Showing posts with label Madden cover curse. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Madden cover curse. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Uncovering The Truth Behind The Madden Curse


 Are you really gonna sit there and try to tell me this man isn't cursed?


The cover of the newest edition of Madden was released earlier today and – surprise! – Calvin Johnson is this year’s cover model, probably because he has nicer legs than Kate Upton.  She has better tits though.  I apologize, that was crass.  Calvin Johnson has wonderful tits and a nice, tight ass, and . . . wait, what the fuck is going on here?  Where am I?  Oh yeah, the cover of Madden.  Depending on who you ask, this is either the best thing to happen in the history of the world or the worst.  Yes, it’s worse than the Holocaust.  Lions fans are split into two warring camps – naturally – the first of which insists that curses are bullshit and that people should stop behaving like a bunch of simpering superstitious ninnies, while the second insists that curses are real and that we should burn a few harlots at the stake just to make sure nothing bad happens. 

As for me, well . . . it’s tough to say what my favorite curse is.  Some prefer cocksucker and I agree that is a fine curse.  My childhood best friend’s favorite curse was dickweed and that brings back some fond memories indeed.  But my favorite curse is probably motherfucker.  It’s descriptive, it packs a wicked punch and it implies that the cursed has sexual relations with his or her mother.  (You bet your ass that a woman can be a motherfucker.  I’m no sexist.)

But my beliefs when it comes to curses are of no real consequence.  Neither are yours.  Instead, we must rely upon the cold, impartial hand of science and as a man of science, I’m here to help all of us out in these trying times.  You may be debating whether to chug that bottle of drain cleaner or throw yourself off of a bridge like that coward George Bailey because you don’t know what in the fuck to think about Calvin Johnson being on the cover of Madden, but that’s okay.  I understand.  That’s why we have science, to help guide us through some of life’s most difficult quandaries.  I mean, we can sit here and debate all night long the existential meaning of Calvin Johnson being on the cover and our thoughts on curses.  I’d call you a motherfucker, you’d call me a shithead or whatever you prefer and then we’d go to bed not knowing who was right and who was wrong and nobody needs that.  So let’s just take a look at the facts, and remember, facts never lie, except for the facts that were compiled by that breathalyzer that one time.  Those facts were full of shit.  Anyway, here is how the infamous Madden Curse impacted its various Cover Models:


2001: Eddie George – The man self-identifies with Ohio State University for fuck’s sake.  Clearly he has been cursed with an infant’s brain.  Also, he was rendered impotent after an angry girlfriend attacked him with a blowtorch and a butter knife.  But that’s what he gets for setting up double dates with Steve McNair.


2002: Daunte Culpepper – Became a Detroit Lion during The Dark Days.  If that’s not enough, he was arrested in 2009 for his involvement in a cat-fighting ring and was given 15 hours of community service after a picture surfaced of him pulling a cat’s tail after it lost a matchup to a stray tabby.


2003: Marshall Faulk – Marshall Faulk has been missing since 2008.  He was last seen traveling in the backwoods of the Louisiana Bayou.  Some say he was searching for The Great Willie Young, lord of that bayou, but obviously, like so many before him, especially that motherfucker Kingfish, the former governor of Louisiana, he was found unworthy.  His ghost still shows up on TV from time to time but it has shitty opinions.


2004: Michael Vick – Come on now.


2005: Ray Lewis – Ray Lewis was visited by aliens one night in 2007.  They flew him to the ends of the universe and promised to show him Attack Ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion but just before they reached their destination, he stabbed all of them and was thus denied that awe-inspiring sight.  He then crashed the ship into Baltimore Harbor and had his mind erased by government agents.  This experience left him mildly retarded.


2006: Donovan McNabb – Is Donovan McNabb, the poor bastard.


2007: Shaun Alexander – Had his penis bitten off by a hooker in a Thai whorehouse.  He then received a penis transplant but it turned out that the new penis was haunted and the ghost goes by the name “Phil”.  He was arrested at an airport for arguing with “Phil”, an argument that ended with him exposing himself and attempting to choke the life out of “Phil”.  He is now in an institution for the criminally insane.


2008: Vince Young – Was arrested for getting into a shirtless brawl in a nightclub.  What the police report didn’t tell you was that he was compelled by a little green alien who lives on his shoulder and that a full body cavity search revealed that he was being used as a drug mule by interstellar heroin dealers.  Truly, a cursed man.  Plus, he sucks.


