I said, my dreams are dead, and if my dreams must die I would hope it is at least exonerated in the cleansing chaos of an apocalypse. If my dreams are dead and there’s no divine intervention or world war or something to distract me from reality, then I will be forced to actually retrace my own mistakes. I don’t want to do that, and right now I’m having trouble finding actual opiates. I guess there’s always painkiller abuse (like always), but there’s something so blissful about the hazy dream world of smoking actual opium. And to smoke opium and watch football where some weird barely good QB somehow keeps winning? Even better. And to smoke opium and watch some weird barely good QB somehow keep on winning, over stupid Tom Brady, with shitty Phil Simms on mute and pumping DJ Burn One’s The Ashtray so goddamned loud shit is vibrating off the desk? That would be a real nice way to spend a Saturday night. But no actual opiates. Just fucking Bibles and football. Fuck this world.

A Referendum On Defense

2012-01-13T13:28:00.005-05:00

MISTER PATRICK WILLIS was a Madden Cover Boy?
Behold the power of WILLIS, for this means he is Curse-Proof.
Sadly, this is not nearly the same as Brees-Proof.

So earlier in the week I made a point of watching college football's championship game. Alabama ended up winning 21-0. It was an unusual 21, too; 5 field goals (out of 7) and a missed extra point very late in the game when the outcome was essentially decided and Alabama's running back finally scored an actual touchdown. The Tide strung a lot of good drives together, but they all ended up bogging down in or near the red zone; meanwhile their defense absolutely smothered LSU's offense and made all those field goals stand up [although, admittedly, LSU's QB had an atrocious game and their offensive play selection couldn't have been worse and less imaginative even if you consciously attempted to make it so].

Or in other words, it was the same game I've been watching throughout the second half of the 49ers' 2011 season. I inevitably started pulling for Alabama, with their familiar dominance of field position and time of position, their ineffective short yardage offense, their settling for repeated field goal tries and somehow making it stand up until the turnovers started happening and the other team finally broke and surrendered a game-cinching TD. Tony Richardson became Frank Gore in my mind's eye.

I couldn't hope but pick up on the similarity, both in the development of the game and the exasperation of play by play broadcaster Brent Musberger sarcastically whining about their not being enough touchdowns/scoring. Because, after all, this is the 21st Century and Professionalism amongst journalists and broadcasters is a relic of America's Ancient Past, languidly haunting the inside of something called a "phone booth" or perhaps the shattered remnants of a horse and buggy.

It's bad enough when we as Americans bitch about the world's game, football (i.e. soccer), being boring because there aren't enough goals scored. But now, after a couple decades of us playing Fantasy Football, being able to bet over/under in a Gambling Book, and playing the Madden NFL video game franchise, and the NFL attempting to coddle and placate this new market by re-writing its rule book year after year to make the game more conducive to high scoring shootouts that more closely resemble the video game world, here we are, now bitching about our own mutant strain of football being not "exciting" enough because the score totals aren't quite as ballooned as basketball yet.

But that's where we are. 2011, where "taking steps to promote player safety" is merely another fancy way of saying "neuter the defense". If you throw deep balls trying to draw pass interference as a means of moving the ball down the field, you will be rewarded. Holding is almost as decriminalized as marijuana. And casting an unpleasant gaze in the Quarterback's general direction is a 15 yard penalty also subject to later fines and suspensions. Hit a QB high? That's a flaggin'. Hit him low? Flaggin'. Hit him late? Flaggin'. Hit him on time, in the middle of his body, but momentum and gravity carry you through and as you both fall to the turf, you land directly on top of him, and he's thus a little slow to get up? That's a flaggin' too. What's a Pass Rusher to do? Why, be worried about penalties and fines so he'll hesitate a little bit, be a little less effective, and the glorious Offense Show will be unimpeded by those pesky defensive players trying to muck things up with this "competitive balance" bullshit. Since, after all, nothing neuters a pass-heavy offense quite like a dominant pass rush. Go watch Super Bowl 42 again if you need a visual aid of this principle.

[Somewhere Roger Goodell and David Stern are at some degenerate billionaire resort, giving each other handjobs, all the while Stern is reassuring Goodell in a breathy voice that the increased score totals are good, and he loves the way the rules/protection is different for star individual players than the rest of the grunts, and that "you're almost there, Rog!"]

All year long, the passing record book has been getting re-written. Dan Marino's ballyhooed single season passing yard record stood for 27 years. This year THREE QB's eclipsed it. And one of them didn't even make the Pro Bowl roster, think about THAT. Madden fans and Fantasy players are loving this year. The three top teams in terms of power rankings are Green Bay, New England, and New Orleans. All of them have high scoring pass heavy offenses (2 of the 3 Marino Record-Breakers), and all three have forgettable defenses. Green Bay's has often looked bad and the Patriots almost seem indifferent to the concept of playing defense; they have a 3rd string Wide Receiver playing CB, for instance. It hasn't mattered, because they all score TDs seemingly at will.

Thus, sticking out like the proverbial sore thumb at the top of the NFL power rankings, trailing just behind those teams, are the lower scoring, defense-led San Francisco 49ers. The Saints average 40+ points a home game. The 49ers only scored above 30 three times; once against a shitty team, once against another shitty team and they needed to resort to a fake field goal to do it, and once against a mediocre team and they needed two special teams return TDs to do it. The 49ers take the antiquated approach to football success; they use a run-heavy offense to control the ball and the clock, taking occasional shots downfield (that fail half the time). They kick a lot of field goals. Their kicker and their punter consistently bury the other team's offense in shitty starting field position and force them to go 90 yards to score over and over again, knowing that a team can do that once or twice, but not repeatedly. The odds are the other offense will make an eventual mistake when trying to cover all that territory. That mistake becomes a turnover and a short field for the 49ers, and thus they dominate the field position battle against opponents as well. The offense needs only be pretty good, not great, when it only has to go 30 yards (or less) to score.

So a long snapper, a punter, a place kicker, and a kick returner walk into a ring of honor...

It's the style that all the rules changes are all but legislating out of the pro game. It is also anathema to folks whose football "expertise" comes from following stats for fantasy football or from playing the Madden franchise. There is no blocking or tackling in Fantasy Football. There are no offensive linemen. There is no field position, or time of possession. There are no gunners or long snappers. There is no punting and there are no punters. The 49ers thrive on these things (well, not the offensive line so much), and they make no sense to the fantasy player. A team that wins this way boggles their mind. [Come to think of it, the Broncos squeak their way into more wins than anyone expected them to get much the same alien way; Matt Praeter hits 50 yard FGs as easily as most of us piss into a toilet bowl and Von Miller wrecks QBs on defense. Of course this crowd has no other explanation for their results than ascribing magic Jesus powers to Tim Tebow!]

It is boring. It is frustrating even for fans of the team. It will cause much petulant whining from the Tony Kornheiser's of the world and the dittoheads that quote them on the internet, smugly complaining about how its a "ratings disaster" whenever the pre-ordained marketing friendly teams don't make it to the championship game. Most of the time they're just trying to cover for their own disappointment as fans and trying to pass it off as objectively bad for the game when their team fails, but it's still annoying as hell when people treat this like a valid complaint. Especially in football, since the Super Bowl is ridiculously popular and has proven time and again that this country will basically as a whole stop to watch it regardless of the teams involved. Fuck those people. Go watch pro wrestling if you want to make sure the championship is always contested between the top ratings draws without any of that pesky real world randomness and legit competition ruining the storyline for you.

But, in regards to the 49ers Defense & Field Position approach, the question "Does This Shit Still Work?" still waits to be answered. The 49ers' Defense hasn't faced an offense on par with New Orleans (there's almost no such thing). The Saints haven't faced a defense as good as what the 49ers have. The old football axiom was "Offense Wins Games, but Defense Wins Championships." It seems to be on trial, in a way, this weekend. Counsel for the prosecution: New Orleans, and Drew Brees, Esq. Presenting the case in defense of... well, defense... will be the 49ers. It is not the ideal test case, since the Saints will not be playing their ideal Dome element, instead in the wonderfully shitty mire that is Candlestick Park, with its below-sea-level playing field. [Note: the weather outside is nice. Bright and sunny and few clouds in the Bay Area. DAMN IT. Break out the fucking hoses and spray that turf down until its yellow and brown. Not one blade of green remaining.] The 49ers, for their part, are in Uncharted Territory: this is the franchise's first playoff game in NINE YEARS, which means its the first taste of postseason pressure for virtually the entire roster, particularly the key players like Vernon Davis, Frank Gore, MISTERS PATRICK WILLIS AND NAVORRO BOWMAN, Dashon Goldson and Carlos Rogers, and arguably most key of all, embattled Alex Smith. It would not be unheard of for the 49ers to be nervous and choke on the pressure of the big stage. They could vomit all over themselves and Alex could play like he did in the first 6 seasons of his career. But, assuming (hoping) they don't, and likewise assuming no flukes of luck in the other direction, like a last second monsoon or a freak injury to Drew Brees, we could have a litmus test on whether Defense Wins Championships still applies in the modern NFL. There is nothing to suggest the 49ers are capable of out-gunning the Saints in the way some thought Detroit might be able to. If the 49ers win this game, it will be because a great defense CAN cripple a great offense, still. 26-21 would probably be the score; field goals at least coming after long, tedious, time-devouring drives that keep Drew Brees on the side line. A couple turnovers turned into the touchdowns. Long fields increasing the chances of a sack, or a bad throw, that kills New Orleans drives. Not all of them, but enough of them. If, however, this team build is invalid, and Offense now Wins Championships, the 49ers can't win; this IS the end of the fun part of the season, where they run into a team they can't score enough to beat, and the glee of "look how far they've come" turns to the bile of "look how far they still have to go".

And . . . Curtain

2012-01-08T20:02:00.003-05:00

I actually sat down to do this late last night, half drunk, completely insane, filled with a whirlwind of conflicting emotions, but I was just too wrecked, both physically and spiritually, to do anything other than pound my keyboard like some pathetic half-mad ape and the final result would have no doubt resembled a cuneiform version of a succession of hoots, grunts and whistles and throughout it all there would have been a terrible eerie soundtrack playing through all of our heads, the ghostly sound of me weeping like a faithless man from far away. Terrible, terrible . . .

And so I decided to put it off until today when I would no doubt be refreshed and re-energized. Instead, I am vaguely hung-over, my eyes burn and so does my soul. There will be a time when I look back upon this season with happiness, when I give it the fond farewell it deserves, but it still hurts too much and so all I can do is try to explain what last night felt like, which is kind of impossible because in order to do so I would have to die and then be reincarnated as Edvard Munch’s “The Scream”.

The weird thing is, is that it wasn’t all horrible. Hell, the Lions actually led at the first half and I managed to tweet some gibberish about the team playing well, and even as I wrote it, a vague thought was flying through my mind which resembled something like “No, stop, you fool, you are only setting yourself up for something ridiculous.” I promptly ignored this thought because it seemed a product of old fear based thinking and then I went back to watching the game. And then the world caved in on itself, my head melted like at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark and I’m pretty sure I traveled back through time and was crucified by Pontius Pilate. Or maybe it was by David Bowie playing Pontius Pilate in The Last Temptation of Christ. Who can say?

Anyway, sacrilegious babble aside, there was still never a moment when I lost faith, which I suppose is a good sign. After all, I’ve seen too much wild and crazy shit this year to completely fold in on myself, too many comebacks, too many manic adrenaline fueled “Holy shit, I can’t believe this is happening!” moments, and so I kept my heart alive for as long as I could, a dangerous decision given that I should have disconnected and gone into protectionism mode far earlier.

After all, I was a goddamn beast last night. During gamedays, I am continually thankful that my neighbors don’t regularly call the cops on me. After all, during the course of your average game it probably sounds like I’m doing everything from strangling a goat to singing death metal – while strangling a goat. I am not what you would call a cool, calm, composed fan while the action is actually happening. So . . . yeah, following a game I always feel like I both survived a war and thankful that nobody had me arrested or committed.

But this game . . . this goddamn game . . . well, I wouldn’t be surprised if my neighbors went into hiding at some point in the second half. Shit, they’re probably all in the Witness Protection program while the feds try to build a case against me. “Yes . . . yes, sir, that’s the man . . . that’s the one I saw wrestling a bear in his living room and then eating the bear’s heart while punching a puppy. That’s him!”

At various points in that second half of woe, it probably sounded like I was wrestling with the devil while simultaneously arguing with God like we were some sort of dysfunctional couple on Cops. “You said you were gonna stop all this nonsense, God! This is fucking bullshit! Never again!” That sort of thing. If someone would have looked in the window, it probably would’ve resembled the scene from Highlander right after he chops a dude’s head off – just lightning flashing everywhere, people screaming, headless bodies flopping on the ground, swords slashing, madness, just . . . utter madness. At one point I lost my shirt. I ripped it off like some sort of degenerate street thug getting ready to throw down. A couple of hours later, I couldn’t find it. I finally found it earlier today. To be honest, I forgot I was ever wearing it. It was just a sweatshirt and I still had a tee-shirt on so it wasn’t completely absurd, but . . . okay, fine, it was but I just don’t want you to think that I was just stomping around bare-chested and violent all night long. I’m a civilized man, after all.

Not that anyone would have been able to tell last night. Had the cops actually been called, they probably would have broken down my front door and then tied me to a chair and called in an exorcist while I swore at them in tongues and spit pea soup and vile, vicious words, my head turning 180 degrees while I vowed to eat Drew Brees’ soul and to banish Aaron Berry to some dark corner of hell.

So . . . uh . . . yeah, it wasn’t the best night. I’m an emotional dude, a passionate dude, and I make a goddamn ass out of myself watching this thing we call football. I scream and I yell and I carry on like a freak. I scream “Fuck you!” at the television like a goddamn petulant child, I try to bargain with all manner of deities and I’ll even change clothes during the middle of the game because I think that it somehow makes a difference in the outcome of the game. My adrenaline spikes, I shake like a junky, I weep like a faithless man when things are going bad and I cheer like a Roman Coliseum fan hopped up on crank and blood when things are going well. I do not temper myself because this is sports fandom and sports fandom is carnal and wicked and beautiful and completely unreasonable. It exists completely within its own sphere, its own world, and this world is insane and has no laws other than the laws of the beast. It’s feral and strange and completely fucking insane and I revel in it because why not? Why not? It’s perhaps the only socially acceptable way to touch the madness, like scream therapy for the crazy.

I’ve begun to ramble and I haven’t touched on the actual events of the game nearly as much as I probably should, but I suspect this is just my way of protecting myself. After all, I don’t exactly want to relive what went on in that second half, you know? Some part of me still believes that it’s halftime and that the score is 14-10 Lions and the biggest thing I can be pissed off about is that the ref blew the whistle and caused the play to go dead after The Great Willie Young ate Drew Brees’ soul and knocked the football loose. A part of me is huddled in that memory, clinging to it like the last rickety life-raft in a storm from hell.

But I know that that second half happened and so do all of you. We all watched it and even though it caused me to descend into the heart of darkness, whispering The Horror, The Horror over and over and over again to my beleaguered soul, there was still that rational human side of me that stayed reasonable (well, sort of, anyway) and wondered over and over and over again “What if?” What if that ref hadn’t blown the whistle and the Lions were allowed to return that fumble for a touchdown and a 21-7 lead? What if the refs didn’t inexplicably spot the ball a yard further down the field thus giving the Saints a key first down following a third down pass which only netted nine yards instead of the ten they said early in the second half, which would have forced the Saints to punt? What if Eric Wright or Aaron Berry would have caught just one of the interceptions Drew Brees tossed into their arms? Just one? What if the Saints didn’t convert every single third down or all 168 (I believe this is the exact number if I remember correctly. You can trust me, I’m a professional.) 4^th down conversions? What if Sean Payton had behaved like every other caveman coach and punted on those 4^th downs? What if Titus Young wouldn’t have fallen down on that first Matthew Stafford interception, which in retrospect, was basically what ended the game? What if the Lions understood how to properly tackle? What if the refs decided to do their job and call holding on the Saints offense line just one goddamn time? What if, what if, what if, what if, aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarfggggggfhkjkhjloksiflhweygfliwefi

And so it goes. So it goes. In a sense, I suppose there’s something macabrely good about all those “what ifs”. Even being able to ask them is a sign that the Lions were at least competitive, that they showed up, that an outline exists – no matter how hazy – for a different story, a story, a world, an alternate reality in which the Lions actually won the game. But it also makes it hurt more. It makes it more frustrating. The closer you get to heaven, the more bitterly painful the flames of hell feel licking at your feet. Because I can see that alternate reality, it makes it more maddening that it never actually happened and that I am forced to live in this world with its bullshit outcomes.

