Haynesworth is Scientifically Lazy & Shanahan Ain't No Genius Yet

You know, I honestly had told myself I couldn't possibly be interested in writing anything more on the Albert Haynesworth/Mike Shanahan saga, but then Haynesworth proves his worth as the most expensive something or other in the history of American overabundance category team sports and takes the game of bitch-assing to a whole 'notha level. I'm sure you've heard, but holmes started missing practice last week, for dehydration then headaches as it was said, and because of not practicing, is relegated to playing with third stringers in the second half of an embarrassing preseason fuck-up against the Ravens. (This reminded me too, usually those two teams would play a scrimmage every year, being so close to each other, and they used to even show THAT shit on local TV... and I live a couple hours outside of D.C. Dan Snyder has really run this team further into the ground than anybody really admits.) So afterwards, King Albert complains that he shouldn't ever have to play with dudes like that, and then says it wasn't just headaches like they was saying, but some sort of shit that Dr. Nick Riviera diagnosed him with, where his skeleton is eating through his muscles or some nonsense like that.
The greatest thing about this ailment, which I won't bother finding the word for because nobody ever heard of it until two days ago and soon nobody will remember it and call it labradachsund disease or the stromboliosis, but apparently you usually only get it because you have not been working your muscles then all of a sudden you start working them really fucking hard. Rarely is it seen in what would be considered a world class athlete. But somehow Albert Haynesworth, who avoided off-season conditioning (and to his credit, the buffet tables as well, as he dropped 30 lbs.) and showed up to mandatory training camps unable to string together a succession of shuttle runs (much to Ronald Reagan's dismay, I would imagine... wonder how Haynesworth would do on the 600 yard run-walk?), has muscles that literally starting eating themselves out of existence under the effect of strenuous physical activity.
Good fucking lord, man. This is ridiculous. And I know NFL players stick together, through thick and thin, through stupid bullshit and professional trials, often looking the other way over a teammate's indiscretions, to keep things backyard barbecue friendly in the locker room. But straight up, with the NFL headed to a lockout next year, and owners looking to squeeze some more scrilla away from or games out of the players union, if I was an NFL player, I would be like, "Fuck you, Albert Haynesworth, you fat lazy sack of shit." Because when the two sides sit down to negotiate all their bullshit, one thing that's bound to come up is guaranteed contracts, being half-retarded basketball players and fully-retarded baseball players, when you take into consideration how their contracts are guaranteed once signed, rake in far more money than NFL players, and do far less permanent damage to their bodies and brains. But if that subject comes up, Mr. Owner Lawyer only has to say, "Wait a second... look at this Albert Haynesworth bullshit. How do you expect the owners to guarantee contracts when crap like that is bound to happen?" And since they will be pretending to be partners in a multi-billion dollar industry, Mr. Players Union Lawyer can't just go, "Well, Dan Snyder's kind of a stupid fuck," as a legitimate defense. Regardless of Haynesworth costing his teammates this year trouble and endless soap operatic questioning, he's costing future players cash money. And isn't really the only thing you want to do in any industry, any family, any generational hand-off, is not screw it up for those coming up behind you? Like that's all you really want to do - get your's and keep whatever golden goose you exploit for your gold eggs healthy enough to keep laying them bitches.
I also do not like how Mike Shanahan is made out to be some super-smart head coach who has handled this whole thing as masterfully as could be done. If he was so goddamn masterful, and truly in charge of the Redskins, then why the fuck is this dude still there? I know after Haynesworth refused to not take his $21 million bonus to get waived free and clear, the thinking was, "Well, someone will trade for him in the draft." But nobody did. And now the thinking seems to be, "Well, somebody's gonna have a preseason injury and need a solid center piece to a 4-3 defense at a cut-rate price. We can at least get a mid-round draft pick or two out of this fat fucker." But goddamn, every week there's more bullshit going on with this situation, to where, once again, the Redskins are the laughingstock of the pro football universe.
The newspaper (I read the Washington Post) had a column by the chick sports columnist (doesn't every newspaper have the one chick columnist nowadays? that shit's funny to me) where she was talking about how in college, Shanahan had his spleen pushed behind his spinal cord or something, leaking death into his body, and passed out and they performed last rites on him and he was unconscious for five minutes and saw football jesus standing in front of those curly mercury light bulbs like 20 years before they even existed in real life, and how when he was still alive, he wished he had died because his football career was over. Yeah, what the fuck ever chick sports columnist.
