NFL 2010: Week 10 - NFC North & West (3rd Quarter)

So we are actually into the second half of the season. American are an impatient bunch of assholes usually, which is why NFL pundits and talking faces will try to give you The Real Deal on how the season is shaking out after 2 games. But we are just now to a point where we have an idea of what is going on. Honestly, at this point, you can only write off a couple of teams, and really the only one for sure is the Cowboys. Actual shitty teams like the Bills and the Panthers are full of young players looking to psychologically rebuild themselves and make a game out of this season still, to at least make it competitive. So using the season as a game, and the fact that we’ve just now only reached halftime, really the Cowboys are the only team that is metaphorically down 35 to 3 at the half, is kicking the ball off to start the second half (with a new interim head coach), and probably not worth a fuck, as they got blindsided by this season. Everything else, we will see in the next four weeks how they continue or grow or develop or fall apart. In other words, you don’t know shit yet, so all that crap that NFL talking faces talk at you, it’s just filler to occupy your stupid brain that wants nothing more than incessant NFL bullshit all the time all the week all your life. It is nonsense.
But as I cycle through the league for the third quarter of the season, we shall do so in pairs of divisions connected geographically and sharing conference affiliation, to gauge how these teams shake out amongst each other. I usually add up overall records and work my way worst to first in this sense, and it only makes sense the NFC would come up first, as that thing is a clusterfuck at this point. Like any of about 8 teams could decide to be an actual solid team and stomp their way into the Super Bowl with little resistance. Or none of them could, and the playoffs on the NFC side will be a by-default battle to enjoy the pageantry of the NFL’s showcase stripper fest and product placement parade in that abomination of a showroom that is the new Cowboys Stadium. So here we are this week, taking a stroll through the NFC North and West divisions, remarking at the wreckage found therein, contemplating what might could be salvaged from this or that, and wandering through the very beginning of the second half of the regular NFL season…

#1: GREEN BAY PACKERS (6-3, 8th overall) – The Pack is almost running a New England Patriots model on offense, with a highly-respected young superstar QB in charge, and a rotating cast of “who the fuck is that?”s to fill the rest of the positions. The main difference is the Pats O-line has been consistently held down by the same handful of dudes, whereas the Packers O-line has been in constant flux for a few years now, yet still somehow they are able to pull of wins. This leads me to believe that Aaron Rodgers is far better than we even have seen thus far in his NFL career, yet he still looks like the crackhead boyfriend who almost killed my youngest sister, so fuck him.
Meanwhile, defensively the Packers have become a monster that not only will punch you in the mouth and deny you points, but straight up punk you and make their own off you having the ball. It is impossible to not like Clay Matthews Jr. yet at the same time hope he is garishly disfigured by a broken facemask at some point. I think long-term he would be a better player if he wasn’t so pretty – the longhair and a hideous scar across his left cheek that curves around his eyebrow with his nose slightly crooked, this would make for a more all-time awesome LBing presence than the current surfer god gone snowboarding dude they have now. And the NFL does not need another chick-friendly Troy Polamalu type. Football is a sausage-fest, both figuratively and literally in ideal conditions, so fuck pretty boys drawing in the lusty chick fans. Unless we can rape them. For better or worse, we are not allowed to group rape wayward vixens in modern American society. But if MMA’s meteoric rise in popularity is any indicator, we can’t be but a decade away from that changing. Here’s to our collective American future!

#2: SEATTLE SEAHAWKS (4-4, 16th overall) – Man, it is such common dumb shit to be like “OMG! The NFC West is tha worsterz evar!” And it is, but a tiring dead horse that I refuse to beat upon, because there have been division with similarly poor records where a lackluster champion will be playoff bound come January. Whatever. But this crop of NFC West teams seems especially lackluster. The Seahoohas have been impressive in inconsistent spurts, which is to be expected as the Pete Carroll experience was to be a rebuilding one. Yet somehow, they might be the best team in the NFC West. It is sad. Still though, I will never be one of those bitch asses that is all like, “We need to change the playoffs so only the best 12 teams from whatever get in because this is unfair and ruins the integrity of the playoffs blah blah blah.” Division champs are still division champs, even if it is like being King of the Retards (as in the NFC West), and the King of the Retards deserves his fair shot at lucking into the Super Bowl. Without that chance, how we get things like Kurt Warner on Dancing With the Stars? (Sidetrack: I actually watched five minutes of that show last night – first time ever – and good lord, this is what is popular with human Americans now? I would gladly never forget a new and more worser 9/11 every month of the year if somehow that would bomb this ignorance out of my homeland.)