After the game, as I always do, I calmed down and began to channel my wild emotions into something approaching coherence. I tried to be philosophical, to put it all in its proper perspective but to be honest, I couldn’t. I still can’t. Not really anyway. I admire everyone who was able to do an immediate about-face and remind everyone else that this has been a hell of a season, a magical season, and hey, I’m right there with you. But last night is still too fresh in my mind, in my heart, my soul, to do anything other than grieve for what could have been but isn’t because of all those goddamn “what-ifs”. Later, I am sure that I’ll be able to summon something worthwhile and human to wrap up this amazing, wild, weird, fantastic season. And we’ll all smile and laugh and say things to each other like “Man, what a ride!” and “I can’t wait ‘til next year!” Those are things that are undeniably true, and maybe a part of me is starting to crawl into that place already. I don’t know. But the majority of me is just gritting its teeth and remembering all of the things – both big and small – that happened last night and caused the Lions to lose that game and that part of me is too big and too tough to conquer right now.

I do want to say this: for as much as the Lions lost that game (well, defensively anyway), and for as much as the refs stuck their little knives in, helping to bleed us to death while Sheriff Goodell cowered in Houston, shining his tin badge with a smug smile on his liar’s face, the New Orleans Saints won that game. They were pretty damn good and so was their coach. For as much as it rankles me that Sean Payton went for the jugular every damn opportunity he got, I respect him like hell for it. That’s what a real coach does. That’s what a winner does. That’s what allows a team like the Saints to reach their full potential and I commend him for it. Besides, I take that jugular hunting as a sign of respect. He knew he had to do that in order to put the Lions away. That was his acknowledgment that the Lions are a real team, a dangerous team, a damn good team capable of beating his Saints in their own building. He played to win because he knew that playing not to lose would have just meant that his team would be walking around in a daze after the game, wondering how they got knocked out of the playoffs in the first round for the second straight season.

But enough about all that. Nobody wants to hear that shit today and I feel unpleasant even acknowledging it. Today is a day for us, a day to try to purge our own pain, not to celebrate the joys of another’s soul.

I have spent a ridiculous amount of words lately hyperbolically comparing this last month of the season to arriving in a New World or to Wild West shootouts at the OK Corral but today metaphors just seem cheap and trite. Today, the feelings are too real, too raw, too big, to explain away with some pithy imagery. There is nothing symbolic about any of this. There is just an open wound. I know I just said “No metaphors” and then with this open wound thing I, well, I just gave into the welcoming arms of metaphors, but this is just the way I think. Everything is a goddamn play, an opera of the mind, heart and soul and I don’t know what to tell you. My brain is a drama queen.

I guess the difference is that while my brain keeps searching for metaphors, for symbolism – and keeps finding it – last night’s game exists in that same brain as something separate, something that cannot be summed up with gunfight metaphors. Everything else – including my feelings (hell, especially my feelings) - is fair game for the symbolism addict that is my brain, but the game against the Saints exists as its own thing, immune to symbolism, to stories, to metaphors, to imagery. It does not fit in some grand narrative in my head. It just exists by itself, the facts cold and hard and brutal, the memories raw and untouched by anything other than themselves. I kind of just want to wrap that whole goddamn thing up in chains and dumb it to the bottom of the sea of my brain but that can’t happen and we all know it. I’ll always remember this game and I’ll always remember how much it sucked and that’s that.

I should never, ever, say that I’m not going to give into symbolism, to metaphors, because as I’ve already demonstrated, I am completely incapable of doing so. I don’t just write in metaphors, in symbols and dramatic imagery, I think that way too. This is what makes me the creative super-beast that I am, but sometimes it gets in the way. Sometimes, I just want to think in clear, concise terms and I want everything to be simple, easy, black or white, up or down. This is how I feel about last night’s game. I just want it to be a dead thing, not something that lives and blossoms and flourishes in my brain, taking untangleable (spellcheck says this isn’t a word but fuck it, I just made it a word) root, something that will pop up in epic terms later on, something that will inform the rest of my fandom, the way that the last 50 years of failure has. I desperately don’t want this to happen. I don’t want it to become some epic dragon, flying through the halls of my brain, breathing fire and laying waste to everything in its path. As you can see, it’s too late. Too late.

So, I guess all I can do now is try to put it into its proper context, to allow the metaphors and the symbols and the imagery to grow but to watch over them and make sure that they don’t grow into something too ugly or monstrous. Obviously, I’m rambling, but this is what happens when you write at the exact same time that you try to gather your thoughts, that you try to contextualize everything. In the end, I suppose I have no choice but to acknowledge this game’s place in the epic opera of my mind. It happened, but I have to remember that it is but a scene – a scene that marks the end of an act but not the whole damn opera. It is a scene that marks the end of an act, but there is more than one act in any play, in any opera, and even though this one is over, I don’t hear a fat lady singing, and even though the lights just dimmed and the singing just stopped and the curtain momentarily closed, I know that soon enough, it’s going to open up and there will be Matthew Stafford, at the height of his powers, and there will be Calvin Johnson and my God, what beauty, what a fucking show, and I can’t wait. I can’t wait.

Last night happened and there’s nothing anyone can do to change that. My mind still reels, and my heart still thunders against the ravaging horrors of it all, but it’s over now and maybe this is what people call acceptance, or at least something like it, or the faint whispers of it. I don’t know. What I do know is that as soon as I am done writing this, it will be time for my mind and my heart to move on, and I will begin watching that curtain, waiting for it to open, and I will remember that despite the way it ended, this act was a ton of fun, fucking incredible, awe inspiring really, and I’ll smile a faint, hopeful smile and I’ll remember that this opera is destined to be amazing, because it is my opera and all my operas are. And finally, I’ll remember that this is just a beginning, the birth of a star, and that soon – very soon – this star will shine and on some distant planet, someone will look up, see it shining up in the sky and they’ll wonder where this star came from, and what it actually is, and my soul will whisper that it came from my heart and what it is, is the Detroit Lions and it will never die.

2011 Chicago Bears Postseason Postmortem, Part One: New Guy Report.

2012-01-08T00:49:00.000-05:00

Someone out there is selling Patrick Trahan jerseys for the ladies.

So here we are, the Bears' season in hell finally officially over about seven weeks after Jay Cutler's thumb unofficially ended it. And with Jerry Angelo finally -thank god, finally - out of the picture, I thought I'd give you people a taste of just how badly this team was managed. I'm too lazy to actually count everybody, but counting Injured Reserve guys, the Bears finished the season with a little over sixty guys on the payroll, and a whopping thirty of them weren't with the team last year. In a normal situation and on a team with any sort of plan for the future beyond the next three days or so, this would sound like some huge rebuilding year, clearing out all the dead weight and laying down the foundation for something special sometime in the next couple years. But this is the Bears, and you should know better than that. When faced with glaring weaknesses and gaping holes, this team had a philosophy of just plug-and-playing the shit out of it, snatching up whoever they could find on the cheap, crossing their fingers, covering their eyes, and hoping for the best; the "best" in this situation being Stupid Angelo getting to pretend he's smart when one of his blind reaches pans out, which he should have figured out never happens sometime around 2005 or so. Don't believe me? Thirty new players, fifteen officially recognized as rookies, ten of those being undrafted rookies, and maybe three or four other guys being blind grabs from other teams' practice squads who might as well be rookies. Add in all the other players already on the team who never should have been more than preseason bodies, (basically every offensive lineman other than Garza and C. Williams, for starters) and you've got a team that seriously might have twenty or less actual NFL-caliber players. Looking back, that this team finished 8-8 instead of 1-15 probably means that Jay Cutler is some sort of destitute man's Peyton Manning. Just look at these motherfuckers:

* = Rookie, ** = Undrafted Free Agent Rookie

Kyle Adams** - TE - This was a fine example of a dude they just sort of plucked out of thin air and threw on the roster. Personally, I'd have just kept Desmond Clark around for veteran presence, or whatever, because hell, if you hit a point where you have to really rely on your #3 tight end, you're probably screwed anyway. I think this guy played special teams, maybe?

Armando Allen** - RB - Once injuries started piling up, the Bears went on this crazy flurry of just signing everyone and their grandma over the last few weeks, and that's how this guy got on the team. Actually didn't do bad against Green Bay, but shit, with newly-shitty B.J. Raji barely even bothering to leave a three-point stance half the time, I could probably get four yards a carry against Green Bay. Either way, I doubt he makes the team next year.

Marion Barber III - RB - Actually was decent here and there in spot duty, where he didn't have as many opportunities to randomly tear a ligament, but FUUUUUUUUCK.

Gabe Carimi* - OT - Well. This guy was my Only Hope for 2011, and he plays about a game and a half before spending the rest of the year basically just having knee surgeries every few weeks. And with the Lessons of 2008 being forgotten, just like Chris Williams, it was with a repeat of a pretty serious college injury (that went strangely unspoken of until about Week 8) that made other teams pass on him. So this guy is heading into his second year with about half a career worth of wear already on the tires now. Just god damn.

Tyler Clutts - FB - Man, this guy. This guy confirmed everything I ever suspected or made jokes about on the internet about white people as pro sports fans. People just absolutely rave about this guy, even to the point that one NFL.com guy gave him a Pro Bowl vote, and no one notices that he's completely terrible at everything he does. I'm sure it could be that they're blinded by the smoke-and-mirrors combo of his rags-to-riches story of coming up throw the AFL, CFL, and UFL and the one good block per game he would make, but you know better. He's a blond white guy with a name like "Tyler Clutts" who wears the number 44 and plays what I guess could be called a skill position, and he represents a return to the white man's sport, back before they added all these forward passes and dreadlocked thugs. It's a shame, because once the team decided that Mike Martz was stupid and that they should start doing things Mike Tice's way, they probably could have found an actual decent fullback instead of a whiff-machine like Clutts, but instead went the Jason McKie route and just groped in the darkness for whoever. Stupid Bears.

Chris Conte* - S - You know, once Chris Harris crumbled into dust and Brandon Meriweather did whatever the hell he did, I was horrified at the thought of this guy getting to play, but he was way better than I figured he would be. Sure, he did some stupid crap every so often, but it's better to have a teachable rookie doing that, as opposed to a shitty ten-year veteran, you know? Also, his nickname is apparently "Birdman," and that makes me hope that he becomes a star and that NBC hires more complete dorks for their production crew, so that someday, he'll score a touchdown on Football Night in America, and all of a sudden Koko B. Ware's WWF theme will start playing. I have small dreams, but dreams nonetheless.

Chauncey Davis - DE - This guy has played for the Falcons for a while and was one of those aforementioned late-year signings. Actually wasn't too terrible, and given the sad shape of the Bears' DE depth, might stick around. Also, his name is Chauncey.

Dom DeCicco** - LB -

Nathan Enderle* - QB - Okay, I'm going to do a thing here I never figured I'd ever do. Okay, Mike Martz, for once in your life, you were right. Caleb Hanie was not the guy, and you recognized it, and that's why you kept getting the team to draft people like this dude and Dan LeFevour. So there you go. I still hate you though, you cocksucker. Remember, Mike. Fuckin' gut punch.

Thaddeus Gibson - DE - I... Don't remember a goddamn thing about this guy. He might just be a fictional dude made up by the Chicagobears.com webmaster to test us. What if nothing is real? Whoa.

Ricky Henry** - G - Oh man, this guy, too.

Max Komar - WR - This guy played in a couple games for the Cardinals last year and was apparently half-decent, but it couldn't get him anything better than a practice squad spot in 2012. The Bears signed him to their roster, but apparently didn't feel strongly enough to actually put him on the field, even after all their other receivers were either injured, heading to federal prison, or Roy Williams. As for me, I could have sworn he was a quarterback.

Chris Massey - LS - An era ended when Patrick Mannelly went down in week 11, and it illustrates just how crazy good he was as a long snapper. Like this Massey dude had been a pretty good one for like nine years, and whoever he had played for just cut his ass loose, because long-snappers are a dime a dozen, but Mannelly had stuck in one place for fourteen years. Damn. his will be the most ignored intense position battle of 2012 in the entire NFL.

Josh McCown - QB - Hey, he played well enough to be a backup quarterback in the NFL, which is more than could be said for Hanie. The Bears might have lost in the playoffs this week if someone had thought to sign him or someone similar about fifteen weeks earlier.

Brandon Meriweather - S - Well, I guess the Adam Archuleta fiasco had been forgotten. You'd think that when a team that actually wins games more often than not just dumps a guy following the preseason, it might mean that his actual real-life performance doesn't live up to his reputation. But nope, Lovie and Jerry knew better, so this guy got paid several million dollars to blow a bunch of coverages, miss a bunch of tackles, and spend the last part of the year buried on the depth chart behind Craig Steltz and Winston freaking Venable. BUT GUYS, GUYS, HE MADE A PRO BOWL!!! Ugh.

Jordan Miller** - DT - This is another one of those dudes that I think was just made up for the website. You're not real, Jordan Miller.

Amobi Okoye - DT -Hey, this guy was alright. Never broke the starting lineup, but that was more because of what Henry Melton did than because of anything Okoye didn't do. Why do the Bears always seem to have like thirty defensive tackles? Hey, speaking of which...

Stephen Paea* - DT - He never wilded out and ripped everyone's heads off like I figured he would, but in limited action, he was alright.

Adam Podlesh - P - Okay, okay, I admit it. I always knew his name, and that thing where I would just say I forgot it and throw in some crazy made-up name was just a joke for the internet. But for the record, in addition to Chuck Balls and Dirk Buttocks, other names I figured I would use eventually included Craig Testicles, Jake Taint, Duke Titties, and Slade Van Der Butt. But it's over now. Anyway, I didn't really notice how much Brad Maynard had regressed over the last few years until I saw the kind of things this guy was doing with the ball this season. So good job, Pete Hooters.

Dane Sanzenbacher** - WR - I really don't know if there's anything left to be said about racist football fans and their undying love of the white wide receiver, so I'm not going to go headfirst into that again. But while he was filling in as the Fake Earl Bennett, you have to wonder if there all those dropped passes would have been ignored as much as people tended to ignore them if his name had been Tyrone Jenkins. People tried really hard to make this guy out to be the diamond in the rough undrafted sensation of the early NFL season, but really, he was kind of terrible.

Andre Smith** - TE - Yes, alright.

Matt Spaeth - TE - There's not much to say about a blocking tight end. This guy sure did block. Yes.

Chris Spencer - C - With the worst offensive line ever and Gabe Carimi being the only major difference from 2011, this was supposed to be the signing that turned it all around. A first round bust, cut at the end of preseason, and playing out of position at guard all year, while a guard played center. Still, there were times when he looked like the team's best lineman, but on the Bears, that usually means giving up two sacks to J'Marcus Webb's five.

J.T. Thomas* - LB - Seems like a nice fellow, but has spent his entire career on injured reserve.

Patrick Trahan - LB - I could have sworn this guy was a rookie, but I guess he was a 2010 guy. Huh. Speicial teams dude, I think.

Winston Venable** - S - I saw this guy try to murder one of the Browns in the preseason, so I know he exists. That's all I got, really.

Anthony Walters** - S - They cut Winston Venable to sign this guy, then re-signed Venable when this guy got hurt. That had to be awkward.

Jabara Williams** - LB - For some reason, his first name always looks misspelled to me, like it should be "Jabar" or "Jabari." Other than that, I got nothing.

Roy Williams - WR - I remember that smug prick Martz practically guaranteeing that Ol' Roy would do something like catch eighty passes for twelve-hundred yards, and in the end, I think he maybe had a quarter of that. He was the worst player ever, but he was still listed as the starter, by god, even if it meant just throwing him out for one play and then getting Johnny Knox out on the field as soon as possible. No one outside of Martz could have possibly seen this move panning out, and that's why this franchise needs to be blown up and rebuilt from the inside out. And he wants to be a Bear next year, which is like the funniest thing ever.

Mansfield Wrotto - G - Holy shit, that is a crazy villain name and completely makes up for not keeping Tressor Baptiste on the final roster. Like this guy should have pulled some crazy evil shit in a Disney/Pixar movie, probably.