2009: Brett Favre – Ha ha ha ha!  Okay fine, was publicly embarrassed when it was revealed that the ol’ Gunslinger sent pictures of his lil’ Cumslinger (lil’ being the operative word there) to a repulsed female employee of the Jets.  Now he spends his days (presumably) hanging out shirtless with Matthew McConaughey and gibbering like a pilled-up Boomhauer at teenage girls in front of the local arcade and they all laugh at him and refer to him as “the creepy old dude in the Crocs.”  Basically, he’s a sadder, creepier version of Wooderson from Dazed and Confused.


2010: Troy Polamalu – Was mistaken as a woman by a Saudi Sheik who kidnapped him and kept him as a member of his harem for three months during the lockout.  Unfortunately for Troy, it took so long to discover the mistake because it turned out that the Sheik never actually attempted intercourse with Troy.  Instead, the Sheik had a hair fetish and would spend hours at a time just brushing Troy’s hair and braiding it, which wouldn’t be so bad except the Sheik was naked the whole time and would furiously masturbate, ejaculating into Troy’s hair when he was finished and let me tell you something, semen is not a natural conditioner.  Don’t make the same mistake I, er, uh, I mean Troy, yeah . . . Troy did. 


2011: Drew Brees – Kicked in the head by a goat but to be fair, Drew deserved it after insulting the goat’s wife.  The man has no manners.  To top it all off, the goat then ratted out the entire Saints organization to Roger Goodell, who, unbeknownst to Drew, is the goat’s brother-in-law.  Then again, how was Drew Brees supposed to know that Roger Goodell was a goat-fucker?  Sure, sure, all the evidence is there but Drew Brees is just a slow Indiana farmboy.  He’s functionally illiterate for Stafford’s sake.  (See what I did there?)  He’s lucky he can even tie his own shoes.  Plus, he was marked as a demon at birth.


2012: Peyton Hillis – Broke his leg after a raucous celebration in his honor by the Ku Klux Klan.  Also, he was forced to live in Cleveland for a couple of years.  Terrible, terrible . . .


And let’s not forget the original Madden Cover Model, the man himself, John Madden, who hogged the cover for a full decade.  It’s been said that he is actually the originator of the Madden Curse, a powerful wizard posing as a bumbling old man who decreed that all those who would dare steal his spotlight would have their lives ruined.  Others say that all you need to do is look at the poor old fart himself to know that the Madden Curse is real.  Still others say that John Madden is actually the unwilling human vessel of an evil spirit, one which has corrupted both his flesh and his mind, leaving him the fat, gibbering mess we know and pity today.  But what no one knows is that John Madden is actually just the puppet for that evil mastermind, Pat Summerall.  Summerall poses as an old drunk but in reality he is a ninth level Nazi Warlock.  He lives in a secret compartment on Madden’s bus and periodically emerges, naked and enraged, to whip a cowering and whimpering Madden with his own belt.  That’s how he keeps him in line, you see.  He then forces Madden to tap into his vast evil and then channel that evil into the photograph of the latest Madden Cover Model, all of whom are personally selected by Summerall himself as part of a vast and confusing Eugenics experiment gone totally awry.  He is insane and extremely dangerous.  It’s even been said that The Fuhrer himself was terrified of his madness and ate a gun just to escape him and his deadly power.  There are rumors that Al Michaels tried to stop Summerall once in the midst of one of his rage fueled beatings of Madden, but Summerall just shrugged Michaels aside like an old coat and then made Al suck his . . . okay, okay, perhaps I am getting a touch carried away here, but as a species we can’t afford to pretend anymore.  Our very humanity is at stake.  Pat Summerall must be stopped.


Well, there you have it, dudes and lady dudes.  Some pretty power evidence to be sure.  Obviously there is something to this Madden Curse, something terrible and evil and to ignore it is to ignore your responsibility to the human race.  Sure, some would say all this is coincidence and only a great fool would believe in such things but, in the end, here’s the thing . . . who cares?  For the night is dark and full of terrors and did you see that lady on Game of Thrones birth that fuckin’ shadow?  That was wild.  I bet she understands a thing or two about curses and . . .




