The Great Willie Young Beyond Thunderdome: The Battle of Oakland

After sacking Baltimore, General Jim Schwartz led his troops on an exhausting overland trek to the West Coast, marauding through the heartland, burning and pillaging as they marched, like a Napoleonic army on PCP.  They would have returned to Detroit but the General received a phone call from the Mayor informing him that agents representing the War Crimes Tribunal had gathered outside of Castle Ford, awaiting the Lion army return, where they would have arrested several of the General’s best men for crimes against humanity, especially Private Fairley for his baby eating rampage.  The General asked the Mayor what they should do and the Mayor responded “Fuck if I know, Jim.  Go fuck up Oakland.  Those motherfuckers hid a goddamn vampire named Al for over a hundred years.  ‘Bout time they get what was comin’ to them.  Oh, and thanks for the pants, Jim.  You didn’t have to mail them first class, but fuck am I glad to have ‘em.  They a little tight in the dick region, Jimmy, but hell, good luck findin’ me a pair of pants that ain’t.”  And then he laughed and hung up the phone and so the General gathered his men and set off for Oakland.

It would be a hard fight.  The General was under no delusions there.  The Kingdom of Oakland was like a scene out of Mad Max.  Its people were said by some to all be vicious hooligans and reprobates, animals really, who feasted upon the corpses of their own dead and were rumored to drink the blood of their own children and howl at the moon, drunk on their own degeneracy, monsters devoid of morality, swept up in their own profane perversion of life.  Others said they were just typical Californians. 

But the General surveyed his army and knew that if any group of scum were capable of outdoing those vile Oaklanders when it came to the dark arts it was his group of warriors.  But tragedy struck somewhere around Iowa when agents representing the War Crimes Tribunal snuck into the camp, put a black bag over Lieutenant Delmas’ head and dragged him away like an animal, accusing him of being a voodoo priest and of violating no less than 168 different international health codes for what he did with those chickens and goats.  Incensed, the men wanted to go after Delmas, rescue him and butcher the War Crimes Tribunal but the General explained that that probably wouldn’t help their cause unless, of course, the War Crimes Tribunal were fans of irony.  This was lost on most of the men and a few of them took off after Delmas anyway.  This left the Lion army shorthanded and the men were never seen again.  It is rumored that they are currently being held in a detention camp somewhere in the Alps, but until The Great Willie Young returns either with more information, the rescued men themselves or the bloody pelts of their captors, no more can be said at this time.

And so after that unfortunate bout of attrition, the men kept up their brutal march.  Private Backus was tricked in Nebraska by a cruel farmer into making love to his prize sow and the resulting paternity suit bogged the army down for another several days.  While they were stuck in that depressing land, Lord Suh went AWOL.  A price was put on his head but Corporal Gun eventually found him in a Lincoln whorehouse, and was stunned to find that Lord Suh was attending to no less than 78 bastards he had spawned during his training days in the Nebraska wasteland.  Corporal Gun was a kind man beneath his gruff surface and rather than pistol whipping Lord Suh, as was the customary punishment for desertion, he merely gave each of the bastards ten dollars each out of the army’s petty cash and then escorted Lord Suh back to camp in leg irons.  Lord Suh then broke his chains, flipped a Chevrolet and punched a farmer’s wife before Corporal Gun soothed the rogue Lord with promises of both glory and blood in the coming Oakland campaign.

Once that was all sorted out, the army crossed the Rocky Mountains, losing several more men to an unfortunate bout with cannibalism.  When informed of their horrible act, the General was dumbfounded, saying only “But it’s the middle of summer, no one was trapped . . .”  The offending men were executed and flung from the top of Pike’s Peak.  This understandably shook the army’s morale, but still they soldiered on, stopping in Denver to run whores and sack that mountain hamlet.  Sergeant Tulloch even entertained the rest of the men by throwing a saddle on a conquered John Elway and riding him up and down the city’s main street while the Denver citizens watched from their cages, weeping and begging Tulloch to spare Elway’s life.  But then Elway threw a shoe, was hobbled, and Tulloch had no choice but to slit the poor beast’s throat in front of his own children. 