NFL 2011: Week 18 – Wild Card Round (OT)

2012-01-06T22:24:00.008-05:00

So I have not exactly been keeping up my NFLuminati duties here at the ArmChair LineBacker, but life has been a motherfucker, which ultimately is the point of the normal Illuminaut, and translates into the NFLuminaut as well – to deplete the warriors of right, in the name of profit and gold to be held out in honor of Moloch the Luciferian Owl God. Of course, I’m not helping my cause coming out the gates with conspiratorial jibber-jabber, but it applies now, more than ever during the playoffs, because the way my system is weighted, you really see the powerful and unpowerful teams, beyond record, and beyond the normal “oh they lost so I’ll move them down automatically, which is how Buffalo was a top ten team at one point even though they weren’t.” I base my rankings on science, math, and the metaphysical realities of these franchises. The metaphysical is the hardest of all to overcome, and perhaps part of the reason I have disappeared is I realize deep down inside that my beloved Redskins are not a prominent NFL franchise, in the psychic sense, and we have been pilfered down to the level of the have-nots. Not just bad for a spell but bad for an ever.
Allow me the tangent of just outright proclaiming we are doing the Lord’s work here at ACLB. Maybe not the Lord of Christian Spending or the type of Lord politicians pretend to be in service for. But we are doing the work of the Lords of Lounge, the Lords of Righteousness, and the Lords of Football in the name of the fans aka the Football Gods, who recognize the awesomeness of Keisel’s beard, of Ickey’s celebratory footwork, of Riggins’ brutishness, of Barry Sanders’ immaculate shiftiness, of Kenny Stabler being the real man’s Joe Namath, of it all man. All the things that make football something you are like FUCK YEAH about, which is not the same as the things that make you buy a new football pullover or like Drew Brees but not the Saints because of your fantasy team. We are real as fuck, and doing the real work here.
Some dude sent us $50 through the Paypal donation button on the sidebar there the other week, and from his message it seemed that it was in honor of Neil’s amazingness, which is understandable. Neil’s visions have carried the site as myself and Harpo and The Baron struggle for motivation. It has carried the site while new voices like Whiouxsie and that Jets dude that showed up briefly find their place. But we are all the same voice though.
And I was gonna pass that money along to Neil, but keep $12 to renew the site’s domain name for another year, and then I used it for gas because I had no money, and felt terrible, even though I shouldn’t, and promised Neil when I got paid today I would Paypal him $40, so he should get good and drunk for the Lions on some random dude with an email like whitetiger420 at hotmail.com or something sent us money. Which I will right after I finish channeling all this that I’ve been taking notes on scraps of medical record files at my temp job when no one is looking. I am doing my work, both for the money that the fake Gods of football and god and politics and Moloch the Owl God and all them worship, that helps me continue to sharecrop for credit systems and keep the lights on in my actual house. But I am also doing the real work of knowing, and of knowing that I don’t know, so always looking to understand things in the proper light, whether that be football or the pistons on an engine or how peyote makes you feel in 20 degree weather. We are all doing that at ACLB – the real work. On one hand, I want to condescend to you and say something like, “I hope you fucking appreciate it,” but you are already here, so you are with us, and instead I tell you I fucking appreciate you.
So let’s get to it, with these wild cards for this weekend…
#1: NEW ORLEANS SAINTS (13-3, 3rd overall, 7.6 out of 10.0 rating) – The Saints are the one team playing this weekend that should have gotten a bye. I understand the NFL’s system, and a team always fall, but this team is on a separate level than a majority of the teams playing this weekend. Drew Brees is one of the main figureheads of the new school NFL that is more like a game of Madden that the old school smashmouth style. The problem with that mode of football is, much like Madden when the game’s artificial intelligence gets all shitty on you because the 1s and 0s line up just so, it can fail you. See last year when the Saints lost, on the road granted, in the wild card round against a 7-9 Seattle Seahawks team that saw Marshawn Lynch shift into the Beast Mode that he has so adoringly ran with ever since. I do not think that will happen this weekend, as the Saints are in New Orleans, and the NFL – after Hurricane Katrina – loves nothing more than to be able to have a party in New Orleans. The NFL Gods that love merchandising and money and shit like that love Hurricane Katrina because it got all the negroes out of NO, gave the league reason to allow the Saints to win a Super Bowl to exorcise themselves of the Failure Demons on a psychic level, and run endless commercials of dogs wearing expensive Drew Brees gear wobbling down Bourbon Street. The money comes in, and the Saints help bring that money. They should win, as their offense is full of quality skill players, and if there’s one weakness to the Lions, it’s that secondary, as seen last weekend.
#2: DETROIT LIONS (10-6, 6th overall, 4.7 rating) – And yet, note the overall ranking – the Lions are the 6th best team in the NFL, according to the NFLuminati Index. That is no mistake, and is not tinkered in Neil’s favor. That is science. However, at this point in the season, science falls back to only 50% of a game’s influence when compared to psychic factors (during the season it’s usually 67% science/33% psychic factor). The Lions psychic factor is shit, and it’s an egg and chicken type situation. Are the Lions such a suffering franchise because they are held down by the NFL, or are held down by the NFL because they have always sucked? I know this much though – their ascension to more-than-respectable started last season. Remember Calvin Johnson’s non-TD catch last season? Remember the officiating during the Thanksgiving game this year? Remember how Sheriff Goodell was calling out Ndonkykong Suh before he even did anything, and helped create this “dirty player” reputation? Why was Matt Millen allowed to remain GM for so long? Were factors higher than the Lions involved? And go beyond that…Why is Detroit so neglected? Did the auto industry really get too big to fail, or did it squeeze profits from machines and leave men abandoned behind? Once the Detroit of men was replaced by machines elsewhere, did the auto industry really give a fuck about Detroit the city?
Look, I am listening to The Grapes of Wrath on book on CD in my daily commute lately, and I think that is the truest fucking American novel of forever, and applies just as much to our 2011 world, where – like I said – most of us are sharecropping for credit cards and loan payments that balance out more than what they are for, and where we, as people, may never get back on that footing we once thought was our birthright at Americans because we drank the wonderful Kool-Aid of public school political science training.
I have always been a Lions fan, even before I felt this psychic bond with Neil at this site. There are two embroidered fancy pants NFL jerseys of actual players I have – Sean Taylor and Barry Sanders. I dig this team, and dig them even more now that they are good. I liked Calvin Johnson before he was a pro, so was stoked he went to Detroit and not some godforsaken scumtown like Philadelphia or Seattle or Denver or something. And Detroit is a lost place, but that is the type of place that could spark a rebirth of a new America, where men don’t give a fuck about sharecropping for Moloch anymore, and start doing the real work that is still left to be done on this Earth. And the Lions – with what they have on their roster right fucking now – could be the perfect team to symbolize that, much like the Oakland Raiders of the 1970s. It makes me sad there’s no Al Davis type to own the team, and embrace this reality. But it won’t happen. The NFL has shown they are against them. Detroit and the Lions are not profitable, they are not able to bring money to the evil Learned Elders of Capital that the new NFL is in allegiance to. Sure, the real football Gods, they’d love this Detroit team. But it didn’t come together in an age of football as battle; it came together in the age of football as sports entertainment. It’s a fucking shame too, because I’d like to see some real fucking football and not just some QB standing back there tossing TD passes like an arena game. But I imagine that’s what we’ll be seeing, along with those dog-in-Brees commercials, and probably the Chrysler car things that act like Detroit has resurrected the auto industry, when really Chrysler is just oiling more machines with the blood of the masses, and the real men of Detroit are fighting off wolves and psychic chupacabras for the scraps of survival. I am right there with you, bros. And just like you, I will be watching free TV and praying to my Real Gods that Ndonkeykong Suh paralyzes fucking Drew Brees at some point before halftime, so that we can have a real fucking football game.
#3: PITTSBURGH STEELERS (12-4, 7th overall, 4.5 rating) – When you think of psychically powerful teams, none have more aura than the Steelers. I know NFL television heads have tried to encourage this belief that somehow the Broncos will find a way to beat the Steelers, because of Tebow and because the Steelers are injured and all. But come the fuck on… are you kidding me? This is ridiculous to even think about. And sure, someone will say, “But what of the Saints at Seahawks you spoke of last year? Is this not the same thing, with the same potential?” No, it’s not. Even in their newfound elevated state, the Saints are nowhere near the NFLuminati factor of the Steelers, though the Broncos and Seahawks are comparable. I just think the NFL would rather feed the beast of the Steelers, to appease people like me who know what football should be, because the Steelers are really the last successful example left, and they can say, “The Steelers – old school football!” and show some fat dude with no shirt on in the crowd who is drunk and obviously one of us wrestling with the same Failure Demons of Regular Real Life that we all wrestle with. The Tebow glamour sold enough jerseys and magazine covers this year, and the NFL won’t continue to push that, because the ramifications are too high. After all, why would they want to create a second-rate Kurt Warner? They already have to keep Kurt Warner on-staff at the NFL Network to keep him placated.
#4: ATLANTA FALCONS (10-6 8th overall, 3.8 rating) – The Falcons are the perfect example of the type of team that is great this weekend, but in over their heads next weekend. It’s hard to understand how you transition beyond being a playoff-potential team to being a playoff-successful team. But the Falcons don’t seem to have made that transition. Matt Ryan and Joe Flacco are both dudes who have not sold the World on their alleged awesomeness, beyond the greater metropolitan areas of where they throw footballs professionally. Same thing with Mike Smith as a head coach. And the Giants are always a psychic heavyweight, especially in January.
#5: NEW YORK GIANTS (9-7, 9th overall, 2.9 rating) – Tom Coughlin is an old cockroach of a head coach, whose teams continually barely perform up to snuff, rarely to their potential, but somehow they won the NFC Least, which makes it so the old man probably won’t get fired. And if they win the only home game that the new Whatever It’s Called Stadium in New Jersey, then they’ll never get rid of that old dude. Relatedly, you know what sucks? Michael Strahan on Fox. Also Justin Tuck is a very strangely shaped dude.
#6: HOUSTON TEXANS (10-6, 11th overall, 2.0 rating) – Someone will win this early game tomorrow afternoon, and that team will be able to pretend, “We made it to the final 8 teams of the NFL season of 2012, and therefore we are a team that is to be considered great.” But that won’t be true. The Texans very well could be that team, though their psychic factor is at 0%, and they are starting their 3rd string rookie QB. Honestly, I think this game is established for a Bengals upset, to justify Andy Dalton, and give us all a great time tripping out on the Double Beast Mode that is essentially the Bengals backfield. The Texans are a collection of great players who do great things, but aren’t really a notable team. They are NBA-mentality, but in football. Ultimately even the greedy money-hungry sports entertainment barons that now control the NFL do not respect that come January, when the cold weather sets in.
#7: DENVER BRONCOS (8-8, 17th overall, 0.6 rating) – Have you ever been to Colorado? There is not a more perfect place for a do-good Jesus freak QB to become a star. And there is not a more perfect place to have a late Sunday afternoon football game, combining the Football Gods with the Christian God, in the Rocky Mountains. The last few years of his life, most of his writing was complete crap, including his ESPN columns, but at times like this I wish Hunter S. Thompson was still alive, and I could do mushrooms with him and watch the game. Actually fuck that, I wish Oscar Zeta Acosta was still alive and I could do peyote with him somewhere in the Pacific ocean, watching the game with drunkard Samoans who all love Troy Polamalu but wonder if he ain’t a gay.
#8: CINCINNATI BENGALS (9-7, 19th overall, 0.6 rating) – The Bengals always seem to make themselves relevant every couple of years, but just barely. But look at the overall rating according to my system – 19th overall. This team has never been higher than like 13th all year long, and is the worst playoff team on a real scale. But yet they have that strong second-tier psychic factor, that goes back to Boomer Esiason and Ickey Woods and even that one run with Carson Palmer where his ligaments were sacrificed to a higher power as some sort of public penance for the Brown family to contemplate. Finally, the Brown family is back in line though, and they have been rewarded with a playoff position, and Andy Dalton and A.J. Green and that Samoan Swat Team defense, plus the aforementioned Double Beast Mode at RB, will help the Bengals play another weekend, because in the eyes of both the Football Gods as well as the Sports Entertainment Gods, the Texans are not actually a real team yet.

This Time, We're Bringing a Bazooka

2012-01-05T21:41:00.001-05:00

I’ve been trying to figure out what I would talk about for this here preview since, let’s face it, this is kind of a momentous game and I figured it deserved something suitably epic. But how do I do something especially epic when my normal stuff has dragons and dead people and monkeys and semen and werewolves and escaped vampire apes and Willie Youngs and a whole menagerie of epic creatures and imagery? I don’t know. Maybe I could attach a drawing of a 40 foot tall clown devouring a baby? Or a 40 foot tall baby devouring a clown? In the face of that disturbing truth, I felt like maybe the best idea was to just discard hyperbole all together and just try to be quietly honest, a beautiful piano sonata rather than a wild loud guitar solo from hell.

And with that in mind, my initial idea was to get personal and talk about being eleven years old and watching from the upper deck of the Silver Dome as the Lions blasted the Cowboys into oblivion, but I figured that would take a maudlin turn pretty quickly and would end with me babbling about the horrors and disappointments of the last twenty years and I think we’ve all had enough of that, haven’t we?

Right.

So with that idea discarded, I toyed with the idea of linking this game, against the Saints, to the very first game of the Jim Schwartz/Matthew Stafford era, which was also against the Saints. I was intrigued by the similarities between the two games. In the first, I remember writing that I expected the Lions defense to be firebombed by the Saints and I likened it to a Wild West shootout and just hoped and prayed that our boys would show up with something more than a slingshot. They didn’t, and, well, the Lions were firebombed. Obviously, ever since it became clear that the Lions would play the Saints in their first playoff game since the Tyrannosaurus Rex administration most Lions fans have been bracing themselves for another shootout, only this time we’re pretty sure that our boys will be bringing something more akin to a bazooka than a slingshot. Obviously, the parallels are interesting, enticing even, and for a symbolism addict like me, it’s hard to turn down an opportunity to start gibbering about the Symmetry of Fate again. Plus, it’s kind of hard to turn down the image of Matthew Stafford as Doc Holliday with a fucking bazooka in his hands blowing away Drew Brees and the Clanton Brothers at the OK Corral. But even that sort of symbolism, that sort of That Was Then This Is Now sermonizing is tied too heavily to the past and I’m sick of the past. We’re in the fucking playoffs and everything else is meaningless.

So . . . what’s left? Well, thankfully, the Saints and the people and fans of New Orleans have done me a kindness and lobbed a big, fat juicy softball right over the heart of the plate. All week long, they’ve been gibbering and jabbering about who they’ll play in the second round, blatantly disrespecting the Lions and damn near taunting us. Hell, ESPN even ran a poll asking which number would be higher, Drew Brees’ interceptions or Ndamukong Suh’s personal fouls. To date, with almost 15,000 votes counted, America, by a 64-36% margin, thinks that Suh will have more personal fouls than Brees will have interceptions. On one hand, I’m almost impressed by the blatant trolling efforts of ESPN and the New Orleans Saints this week. They understand that America is stupid and eats this shit up with a spoon made of ignorance and slackjawed inanity. On the other hand, fuck all of them.

The overwhelming temptation is to turn this into an issue of respect, but to be honest, that’s what the Saints want. That shit plays right into their hands. The Lions are at their worst when they’re feeding off of emotion and punching dudes and slapping refs around because they aren’t being respected. The reality is that for the Lions to win this game, they have to ignore all of that stupid bullshit and then make it all go away by doing one simple thing: winning the goddamn game. This stuff is never going to go away until the Lions show up somewhere like New Orleans and coldly and ruthlessly shank the Saints in front of their friends and loved ones. This is not about respect. Not anymore. The Lions are in the playoffs. They don’t need your fucking respect, ESPN. They don’t need your fucking respect, New Orleans. No. This is about winning. That’s it.

The flipside to all of that, though, is that I don’t think the Saints respect the Lions. That’s fine. I don’t give a shit anymore, and I don’t give a shit for all the reasons I just said. The thing is, though, is that’s not fine for the Saints. If they don’t respect the Lions . . . well, here comes Doc Stafford with a fucking Bazooka, Drew Clanton. Best mind your manners, son.

Let them talk. Let them laugh and taunt and say all manner of stupid shit. Let them look ahead to the second round. Let them talk about the 49ers or the Giants or whoever. Good. Great. While they’re looking ahead, the Lions are focused on one thing: killing the Saints. You don’t hear any Lions players or coaches or fans or anybody really talking about the Lions second round prospects. That’s because all anyone even remotely connected to the Lions cares about is winning this game. And when the playoffs get here, the difference between winning and losing is so small, that something like focus can mean all the difference in the world.