Thursday, August 18, 2011

NFL ACLB PREVIEWS - #27: CLEVELAND BROWNS


PERTINENT DATA: 5-11 last year; 80 to 1 odds to win Super Bowl XLVI.
BEST CASE SCENARIO (Raven): Mike Holmgren has been in charge for a couple of years now, put the pieces in place, and the Ol' Gunslinger himself was helping Colt McCoy learn the West Coast offense in the locked out offseason (which is kinda funny in itself, the Ol' Gunslinger & Colt McCoy... sounds like a comic book from the '70s), so things should taking shape. The Browns were not the most heavily stocked refrigerator in the league when Holmgren took over GM duties, but he's done what he could, mostly through the draft, limiting the waste of money on free agents, which is never a good way to build a shitty team into a good one. The fool's gold of Brady Quinn is cleared the fuck out of town, and the Baby Belichick Eric Mangini is gone as well. It could be a decent year for the Browns, meaning things could start taking shape. They are still a few years away, if things go well, before they can start trying to legitimately compete with the Steelers and Ravens at the top of the division, but really, there's no reason the Browns should not easily leave behind their cross-state rivals this year, and let the Bengals be the Bengals by themselves, while the Browns move back to a steady 8-8 mediocre team looking to get a few final pieces together to start contending for wild cards in the future.
WORST CASE SCENARIO (Neil): The worst case scenario for the Browns is what it always is: hilarious ineptitude, a legion of depressed and angry fans, a quarterback getting run out of town like he just got caught fucking the mayor’s dog and a bunch of whiney woe as me shit about the Ravens and Steelers, but especially the Ravens. There is a good chance that all of the above ends up happening and then when it’s all over, Bernie Kosar will stagger onto the field, senseless, slurring like the broken buffoon that he is, he’ll piss himself and have to be put to sleep like a common mongrel. This might actually all happen this season. In terms of the standings, this translates into 3-13 or 4-12 which I don’t necessarily see happening but it might and that’s why it’s the worst case scenario, and because it is Cleveland, I figure that has about a 75% better chance of happening than it normally would.
PLAYER TO PULL FOR (Raven): I have run a fantastical football league the past four or five years which goes heavy on defense and special teams, because fuck offense. I am a smashmouth dude, meaning I like to smash things, especially in the mouth, because nothing makes you feel better about hitting another dude than seeing his tooth broke and mouth all bloody. It gets your inner-Bob Probert fired up, ya know? (Haha, Robert Probert... man, no wonder that dude was such a degenerate.) Because of this, I have enjoyed the services of one Joshua Cribbs for a couple years now, because he's one of the best return men in the game, everything Devin Hester is sometimes, Cribbs is all the time. Plus, he looks gangsta as fuck, with some long ass cornrows, and a shit-eating smile that says he probably has a girlfriend in every NFL city, plus six or seven across the state of Ohio, but he's smart enough to not get but his favorite one or two of them pregnant. That's a lost skill amongst many sexually-oriented athletes, getting too many different women pregnant all over the place. I understand not wanting to wear condoms ever, because they're lame, and honestly I haven't worn one in over fifteen years I don't think. (My rhythm has failed me five times, in case you were wondering, resulting in three kids, one bastard, and one abortion.) But you have to dial that down to trying to wear a condom or at least not going full bore with most women, and saving the best for like the ones you really love, which is usually only about three or four of them. Those you can get pregnant, and you won't mind so much. When you are accidentally getting random women you were just fucking pregnant, that will put a damper on your soul. But even if you get three women pregnant, intermittently, a couple times each, if you got love for them, you can make it work. And it's always nice to see how your genetics matches with various other people, but that could just be the scientist in me, always wanting to learn more about myself.
PLAYER TO HATE MOST (Neil): I don’t hate Peyton Hillis, but I do hate what he represents. He is the latest Great White Hype who people secretly uncomfortable with dark skinned warrior heroes cling to in the vain hopes that he’ll deliver them some archaic notion of white man glory. It’s embarrassing and shameful as all hell, but this is the sort of battering ram tough grit merchant who white dudes rally to whenever they get uncomfortable or scared of something like Visanthe Shiancoe’s elephant dong. I mean, there’s a reason why Peyton Hillis is on the cover of Madden this season and it’s not because he’s the best running back in the league. I mean, there couldn’t be a more obvious display of the weird and bizarre inferiority complex angry white dudes have. A Madden cover of Kunta Kinte eating a bucket of fried chicken wouldn’t be more racially charged than Peyton Hillis on the cover. (Okay, maybe it would, but