Afterward, the team made a concerted effort to keep it together until they reached Oakland.  Unfortunately, several of the men were set upon by Mormon zealots in the Utah desert and were converted to the faith.  They simply could not resist the promise of countless servile wives and the General had no choice but to watch with disgust as they settled down amongst the natives.  After that, the army had to pass through Las Vegas.  Naturally, ¾ of the men were lost either to social disease or to gambling debts, and by the time the Lion army stumbled out of the desert and into California, they had been badly reduced and the remaining men were both exhausted and disillusioned.

To make matters worse, at the border the army was set upon by agents of the War Crimes Tribunal, who had finally caught up with the army thanks to its repeated forays into degeneracy.  A sort of running battle was fought between the army and the Tribunal all the way to the Oakland borders.  There, amidst heavy fighting, several of the Lion army’s most promising officers were abducted by the Tribunal, including Lord Suh, Field Marshall Snake Stafford and half of what remained of the Lion army’s defensive perimeter. 

And so it was with that as the backdrop that a ragtag group of survivors, bloodied, exhausted and half naked, marched on the walls of Oakland.  The people of Oakland met the charge by flinging their own feces and the heads of their own pets at the army.  And still the men fought on.  By now The Great Willie Young had joined the army once again after spending time in China dealing with family business.  And with him leading the charge, the men broke through the Oakland walls and began to savage the people.  Private Fairley, who had somehow avoided the War Crimes Tribunal, was last seen riding the same police horse he had stolen in Baltimore – and my God, that horse had become something more akin to some sort of bear from hell by the time they reached Oakland, and it was even said that Private Fairley fed the animal a diet consisting of baby left-overs, various prisoners from the army’s previous campaigns, steroids and the prostitutes the army had broken, oh and apples because horses love apples – marauding through the streets, skewering children and eating them raw while their mothers wept horrified tears and cried out in terror.  The General has reportedly been mulling turning Private Fairley over to the War Crimes Tribunal himself because, goddamn man, enough is enough, but until they find the degenerate, there is little he can do.  Besides, Private Fairley could implicate the General in the grisly demise of John Harbaugh and so I’m afraid that they’re all in it together, for better or worse.

And so Oakland began to burn, the same way that Baltimore had burned.  But in a cruel and shocking twist, it seemed that the people of Oakland had anticipated what was to come and had imported a secret weapon, a crackhead from Ohio named Pryor, a terrible beast who had been raised in the rust covered hellfires of that savage land.  That animal Pryor flummoxed the Lion army by slaughtering his own people and stacking their corpses in an impenetrable wall in the heart of the city.  And from atop this corpse wall, Pryor rained down his own radioactive feces on the Lion army, burning the men like acid.  The men wailed in pain and were forced to pull back while that ogre Pryor laughed and ordered more Oakland bodies stacked around the wall’s base.  The Oakland people wept with fear and recognized their terrible mistake – putting the city in the hands of an Ohio barbarian was worse than the worst fate that the Lion army could ever deal to them – and they tried to fight back by pulling the stake from the heart of the vampire Al Davis.

This bout of foolishness only worsened their plight as Vampire Al then began devouring the Oakland people who, savage as they were, were in way over their heads here.  This then pulled The Great Willie Young away from the terrible battle, as he was forced to engage Vampire Al in single combat.  With the Great One busy, the Lion army’s depleted reserves were slaughtered by Pryor’s vile counter-offensive.  Private Wendling was last seen, flesh burning from his body, trying valiantly to climb the corpse wall before Pryor unleashed a terrible weapon – a cluster bomb which when detonated released the stench of a million poop filled Ohio coolers.  The smell was overwhelming and powerful, a piece of dirty chemical warfare that would horrify even Saddam Hussein.  Both the Lion army’s reserves and the people of Oakland withered under the stink bomb, and as their flesh melted and their eyeballs burst, their brains cooked and their hearts seized, Pryor stood like a fell beast atop the corpse wall and laughed the laugh of the truly corrupt of spirit. 

