2013 All-Armchair Linebacker Team (numbers 1 through 11)

Let me make this clear – this is the 2013 All-Armchair Linebacker team of people. I am not sure where Neil is, as he has not been at the ACLB Clubhouse the past couple weeks, after I gave him some cursed turtlehead knife from a Portuguese bruxa. We usually try to meet every other week in Louisville, Kentucky, at a studio space our immense profits from Armchair Linebacker allows us to rent in the downtown arts district, where we chat about our editorial direction. Neil hasn’t showed up the past three times though. Whatever. Thus, he’s not helping with this.

Also I think picking teams based on position alone is for assholes. If you want to read some bullshit like that, go google Peter King and get your asshole reading done elsewhere. This list is done by numbers, one player per number, so our team has 99 players and like 10 kickers. Fuck you if that’s a problem.

Our first listing goes from 1 through 11 – the primadonnas of the NFL – kicking specialists and sheltered QBs and the occasional weirdo WR with a super low number (though none made our All-ACLB team in these numbers). These are the little twerps of our football team, thus they have little twerp numbers, and are the guys most likely to be good at really complicated five-part sudoku puzzles. Or backgammon. Man, is there any game more asshole-y than backgammon? Anyways, here’s the 2013 All-ACLB team, Part 1 of 9…

#1: Pat McAfee (P, Indianapolis Colts) – Don’t know shit about this guy, like at all, and I hate the Colts, but I can’t help but imagine weird ass drunken rich guy Jim Irsay is somehow friends with that weird ass drug-addled rich dude who started the actual McAfee virus software that was in Central America doing brain drugs and killing some other dude and being a nutball, so I sort of imagine Pat McAfee is probably about as good as 142 other punters on this earth (as they are all about the same after the best five), but because his uncle is the crazy software guy, and that guy used to go on hash/16-year-old boy indulgence vacations with Irsay a few years back, Irsay got him to be his punter.

#2: Kai Forbath (K, Washington Redskins) – California kid called Kai who kicks with a shoe three-sizes too small… not normally what I’d be proud of, but he’s the first good kicker the Redskins have had in 20 years, even though half the guys who used to kick for the Redskins all kick elsewhere now. Naturally easy nickname of “Cobra” Kai as well.

#3: Russell Wilson (QB, Seattle Seahawks) – Look, I don’t like Russell Wilson, mostly because he sounds and looks like Tiger Woods, and who the fuck likes Tiger Woods? That’s like liking feudalism. But there’s not a lot of great shit going on with the #3 in the NFL right now, and the kid had a good rookie season, so I’ll give him some shine.

#4: Jason Hanson (K, Detroit Lions) – Has been playing since before anybody outside of defense contractors knew what the internet was. Oldest man in football probably, and one day will be forced to retire, thus causing the Lions to lose the one piece that tied together the three times they were almost good as a franchise.

#5: Chris Kluwe (P, Minnesota Vikings) – Very popular amongst the internet for being an internet douche type that likes comic book shit and is okay with gays. Sometimes it is lost on us nowadays that just because you like comic books and are okay with gays, it does not mean you are a cool person. There are plenty of dumbasses who like comic books and are okay with gays. You should stop using the logical fallacy of thinking because somebody is the opposite of something stupid, they are not stupid. Everybody is stupid.

#6: Mark Sanchez (QB, New York Jets) – Oh man, there is so much to say here about Mark Sanchez. First, the butt fumble thing is an amazing work of chaos that we are all so blessed to have happen in the internet age when wacky gifs can live forever (relatively speaking). If that had happened in 1971, which it might have, we wouldn’t know, much less catch many lulz over. But beyond this, the entire Mark Sanchez story is interesting to me, as you have this magazine advertisement handsome kid from SoCal, going into the largest metro market in America, wooing everybody with his good looks – a natural pussymonger if there ever was one, in the Joe Namath tradition. Now usually the professional athlete of this stature takes years to slowly deteriorate and be forced, against his will, to take on a normal man’s life. Except with Sanchez, his lack of successes has caused this to be foisted upon him even earlier. He is essentially the most handsome failure of America, even more handsome but more of a failure than even Matt Leinart before him. And yet there is coach Rex Ryan on Caribbean vacation sporting a shitty tattoo of his wife in a Sanchez jersey. That would be weird under normal circumstances (if such a thing can occur in normal circumstances) but given the fact Ryan’s wife has been outed before as star of homemade foot fetish videos, and Ryan himself an alleged prevert, it all the more remarkable. “Why?” you may ask. Well because through rampant surfing through tumblrs, I can tell you foot fetishists tend to skew towards liking to be humiliated, and there is a strong cross-section of this demographic that also enjoys playing the cuckold, which is a medieval term for “haha, somebody else is fucking your ol’ lady while you watch.” So for Coach Ryan to have his star handsome QB’s jersey on his poorly tattooed wife in a sultry pose, it suggests things very Craigslist No-Strings-Attached folder-like. And of course, that makes perfect sense for the New York Jets, and their degenerate fanbase. Of course now the Sanchez era may be over, and he will just be a high profile back-up somewhere like San Francisco or Carolina or something, but man, it was really the most perfect thing ever while it was rolling along.

#7: Ben Roethlisberger (QB, Pittsburgh Steelers) – Fuck the haters, Big Ben is the best. Giant, halfwit QBs who probably hang out on the Sons of Anarchy set in the off-season will always be the best. Kenny Stabler taught me that.

#8: Adam Podlesh (P, Chicago Bears) – Nothing remarkable about Adam Podlesh, other than he is the Bears player in the #8 jersey, formerly made infamous by Rex Grossman, who is perhaps the worst QB who ever made it to a Super Bowl. Have you ever thought about the fact the only Super Bowl Peyton Manning ever won was against Rex Grossman? Doesn’t seem quite so Hall of Fame-worthy, does it?

#9: Tony Romo (QB, Dallas Cowboys) – There is nothing more perfect than watching Tony Romo fuck up the end of a game and/or season in the haphazard, confused twinkle-eyed ways that only Tony Romo can. For that reason alone, there is no way he would not be on our All-ACLB team, because we are about the beauty of suffering more than probably anything else.

#10: Robert Griffin III (QB, Washington Redskins) – Briefly made the Redskins seem like they might right their immense wrongs, until their immensely wrong ways swallowed RG3 whole and snapped his knee sideways. Every Redskins fan blog should just have an animated gif of RG3’s knee bending sideways in the hardscrabble surface of FedEx Field as its banner, because nothing more perfectly sums up the Dan Snyder era of Redskinsdom than that moment.

#11: Sebastian Janikowski (K, Oakland Raiders) – Throwback kicker in that he is a rudeboy Polock with a beer belly, and yet still awesome as fuck. If you wanted somebody to speak to your corporate sponsors, he’d be the last choice amongst all NFL kickers, but if you wanted somebody to attempt a 65-yard field goal at the end of a meaningless first half of a meaningless week 13 game against the Chiefs, there’s nobody better.