Eagles vs. Redskins McNabb Returns To Shitadelphia Gameblog

4:05 pm: I am very unexcited about this game, yet hoping to hype myself up against my better logic. I have sort of quit drinking lately, which means cutting back in my world, but have only drank 3 beers in 10 days, plus have been sleeping full sleep nights. Those two things have really never happened together in my entire adult life – I am either on the wagon and not sleeping at all or sleeping in late but drunk as fuck. This has caused me to have terrible terrible dreams every fucking night. Last night, I was convinced my wife had had a 9 month affair with some chump ass dude and we were splitting up and I was moving in with some friends and picking up their lease in January when they move to NYC, and having to pay child support and shit even though this shit was all my wife’s fault. Of course, she was out of town so I woke up angry as fuck.
My mentality going into this Skins/Eagles game is not much better. We got McNabb yet are gonna pay some fucking child support in an ass-kicking today. I am trying to psychically psyche myself out of this, to help the team with fan energy, but man, it is hard. But I am cracking a delicious Williamsburg AleWerks Pumpkin Ale to try and get myself to accept delusions.

4:10 pm: Did you know Howie Long lives in the same metropolitan area as me? Sometimes I see him at the white people grocery store when I go there to see if tuna medallions are on sale or not. The guy that used to work at the seafood counter there a couple years back got busted for serial rapistry. This is the beauty of America – good-looking millionaires walk around within mere feet of serial rapists.

4:14 pm: Oh fuck, Joe Buck and Troy Aikman. This will be painful even more than I thought.

4:18 pm: Yes. This is why I have wanted Brandon Banks on the goddamned roster every week instead of practice squad. An actual decent punt return in a burgundy jersey. I don’t give a fuck if he fumbles sometimes if he can do that sometimes.

4:21 pm: Ryan Fucking Torain did not dive right there to protect the ball. He knocked the shit out of some dude and went in for 6 points. And then my 2 year old wiped out in the hallway wearing her 6 year old sisters Converse and busted her lip. SMASHMOUTH FOOTBALL WATCHING!
And then I sit back down to watch Lorenzo Alexander crunch a motherfucker too. We are concussing bitches today!


4:30 pm: The thing about having a young buck like Torain in the line-up is it will get more out of Portis because he’ll try crazier. It’s like getting your common law wife of 15 years a 19-year-old dude to have a threesome with you guys on her birthday weekend; it motivates you to fight harder and longer.
And as you would expect on McNabb’s first pass in Philadelphia, he just barely overthrows his wide open receiver. Some things never change.

4:34 pm: And sure enough, Portis is now fighting for yards, like a fucking man. I will be sad once they run Mr. C.P. off at the end of this year (which I’m assuming they will) because he has really been the ultimate highlight of the Snyder era thus far. Not much winning involved, but goddamn that dude is a solid dude. If there was any one NFL player I’d have over to my house to throw horseshoes during the day while we slow cook a pig on a pit dug in the ground with an old refrigerator grate over top of it to hold the pig, and then when night came, we’d play dice on the picnic table.
And then they scored another touchdown, and my kids who are under 10 all get flips as is household tradition on a touchdown. They are dressed as some sort of demon fairy ballerinas, and know they are only allowed in the living room when there is a touchdown, or once the game is assuredly won, so daddy won’t be a dick for no reason.

4:39 pm: Yet in the back of my head, I be thinking, “How big a lead can we possibly lose?” I am also not quite sure what to think of the hippie dude playing the flute in Burger King commercials. Rampant Hipsterism has obviously gone too far, because now you can just do something retarded as fuck and it’s good.

4:41 pm: It should be noted, in honor of Breast Cancer, that my dear old paternal grandmother died of breast cancer a few years back. She was in a home and I went to visit one day and my uncle was there and we tricked her into thinking it was okay to go outside without her oxygen, mostly so she could have a moment in the sun, knowing she was gonna die. It made me feel good to my heart. My uncle (who is like 46) and me (who is 37) are the oldest two male members of that family now, which shows what a tragically comic Southern family we truly are. But in honor of breast cancer, ever since my grandmother died, I have only fucked pink vaginas.

4:48 pm: Laron Landry has not destroyed someone yet to my liking. He lurks though, and he will. They should start playing Jason Voorhees music for Laron. He just missed Vick, but then the Skins triple piled him at the goal line. And the Eagles got a holding call, so maybe we get KKK Mr. Kevin Kolbyweather Kolb. Kareem Moore was one of the dudes who sandwiched Vick into grogginess, and he has been a welcome addition to the secondary since not being all injured and shit finally.