The Saints don’t want to think so. They think that they’re worlds better than the Lions. Hell, everybody who isn’t a Lions player or coach or fan thinks so. After all, they’ve got Drew Brees, and with numbers like these – 5476 yards, 46 touchdowns and only 14 interceptions – why wouldn’t they think that no one would be able to keep up with him? He’s the fucking Ferrari of Quarterbacks right now. All they have to do is show up, rev the engine a few times, put it on cruise control and then coast to victory.

Well fuck that. The Saints’ – and all their believers’ – biggest mistake is in thinking that the Lions are showing up to the race in a fucking Minivan or something. Look at Brees’ numbers again. They’re phenomenal. Untouchable. Right? Well, here are Matthew Stafford’s numbers: 5,038 yards, 41 touchdowns and only 16 interceptions. Take your Minivan and shove it up your ass because the Lions just pulled up to the line in a fucking Lamborghini. And now, motherfuckers, we’re gonna race.

It’s amazing to me that the Saints and their fans and the media and everyone from the Pope to starving children in Africa to Hitler’s ghost could be so cavalier about this game. They all laugh and point to the Lions mistakes and personal fouls and all that shit the first time they played, but even with all that, and even with a suspended Ndamukong Suh and a bunch of other injuries, the Lions were knocking on the door in the 4^th quarter, threatening to tie the game. Watch that game again. The amount of terrible penalties the Lions piled up was fucking absurd. Yeah, some were earned, but the 19 pass interference penalties called against Nate Burleson were pure bullshit and you all know it. Remember the Saints flying offsides and blocking the Lions field goal attempt at the end of the first half only for the refs to run off the field like they just witnessed a murder and were too afraid to do or say anything about it? Remember that the Saints received 100% of the breaks while the Lions were crucified by Pontius Goodell while the masses jeered and chucked rotten fruit? Remember all that? Good. Now remember Matthew Stafford smiling like he just shot down a MIG and then buzzed the tower even though all this bullshit was going on, and remember him throwing the ball downfield, again and again, and remember the Lions coming and coming and coming, like some sort of Terminator, and remember that you couldn’t stop us by yourselves. Remember that and keep overlooking the Lions. You fuckers.

I’m getting worked up and I should probably take an ice bath or dive off the roof naked into the snow, but my neighbors complained the last time I did that. Then again, I think my fury is at an appropriate level. It’s not wild or stupid, but simmering and determined, and I’m guessing that’s where the Lions are right now too. They know what happened the last time they played the Saints. They’re hungry for this game – not just for a playoff game, but for this particular playoff game against the Saints. I honestly believe that. They want everyone to see that they won’t be owned by that bullshit, by all the penalties, by all the dumb reactionary shit that drove a stake through their heart in that game. Meanwhile, the Saints are laughing and looking forward to the Conference semis. But most of all, the Lions want to win. Badly. And they want to win the damn game on the field with everyone watching. And the Saints, well, you get the sense that the Saints wish they could just fall asleep on Friday night, have a wizard or fairy sprinkle some dust on them and then wake up on Sunday with a magic victory in their back pocket. They don’t want to play this game, and therein lies the difference.

Of course, while motivation is crucially important this time of year, there is more to it than that. The Lions still have to go out and, you know, actually show that they aren’t a bunch of simple-minded ogres who will flip out like someone just touched their ears or something. They have to make plays when they’re there to be made. They have to stand in the line of fire, dodge some bullets and then unleash hell with their bazooka.

The Lions probably aren’t going to stop the Saints offense. They just aren’t. I’ve resigned myself to that. If anyone is expecting the Saints to go three and out series after series and for Drew Brees to be humiliated, well . . . you’re probably just setting yourself up for misery and despair. But they don’t have to either. Not with the way the Lions offense has been playing. Matthew Stafford has been unstoppable lately and as long as he and St. Calvin do their thing, then the defense just has to make a few key plays. The question then becomes, can they?

I think so. The Lions defense was embarrassed last week, and you can bet that there will be zero tolerance for fuckups in the secondary this week. This doesn’t mean that they will be perfect, but it does mean that they’ll step up just enough to at least slow the Saints down some. By the time it’s all over, all the Lions defense needs to do is take a couple of bullets and not collapse. If they manage that long enough, eventually Doc Stafford will set up with his Bazooka, and then, well . . . New Orleans, he’ll be your huckleberry. (If you haven’t watched Tombstone, then there are things about this post that probably seem weird and incomprehensible but fuck all that, I can’t be held responsible for your cultural illiteracy.)

After all, let’s not pretend that the Saints’ defense are a gang of world beaters themselves. Plus, I think a lot of us – myself included – are falling prey to the old “Hey, that just happened and so that’s what will happen forever” way of thinking. You know, the one that says that since the Lions looked like shit defensively last week, it means they’ll look like shit this week? Yeah, that one. After all, it was only the week before that we were all raving because finally the Lions showed up in all three phases of the game, and it wasn’t that long ago that we were thanking God or Buddha or Patrick Swayze or whoever because we had the defense there to keep us alive and sane while the offense was struggling. That defense is still in there somewhere. Especially if the Lions get Louis Delmas back. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I remember that this is a defense that is capable of domination. Remember the Monday Night Massacre of Jay Cutler and the Bears? Yeah, me too. That defense is still there and everyone would be well served to not forget that.

Anything is possible. I’ve said that a lot lately. I think the most likely scenario is that this game is a shootout, a fucking gnarly gunfight from hell, with dudes carrying machine guns and bazookas and flamethrowers and bazookas that shoot flamethrowers. If that happens, then it all comes down to the ability of the Lions defense to make just enough plays to allow Doc Stafford and Calvin Earp to bring some fucking justice to the land. But . . . I also think there’s at least a chance that the Lions defense we saw earlier in the season, that Monday Night Football defense, could rise from the dead, like pissed off vampire apes from hell, and drown Drew Brees in the River Styx. That’s the thing that nobody’s talking about, and if that happens, well . . . I’ll be writing another preview piece next week. But, on the other hand, I don’t think there’s even a slight chance that the Saints defense will dominate the Lions offense. I just don’t see it. As long as the refs aren’t simpering penises (penii?) the Lions will be able to move the ball at will. Matthew Stafford has proven that pretty conclusively.

My man UpHere had a good point when he e-mailed me telling me that he actually preferred this matchup to the hypothetical Lions/Giants playoff game that would have taken place had Matt Flynn not been possessed by the ghost of Peyton Manning. Of course, my initial instinct was to tell UpHere to quit huffing paint thinner or licking toads or drinking the blood of an Indian following a peyote binge, but when I read his reasons, I realized he was probably right – the Lions are built for a shootout right now, and the Giants defense, with its ferocious pass-rush, is probably the last thing we want to deal with. The Giants might not be a better team than the Saints, but they might actually have been a worse matchup for the Lions.

But I think there’s a larger point in there too – for as much as everyone seems to be worried about what Drew Brees can do, we need to take some fucking pride in what Matthew Stafford and our warrior kings can do. If you want to win by trying to simply outscore us, well . . . good luck with that. I’m not that scared of another team’s offense because I know that my team’s offense can answer the fucking bell. And once you establish that, then what’s left? The Saints defense doesn’t scare me. Not even a little. And while the Lions defense might not scare the Saints, that is their fatal flaw, because it should. For as much as the Lions defense made us all shiver and shake like witless junkies and cry like faithless fools last week, they’re still dangerous and they still have the best defensive player on the field – maybe the best two or three defensive players on the field – and none of us should forget that. If the Saints want to forget that, well, then that’s their problem and I’ll say a prayer for them while they’re getting pulled apart in the bowels of hell.

This game has nothing to do with the past. It has nothing to do with the future. It has nothing to do with respect. All it has to do with is here and now, with the present, with the space and opportunity that lies just in front of us. If other people want to make this game about those other things, then let them. If other people want to laugh and snigger and underestimate this Lions team because of shit that just doesn’t matter, then that’s their problem and our advantage. The only thing that matters is that on Saturday night, the Lions play the Saints, in the playoffs and whether you believe in the Lions or not is irrelevant, because the Lions have dudes named Matthew Stafford and Calvin Johnson on offense and warrior kings named Ndamukong Suh and Cliff Avril and Kyle Vanden Bosch and Nick Fairley and Louis Delmas on defense, and in the face of those immutable truths, nothing else matters. Draw your guns, Drew Brees, because this time we aren’t coming with a slingshot, we’re coming with cannons shooting napalm and this ain’t the Wild West, this is Detroit Lions football and Doc Holliday is just a ghost and Matthew Stafford is very much alive and he is the truth.

Lions win.

Predicted Final Score: Lions 31, Saints 24

Washington Redskins 2011 Wrap-Up: The Offensive Edition

2012-01-03T22:23:00.003-05:00

I had talked to my man Will the Thrill thru the electronic mailboxes about how shitty things ended for the Skins, and wanted to do a position by position rundown of looking back and ahead and shit, but just don’t have the heart for it, especially when I need to be working on these fuckin’ short stories for a collection to come out for real not internetted. But hey, I just drank a double dose of Tazo Awake tea, am briefly amped, so let’s run thru this like two crank aficionados who hadn’t seen each other since community college ten years ago (doing offense this time)…

QUARTERBACKING: Came into the year with the Cannon of Sex and Mormon MacGruber and the world was all “lololol” at us. Internally, we wondered what the fuck was up with the Shanahans, but drank the Kool-Aid on Grossman, if for no other reason than we had no choice. He sucked, so they put in Beck, because we were like, “maybe that dude actually is good, even though he’s never seemed like it.” He wasn’t, so back came Grossman who we begrudgingly loved briefly, all the way through the 15th week of the season when some people were actually like, “Yo, we could’ve had a shot to make the playoffs if Grossman had played those weeks when stupid Beck played.” But then Rex did what Rex does and sucked it up enough against the Vikings and Eagles to close out the season with a healthy splash of Redskinreality. Talk was heavy of Robert Griffin III coming, but with that Leinart/Sanchez 3.0 dude saying he was staying in college to have threesomes with Polynesian chicks, that means Griffin will probably be gone before we pick 6th. Talk was Skins would trade up potentially, maybe even for Andrew Luck (so as to turn him into Ryan Leaf I guess), but then Matt Flynn had one good game in a somewhat who gives a fuck game, so now the Redskins will probably trade 17 draft picks in a sign-and-trade for him. What they should do is keep Grossman, draft either Griffin or Luck (whichever falls to second QB, meaning hopefully Griffin) even if it means trading up, and let Grossman run this thing next year as well until he is so godawful (again) that he has to be replaced by the rookie. I mean fuck it, it’s not like they’ll actually be good next year either, so we should just be looking for improvement. Right?

RUNNING BACKS: Tim Hightower was brought in and was okay I guess, but a really nice dude who doesn’t scare white people. Roy Helu and Evan Royster the rookie dudes both looked very good, which gives hope that maybe Shanahan’s not a complete retard at his advanced age. “Rugged” Ryan Torain became expendable. And the Darrell Young dude really started to shine in a FB role. They will probably stay pat with this ensemble, fleshing it out with some other draft pick next year. Personally, I’m not entirely sold on Hightower (outside of him being super nice, so my apologies to you if you read this bro, even though I went to VCU so fuck U of R), but whatever man. Let this thing we have ride next year, fill it out with some other shit. I would throw a couple of other rookies into the rotation though because I don’t trust none of this. I want to love Roy Helu and dream he could be the Polynesian John Riggins, but I also fear he could be next year’s Ryan Torain.

WIDE RECEIVER TYPE DUDES: Man, don’t even know what to say. We had the most hodgepodge collection of a Madden game fantasy draft where you forgot to draft WRs until the 6th round ever. I’ve had enough of Santana Moss and would not feel sad if he went away forever. I mean he’s been serviceable, and we will always have him and Mark Brunell against the Cowboys on MNF. But I’d like to hope we turn into an actual good football team again and we can fondly look back on guys like Moss and Clinton Portis as dudes who entertained us during the suck years. Jabar Gaffney was good I guess, but it’s not like he’s breaking open shit any time soon. Second-tier retreads are not what championship teams are made of. I had hoped more from the rookie trio of Leonard Hankerson and Niles Paul and Aldrick Robinson, and Hankerson and Paul showed some promise. But you know what? Counting on them to develop next year would be as stupid as counting on Malcolm Kelly and Devin Thomas to develop in their second year, except Kelly/Thomas were 2nd round hypejobs while Hankerson/Paul were later round “bargains”, thus it would be even stupider. In other words, get me a fucking WR, please. I guess there’s that fast dude with the Steelers who everybody wants to throw money at, so I would imagine that’s right up Snyder’s anushole. But dude, remember Randle El? C’mon.

TIGHT ENDS: At one point, this was considered a strong spot, where people were like, “Let’s trade Chris Cooley because Fred Davis is so awesome!” Then Chris Cooley’s knee proved to be as limp as his penis in that famous picture, and Fred Davis proved to be stupid as fuck in getting busted for weed smoking after already getting busted for weed smoking, meaning next time he’s gone for a whole year. Considering I think the dude’s only been here for three, and has already been popped that many times, and every NFL player ever gets high like crazy but only the stupid ones get busted, it seems highly unlikely he does not fuck up again. Logan Paulsen was awesome as the longhaired potential viking warrior as the third TE, but once he actually had to play, not so awesome. Some dude are born roster fillers and look great with bad tattoos and long hair on the sidelines. That is Logan Paulsen. He should learn long-snapping. Most likely the Skins will piss me off with whatever they do with Cooley, because I’ll be sad if he goes and bummed if he stays. In all honesty, he is the one dude I feel an obligation to as a fan, and though he wants to stay here in DC, he really deserves to have that second run in a city of his choice to give his career some spectrum. I’d suggest Denver, because he’d fit in great with his do-anything mentality, and it would be close to his Utah home. As for Fred Davis, I imagine the Skins will sign him to a new-deal and he will never do anything near as good as this year ever again, basically becoming our offensive Rocky McIntosh. But they will think whatever they do is perfect, and be like, “We have Fred Davis who is about to breakout as one of the great TEs in the league like Jimmy Graham or those Patriot dudes except for the fact Davis has been playing longer than all of them and yet to develop into anything near as awesome. And Logan Paulsen got some quality experience last year when everybody else was crippled or drug suspended. So we feel really deep at tight end.”

OFFENSIVE LINEMEN: Oh man, Trent Williams was a #4 overall pick, and got hisself suspended as well for weed. Next time and he’s gone for a full year, which is odd because dude has only been in the NFL for two years, and been injured for part of that. Basically what I am saying is fuck him. Give him next year to either get it or get the fuck out. Seriously. Fuck patience for unfulfilled potential because one thing that’s become painfully clear in the last decade is nobody reaches their full potential – ever – in Washington. They are going to play below their potential somehow if they are known, and perhaps a little over it if they are unknown, which leads to a consistent mediocrity. Actually you know what? Fuck Trent Williams. I’d trade that dude for like a 5th round draft pick to like the Cardinals or some shit, just to send a message to everybody else that you do not give a fuck anymore and you will only bring in players who are insanely dedicated to whatever it is Mike Shanahan thinks football is in 2012. Also, Jammal Brown sucks. I know he’s started a bunch of games and is a veteran presence, but that dude sucks, and few guys on this team have caused me to attempt to break things in my house like he has this season, far more than a guy not from a prominent face time position on TV should be causing. As for the no-name later round dudes who finished out the season, they were respectable. Nothing I’d build around or count on for the future, but a good foundation. If one of the top two draft picks we have next year, and the year after that, as well as the one after that, is not spent on an O-Lineman, then we have learned nothing. Get two good dudes to flesh out the no-names, who usually develop into good dudes as well when surrounded by a lynchpin like that, and we might be better than many think. The real problem is Williams though, as he is supposed to be that lynchpin but has not shown the ability to be that, but we are financially and psychically committed to him for the time being. Which again points toward next year being a hold pattern year to see what happens.

COORDINATOR: Kyle Shanahan is not so good at coordinating an offense, and not even a third as good as he thinks he is. He is a young dude who feels his system can be implemented anyhow, and yet he has no real tangible proof to back this up. But he is also the head coach’s son. Hopefully Redskins highest-ups will feel out making Daddy Shanahan fire his son, but if ol’ Mike doesn’t want to do it, I wouldn’t push the issue. You really have to give Daddy Shanahan next year to sink or swim, either show notable improvement or hit the road you old fucking anus-mouthed Jon Benet Ramsey ritualistic child sex murder accomplice. So I wouldn’t push the issue of firing Kyle. But if you can get away with it, I’d get away with it, and try to bring somebody else in with at least a fucking ounce of humility.