#3: CHICAGO BEARS (5-3, 20th overall) – On the radio the other day, I heard Dan Patrick ask Brian Urlacher who the best team in the NFC was, and Urlacher said, “You mean besides us?” What a douche. Seriously, I cannot wait for him to go to the Cowboys to finish his career, where all douchebag white dude LBs go to end their career (Keith Brooking, Zach Thomas) because nothing is quite as fucking douchebaggy as rocking the white jerseys with shiny blue letters and quoting Gladiator in your pre-game hype speech or going to all-white girl strip clubs with Jason Witten.

#4: MINNESOTA VIKINGS (3-5, 22nd overall) – If ever there was a football coach who looked like he might have wrote a letter to Penthouse Forum about hiding in the closet peeking through the slats while his wife got fucked by three huge-dicked black guys she picked up from his work, it’s Brad Childress. The Vikings season has been such a dysfunctional clusterfuck, completely, and yet should they string a run of 3 or 4 games together, they could still make the playoffs. NFL PARITY – AWESOME!

#5: ST. LOUIS RAMS (4-4, 23rd overall) – Speaking of which, how the fuck does last year’s worst team in the league who has not really gotten all that noticeably better although certain things are clicking a little better, actually end up tied for first in their division halfway through the season? The Rams defense could be a monster in the coming years, though I have to admit, seeing Sam Bradford and Colt McCoy be starting QBs in the NFL makes me feel old as fuck. It also makes me wonder why today’s American men try to look like such huge fucking pussy bitches. Is that a style like the tight jeans that I missed somehow? Is it cool to look like a 14-year-old sexually confused teenage boy?

#6: ARIZONA CARDINALS (3-5, 25th overall) – Larry Fitzgerald seems like such a nice dude that I can’t help but feel sorry for that dude for getting lost in the nethervoid that is Cardinals Professional Football. It’s even worse that he got that one year taste of near Lombardi Trophy levels (that was only two years ago?) because he may never even get beyond the wild card round ever again. They should make a roster rule where once the playoff field is set, any player with ten years service in the NFL that has never won a Super Bowl can enter his name into the playoff expansion roster, and every playoff team gets to pick up one player, on a loaner basis, from somewhere else in the league. I also think that personal fouls should result in the offending player having to sit out one play in a penalty box so that it is 10 on 11 for one play. Also, sometimes I think about there being a triangular field so that three teams play at once and that way you could have dark jerseys, light jerseys, and white jerseys.

#7: DETROIT LIONS (2-6, 27th overall) – I feel bad for the Lions, and Lions fans, considering how much joy our friend Neil has brought to me over the years on this website. Matt Stafford seems fucked again, and do you give up on him and get another QB (which you can’t because they still owe him a bazillion dollars), or do you hope for the best and wish for him to be all better like kissing a toddler’s booboo (which is loser thinking)? Fucked. If ever there was a team that needed a psychological rebirth, perhaps thorugh a uniform change, it’s the Lions. I mean, you have Ndonkeykong Suh, who looks to be the monster he was promised to be, and he still has his rookie swagger. But how long before it is sucked from him by the snakebitten self-doubts of the Lions franchise? That 0-16 season is the high floodmark of ineptitude, like if the NFL history was a small town and you were walking around, that would be a mark way above all our heads on a building front. That’s a tough stain to wash from the psyche. That is why every time they lose respectably, Neil is 3000 words into delusional fantasies (god bless his wretched soul) about The Future and exorcising the Demons of the Past. That being said, it such a joy to spend Thanksgiving rooting for the Lions and against the Cowboys. My family will not be travelling this year, for the first time in a couple years, so I will be in my shitty old farmhouse, cooking the family turkey myself, making stuffing, running between rooms, watching the game. Fall is in the air thickly… leaves changing colors, a Thursday night game on the docket this week, the smell of my eldest daughter making pumpkin scones in the air… it warms my heart. These are the things the Lions must bring back to their tattered minds, and the fans as well – heartwarming wonderful things that make you feel good about your position in life. And trust me, I am broke and retarded and my life sucks. Yet I feel great thinking about Thanksgiving. That crazy old fucker with the Sisu shit this preseason was onto something.

#8: SAN FRANCISCO 49ERS (2-6, 28th overall) – The great thing about Mike Singletary is just as easy as it is to be all like, “Oh man he’s the best, so intense and says whatever he thinks,” you can be like, “hahaha, what a stupid fucker.” That’s where I’m at now. For years he was the go-to black head coach namedropped when they were talking about how black dudes didn’t get their proper shot to head coach NFL teams. Now look at him. The 49ers can’t win with him. Can’t do it. Won’t do it.