4:51 pm: And why wouldn’t Kevin Kolb add himself to this QB drama triangle, live and in person? Andy Reid’s fat ass is on the sideline, sighing heavily between wheezes.
“Plenty to talk about here today, with this quarterback situation,” says Joe Buck. Man, you know when Al Michaels stupid crusty ass finally retires, it’s gonna be Buck and Collinsworth as the Sunday night team, which is gonna cause me to go all Discovery Channel shooter on motherfuckers. Or start mailing bootlegs of Anthrax CDs to people.

4:58 pm: My fucking kids are all dancing to “Pokerface” in the kitchen now, wearing underwear and bathing suit tops and pretending it is bikinis. And Joey Galloway is the Redskins #2 receiver. Really? There’s nothing better out there than Joey Galloway? I simply refuse to believe that. What happened to that Anthony Armstrong dude?

5:01 pm: Oh, there he is, catching a goddamned bomb on 3rd and 14. Yeah, leave him in the game.

5:03 pm: 1st and goal and there’s a flag for holding. You didn’t even have to say #74, Mr. Referee. It was already assumed. We settle for a field goal. 17 to 3, early in the 2nd quarter, which is way too early for a defense as flexible as this one has been. THROAT PUNCH BITCHES! That should be their new mantra.

5:24 pm: Hahaha, now my oldest, who is apparently controlling the music playlist, is pumping the screwed and chopped version of “Purple Stuff”. Parenting – it’s not just for breakfast anymore!

5:32 pm: The longest booth review ever has finally ended, and it is 4th and goal for the Eagles. And now we get a nice moment with Troy Aikman and Joe Buck in the booth. Joe Buck’s shirt and tie are lavendar and very old black guy going to churchy, yet his suit is white guy as fuck. Perhaps, in the realm of sports broadcasting, that’s all you have to do to seem superbly relevant.
Haha, delay of game after a timeout. Lololol, obviously the NFLuminati has decided the Redskins must win this game and remain relevant at least until Halloween. And of course Troy Aikman goes on a diatribe about how bad officiating has been this year in the NFL. Troy Aikman is a huge fucking faggot who got about three concussions too few for my liking. (When I say “faggot” I mean “dumbass”. My apologies to all gay people for my insensitivity. Please don’t send Wanda Sykes to my house, because that is one annoying ass bitch.)
IT IS HALFTIME! Time to put the chicken in the oven. That is not a euphemism. I really I need to put the chicken in the oven.

5:51 pm: Game resumes, and we shall see if this defense is any different from defenses of the past… well the whole year thus far. Has the Haz put the fear of Film God in them? It is the 3rd quarter and our punter has yet to set foot on the turf, which is a game you should win in the NFL, unless you had like 4 turnover and are already down by 20.
Well, this is a very Redskinsy start to the 2nd half, calling our first timeout 45 seconds into the 3rd quarter. I am already uncomfortable. Perhaps I will go yell at my children during the commercial break.

5:57 pm: And that would be their second timeout, 1:26 into the 3rd quarter. Yeah, this looks more familiar. It should be tied by the end of this quarter.

6:02 pm: And that would be a very Jason Campbell-like INT by McNabb in Eagles territory, with the guy making the INT being a draft pick the Eagles made with one of the handful the Redskins gave them for McNabb. Sigh. If they score on this drive, I’m gonna bruise one of my dog’s ribs. (Would that be in honor of Mike Vick, the dog abuser, or in disrespect to him, with his rib injuries? These days of heightened sensitivities make everything so goddamned confusing.) But at least we got the ball back after a 3 and out.

6:11 pm: See, they just had a play where I thought, “Yes, Ryan Torain!” because the Eagles have been in the backfield on the hand-off all half, and yet somehow Torain down south juked his way for at least a positive gain. And even though all we did was punt, my oldest kid came in while Kraftwerk’s “Hall of Mirrors” was playing on her music doohickey and asked if I preferred she use butterscotch chips in the scones she is making. IT IS FALL MOTHERFUCKERS!
And then of course the moment is ruined because the center child dropped a butterscotch chip on the floor and one of the dogs ate it so kids are crying and dogs are being yelled at and chaos is ensuing.

6:17 pm: Shit. I still have to make homemade mac-n-cheese for dinner still too. One of the benefits of being homeschoolers is I can use this as teaching moment to make my oldest kid practice fractions by learning how to make the cheese sauce from the recipe I freestyle at her from the living room.

6:19 pm: Hey, look at that! Albert Haynesworth is on a football field. And he is standing out of the line of action as Laron Landry crushes a motherfucker. Laron looks crazy in the eyeballs too, which is exactly what you want. Of all the Redskins star players they have, I’d only actually keep like four of them for the future, and two of those four are Laron Landry.