OFFENSIVE PLAYER OF THE YEAR: I don’t know, I guess Roy Helu, for lack of anyone else I feel comfortable picking. And even that I don’t wanna pick. Or fuck it, let’s just say Will Montgomery, starting C who bounced around the line but was the one solid dude there. Yeah, I choo-choo-choose him. The Center. That’s a sign of a powerful offense, isn’t it?

I Think I Love You, George McCaskey

2012-01-03T18:55:00.001-05:00

Ever since I reached an age when I had any concept whatsoever of team ownership or the "front office" in general, somehow, I've always known that what the Chicago Bears had there was no good. They refused to pay players their fair market value and did nothing as the 1985 Super Bowl team crumbled into dust before the 1990s had even started. They gave Dave Wannstedt (The Enemy) free reign to cut loose any and every player from the Ditka era, regardless of whether or not they needed to go or whether or not they had anyone to replace them with. There was the fiasco with the Dave McGinnis non-hiring, which led directly to turning their football team over to the unsteady hands of glorified accountant Ted Phillips. With the sort of talent already in place that should have provided the basis of a dynasty, they kept rewarding Lovie Smith and Jerry Angelo for crushing failure after crushing failure with lucrative new contracts. The list goes on and on.
The Bears are one of the original NFL teams in the league's second-largest market. They should be the New York Yankees of pro football, the team everyone despises because they just won't stop winning every damn thing. But instead, this is a team who, outside a quick blip in the mid-1980s, hasn't really won shit since they stopped calling wide receivers "ends" and whose star quarterback and star defensive back weren't the same guy. It always seemed like Virginia McCaskey barely even knew she owned a football team and that her boy Mike had some sort of bizarre narcissism/mental retardation combo going on. So it really didn't give me any warm feelings when little brother George was named Chairman of the Board last summer. But god damn, in one fell swoop, he has gone a long way toward winning me over.

Asshole.

In summation: Fuck you, Jerry Angelo. You came to this team with Brian Urlacher, Mike Brown, and Olin Kreutz right fucking there, three players who could have been the foundation of something special, and you never managed to put together an entire team around them in ten years. You purposefully tanked the 2001 offseason - setting the team back a year talent-wise - to try and get Dick Jauron fired, when you knew damn well he'd just do the job himself. You lucked out when you drafted Lance Briggs and Charles Tillman and just couldn't help yourself after that, thinking you could build a real football team out of players drafted after the second round. You traded Thomas Jones for a pile of shit, just so you could try and convince yourself that Cedric Benson deserved a starting job in the NFL, and your insurance policy was to draft a high school-sized guy in the third round that you might have been able to sign as a free agent in Garrett Wolfe. You also drafted Dan Bazuin, Mike Okwo, Michael Haynes, Jarron Gilbert, Juaquin Iglesias, and Mark Bradley, when the team needed actual NFL players. You gave new contracts to Edwin Williams and Earl Bennett, while feeding Matt Forte some line of bullshit about not negotiating deals during the season. You gave Terrence Metcalf a thousand second chances and made him a millionaire to keep the bench warm. You caved when coaches wanted their old shitty players from their old shitty teams, a policy that got chained Roy Williams, Adam Archuleta, John St. Clair, Brandon Manumaleuna, and the withered corpse of Orlando Pace around the team's neck, to name a few. You let Lovie Smith fire all the real assistant coaches after Super Bowl XLI and replace them with random buddies he had who happened to be college coaches. You could have had Kurt Warner, but told him that if he was a Bear, he would only ever back up Rex Grossman. You gave an eleven million dollar deal to Frank Omiyale, history's greatest monster, based on about three quarters of football you saw him play after he was a backup for like five years. You have been a piece of human cholesterol, thwarting and destroying this team from the inside out, the whole time patting yourself on the back as a genius, no matter how often you fail, like Wile E. fucking Coyote, and I'm glad you're gone. But no, I hope the door does hit you in the ass on the way out, and I hope it knocks you straight to Hell.

Double asshole.

But especially fuck you, Mike Martz. You worm. You sack of shit. I'm gonna come to your house, Mike Martz; I'm gonna find you. And I'm gonna take you out with a fuckin' gut punch. You think you're so fuckin' clever, with your offensive scheme that hasn't worked at the pro level since there were still two World Trade Center towers. You're too taken with the aroma of your own shit to see when everything's on fire around you. Too smugly certain of the perfection of your game plan to notice that a quarterback can't drop back seven steps when both defensive ends only need four to get there. This team has Roy Williams because of you, you fuck. Roy fucking Williams, Mike. And the Bears had to keep putting him in there for the first play of every game, even though he was really the team's Number Five receiver at best - behind Knox, Bennett, Hester, and Dane punk-ass Sanzenbacher - just so he would still be listed as the starter, just to keep your dumb ass happy. Is his ankle 100 percent yet, Mike? And is his ankle why he can't catch a fucking thrown ball, despite allegedly having done it professionally for the last eight years, Mike? We have Roy Williams, and we don't have Greg Olsen. This was the year of the tight end, when everywhere you looked, there was a Rob Gronkowski or a Jimmy Graham or a Vernon Davis or a Jason Witten or whoever else there was who was the key to everything for his team, and the Bears traded theirs away, traded the team's only real receiving threat - in an offense where all you ever wanted to do was pass - smooth the fuck away for next to nothing. Why? Because you couldn't stand to crack open your dusty-ass playbook and switch a few things around to properly use the talent you had around you. You didn't resign. You ran like a little bitch from what you knew was going to happen to you. I hate you, Mike Martz. Gut punch, Mike Martz. Gut punch. It's coming.

A hard rain's gonna fall, Lovie Smith. Watch your back.

Chuck Bresnahan, Enormous Jackass

2012-01-03T01:27:00.000-05:00

Let me say this right off the bat: I have NEVER, EVER been a fan of Choke Bresnahan and his horrible defensive scheme. He was horrible in his first stint as the Raiders defensive coordinator, and even worse in his second go around. His insistence on using a 4 man pass rush and sticking his corners in man coverage made him a favorite of Al Davis, despite the fact that his preferred scheme hasn't won jack shit in the NFL in the last decade. He likes to "think outside of the box" by doing such bold things as asking his linebackers to cover wide receivers. As you can imagine, these sort of things nearly always end up with said receiver standing in the endzone with the ref raising both of his arms in the air. His corners routinely play 10-15 yards off of the line of scrimmage, even on 3rd and short, resulting the opposition being able to put together long drive after long drive. Rather than working a scheme that suits his players skills and limitations, Chunk repeatedly tries to shove the square peg into round holes. Aaron Curry is a good athlete who can make plays against the run but is awful in pass coverage. Guess who the dip shit D coordinator has covering tight ends or receivers? Mike Mitchell is terrible in pass coverage, so guess who repeatedly got raped by a gimpy Antonio Gates on Sunday? Kameron Wimbley is strictly a pass rushing linebacker. Guess who was constantly getting burned in coverage? This shit went on all season, and despite the fact that it was OBVIOUS that his crackpot scheme wasn't working, Chuck stood firm. Chuck Bresnahan, you are the reason the Raiders are sitting at home right now. Your bullshit prevent defense lost the game in Buffalo. Your reluctance to step on the Lions throat helped Matt Stafford bend your defense over and cornhole them in front of your own fans with less than 2 minutes left, ruining Thanksgiving in the process. Either of these games would have put the Raiders in the playoffs.

I am not a vindictive man, but I hope Chuck Bresnahan never works in the NFL again. This was a season dedicated to the memory of Al Davis, and rather than honor that memory, Chuck Bresnahan dropped his pants and squeezed out a 2' coil of shit on his grave. Happy New Year, Chuck. Might want to brush up on your interview skills. You're going to need them.

Beaten But Not Defeated

2012-01-01T20:04:00.005-05:00

I’ve been sitting here wondering how to start this, trying to figure out whether I should sound the trumpets and grovel in front of the throne of the newly ascended Matthew Stafford or whether I should tear my shirt off, beat my chest like an ape in mourning, curse Mike Pereira for a while and end by mooning Thom Brennaman and offering to fight everyone in the NFL and the entire state of Wisconsin. Or I could just start ranting and raving about dragons and semen again. Who’s to say which direction is best in these strange and terrible times?

In the end, the important thing is that the Lions finished 10-6, which is what I predicted before the season and they’re heading to the playoffs for the first time since the Ramses administration. Nothing that happened today can change that. I guess I’m just a little bummed that after spending the past couple of weeks talking about new worlds and dragon slaying, I have to sit here on the edge of the beach and lick my wounds. We stabbed that fucking dragon through the heart over and over and over again, but . . . okay, you know what? Enough of this dragon bullshit. I’m not in the mood for metaphors.

What I am is pissed off because the NFL is a bullshit league run by bullshit people with bullshit ideas. I know that makes me sound like a whiner, but . . . come the fuck on. Did you see that bullshit? I think Mike Pereira got more airtime in this game than Brian Billick. It was ridiculous. It felt like every other play, the people at Fox opened up a portal to hell and summoned that lizard man Pereira, the NFL’s Minister of Propaganda, who flicked his forked devil tongue back and forth over and over again, reciting gibberish from the NFL’s Necronomicon of a rulebook in order to justify the fact that the NFL is a completely ridiculous league with rules that don’t make any sense and procedures which exist just to give dudes like Pereira something to rub one out to before they drift off to sleep at night, their miniscule dongs clutched in their talons while whatever animal dreams fill their hearts float through their lizard brains. Horrible, horrible . . .

I even heard the words “process of the catch” come spilling out of his devil’s maw at one point, which is akin to creeping up on a Vietnam vet wearing black pajamas and a rice hat. And throughout all this madness, you had Thom Brennaman, who has clearly taken it upon himself to replace Joe Buck as the sporting world’s official smug arbiter of morality, carrying on like a fool whenever he got the chance about how shameful the Lions were. Hell, at one point he bitched about the Lions lack of discipline after a Packer clotheslined Matthew Stafford even though the whistle had blown 14 years before he reached him. It was absurd. When the flag came out for the obvious personal foul, Brennaman actually said “There’s a second flag. It must be to back up the flag thrown for a false start on the Lions.” Just ridiculous. It never ends, it never ends. Oh Lord, why . . .

It’s become difficult to even enjoy watching the games. The refs just make up the rules as they go, the announcers stick to an aged and worthless script whether it fits with reality or not, and then Mike Pereira shows up to try to convince the masses that the sky is actually neon green and that piss tastes like wine. Every goddamn game. And while all this is going on you have Jim Schwartz standing on the sidelines, apoplectic, in mid-seizure because everybody on the field knows that Titus Young scored a touchdown but because the NFL is a ridiculous place run by ridiculous people, no one would do a damn thing about it. The fact that that one play ended up being the difference in the final score – exactly – is not so much infuriating as awe-inspiringly ridiculous, the sort of thing that makes men laugh at the idea of a just god and made me want to strangle a baby by halftime.

It’s clear that I’ve chosen the Incredible Hulk Smash Smash Smash route here but this is what happens when you spend a big chunk of the game thrashing around like an epileptic Hulk Hogan and spewing hateful rivers of obscene gibberish that would make even Lenny Bruce cower in fear and despair. I hated this fucking game for big chunks of it because all I wanted to do was slay a dragon and instead of fighting the dragon one on one, that motherfucker had a goddamn circus riding his back, throwing tiny little darts at me and making life hell. At one point, the dragon opened his mouth and I’m pretty sure a lawyer spilled out and proceeded to tell me that dragons are a protected species and that I would be thrown into NFL Alcatraz if I continued to try to slay the son of a bitch. Goddammit, just let me fight the fucking dragon in peace you animals.

Lost in all this - and that just makes this whole thing taste even more bitter - is that Matthew Stafford was fucking incredible. He is, as a wise man once said, the One. He was Superman in this game. But thanks to a combination of supervillains ranging from the refs to the NFL to Matt fucking Flynn to his own defense, being Superman wasn’t enough. No, the Lions asked Stafford to be Superman in this game and he put on a fucking cape and flew to the moon, banged Lois Lane and bitch-slapped Lex Luthor. But then the Lions asked Stafford to be a god, and . . . well, Stafford shrugged and said “Start building me that altar.” Indeed. He was going to do it. Somehow, he was going to do it. I felt it deep in my bones. He had already won the goddamn game once, just like we’d seen him do so many other times this wild and incredible season, and so now, for an encore, he’d win a game twice and he’d do it in Lambeau Field and then he’d spend the night feasting on dragon brains and banging a legion of his most buxom acolytes while the rest of us scrambled to build that altar and worship him before it. But the funny thing about being a god is this: by their nature, gods are infallible, and so being one requires a certain sort of self-confidence which doesn’t include even the idea that you could fuck up. And so that’s how Matthew Stafford played because that’s who we needed him to be. That’s what the circumstances of the game forced him to be, and in that fatal moment, Matthew Stafford faced down the world and tried to do the impossible and in the end, was beaten by the very thing that made him an object of worship and adoration. He tried to do the impossible one too many times. I do not blame him for this because that is what was necessary. He had to believe in his own infallibility because he was forced to shoulder the burden for everybody else. And in the end, the football gods laughed while Matthew Stafford tried to touch the sun. He got burned because, after all, he is not a god, but a man and that’s what makes him great. But at least he got close. He touched the sun and that fire will live in his eyes and in his heart and soul for the rest of his days. He is my quarterback and I wouldn’t trade him for any other player in the league. I mean that. I fucking mean that. I’m not just making a wild, hyperbolic statement. That is a reasoned, measured statement and I stand by it.

I’ve taken a right turn into a weird place, gibbering about gods and Superman, but this was a weird game. The Lions lost a game in which they scored 41 points. That should never happen. What’s even crazier is that they probably should have scored 61. On 4 separate occasions, they drove deep into Packers territory and came away with a combined 3 points. On one, they actually scored a touchdown only to have it stolen away from them by a combination of the Necronomicon and incompetence and were forced to settle for a field goal. On another, Titus Young caught a pass, rolled over in the endzone and saw the ball squirt out of his hands at the last second. Two plays later, Matthew Stafford and Calvin Johnson failed to connect on a wide open pass for a touchdown. Only 1 time out of 1,000 does that pass not get caught for a touchdown. The perversity of fate decreed that this was that 1 time. On the very next play, the Lions missed a 39 yard field goal. Only 1 time out of 1,000 does Jason Hanson miss a field goal from that distance. The perversity of fate, etc. etc. Combine those two plays, think about them - and the odds that both of those things would happen back to back - and meet me in my padded room where we’ll huff ether together and laugh and cry at the madness of the universe. On yet another drive, this one to start the second half, Nate Burleson took a step in the wrong direction – one single goddamn step – and the ball went right to a Green Bay Packer. And finally, on the fourth of these ill-fated drives (and I haven’t even counted the game’s last drive, which also went deep into Packers territory), Lions receivers had balls hit their hands on three straight passes, needing only two fucking yards, and failed to come away with a first down. That’s 3 points on 4 sustained drives. In a game in which the Lions scored 41 points.

Think about all that again. The Lions passing game and Stafford fucking destroyed the Packers defense. Yeah, yeah, Charles Woodson and Clay Matthews sitting on the sideline, blah blah blah, but I’m not exaggerating when I say the Lions could have scored 60 in this game. They should have at least topped 50. That’s impressive no matter who you’re playing.

In the end, this was a game of madness, a game of virtuosic brilliance caught in a maelstrom of pigheaded foolishness and heart-breaking improbability. This was a game that was tragic, flawed, yet still beautiful in its own strange, fucked up way. This was a game that was awe-inspiring to watch at times and yet it was a game that, when it ended, hurt in a deep way that is hard to explain. When the ball was intercepted with less than 30 second left, I actually melodramatically moaned the word “Noooo” like I just watched someone run my best friend or a puppy through with a sword. And then I stared in disbelief and a part of me refused to believe that it was over, and it was then that I realized how far my faith in this team has come, and the totality with which I believe in Matthew Stafford. That epiphany mixed with my heartbreak from this game has created a weird feeling in me, one that I’m not quite sure how to process. I feel somehow unshakeable and yet I mourn what could have been. I know that one day that dragon will die and no amount of hidden assassins riding in the folds of his wings will be able to stop our knight, and yet for now, he still lives and that doesn’t sit well with me. I think of what could have been – what should have been – and I keep gritting my teeth and swearing under my breath. I feel beaten but proud, raging against the spot where the dragon used to be, screaming in vain, calling him a coward and telling him to get his ass back here to fight because we’re not finished. We’re not finished.