Meanwhile, The Great Willie Young fought valiantly against Vampire Al Davis, slaying the beast over and over and over again.  And yet, whenever the monster fell, he would arise again and The Great Willie Young was forced to battle him all over again.  At one point, The Great One vomited when the monster’s rotting flesh peeled off of its body, revealing cankerous sores.  And yet he battled on for that is what heroes do and eventually he slay the terrible Vampire Al Davis, set the corpse of the beast on fire and then, in one last heroic act, gathered up the remains and dove deep into the Pacific Ocean, to deliver Vampire Al to the bottom of the Marianas Trench because he didn’t know what else to do and that is how they dealt with the evil robots at the end of Transformers. 

But without The Great Willie Young, the remains of the Lion army didn’t have a chance.  They fought valiantly that day and eventually Oakland and the surrounding Bay Area was left in ruins.  It is even said that the General stepped away from the battle and found Jim Harbaugh’s house and shit in his mailbox.  He knew that the battle was lost and figured, hey, why not?

With the General busy defiling the Harbaugh mailbox, Corporal Gun was left to organize the men into a fighting retreat.  The idea of surrender sickened him, especially to the likes of that Ohioan mercenary beast Pryor, but the Corporal loved his men and he couldn’t stand to hear their dying wails as they tried to climb the corpse wall only to be inundated with Pryor’s acidic hell-juices.  And so Corporal Gun ordered his men to fall back and with a grim smile, he stripped himself naked and charged the corpse wall himself.  He climbed and he climbed, gritting his teeth both against the stench and the damage wrought by Pryor’s acid-piss.  Miraculously he reached the top and there, it is said, was fought a mighty battle between good and evil.  The young Ohioan troll was said to know fear in that moment as he was beat about the head by the sword-hilt of the grizzled old Corporal.  They fought and they fought and they fought atop that terrible corpse wall as the sun sank and then rose again, although you wouldn’t be able to tell for the skies had been darkened by the smokefire and the chaos of war.  Eventually, the sky began to clear and the men pointed and cheered as The Great Willie Young appeared, blazing like a beacon fire, a bolt of heavenly lightning which vaporized all the hell-soot unleashed by Pryor.  Some even say that in that moment it was revealed that The Great Willie Young and the sun were one and the same, and that every time you enjoy a sunny day, you are merely enjoying the reflected joy of The Great Willie Young, who shines so that we may all might live, but that is still just a rumor.  Then again, the movement already has priests and a growing following and the worship of both the sun and The Great Willie Young has grown by 178% since I started writing this paragraph, so who knows?  By the time I am finished it just might be the official state religion, much like it was in Ancient Egypt.

Anyway, religious discussion aside, when The Great Willie Young appeared and the sky cleared and he shown upon the world again, it is said that Pryor burrowed beneath the corpse wall, insulating him from the light which burned his Ohioan flesh, and that he now lives, plotting his revenge from a small pocket in that very same wall, surrounded by the rotting flesh of thousands of dead Oaklanders.  Someday, the beast will have his reckoning, and someday The Great Willie Young will stand above him and pronounce his sentence as he dispenses his immortal justice but that day will have to wait, for when the General returned from defiling the Harbaugh mailbox, he wept at the state of his ragged army and issued an immediate pullback to Tijuana, where it is said the Lion army rests and whores and waits and whores and prepares and whores and plans its mighty comeback.  For there is much to be done – revenge against Pryor, a brutal battle with the War Crimes Tribunal (by the way, it is rumored that this mysterious Tribunal is none other than the creation of the Lion army’s sworn enemy, Sheriff Goodell, and that it is headed by none other than the Lizard Man Pereira, which makes his escape from the Battle of Baltimore all that more tragic.) and the upcoming campaign against the army of Buffalo, a meager force that nonetheless is said to be preparing to march on Detroit as we speak.  In fact, it is said that Mayor Bing has gone so far as to trade his new pair of pants in so he could afford to buy more minutes for his cell just so he could call the General and warn him of the new threat.  The Tragedy of the Mayor’s Pants knows no end it would seem.