still . . .) His being on the cover is a statement, a terrible and gross statement that says more than we like to about our collective comfort level when it comes to heaping adulation on black athletes. Sure, sure, some of you might be sitting there thinking that I’m overthinking this/being too sensitive/not being sensitive enough/talking out of my ass, but fuck, man, the only reason Peyton Hillis is on the cover of Madden is because he’s the first white dude in a billion years to find legitimate success as an NFL running back. Good for him. But shit, the dude didn’t even finish in the top 10 in rushing last year. Sure, he had 11 touchdowns but that was still only good for a tie for 6th best in the league. That’s a dude who should be on the cover of Madden? A running back on a 5-11 team with stats roughly akin to BenJarvus Green-Ellis? If you tried to put BenJarvus Green-Ellis on the cover of Madden, people would have you beaten on the grounds that you needed to be bled in order to release the “insane humors” from your no doubt possessed body. But everyone’s fine with Peyton Hillis being on there. Fuck, I know this is a dumb thing to get worked up about, and I’m really not. I mean, who gives a shit? But this is in the same family as that Ecksteinian Drew Stanton Grit Merchant shit that drives me absolutely nuts as a fan. I have nothing against Peyton Hillis. I hope he continues to find much success in the NFL, retires with a cheerleader wife, moves to the Florida Keys and shoots rifles at sharks and sends himself to sleep every night on a river of spiced rum. But what he represents is awful and a symptom of the shamefully latent racism which gnaws at our putrid white souls, and which manifests itself in seemingly benign but in all honestly really fucked up ways when it comes to sports. It matters almost because it doesn’t matter. People feel more comfortable letting out their own carefully hidden bigotries because they don’t think that it means anything in terms of the real world. Sports can be revelatory and this is one of the ways in which this is true. I apologize for turning this into a finger wagging, head ache inducing soliloquy but fuck it, sometimes you gotta say this shit. Fuck Peyton Hills. It’s not his fault, but I am uncomfortable with him because I know some Evangelical lunatic who belongs to a whites only country club is cheering on Peyton Hillis like mad, even if he doesn’t quite realize why and I can’t get behind that shit. I mean, I’m white, a lot of you are white, but there is white and then there is the type of pod person alien soulless white who nobody should like and/or identify with. And it’s those sorts of people who are rooting the hardest for Peyton Hillis to succeed, you know? Besides, his name is Peyton, which makes him sound like a sorority girl from Austin.
BEST NAME ON TEAM: Montario Hardesty, because it sounds like Charles Dickens was slurry-typing while drunk.
IN A PERFECT WORLD (Neil): In a perfect world, I chill the fuck out about this Peyton Hillis shit and stop behaving like such a fucking carelord. No, but really, in a perfect world, the Browns would be contracted because Cleveland sucks. It is basically Buffalo and Pittsburgh and all those other cities which are sagging and dying, filled with depressed heart attack merchants who beat their wives and sell their children for hot dog money. Now I know some of you are saying “But, but, Detroit, man.” And yeah, Detroit is maybe the king of the downtrodden and perpetually whipped cities but Detroit has soul, man. Detroit is one of the few cities in this country that is culturally unique and which means something whenever you say it. Cities like Phoenix might be bigger, but what the fuck is Phoenix? It’s just a collection of people massed together in the desert. Detroit is Detroit and all that represents. Detroit is Detroit, motherfuckers and that means something to everybody. You know I’m right. But anyway, Cleveland is a dying city. It’s most notable cultural connection is with losing. If people think anything at all when they think of Cleveland, they think that it’s a town full of sad-sack losers who once set their own river on fire with their disgusting waste and who almost single-handedly crippled one of the Great Lakes. As someone who calls the Great Lakes State home, I say fuck them. Art Modell should buy this version of the Browns and move them to Mexico City or somewhere. This is harsh and I honestly only mean, like, half of this shit. I don’t hate the Browns at all, but Cleveland is perhaps the spiritual capital of Ohio and I am bound by birth, honor and the vows I said atop one of the pillars of the Mackinac Bridge to hate Ohio and everything about it. I didn’t drink the blood of my ancestors for nothing that terrible day, you know? Fuck Ohio and fuck Drew Carey.
PROGNOSIS (Raven): Being in a division with the blood-thirsty Steelers and Ravens is not really fair, but throw into that mix a Brokeback Mountain looking motherfucker like Colt McCoy as your starting QB, and that's a recipe for getting punked out pretty easily this year. Browns will show signs of life, kind of I guess, but only go 4-12, which will make them pretty shitty in the grand scheme of the NFL, but still better than the Bengals.