I didn’t know how to start this and I don’t know how to finish it either. There is more to talk about, more that I could complain about (Oh Lord, why did the defense have to turn into a bunch of shivering junkies?), more that I could celebrate (St. Calvin healing the world, The Great Willie Young devouring Matt Flynn’s soul in one precious, glorious moment) and more that I could gibber on like a fool about, but it’s over now. The regular season is finished and here the Lions are, 10-6, only three years removed from 0-16. Matthew Stafford just had a season that saw him throw for 5,038 yards and 41 touchdowns. Read that again. Fuck a Pro-Bowl. Hawaii isn’t good enough for Matthew Stafford and neither are you. Neither am I. Jesus. Just think about all that, the staggering reality of it, of being 10-6 following that Hiroshima of a 2008 season, of having a quarterback with numbers which are elite not just in the context of this season, but all-time. Think of the fact that that quarterback has led countless come from behind fourth quarter drives this season, of the fact that he led a 98 yard drive with no timeouts and two minutes on the clock in Oakland to beat the Raiders. And then think of the fact that he’s only 23 years old, that he hasn’t even hit his prime, and suddenly, all that other bullshit doesn’t seem to matter, and suddenly that dragon looks like a three inch long salamander. The Lions lost today, but my heart still soared, even while it raged, and it raged because it knows, for the first time really, that it’s finally alive.

Like I said, I have no idea how to finish this, and perhaps that’s appropriate because the season is over and yet it isn’t. It is unfinished, and the truth which is the beating heart of that statement, that the Lions are in the playoffs and that anything and everything is possible, makes everything else completely and utterly irrelevant. Dragon, I wanted your heart, but instead you saw mine, beating thunderous, and even though you got away today, remember that heart, remember its name: Matthew Stafford. Whisper it to your own dark soul and be afraid. Be very afraid. Because we’re coming. We’re coming.

Slaying the Dragon

2011-12-29T23:55:00.004-05:00

No, the title of this post is not a euphemism for masturbation. That would be "taming the dragon." I have no interest in slaying my dragon. That would hurt.

Prior to and following the game against the Chargers on Christmas Eve, I gibbered like a fool on peyote about new worlds and made the courageous argument that the world was, in fact, round, thus probably incurring the wrath of the Vatican, but what the hell, I have The Great Willie Young by my side and his priests drink blood and eat their own dead so I’m not afraid. Yes, dudes and lady dudes, I have a feeling that it’s going to be that kind of a post so come, swallow these weird berries with me and let’s take a fantastic voyage into the delicate corners of our souls where we nurture our wildest dreams and believe in a thing called love.

Wait, where was I? Oh yeah . . . anyway, I spent way too much time blathering about new worlds which means that this is where my mind still lives and as extended metaphors go, stretching one out over the course of a full week may seem preposterous but if it does then you probably haven’t been reading for very long because brother, I can drag out a metaphor over the course of a full year, or two, or three or however fucking long I’ve been writing about the Lions for Armchair Linebacker. In the past couple of weeks, I’ve been pretty direct and to the point (well, as direct and to the point as I can be and for me that means that I have kept my posts under a billion words) and that’s probably served me well in terms of keeping people’s attention but I’m in a mood, and this mood means that I am going to be rambling and strange and if you’re new, well, this is where the madness lies, brother. (No, I don’t know why I’m talking like Hulk Hogan on mescaline, but what the hell . . .)

The truth is, I think, is that I am still kind of in a dazed, dreamy state of mind following the Lions triumphant first steps on the beach of this new world, and this state of mind is conducive to outright goofiness. I would ask forgiveness, but nobody needs to ask forgiveness for how they’re feeling right now. We’re in a festive mood as a people. There are half naked freaks cavorting on the sands, pure animal lust in their eyes and wild, inhuman joy in their bursting hearts. Ernie Sims’ monkey is playing the banjo from his perch in a palm tree, dudes are open mouthed kissing one another and somewhere I think Roary is stoned in the midst of a sea of beach grass, being attended to by his own personal harem. We’re all in a celebratory mood, a blissful mood, a mood without end or care, a mood in which time seems to have stopped and the natural order of things has yet to be written, for this is the new world, not the old, and everything and anything is possible.

I am being ridiculous, but so what? Somewhere beyond this beach, we know that there are savage tribes waiting to scalp us and gnaw on our bones, but that can wait a while. For now we just want to . . . wait, what’s that? It’s time to start exploring this new world? Well, okay then. Somebody make sure Roary can walk while I try to coax Ernie Sims’ monkey out of that tree without him pelting me with coconuts and feces.

Yes, as fun as this past week has been as a Lions fan, we can’t stop here. We can’t just lounge around like shiftless monkeys, hooting and masturbating like animals. Like I said, there are people out to get us and they are vicious bastards and I, for one, haven’t come all this way just to see my scalp tied to the belt of some heathen while a bunch of his tribesmen get high on the spirits and play my skull like a fucking bongo drum. No, I intend to live in this new world for a long time and if that means I must make war, then so be it.

Besides, I can hear dragons screeching in the distance and although I will admit that may be the drugs talking, I can see them taking shape on the horizon, all decked out in ugly ass green and yellow, like a bumblebee just jizzed on Oscar the Grouch. And as I see them taking shape, I remember why we came here in the first place and suddenly my head is clear and goddammit, my dudes and lady dudes, it’s time to kill us some fucking dragons.

Indeed. It’s been 20 years since our team last beat those despicable Packers in Green Bay, on the frozen, Chris Berman semen encrusted tundra of Lambeau Field. Too goddamn long. And while some would say this game is essentially meaningless, and that only the upcoming playoffs matter, those people forget that we have spent those twenty years getting cornholed by that terrible dragon and now that we have a sword in our hand, it’s time for some fucking retribution.

I don’t care that the Packers won’t be taking this game as seriously as we probably will. I don’t care who plays. I don’t care if it’s Aaron Rodgers’ meth-head face, the same one that gives poor Raven Mack flashbacks to the fool who sullied his sister and almost destroyed her, or if it’s the sacrificial lamb named Matt Flynn playing quarterback, I want to beat these sons of bitches and I want to beat them badly. This is not about sending a message – after all, whatever message we can possibly send will be immediately dismissed as meaningless given the circumstances of the game, much like the Lions take no prisoners shitkicking of the Patriots back in August. No, this game is about slaying dragons, about our own pride, our own hearts and souls. We have come a long way, and that old world is dead and gone, but we still have our memories, and in this new world, I will not sit back and cower in the face of the dragon that is that memory.

There is nothing substantive about this preview. There are too many moving parts, too many variables, too many questions about who is or isn’t going to play, to be able to forecast this game with any sort of accuracy or intelligence. Instead, there is only the beating of my heart and the thunder of my soul, the flapping of dragon’s wings and the sword in my hand. This game is a reckoning, without meaning other than as a facing down of wounded memories, of days when we sobbed in dark corners and made love to shame. It’s not even about killing the beast, although that would be nice, so much as it's about just standing there and fighting, teeth bared, covered with blood, laughing at the sheer thunderous glory of battle under the sun of this new world, where nothing is written and everything is ahead of us, soaring into a horizon that never ends.

I’m hungry for this, for victory, for the obliteration of a dragon which has deviled our souls for far too long. Once again, this isn’t about the past, but about the here and the now, about standing up for ourselves in a new world so that it doesn’t become the old world. This is not a statement to the rest of the world, or even to the dragon, but a statement made to our own hearts, to a place where only we can hear, only we can understand and only we can cherish.

I actually anticipated that this post would be longer, a rambling, shambling mess devoid of a point, filled with nonsensical gibberish and to an extent, I suppose that is has been at that, but in another sense, I think that I surprise even myself because I now see the world laid out before me and I am eager to march into these savage jungles and I am eager to war with dragons and feast on their black hearts so that mine may live and at the heart of all this dumb gibberish is a certain direct sharpness, a definitive belief in this journey we are on and for as much as I promised digression and madness, it is a calm sort of madness, digression with purpose, and in that I feel as if I am mirroring my beloved Lions. It no longer takes a million weary words or a million broken plays and broken hearts to try to explain where we’ve been and where we’re going. There is only this, the celebration of the here, the now. It is not confused nor is it afraid. It is a lion, hunting in the jungle, chasing down dragons and ripping out their throats. It is the fevered hunt of the new world, the explosive release of the soul’s most long cherished and hidden dreams, and in this hunt, in this release, details don’t matter and these are all just words and inside of them lives this one fundamental truth: anything and everything is possible and in this world, even dragons can die, and lions can rule the earth and, as a fan, that’s all I ever wanted.

Lions win.

Predicted Final Score: Lions 28, Packers 24

Reading From The Necronomicon; How the NFL Breaks Ties

2011-12-28T20:45:00.008-05:00

If you've read this site long enough, you know our man Neil, the chronicler of all things Detroit Lions, periodically describes the NFL's Rule Book as akin to the necronomicon. And, really, when its given the sports world such esoteric nonsense as "completing the process of the catch" and "the tuck rule", byzantine footnotes so specific and narrow one can't help but be convinced they were added on the spur of the moment to screw your team over. After all, nobody's heard of this shit before, and nobody usually hears about it again (has the tuck rule EVER come up since it gave Tom Brady a do-over on that fumble that by rights cost them that playoff game? No, of course not). Other insanity, like how the ground cannot cause a fumble, even when it clearly does (though it can cause an incompletion, according to that "complete the process" nonsense), or how one molecule of the nose of the football intersecting the plane of the very front of the goal line even for a fraction of a second is a touchdown, yet the reverse is true on a safety (both ball and player must be entirely behind the goal line), or all the weird shit about guys being in the air vs on the line regardless of where the ball is on a potential touchback of a punt, and the 83 if -> then Boolean phrases that go into determining whether an incomplete pass is Intentional Grounding or not, even though the most intentional of all groundings, the clock-stopping spike, is always exempt, unless you hesitate a second and take a step back and look around before doing so (as Caleb Hanie found out about a month ago when he cost the Bears a game doing this exact thing) almost seems normal in their constant use relative to this bizarre one time only shit.

Other fun stuff we learned about the NFL rule book this year: Michael Crabtree once caught a ball with one foot in bounds and one foot in the air, lept up, came back down on the same foot, then the other landed out of bounds. i.e., two feet in bounds, but not both feet in bounds. It turns out this does not count as a catch; it must specifically be both feet. And one knee or one ass cheek or one hand is equivalent to two feet (but only if the hand lands out of bounds) with regards to landing on the turf, likewise an elbow equals feet, and only foot fetishists like Rex Ryan spend this much time thinking about feet and equating other things to feet. We also learned during a Thursday Night game that joint possession of a pass belongs to the offensive player over the defensive player UNLESS an unrelated part of the defensive player hits out of bounds while maintaining joint possession of the ball, in which case both players and the ball are all 100% completely out of bounds even if no part of the offensive player touches out of bounds, and the pass is incomplete instead of a touchdown, go fuck yourself San Diego, and in the ancient sunken city of Ry'leh dread Pete Rozelle lies dreaming.

So it's really no surprise that, as we near the final week of the season, the NFL's rules and regulations once again emulate this equal parts arcane and insane tome as it comes time to settle Playoff Seeding via a series of tiebreakers. The tiebreakers are important, of course, and have wide reaching consequences, especially in the AFC, where the Steelers could still be the #1 seed and have home field throughout, although they currently sit as #5 and are looking at playing all their playoff games on the road. FOUR teams could still end up as that final wild card team; The Bengals, The Raiders, The Titans, and The Jets. The latter three are all 8-7, yet via tiebreakers they are ranked in that specific order. I know this, but I don't know WHY. I'm not sure anyone, especially fans of those respective teams, knows the why, only the what. The tiebreakers start out relatively sensible; with head-to-head results. But in the event that's not applicable -- and it often isn't, since you obviously can't have everybody play everybody in a 16 game 32 team league -- they start breaking out the weird shit. Shit that would make a BCS computer shit itself, even though it's an inorganic silicon based entity that should be incapable of any organic chemical reaction, particularly one that produces a carbon-based mound of waste. But it does anyway.

I mean look at this shit (care of the official nfl.com webpage, probably posted by a staffer named Al-Azif):

NFL Tiebreaking Procedures

The six postseason participants from each conference are seeded as follows:

The division champion with the best record.
The division champion with the second-best record.
The division champion with the third-best record.
The division champion with the fourth-best record.
The Wild Card club with the best record.
The Wild Card club with the second-best record.

The following procedures will be used to break standings ties for postseason playoffs and to determine regular-season schedules.

NOTE: Tie games count as one-half win and one-half loss for both clubs.

TO BREAK A TIE WITHIN A DIVISION

If, at the end of the regular season, two or more clubs in the same division finish with identical won-lost-tied percentages, the following steps will be taken until a champion is determined.

Two Clubs

Head-to-head (best won-lost-tied percentage in games between the clubs).
Best won-lost-tied percentage in games played within the division.
Best won-lost-tied percentage in common games.
Best won-lost-tied percentage in games played within the conference.
Strength of victory.
Strength of schedule.
Best combined ranking among conference teams in points scored and points allowed.
Best combined ranking among all teams in points scored and points allowed.
Best net points in common games.
Best net points in all games.
Best net touchdowns in all games.
Coin toss

Three or More Clubs

(Note: If two clubs remain tied after third or other clubs are eliminated during any step, tie breaker reverts to step 1 of the two-club format).

Head-to-head (best won-lost-tied percentage in games among the clubs).
Best won-lost-tied percentage in games played within the division.
Best won-lost-tied percentage in common games.
Best won-lost-tied percentage in games played within the conference.
Strength of victory.
Strength of schedule.
Best combined ranking among conference teams in points scored and points allowed.
Best combined ranking among all teams in points scored and points allowed.
Best net points in common games.
Best net points in all games.
Best net touchdowns in all games.
Coin toss

TO BREAK A TIE FOR THE WILD-CARD TEAM

If it is necessary to break ties to determine the two Wild-Card clubs from each conference, the following steps will be taken.

If the tied clubs are from the same division, apply division tie breaker.
If the tied clubs are from different divisions, apply the following steps.

Two Clubs

Head-to-head, if applicable.
Best won-lost-tied percentage in games played within the conference.
Best won-lost-tied percentage in common games, minimum of four.
Strength of victory.
Strength of schedule.
Best combined ranking among conference teams in points scored and points allowed.
Best combined ranking among all teams in points scored and points allowed.
Best net points in conference games.
Best net points in all games.
Best net touchdowns in all games.
Coin toss.

Three or More Clubs

(Note: If two clubs remain tied after third or other clubs are eliminated, tie breaker reverts to step 1 of applicable two-club format.)

Apply division tie breaker to eliminate all but the highest ranked club in each division prior to proceeding to step 2. The original seeding within a division upon application of the division tie breaker remains the same for all subsequent applications of the procedure that are necessary to identify the two Wild-Card participants.
Head-to-head sweep. (Applicable only if one club has defeated each of the others or if one club has lost to each of the others.)
Best won-lost-tied percentage in games played within the conference.
Best won-lost-tied percentage in common games, minimum of four.
Strength of victory.
Strength of schedule.
Best combined ranking among conference teams in points scored and points allowed.
Best combined ranking among all teams in points scored and points allowed.
Best net points in conference games.
Best net points in all games.
Best net touchdowns in all games.
Coin toss

When the first Wild-Card team has been identified, the procedure is repeated to name the second Wild-Card, i.e., eliminate all but the highest-ranked club in each division prior to proceeding to step 2. In situations where three or more teams from the same division are involved in the procedure, the original seeding of the teams remains the same for subsequent applications of the tie breaker if the top-ranked team in that division qualifies for a Wild-Card berth.

OTHER TIE-BREAKING PROCEDURES

Only one club advances to the playoffs in any tie-breaking step. Remaining tied clubs revert to the first step of the applicable division or Wild Card tie-breakers. As an example, if two clubs remain tied in any tie-breaker step after all other clubs have been eliminated, the procedure reverts to Step 1 of the two-club format to determine the winner. When one club wins the tiebreaker, all other clubs revert to Step 1 of the applicable two-club or three-club format.
In comparing records against common opponents among tied teams, the best won-lost-tied percentage is the deciding factor, since teams may have played an unequal number of games.
To determine home-field priority among division-titlists, apply Wild Card tie-breakers.
To determine home-field priority for Wild Card qualifiers, apply division tie-breakers (if teams are from the same division) or Wild Card tiebreakers (if teams are from different divisions).
To determine the best combined ranking among conference teams in points scored and points allowed, add a team's position in the two categories, and the lowest score wins. For example, if Team A is first in points scored and second in points allowed, its combined ranking is "3." If Team B is third in points scored and first in points allowed, its combined ranking is "4." Team A then wins the tiebreaker. If two teams are tied for a position, both teams are awarded the ranking as if they held it solely. For example, if Team A and Team B are tied for first in points scored, each team is assigned a ranking of "1" in that category, and if Team C is third, its ranking will still be "3."