This brings me to my final point. Fuck the overall conspiracy every goddamn year to make believe change has arrived, utilizing full wag the dog special effects. The Washington Post does all these feel-good pieces and hypes up the new guys and no one questions a goddamned thing, until about late October or mid-November once the wheels start blowing off this lead-painted burgundy and gold bandwagon yet again. And then the hit pieces start coming out by the end of the season, so that Redskins management can usher out whoever's fault this is being laid at the feet of and usher in some new savior of the goddamn year. I'm sick of it, bros. Sick of it.
Where I live geographically is called central Virginia, and our local stations pre-empt any other NFL games for the Redskins. But if you go a couple hours southwest of here, to Roanoke, Virginia, their local team is considered the Carolina Panthers. With this new digital television bullshit, I lost all my channels with my old school antennae, but then I got schooled by some super nerd at Radio Shack one day and bought this signal booster shit that's on top of my house with coaxial running to the TV. Now, with no cable and just straight up TV antennae, I get like 25 channels, in rural Virginia. A lot of it is duplicates of network stations, just ones from Richmond and from Charlottesville and Staunton, but those rare windows when syndicated shows are on, it makes for a good variety. (Makes me long for the olden days pre-paid programming on TV when I could probably have my choice of Cheers, The Cosby Show, A-Team, World Class wrestling, and Kung Fu, all at once.)
Last Saturday night, the sky was clear, and all my stations that the autoseek set up were coming in, so I knew I wouldn't lose any by autoseeking again, to see if by any chance rebel Mexicans were transmitting from Carter's Mountain or if Jack Van Impe was broadcasting from the Blue Ridge up near Afton nowadays, and low and behold I picked up an additional four channels out of Roanoke. Now understand I was doing this during the incredibly boring ending of the Redskins/Ravens game, so obviously my die-hard interest is already on the wane. But one of those other channels was showing the Panthers preseason game, and I was like, "Oh shit, I could get into following the Panthers this year." Back when they first came into the league, I was tempted to abandon the Redskins for them because I hated what was going on after Jack Kent Cooke died and hated Norv Turner and to be honest like North Carolina a whole lot fucking more than I do my home state of Virginia. Basically, Virginia is awesome, except for the soul suck that is northern Virginia, and the soul suck that is the Virginia Beach/Hampton/Norfolk/Tidewater clusterfuck of strip mall muck, which basically means all that is left are the parts of the state that are more like North Carolina. In fact, it was either the first year of the Panthers or the second that they played the Redskins, and I told myself it was for my lifelong allegiance from that point onward. The Panthers won, but of course I bailed on my personal pledge to no one but my insides because damn, I been a Skins fan since birth.
But it is a bad bad sign for your marriage to a professional sports team when some random chick other sports team you come across on a clear night on your bobo ass free TV tempts you into emotional adultery. Keep that in mind, Mr. Snyder, and engineer articles in the paper and find some sort of way to trick people into buying jerseys again come springtime, but we Redskins fans, our eyes are wandering. This bullshit ain't been sexy for a long ass time, and you pulling out the Lombardi trophies every third press conference you hold is like bringing out pictures from twenty years ago to back when our relationship was tight as fuck. It only adds to our wandering eyes, because we know you ain't gonna give us them good times again.
That's what will prove to me if Mike Shanahan is a genius or not. Maybe he knows this team was a hodgepodge of has-beens and over-inflated egos already, but he's coming in with the whole, "We're not rebuilding, we're gonna win a Super Bowl" attitude, knowing full well that by week 8, we'll be lucky to have 3 wins. And then he can switch into, "You're either part of our future here, or fuck you," shtick and we can start to seriously trying to be a football team again. I doubt Mr. Snyder would ever admit to rebuilding ever, because to him this is the most perfect thing to ever be owned in his whole life and all he's done is throw money into it to make it better and it just doesn't make sense we don't have like three more Lombardi trophies yet.
I also find it highly comical how many pro football talking heads have fallen in love with the Redskins team and actually consider them a threat to make the playoffs. Sometimes I feel like the whole world is predesigned just to fuck with me. I know that's classic paranoid egotism, and I probably am, but fuck it. That's what I am. And regardless of my own personal mental deficiencies, I can still see that this team is more smoke and mirrors than fire and fury. The Albert Haynesworth issue is just clouding that fact, ultimately to set him up as the fall guy for why year 2010 was not the success it was supposed to be. And then he can be gone next year and the hype machine can crank up again and they'll somehow try to convince us again how it's totally different this time around. Fuckers.