6:21 pm: Redskins challenge what looks to be a fumble, with 3 minutes left in the 3rd quarter. This is why you try to keep your timeouts, stupid fucking assholes.

6:23 pm: The ref’s name, if I am hearing Joe Buck right, is “Alberto Riverrod.” And he has a pink whistle. I want a pink whistle. And it were a fumble. Thank you token hispanic referee. Now if we can just somehow make the clock disappear as smoothly as possible. (This is what being a Redskins fan is reduced to. We go into kneel-down mode with 18 minutes of clock left.)

6:27 pm: Huge 3rd & 7! Oh, a false start… let me guess… #74. Yep. How can a guy who looks so much like Dexter Manley be so penaltastic. This is why you don’t teach everybody to read. It confuses the natural order of things.
Sack, and punt. It is ugly as fuck but rolls for an extra ten yards. That is Redskins football in a nutshell.

6:31 pm: One of the worst aspects to the switch to a 3-4 defense is Andre Carter being an outside LB and expected to cover dudes. He is a natural born pass rusher, and the way he just spleened Triple K Kevin Koltdexter Kolb is a perfect example. Please forgive a slightly overweight far underbrained dude in a thrift store three-quarter length shirt of his favorite football team sitting on an inherited couch for challenging NFL geniusry, but why can’t this guy play DE in the 3-4?

6:52 pm: I come back in the room from releasing a crying child from timeout (mine are unlimited) to hear Joe Buck say “broke free and that should’ve been a touchdown,” and then see the stupid Redskins punter shank one. We are winning by 9. There is still plenty of time left. This is setting up all too familiarly. The whole thing – the game, the children fighting, me feeling frustrated and inebriated. I would expect a 45-yard TD by DeSean Jackson, one of the dogs to shit in the hallway, and my cellphone to ring with a call from my boss about some super important bullshit to him in the next ten minutes.

6:55 pm: Part of the problem is me. I haven’t been focusing my rooting energies into this game hard enough. Alcohol clouds focus, which is why I cut back. I usually for years have done a hand motion while saying “Shim bala bim,” during opposing field goal kicks, and it hardly ever works. But this year, with less drinking, I have been in tune to the feeling, and only do it selectively. Out of 4 “Shim bala bims”, three of those field goals by the opposition have missed. Seriously. I don’t do it when I don’t feel it matters; but when it seems like it might, I go with it. It can’t hurt. Science only explains the things living in laboratory conditions; everything else has a strong dose of mystery.

6:58 pm: 1st and goal, the Eagles, with less than five minutes left… and before I could type up some melodramatic “what shall our defense do?” bullshit, they got a TD, to a white dude wearing pink shoes. At least we broke up the 2-point conversion.

7:01 pm: It is now the dinner o’clock hour, with 4:10 left in the game, and the Redskins are up by 5, with a kickoff coming their way. Redskins get the ball on the 16 after a muffed kickoff reception. McNabb comes out. The NFL couldn’t have scripted this any more dramatically. Yet, who knows, they might have, because this shit seems scripted as fuck.

7:04 pm: 3rd & 4! 18 yard run by McNabb, where he signals his own first down while still running. And the clock runs slowly. “Even the greatest stars discovered themselves in the looking glass…”

7:07 pm: Ryan Torain, 10-yard run for a first down. I am starting to feel like we might actually possibly might could just win. This is why you have a fresh, hungry, starved, unfamous RB.

7:08 pm: When the Skins have the ball and the ref rolls his hands over each other, you yell out “#74! #74!” and that dance is called The Stephon Heyer. Yet it is the two-minute warning.

7:12 pm: Punt goes out of bounds at the 26 with 67 seconds left. Kevin Kockinmouthking Kolb comes out to play out the McNabb or Kolb: Who is Greater question, in live theater. And he proceeds to throw an interception to Carlos Rogers, which 99 times out of 100 means an incomplete pass.

7:15 pm: 30 seconds left after a ball spike. I am glad I am livedorking this or else I would be stomping worried holes into my hardwood floor.
Haha, Laron Landry could’ve had an interception himself but was keyed into a headcruncher hit. And a defensive holding penalty on one of the old dudes I hardly care about on our team.

7:17 pm: Man, Kevin Kolb sucks. Thank your fake christian gods for that.
The Eagles tricky-dicked their ways into one final first down at the 32 yard line, and now will air it out, do or die. Hey look at that, DeAngelo Hall finally does something. Maybe he should be our second receiver instead of our first corner. And we won, once again, by default as much as anything else. The Dan Snyder Era: The Law of Averages Means We Could Very Well Be a Better Average Than the Other Average!
That's the game and I've got to make some mac-n-cheese.