So yeah, anyone feel like going back through box scores and counting touchdowns to tell me if that's why the Titans effectively have a 1 game lead on the Jets even though they're both 8-7? Or why the 9-6 Bengals suddenly fall behind all of them if they lose and the rest win, which means even though they're 1 game ahead of those teams, they actually aren't? The Raiders can contribute to this mess by winning, unless the Broncos also lose, in which case they win the division. A Bronco win clinches the AFC West for Denver; Denver and Oakland will both be 9-7 with wins, including identical 4-2 division records and 7-5 conference records after splitting their season series 1-1. Or in other words, it's somehow the Miami Dolphins' fault that the Raiders lose the division at 9-7, but it might not be had they scored one TD less against the Raiders or allowed one more against the Tebows er I mean Broncos. Or if Miami had won one more game, which would then make it the Broncos losing the division at 9-7 and it would have been the Bills' fault.

Even the simple part of this mess isn't all that simple. At the top of the AFC, Pittsburgh has head-to-head on New England, if they both finish 12-4, but this is moot if the Ravens also finish 12-4, because they have head-to-head on Pittsburgh by beating them twice. And for that matter, they have the tiebreaker (not head-to-head, though) on New England.

Also, the Packers didn't clinch the #1 seed until they got win 14 against Chicago on Christmas Night. Why? Because had they and the 49ers both finished 13-3, the 49ers would have had the tiebreaker on The Packers. The same Packers who are defending world champions and were until very recently undefeated. Talk about counter-intuitive. San Francisco also has tiebreaker on New Orleans for the #2 seed. This tiebreaker edge over these other very good teams would suggest that the 49ers are a juggernaut or have played the world's toughest schedule and come out on top, but not really. The difference is that the 49ers beat a bad team (Tampa) while the Saints lost to an even worse one (St. Louis), and the 49ers' loss to Baltimore effectively doesn't count because Baltimore's an AFC team. Green Bay beat both St. Louis AND Tampa. Maybe they'd lose a tiebreaker to S.F. because of where the defenses are ranked? My God, the monolith is Full Of Stars.

So that's how the NFL determines tie-breakers. Amazingly, it seems that mushrooms are not involved. Although psilosybin's not actually on the banned substance list, and the NFL doesn't really care about seriously testing for PEDs anyway so maybe they are involved? If they ever have to resort to the coin toss, there'll be at least one fan base that wishes they were.

[ADDENDUM: To clarify how un-clear the tiebreaker process is, I have delved into the NFL's official site and read up on the Tennessee Titans' playoff scenario, because theirs is the weirdest. Ready? Here goes: they lose the tie breaker if the season ends with them in a 2-way tie at 9-7 with The Bengals because the Bengals beat them head-to-head. They WIN a 3-way tie at 9-7 with either the Bengals and Jets, OR a 3-way tie with the Bengals and Raiders, because head-to-head no longer matters with these teams involved, as the Titans and Bengals didn't play either of them. However, they LOSE a 4-way tie at 9-7 with the Bengals and Jets and Raiders. Fuck if I know why.]

Unfantasy Football

2011-12-25T00:43:00.004-05:00

Taste The Muthafuckin' Rainbow!
(Also, why is it when fans pick replica jerseys to buy and wear, you invariably
end up with the fat white fan guy rocking the skinny black WR guy's jersey?)

Well, once again, the 49ers handled business, sorta. Field Goal-Spamming their way to withstanding an ankle-biting attempt from within their own division, the NFC LOL West, the 49ers are now 12-3 and back in position to claim the #2 seed in the conference. 1 more win or 1 more New Orleans loss will do it, since the 49ers have the tiebreaker edge on the Saints thanks to that bizarre loss to the Rams a couple months ago. LOL West, indeed.

Anyway, the 49ers survived a short week (4 day turn around from Monday to Saturday). They survived a road game against the loudest crowd in the division (possibly the conference). They survived the offense continuing to be not quite as good as they should be, as they went to 5-2 over a bizarre 7 game streak in which they have failed to score a 1st Half Touchdown. They survived a blocked punt in the 4th quarter, and if you read the score ticker at the bottom of the above picture, you'll notice they also survived Seattle ruining the two streaks that were a point of 49er defensive pride: 36 games without a 100 yard rusher, and 0 rushing TDs allowed this season. Almost makes me kinda wish they'd not bothered recovering the blocked punt and let Seattle take that in directly. But I'm a fan worrying too much about STATZ, and the 2011 49ers season is, among other things, a repudiation of concern about STATZ that fall outside the rubric of W-L.

After all, Alex Smith has spent the year playing with the Scarlet Letter G for "Game Manager" stitched to his jersey. Game Manager being the slur Fantasy Football players use to tarbrush QBs who don't rack up the passing STATZ conducive to being a good fantasy pickups. I doubt Alex gives a shit. After all, it's a drop of rain in the ocean compared to the abuse we The Faithful have heaped on him for six years of his constant sins of Not Being Joe Montana Reincarnate, and Not Being As Good As His Draft Brother Aaron Rodgers, neither of which Alex will ever be. But for now, he continues to Avoid The Big Fuck-Up. And technically, he did lead a come-from-behind-to-win drive late in the 4th Quarter, which makes him 2 for 2 in such situations this year; when he absolutely has to hit those throws, it seems like he does. It helps that Michael Crabtree has finally figured out that Practice Is Good. Alex also has been demonstrating a good sense of when to tuck it up and run for the 1st down, and he's actually got some speed. No one will ever mistake him for Michael Vick, but he can make some plays with his legs.

Ultimately, this team is about defense and rushing. The "Physical With An F" type of bruiser that Mike Singletary wanted to turn the team into but never really could because he ultimately was better at the Scream And Yell At People part of coaching than he was at the actual Coach People And Teach Them How To Get Better At Playing Football part of coaching. This is an archaic approach to professional football; the rulebook has been leading teams away from it for several years, fantasy players don't understand it because There Are No Offensive Linemen and There Is No Field Position in Fantasy Football, and I like to think Roger Goodell is angrily chomping down on an ice cube or two over it, because all the lovely corporations buying ad space on NFL network and during game broadcasts aren't going to want to have to hire Andy Lee to sell cars or insurance or beer while he rattles off puns that revolve around punting.

Field Position. Time Of Possession. Winning The Turnover Battle. Special Teams and Defense.
PUNTERS~! LONG SNAPPERS~! Guys You've Never Heard Of. Take That, Fantasy Football Players,
and remember Miller Lite has more taste and Ford Trucks make your penis bigger.

They're an ensemble cast that is more than the sum of their parts. They've barely even missed a beat in the absence of their one true star on defense, MISTER PATRICK WILLIS. That's his replacement you see above, next man up Larry Grant, enjoying a little mockery of the opposition via Skittles after forcing the game winning fumble, running down Tavaris Jackson from behind and timing his ball-slap to coincide with Jackson swinging his ball carrying arm back as he ran.

David Akers also set the single season NFL record for most field goals today, going 4/5 to got to 41 on the year. He passed Jerry Rice for the team single season scoring record Monday Night, which is kinda funny if you think about it. This is good, in that he is so accurate and even 50 yarders ain't no thang to Akers, and he's as close to automatic as a kicker can get. It is also bad in that the 49ers really need to score more TDs, especially when they get so many 1st and Goal situations. They've only broken the 30 point barrier twice this season. One was against Tampa, who turned out to be shit, and the other game against Seattle, where it only happened because Ted Ginn got two return TDs in 1 minute of play. These can thus rightly be dismissed as statistical outliers.

The 49ers don't score a lot, and I'm used to it by now. So far it has mostly been enough. Eventually [read: Green Bay or New Orleans], it will most likely not be, but who knows? Detroit has an explosive offense too, and the 49er Defense managed to hold them under 20. They can't win a shootout against any of these teams, but they haven't had to play a shootout once this season, either, because guys like David Akers and Andy Lee and Aldon Smith and Donte Whitner and NAVORRO BOWMAN make each game be about whose gun makes a better club or has a sharper bayonette on it once all the bullets are gone. They have cast their lot as the Immovable Object. The Irresistible Forces lay in wait, in the uncharted territory and alien environment that is January/Playoff Football.

We Made It

2011-12-24T21:02:00.001-05:00

I was going to put this off until Monday because it’s Christmas Eve and all that, and so I posted that little thing below as a shitty little placeholder until then, but . . . I lied. I’m just too happy to not write about this. I’m hanging around twitter and answering e-mails and talking about the game a bit anyway, so I figured hey, why not? After all, I think we need to keep our priorities in perspective here. A Lions victory to clinch a playoff spot and their first ten win season since before the birth of Jesus (the non-Stafford Jesus that is) takes precedence over the celebration of the birth of some kid in an outhouse any day, right? (Ducks thunderbolts)

Right. And so . . . here we are. Take a deep breath and just luxuriate in it. Feel this moment. Savor it. We are survivors, every one of us and by God, we have earned this, this new world of the spirit, this haven for our souls.

It’s impossible to overstate how fucking crazy it is that only three years ago we were lamenting 0-16 and now here we are, at 10-5, ready for the playoffs to start, knowing that we belong. We didn’t back into this thing. We didn’t fall backwards into this new world. No. We grabbed it by the fucking throat, looked it right in the eyes, smiled and said “Here we are and there’s nothing you can do about it.” The Chargers wobbled into our path, into our final steps, and they were blown into dust and now here we are. Here we are.

The way the whole thing played out was enough to make a man believe in Fate – or at least something like it. I have gibbered on about Fate so many times here that it is almost a running joke. But goddammit, this was just so . . . perfect. This was the biggest game for the Lions since the Pontius Pilate administration, the biggest moment for us as fans maybe ever. Given what we’ve been through and where we are right now, I don’t think that’s all that hyperbolic a statement. On the brink of that new world I ranted and raved about in the preview piece, on the brink of something we’d only dared to whisper about in our own hearts for so long, the Lions not only rose to the occasion, they owned it. This was their best game of the season, top to bottom, start to finish, back to front, head to toe, ass to mouth, soup to nuts . . . whatever ridiculous way you want to put it. In the one moment where we needed this team to step up, they exploded like a supernova, obliterating that old flat world and shining down on that brave new round world of our dreams. This is serendipity. This is salvation. This is, most importantly of all, reality.

Yesterday is just a word. The past belongs to someone else, to haunted people who don’t live here anymore. The future is limitless and the present is standing on a sandy beach, looking out over a new world filled with promise and possibility. There are no guarantees but that doesn’t matter. We made it. We fucking made it, and here, in this new world, is where we’ll live or die. We are not beholden to the rules of that old world, to its restraints, its vile chains tethering us to a past we never wanted. Not anymore. We’re free. And that’s all that matters.

Matthew Stafford took yet another leap today. He was magnificent, and it’s tempting for me to go completely crazy here and start talking about the symbolism of our savior rising to glory on Christmas Eve but that would get unseemly in a hurry. Then again, I guess I kinda just did, didn’t I? Oh well, that’s okay because today is a day to get wild, to get hyperbolic and stupid, drunk on the sheer wondrous joy of this moment. I am, of course, getting ridiculous, but so what? I’ve earned it. We’ve all earned it.

There is moment after moment I could point to from this game, but that would quickly degenerate into a series of “Hey, did you see that? How about that???” Then again, maybe that’s okay. Like I said, we deserve to luxuriate in this, in the beautiful little details that made this new world possible. I think my favorite moment actually came on a play that didn’t work, when Stafford spun away from a Charger pass rusher, and heaved it deep into the endzone where St. Calvin soared like a beautiful angel, to a place only he can go, and he grabbed an impossible pass and then came down with it only for one of the zillion Chargers draped over him to knock it away at the last second. It didn’t work, but goddammit, it was beautiful. It literally took my breath away. That may sound ridiculous, but . . . Jesus, what a throw and what an inhuman effort of sublime beauty by St. Calvin. Even though it ended up a mere incompletion, I knew that Stafford had risen to another level and that everything would be okay.

The crowd was alive and electric from start to finish, a great and unstoppable current ripping through them, voicing the collective will of millions of Lions fans watching all over the world. This felt like something inexorable, something unstoppable, a wave that has built and built and built and which was going to carry us to the new world no matter what happened. This was our time – this is our time – and everything else was – and is – irrelevant.

There is nothing to complain about today. Nothing. There is just joy and happiness and for once I don’t feel like a crusty bastard, an acid tongued dragon from hell, breathing fire. I just feel like a dumb, happy kid on Christmas and the Lions did that. The Lions!

This is the new world and my eyes are wide and right now everything is just . . . beautiful. And this is how the story starts and how the old one fades into oblivion. We made it. We fucking made it.

Welcome To The New World

2011-12-24T20:16:00.002-05:00

More on Monday. For now, feel free to celebrate in the comments.

The World Is Round

2011-12-22T23:47:00.002-05:00

I have consciously never used images from the Lion King because let's face it, that shit is corny as hell, but I don't care. I've been saving this one for just the perfect time and I'll never do it again.

On Saturday, Christmas Eve, the Lions have a chance to not only clinch a playoff spot for the first time this century, but they also have a chance to win 10 games for the first time since people thought the world was flat. Naturally, this is an exciting time. These Lions are an imperfect team, but at this point I don’t really care. They are a fun team, led by a 23 year old wunderkind fighter pilot who spends his offseasons hunting T-Rex’s and crushing ass and his onseasons (That’s right, I’m making up a word. If “offseason” is a valid word then logically “onseason” should also be a word. Don’t argue with me, I’m a very cunning linguist.) leading epic comebacks and throwing laser beams to an angel from heaven by the name of St. Calvin. The team is young, dumb and full of cum, a goddamn wild bunch that has spent as much time running from the law this season as they have spent running for touchdowns. Hell, it wouldn’t surprise me at this point if a game ended in a goddamn Wild West shootout. And I don’t mean that metaphorically. I mean that literally, with Ndamukong Suh charging down the field with a fucking shotgun and Jim Schwartz galloping down the sidelines on a horse, firing an old six shooter at the other team’s coach. This is not a smart, disciplined team. But so what? Ain’t it fun?

Indeed. And the difference between that and the wastelands of 0-16 cannot be overstated. It is a chasm so vast, so absurd, that it can’t even be properly comprehended by the human mind. Instead, all we can do is sit here, dumb smiles on our faces, while we watch the sun rise on a new world, a world in which the Lions are not only a playoff team but a team with double digit wins, a world which is no longer flat but round and beautiful, which seems to stretch forever and in which the possibilities are endless.

Of course, we’re still standing on the edge of that brave new world, our arms and hearts and minds and souls stretching towards an infinity of the spirit, a dream world made real, and in order to truly get there, to be able to not only reach for it but to hold it on our arms once and for all, we need to watch our Lions take out the San Diego Chargers. And this makes the San Diego Chargers our enemies. And our enemies deserve to rot in hell.

The Chargers are a weird team, a team that always seems like it should be better than they are. Hell, last year they had the number one ranked offense and the number one ranked defense in the entire NFL and they somehow managed to miss the playoffs. That is fucking absurd. And yet, that is an anecdote that will forever sum up the San Diego Chargers under head coach Norv Turner. I won’t even wonder how in the hell something like that could happen because honestly, I already answered it. Norv Turner. He is a hysterically awful coach, a complete boob who parlayed his proximity to Emmitt Smith and a Dallas offensive line that could block out not only the sun but the entire Milky Way (somewhere, Nate Newton’s head snapped around like an animal when he heard the phrase “Milky Way”. Relax, dude, I’m talking about the universe, not the candy bar.) into various head coaching jobs which have all ended the same way – in tears and regret, with livid fans threatening to burn down his house and with Norv standing, slackjawed and ridiculous, his shit all in a box, wondering where it all went wrong again.

This is the enemy. Both for us this week and for the Chargers, well, every week. They are like an army that should be good but is plagued by an incompetent general. Norv Turner is basically George McClellan (History, what up?) only there’s no Lincoln around in San Diego with the balls to fire him and replace him with a freewheeling drunk like U.S. Grant. (Who would be our U.S. Grant in this scenario? Les Miles? Barry Switzer’s corpse?) This means that when things are most tense, which they assuredly will be this week, ol’ Norv gets the sweats and then pisses himself while his soldiers shake their heads in disgust and prepare for their inevitable deaths.