And so the battle of Oakland ended in misery and heartache for all involved.  All of Northern California lies in ruins and half of the Lion army is either in custody or missing in action.  But the Lion army shall return and when it does, led by The Great Willie Young, the rest of the football world will pay for the actions of that degenerate Pryor, the War Crimes Tribunal and those tantalizing Mormons who led so many of our boys astray in the Utah desert, and when they do I shall be here, a humble chronicler of Truth, and I hope you will gather before me to hear more Tales of the great Lion Army and of The Great Willie Young.  Good night and Vaya Con Dios.

The Adventures of The Great Willie Young: The Battle of Castle Ford

 Invaders from Ohio

The chronicles will say that the Detroit Lions lost to the Cleveland Browns on the tenth of August in the Year Of Our Lord 2012 (27 AW (After Willie) ) and history will claim it as a mere footnote, a quiet preseason game, the first of the year, a mere prelude to the Lions magical Super Bowl winning season of 2012, but as usual history is full of shit (not about the Super Bowl part – hopefully anyway) and the chronicles will be written by heretics and vicious sex freaks who spend all their time furiously jacking off to grotesque porn and beating each other with wooden paddles in steamy saunas, wearing masks and worshipping goat gods with monstrous erections, and who therefore miss the subtle buds of truth which flower, fragile yet perfect, in the cracks of time.  And so, as usual, it falls upon me, a lone prophet, drowning in an ocean of the obscene and the false, to swim to the surface and deliver unto you all the Truth.  Though a delicate bud, a crushed flower smelling of regret and what might have been, a single pedal shall be plucked from the . . .

[At this point, Neil’s friends staged an intervention for him and took away his ether and urged him to get on with it.  One of them even slapped him, the vicious cur, and told him to stick to the facts and stop gibbering about flowers.  Neil wept and reached for the ether and upon finding it empty burned the building down.  After a month in rehab (don’t ask how a month went by when the game just ended or you will melt your own brain), he returned, eyes wide, shining with the Truth, and proceeded to tell this tale, the tale of how The Great Willie Young saved the city of Detroit, the state of Michigan and all of its noble inhabitants.  No . . . he found the ether again!  Goddammit, someone tackle him!  Someone . . .]

The peoples of Michigan and Ohio have always hated one another.  This is an undeniable truth.  They have fought wars and they have viciously slandered one another whenever the mood takes them, and it takes them often.  But after more than a century and a half of rancor and bloodshed, one beautiful being decided it was time for a Great Reckoning, and this . . . this is his tale.

An ugly haze drifted across Lake Erie and with it came a terrible stench.  It sickened the people of Michigan and as they vomited they wept for they knew that terrible beasts approached.  The scent was unmistakable, the smell of failure, rust and feces, the smell of Ohio.

Mayor Bing put down his crack-pipe and made a frantic phone call to his top general, a weary and underappreciated military genius, tasked with leading a group of soldiers who spent their down-time getting shitfaced and wandering in and out of the city’s jails.  This general went by the singular name Schwartz and when he received the phone call from the Mayor, he was able to interpret the Mayor’s cracked gibberish and rushed to the window of the Lake Erie fortress he was tasked with defending.  His jaw set and a grim hatred took his heart as he witnessed the boats sailing through the haze, adorned with shit-stained banners depicting scenes from Ohio’s history – a man pooping in a cooler in a parking lot, a shameful looking chap furtively masturbating in a library, and several others too grotesque to describe here.  As the ships neared, General Schwartz peered through the haze and sneered with disgust.  Already he could see the vile charlatans, the cousin fuckers and the obscene orc-like beasts that passed for women in Ohio as they cavorted and mated like beasts under the sun.  It was too late to stop them from landing but by God, General Schwartz would not let them defile the land and the people he was charged with protecting.