To make matters worse for the Chargers, Norv’s Captain, the one who relays all of his orders to the rank and file, the one who coordinates the actual attack on the battlefield, is a goddamn frat boy stereotype named Philip Rivers, who’s basically a bad guy from Animal House brought to life. Well, you’ve all seen Animal House, right? The Wild Bunch Delta house ends up humiliating and destroying the uptight Philip Rivers types and then I’m assuming they went on to win the school’s intramural Super Bowl. (A deleted scene, I’m sure.)

The point is this: the Chargers are a team hilariously devoid of leadership that always – always – cracks under pressure. They’ve done it for years now. That’s why I’m not too worried about all the rumblings about the Chargers playing their best ball of the year the past couple of weeks. If anything, that means that they are just primed for another epic fuckup. People talk about the Lions being the “Lions” and all that bullshit has meant over the years, but the Chargers are the “Chargers” and if any of their fans are reading this, then they know what that means, and they know, deep down, that I am right and that their team is forever doomed to wander a flat, lifeless world while we embrace a world that is round. That is the price you pay for not having big, swinging Abe Lincoln balls.

Am I worried about this game? Of course I am, but that has less to do with the Chargers and more to do with the precipice we find ourselves leaning over, eyes wide, awed as we stare down the dawn of a new world. I’m nervous, but it’s more of an excited kind of nervous if that makes any sense. Everything’s all set and now we just need to finish the damn journey.

There is a part of me that is screaming GO BACK YOU FOOL YOU’RE ONLY GOING TO FALL OFF THE EDGE OF THIS FLAT WORLD AND THEN YOU’LL BE DEAD AND WHO WILL WRITE NONSENSICAL GIBBERISH ABOUT THE LIONS THEN? But this is where I tell that part of me to shut the hell up because Fear is just a word and even if I did die, my spirit is powerful enough that it would continue to write nonsensical gibberish long after my body went up in white hot flames. But I don’t think that I’ll die. Not this time.

This team is not perfect and this new world isn’t perfect either. But so what? It’s a real world, round and beautiful and even its flaws are better than the best parts of that stale, flat world we’re about to leave behind. The losses somehow hurt more now. They hurt like hell. But that’s okay because they actually mean something. But the wins . . . oh God, the wins. They are so much sweeter in the new world because, like the losses, they actually mean something now. This world is round and it seems like it’s endless. It goes on forever and forever and in this world anything and everything feels possible. I’m sure that we might lose some good people along the way, intrepid explorers who won’t be able to survive the hurts of the new world, but there is freedom in that, the freedom to live and to die in a world filled with meaning, the freedom to run to the ends of the earth and then to keep running because it never ends. It never ends.

I am getting philosophical and weird now, which shouldn’t surprise you, but I won’t apologize because we are on the edge of something miraculous, on the edge of a world that seemed like little more than a fantasy only a few short years ago. We have come far – so goddamn far – and we’ve been bruised and bloodied along the way, but finally here we are, staring at a world that is alive with the promise of possibility. And really, that’s all we’ve ever asked – that we get the chance to live as free men, in that world of possibility. It does not promise salvation, only the opportunity to create a world of our own salvation, and for our souls, wounded and beleaguered as they’ve been, perhaps that is the most poignant and meaningful kind of salvation there is: a salvation that is uniquely our own, one that we have created and fashioned and shaped, and which lives in our hearts and which no one can take away from us.

I have talked a lot lately about overcoming the past, or at least its hold on us, and the only way we’ll finally be able to honestly do that is if we can take that final step, that last, miraculous step from this dull, flat world into that new, exciting round world that is alive with possibility. The San Diego Chargers are the only thing, the last thing, standing in our way, and they have a poisoned core, fatally weak and if we honestly deserve to take that final step, then we need to drive our righteous swords deep into that core and then watch the Chargers bleed out, just like they always do, as we take that final step. And when we do, there will be nothing in our way, only a world without end, a round world open to our hearts, our mind and our souls, waiting for us to run wild and free, and in that world, we can run forever and nothing can stop us except ourselves.

Lions win.

Predicted Final Score: Lions 28, Chargers 24

The End Of The Fun Part

2011-12-19T15:48:00.004-05:00

Alex totally aced that Wonderlic test back in the day. Which means he's super smart.
Which is good, because you need to know how to do Calculus to keep track of how often
he's been sacked in the last three games. Looks like that's what he's doing.

Man it's been great to see the 49ers surge back into the land of the relevant this season. Figuring out how comically easy they could (and almost did) clinch a division title and guarantee the first home playoff game in virtually a decade was downright fun. Watching a bad team turn quickly into a good team always is. Especially when it's yours.

However.

Quickly, though, everything switches. They've done so well (for the most part) and won so many games in a row that it becomes harder to accept losses when they finally come. Doubly so now, because losses are more significant. Being back amongst the pretty good teams means playoffs, and being a playoff team means no longer being able to end the year on a high note, as 8-8 teams winning their home finale get to do. Being a good team means there's an 11/12 chance you will end the year screaming impotently at your TV, beseeching your God of choice, and wondering aloud why the hell didn't they keep the ball on the ground and run that clock down another minute before punting. Or why did they waste that beautiful play action pass that deked even the cameraman by throwing to the third string tight end instead of the main wide receiver. And dreaming of what might have been. And hoping the other team's QB gets caught with a dead hooker and is arrested before their next game so that fan base feels the same anguish you now do. Fuck them.

This is the time of the season where it ceases to be about how far a bad team has come to become good, but instead about where a good team falls short of being a great team, with one exception. Unless the 49ers are good enough to win the Super Bowl -- and they're most likely not -- the end of their season is going to piss me off. The funny thing about a season where "getting back into the playoffs" is good enough to be a successful season is that along the way it becomes not good enough anymore. Around March or so I'll be able to look back and be happy that they've gotten back to this point, but right now, no. They have a chance at the #2 Seed. They could actually win a playoff game, not just be in one.

A chance, by the way, that got a lot slimmer last week. I've been seeing the end of the fun part of this season coming since Thanksgiving, when a short week meant my personal nemesis, Chilo Rachal, was back out their playing guard, and not only did the Offensive Line go back to stinking as is predictable with him out there, but he also was part of a chop block that wiped out an early big bomb TD that would've totally changed the tone of that game and, yes, might have meant that the 49ers could've won that one. Not that anyone who doesn't follow the 49ers knows who the hell Chilo Rachal is or why he makes that much a negative difference. It was their first nationally televised game of the season, and they lost, so the talking point becomes "were the 49ers exposed?" No, of course they weren't. Short week, Ravens are really good, injury, Nobody Wins Every Game, etc.

Except maybe they were, because the offensive line has kinda stunk in the two following games, too. Maybe the offense is trying to get too cute with play selection in the Red Zone, too, but here's the bottom line, and I'm going to start a new paragraph with it just so it stands out that little be more, because it needs to:

The 49ers have had a drive START at the other team's 5 yard line and end in a field goal. TWO WEEKS IN A ROW. AGAINST TEAMS IN THEIR OWN SHITTY-ASS DIVISION.

That's abysmal. Especially for what is ostensibly a smash mouth power running team that hitches its wagon to Frank Gore and spends 1/4th of the game in a jumbo package with Defensive Linemen coming out of the woodwork to report eligible and play H-Back. They got away with it against the Giants and Rams. It finally caught up to them against Arizona (against which they had a second drive start in their red zone and end in a field goal. Why yes they lost by two points and either one of those drives being a TD would've meant a win instead). It sure as shit will catch up with them tonight and again in the playoffs. The OL has not been good enough, and I can't just pin it all on Chilo Rachal anymore.

Losing to the Cardinals because they're the f'n Cardinals is problematic enough as it is. What's really concerning is the Cardinals, due to the roots of their coaching staff, basically run a junior version of the Dick LeBeau Blitzburgh defense that is in town tonight. Which is to say they now have to deal with the Big Nasty Grown Up version of the defensive scheme that's already shown it can push them around.

So here we are, the end of the fun part. Another national televised game against one of the Real Teams. And from a playoff positioning standpoint, the Steelers need this game as bad as the 49ers do. Win out and they get home field advantage. Lose this and they're a wild card team and play all their games on the road. The 49ers have their division sewn up, but they need to win out to keep the #2 seed, so a loss here means a long road. Or a short road, more likely, because it will begin and end in New Orleans, probably by halftime. I have to laugh at all this Ben Roethlisberger "game time decision" nonsense fake drama NFL talking heads are trying to create. There is no fucking way the Steelers can afford to rest him. Unless his leg has fallen off or his Yinzer has gotten permanently wedged in a 19 year old girl, he's fucking playing. James Harrison suspension aside, all hands have to be on deck for Pittsburgh. They have too much to gain or lose this week. There will be no asterisk, or mercy, or cut corners. The 49ers will get to measure themselves against the Real Steelers and will have to beat them. And the whole country will see it one way or the other.

This isn't quite a playoff game in terms of eliminating the loser directly, of course. But they're playing for the same thing, in essence. The loser will be a low seed, look more like a "just IN the playoffs" team for losing tonight, and due to that lower positioning will more likely be just that. The winner gets a bye, a home game, and at minimum not have to face The End Of The Fun Part until conference championship week. It's a little more important for the 49ers, though. Pittsburgh's been here for a while, and have earned national respect by continually being here. The 49ers are newly back, and not quite nationally known. If the 49ers lose, all of the above applies plus "lol one and done" "lol exposed" and "lol just the best of a shitty division" and "lol not for real". Nationally nobody knows, or cares, that the 8 game win streak was against the rest of the league instead of the shitty division, or that Detroit was undefeated or the Giants had a commanding division lead until the 49ers knocked them off. There are no quality wins anymore, unless of course they get one tonight.

The fun part of the season has ended. There is only the relief -- not thrill -- of victory, and the potential agony of a defeat that renders most of this season's accomplishments all but moot.

There is Thunder in our Hearts

2011-12-18T20:11:00.003-05:00

Okay . . . okay, there is a good chance that this will not be coherent or even readable. If I were writing this down with pen and paper, it wouldn’t even be legible. There just would a bunch of scribbled nonsense, a bunch of exclamation points and a horrible drawing of me proposing to Calvin Johnson. I’m writing this now even though my fingers are still shaking from the adrenaline and this is probably a mistake since there is no possible way that I can organize my thoughts in any sort of constructive manner but HOLY SHIT YOU GUYS DID YOU FUCKING SEE THAT???

I have people like my boy Nick tweeting me right now telling me that he would have kissed me on the mouth if I would have been in his living room. I’m pretty sure Charles aka AdamantiumAC is going to end up in jail tonight after the police catch up with him naked, prancing through the streets and Big Al probably had to stick a knife in his toaster in order to jump start his heart. I’ve been ranting and raving about feeling like Jason Statham in Crank and about gnawing on the adrenal gland of cheetahs and The Great Willie Young’s name has been flying around and there is thunder in our fucking hearts, and . . . and . . .

Okay. I’m going to try my best to calm down. It’s probably not happening, but I’ll try. For most of this game I had a whole narrative shaped and as pissed off and whipped as I felt, it would have been easy to write because there was no ambiguity involved. But then things changed and now I don’t know what to write other than wild, raving gibberish. Actually to say that things changed is a ridiculous understatement, a phrase that is essentially devoid of meaning when placed up against the totality of what actually happened. How do you put something like what went down in perspective? Well, you don’t. Instead you just cheer like a goddamn lunatic and you point like a deranged ape and gibber things like “Hey, did you see that???” My eyes look like a cokehead’s right now.

My good pal UpHere summed things up about as well as anybody could right now, I think, when he said “The OLD Lions would have lost on a record setting field goal.” And he’s right. They would have. But these Lions didn’t. Ndamukong Suh – and how appropriate is that – rose from the earth and swallowed up the Raiders last desperate prayer and before that the Lions did what no other team has done in NFL history, scrambling back from two touchdowns down for the fourth time this season to win the game. The old Lions are dead, and the past can go fuck itself.

Are there things to complain about, to worry about going forward? Of course. But only a monstrous ogre would discuss such things right now. I’m still glowing like a goddamn nuclear firework and any negativity I felt during that game has been utterly obliterated.

I am a man who trades in symbolism, as you all well know, and so the way that game ended felt extra special to me. I am beyond being able to explain it right now, and while that may disappoint some of you, I hope you’ll be able to forgive me. I mean, I could try, but I’d quickly degenerate into hoots and grunts as my brain tried in vain to save itself from climbing out of my head and soaring into the sun playing the air guitar and laughing like a damn fool.

Beyond all explanation, here’s all that matters: the Lions are now 9-5, we are mere inches away from a world we’d only dared to whisper about for so, so long, and the world feels like one big Broadway musical, insane and filled with bright colors and I’m pretty sure I just saw someone fly by on a giant guide wire, although that may have just been St. Calvin soaring through on his way back to his house in heaven.

I’m incapable of making sense, of penetrating beneath this perfect surface, and you know what? That’s alright. Sometimes the deeper story is the surface story. And I think this is one of those times. I spent all week gibbering on about letting go of the pathos of the past and now here I am, incapable of doing anything other than basking in the pure primal joy of the present. And that’s just beautiful, you know? Just . . . beautiful.

This is shorter than what I normally write, and I hope you don’t mind, but my heart is a supernova, burning bright and traveling through the universe at the speed of light and in the truth of that, everything else falls by the wayside and words are meaningless and forgettable and the only thing that matters is that right now I feel like I could fly and that, for a single precious, wonderful moment the world feels . . . perfect.

This is What Happens When you Sign Former Cowboys

2011-12-17T21:41:00.000-05:00

"Say good night to the bad guy"

So. Well. Huh. Sunday night, I had to endure a taste of the awful. The Bears lost to the Broncos, just like I figured they would, and they did it in the most annoying way possible, because God loves Tim Tebow and hates me. But I had made my peace with this sort of thing happening ahead of time, and I was prepared for that to be the worst part of my sports-related week. You know, hearing all about how the sports media's new-found Favre used his work ethic to have the Chicago coaching staff abandon all acknowledgement of the concept of a first down in the fourth quarter, his leadership to make Marion Barber run out of bounds and fumble at the worst times humanly possible, his athletic prowess to make Lovie Smith opt for the Prevent defense, his undying faith to make Zack Bowman and Chris Conte both blow their assignments on the same play, and his stunning good looks to inspire Matt Prater to kick a 59 yard field goal. You know, that whole thing. Then, this thing happened.

"Don't worry, dude. Maybe someone on the team will get busted for being a huge drug kingpin, and this'll all blow over."

So the guy the Bears signed to be a younger, shittier Rashied Davis ended up actually being a younger, shittier Nate Newton, and the effects could be far-reaching. Already, there's been speculation that for signing this guy the very next day after he had to go get back his $88,000 from the police after a dude driving his car was busted on the way to a huge coke deal with an undercover fed, (I wonder what all that money could have possibly been for...) this thing could cost Jerry Angelo his job. And oh Lord no, please don't let that happen. Seriously. The part that might actually be bad for the team, though is this little gem: In addition to however many regular people that ten kilos of coke and a thousand pounds of weed could keep high in a week, he also might have been selling to other NFL players. Selling to other NFL players. In Chicago. You know. Where the Bears play. Fuck.

PICTURED: Fullback Tyler Clutts is questioned by federal authorities.

So just when it can't get any worse, when the Bears lose Cutler and Forte and go from a Wild Card playoff team in control of their own second-place destiny to a flaming wreck of a team that's got no hope for January, but has won too many games to get a good draft pick in 2012, Hurd goes down, and who knows, he might be taking other players who are actually good down with him. I mean yeah, it's all just potentially-bullshit rumor at this point and he and his lawyers have denied it, but every day becomes an adventure from here on out, waiting to see if anyone else shows up in the news reports, either being suspended for a few games for weed, or maybe even doing fucking time for cocaine. Not to mention all those antibiotics he must have sold to Roy Williams, because seriously, that guy couldn't even catch a cold, am I right, fellas? HEYYOOOOOOOO. Sorry, that was terrible, and I apologize. Just not to Roy Williams, though. Screw that guy. But to sum up the last week of Chicago Bears goings-on: God damn. Just god damn.

Everything is terrible, so here is a picture of my dog looking concerned, because it makes me happy.

TOMORROW: The Bears play the Seahawks, and I haven't paid a bit of attention to them, but I'm going to assume they're still kind of awful. And the Bears are coming into this game with failure as absolutely not an option. With all the ground they've lost on teams like the Lions and Falcons, and let's face it, with defeat basically guaranteed against Green Bay a week from now, their backs are against the wall, and this is the must-win situation to end all must-win situations for this team.

But yeah, Caleb Hanie.

PREDICTION: Seahawks 14, Bears 9.