Immediately, the General rallied his troops, dragging some out of taverns and whorehouses.  They were half-drunk to a man and smelled of cheap sex and old blood.  The soldier named Suh was found shirtless, pissing on a corpse so badly mauled that the only thing that identified it was a cheap tin badge that read “Sheriff Goo . . .”  Schwartz wasn’t interested in Sheriff Goo though.  He knew his boys specialized in rough trade but when it came time to fight, they were always ready.  Songs would never be sung about them in church but that was appropriate in some strange and savage way because the things that they did were not fit for a house of God.  They were bedeviled men, vagrants and reprobates whose existence allowed the sheep who lived behind their walls to roam the fields safely and freely.  No, their deeds and names would never be sung about in church but this was best, for their deeds were decidedly unholy.  But when the earth finally opens up and takes us all, God and these men will have a grand reckoning and they will stand before Him and they will say “We existed because we had to.  We were the righteous sword of Truth, and we tread in the dark places your beloved would not.  We slayed the forces of evil, not for you nor for your flock but for the sheer joy of it.  We belong to neither heaven nor hell but to Detroit, to Michigan and if that is enough, then so be it.  If it is not, then so be it.”

Indeed, these men answered the General’s call, just as they always did.  They arrived missing clothes and teeth, armed with spiked clubs and their own fists.  Corporal Gun wandered shirtless amongst his pack, whipping them and calling them dogs.  They grumbled and spit at him but deep down they loved the old Corporal, who had whored and killed with the best back in his day, and they slowly all fell in line, stacked like spiked iron behind the walls of Castle Ford, waiting for the heathen hordes of Ohioans to crash against those walls.  They knew from experience that those beasts would do everything from fling shit to the bodies of their own dead – that is when they weren’t eating or fucking them – in an effort to penetrate the noble walls of Castle Ford.  They knew that some of them would lope towards the walls on all fours, like degenerate beasts and would howl and snarl as they threw their idiot bodies against the fortress, dying by the thousands while still more piled in behind them, disgusting wretches with no appreciation for life.  They knew this and yet they looked out over the approaching mass with grim smiles on their faces and bloodlust in their hearts.  Fuck Ohio.  That was their rallying cry and the men knew it well.

But on that day, the beasts from Ohio brought with them a secret weapon, a terrible weapon too awful for a mortal man to face and live to tell about it.  They brought with them great tankards filled with the sludge collected from the Cuyahoga River, and attached to these tankards were great hoses, hoses wielded by the giant ugly vicious trolls they called their cheerleaders.  These vile beasts, more animal than woman, each grabbed hold of a hose, and moving like syphilitic elephants with a bad case of the gout, they approached the walls of Castle Ford, their thick leathery hide seemingly unaffected by the arrows fired at them from the battlements high above.  And with a mighty roar they stopped, aimed their hoses and began spraying the sludge from the Cuyahoga – less water than a collection of shit, urine, spit, motor oil, acid and failure – over the walls.  The men known as Lions did their best to fight back but soon found themselves vomiting.  These were hard men, men who had seen – and done – the nastiest of nasty shit, but this was too much for even them.  To the people of Ohio, this water was as pristine as the water they drank – when they weren’t drinking each other’s semen and sweat anyway – but to the noble people of Michigan, this was worse than the worst sewage and it was only a matter of time before the Lions were reeling under the stench of the filthy Brown onslaught.

In the Ohioan camp that day was a warrior, an old man who had failed in every other endeavor in life, a villain known simply as Weeden.  He was a vicious and terrible beast, who ate the flesh of his fellow man and fornicated with livestock, which was enough to earn him adoration and worship from the vile scum with which he kept company.  Yes, the Ohioans declared such a pig their savior and carried him around on a giant litter, from which he shit and pissed all over everyone he passed.  The litter was carried by a horde of slaves harvested from the hills of Kentucky to the south, simple men who couldn’t comprehend in their hearts the sort of evil the Ohioans visited upon them when they conquered them years before.  They lived in perpetual misery and were barely human anymore.  They just trudged, day after day, year after year, carrying Weeden’s litter.  Their minds were gone and they were as oxen, beasts which Weeden violated on moonless nights, terrible nights which caused all of nature to shudder.

These slaves carried Weeden behind the trolls with their hoses filled with poop and despair and when they arrived at the walls of Castle Ford, Weeden disembarked and just for fun, cruelly ran his sword through the nearest Kentucky slave.  He then laughed as a horde of Ohioan scum descended upon the fallen body like vultures, tearing at it with their teeth.  He stared at the walls of Castle Ford and felt a sick surge of satisfaction as he listened to the cries of anguish, as the noble Lions tried to keep from drowning in the fell waters of the Cuyahoga which had poisoned their land.

Behind the walls the men reeled and General Schwartz turned to his friend, a noble warrior clothed in gold, his armor shining so brightly that even the angels averted their eyes when he strode in their presence, and he said “Willie, we need you.  We need you more than we’ve ever needed anything.  You are our only hope, our savior.”  The warrior known as Willie merely nodded, put down his fishing pole and picked up his flaming sword, a sword which was said to have been forged in heaven itself.

The gates of Castle Ford opened and Weeden laughed a monstrous laugh, horrible and profane.  The men behind the walls reeled and covered their ears.  Weeden staggered forward like an ogre from some horrifying and ugly nightmare, assuming that Castle Ford was capitulating, but he was wrong.  Oh, was he ever wrong.

For from behind those gates, when all seemed lost, strode The Great Willie Young, hero of a thousand battles, subject of a thousand epics, savior of a thousand ages.  He shone like the sun and before him the Ohioan hordes disintegrated into the vast nothingness which is at the core of their being, and he strode valiantly to Weeden and pimp slapped that motherfucker.  Weeden cried out in agony, and fell to his knees.  The Great Willie Young then took his flaming sword and lopped Weeden’s grotesque head from his body. 

And with that the Ohioans fled in fear from the battle, back to their homes where they made love to shame and to their pets and family members.  History will record that they won the battle, for Castle Ford was invaded by their foul sludge and was overrun by their beasts and hill-trolls, and it’s been estimated that it will take 50 years and hundreds of trillions of dollars just to get the place clean again, but they were driven from the land, and they will not come back again, for they now know that amongst those brave warriors known as Lions lives The Great Willie Young. 

After the battle, The Great Willie Young led the Lions to the border separating heaven from hell, also known as the Michigan/Ohio border, where he placed the head of the monster Weeden on a pike, a warning to all those fell beasts that they will get more of the same should they ever cross into his land again.  Upon mounting the head on the pike, The Great Willie Young turned to the men – and to the thousands upon thousands of grateful Michigan residents who had followed them on the journey (it’s said that the women who followed the Lions in this celebratory train walked bowlegged for months afterward and that several babies of unusual size and hue were later born, including several with a deep love for fishing) The Great Willie Young turned and he said the following:

“My people, my friends, I have journeyed far, from the ends of the earth to the ends of time.  I have fought pirates, Vikings, Nazis, hippies, Indians, old Chinese mystics, Rex Ryan and all manner of dangerous and fell beasts.  I have fished off of the shoulder of Orion, laughed in the face of a supernova and even entered a few black holes if you know what I mean, but nowhere and in no time have I ever encountered such a villainous horde of scum as these wretched Ohioans.  Let this severed head be both a warning to them and a reminder to all of you that as long as there is breath in my body, as long as the earth turns and the sun rises, as long as the stars shine and existence, uh, exists, I will be here, guarding you and haunting them, for I am The Great Willie Young and you, the people of Detroit, the citizens of Michigan, from Sturgis in the South to Copper Harbor in the great North – with the exception of those filthy Packer fans up there – are all my people and together we shall create a golden age, one in which every man has a steak on the table, a whore in the bedroom and a goddamn mustang in his garage and every woman has, well, they have me.  Sure, this all sounds like a paternalistic nightmare for you women but I am not here to argue social philosophy with you, I am simply here to guide you into a golden age of the human spirit, into the age . . . of the Lion.”

And with that the crowd roared its approval.  The men were satisfied, the women realized they had vaginas and thus all the power, and the Ohioans were left to try to refill the now dry river bed of the Cuyahoga and my god, you do not want to know what fluids they used.  But most of all, the Detroit Lions were happy because they knew that they were still the Detroit Lions, and that meant something amazing now, while the Cleveland Browns were still the Cleveland Browns and all the sorrow that that meant, and besides they still had Suh, they had Matthew Stafford (seriously, can we get him a nickname?), they had St. Calvin, they had General Schwartz and most importantly, they still had The Great Willie Young, and who gives a shit about the result of a goddamn preseason game?  In the end, I think we can all agree on one thing: fuck Ohio.  Amen.

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.