NFL 2012 Week 18 NFLuminati Index - the Wild Card

I have decided for the remainder of this season, or at least the next two weeks, to return to the traditional NFLuminati Index posts, as I don’t give a fuck to recap the successes and failures of every team right now. So this week we do the old school eight-team listings of teams who are playing this upcoming weekend, with all sorts of pertinent details and wonderful gibberish, as you should be accustomed to by now…

#1: HOUSTON TEXANS (12-4; 2nd overall, same as last week) – Yes, the Texans still sit in the 2nd position in the overall listing, despite the late season crumble. Here’s the thing: the NFL is good at setting up illusions going into the playoffs, and then those illusions are dispelled come January. Nothing for the Texans has changed since what I wrote a few weeks ago about how they own their home and try to steal the road. This weekend, just like last year, they have a chance to own their home in a playoff game. As shaky as they’ve seemed, that shouldn’t be a problem. The problem is this is not uncharted territory, as it’s exactly what happened last year. Next week, when they go to New England, that’s when they try to stake a claim at being an improved team capable of more than being a upper-mid-level success story for the playoff’s early rounds.
And actually, Matt Schaub and the Texans along with Matt Ryan with the Falcons are going to be going through very similarly scrutinized performances in the coming weeks. Both QBs and teams have shown promise, and delivered big in the regular season Ws column, but have yet to translate that into the post-season. (Don’t forget that Schaub was injured during last season’s playoff time for the Texans.) Neither team, even after a season of success, is really rolling into the playoffs light from the internal emotional pressure of living up to their own hype. That shit gets heavy in the post-season, and don’t think it’s not going to be tap-dancing all throughout Matt Schaub’s brain. The best thing for the Texans is for the Galloping Vegan Arian “Pride” Foster to run roughshod on the Cincinnati Samoans’ defense, to keep the brain tap-dancing to a quiet minimum.

#2: GREEN BAY PACKERS (11-5; 4th overall, same as last week) – Okay, my apologies, everything to this point was written previously yesterday when I don’t know, I was in a bad place where I was actually trying. Fuck trying. I have been thinking about smashmouth football and sabremetrics and shit like that overnight, because stuffing a ball down somebody’s face is very primal and basic and like crushing the spirit of others, and yet can’t be quantified really. How do you sabremetric spirit levels? But the whole concept of the West Coast offense is to slightly replace the running game, which is considered short yardage, with short passes that spread the defense out. But the concept of the running game is it gets defenses leaning in to the line so then you can go deep for the kill shot. West Coast offense is more of a constant spreading side-to-side, and less primal, in my opinion. This is why I have decided I hate the Green Bay Packers, because Aaron Rodgers does that shit more than anybody, throwing to 19 guys, no actual RB on their roster for the past five years. Fuck that. Football is about crushing the spirit of the other guy, and about getting concussions, and about dying an early death but with a memory-speckled brain that kinda remembers how awesome it all was. Football is a shitty midwestern townsfolks’ blowing off steam from the shitty routine and ultimately soul-crushing life of the local factory. Football is rusty machines and kielbasa sausages made by old white women who believe in European voodoo gods. Green Bay is not even a for-real city; it is a throwback to football teams in places like Dayton and Canton and Rockford and shitholes of today like that. If there is one place that should embrace for-real football, it should be Green Bay. Instead it is what it is, which is an abomination against the Football Gods, and a treacherous display against what it means to be American. Not bullshit politicians talking God, Guns, and Freedom America, but the for-real dirt dogs along every shitty street in every shitty city and town that exists America, where we do whatever the fuck we have to do because what the fuck else are we gonna do? Shit man, there is only survival; everything else is gay.

#3: SEATTLE SEAHAWKS (11-5; 6th overall, up one from last week) – I will be very honest as a Redskins fan, I am almost certain this football game is somehow related to the Idle No More movement, and that Beast Mode is not so much Marshawn Lynch on his own but him channeling through the power of the Seahawks tribal logo. Anyone who knows me knows lime green has been a power color for my Rojonekku styles for, well for ever. It seems no coincidence to me that the Seahawks more prominently display lime green and they become a more powerful overwhelming force. So although I really am stoked for my Redskins (and afraid to write separate articles about them here, because what if their success is due to me not writing about them? Have you thought about that?), I also am partially convinced that the psychic karma I’ve mentioned many times over the Redskins name and racialist history is going to be avenged psychically by the Seahawks, perhaps in horrible fashion. Perhaps in QB-crippling fashion. I really hate to say these things but nothing the Redskins have done, especially under George Preston Marshall, as well as Dan Snyder, who has switched racialism into classism and was offering a commemorative silver coin 20 minutes after last week’s Sunday night game, has worked to correct the mistakes made. And you don’t make complete reparations or any shit like that, but you do acknowledge wrongdoing. My previous suggestions that native shaman take over FedEx Field and channel peyote vines was overlooked. That is going to come back to haunt this weekend. And shit man, I’d love nothing more than to try and convince myself the Skins can win it, then win in Atlanta, and somehow make it to the NFC Championship game where fuck it they could get lucky and win that I guess. But there are strong psychic forces at play here. No matter how much men try to change the frequencies of the Earth through cybernetics and wireless robotics and electromagnetic tomfoolery, the Earth has its own fractal geometric rhythm that is chaotic and perfect and beautiful and ultimately always triumphant. Always triumphant. No matter how “civilized” we claim to be, our psychic umbilical cord still goes down into the dirt, into the Earth. Marshawn Lynch is not so much Beast Mode as the channel through which Beast Mode currently flows. The Seahawks have dabbled into some strong organic energy that no amount of trick scheming by coordinators is going to stop. This is some Nikolai Tesla and Wilhelm Reich level shit going on. It pains me to say it, but that’s what it is.

#4: MINNESOTA VIKINGS (10-6; 8th overall, up two from last week) – The Vikings have had a hard upswing in the overall NFLuminati Index the past two weeks, with a road win against the #2 team, and then a home win against the #4 team. Adrian Peterson was only 9 yards short of Emily Dickinson’s single-season record for quatrains. But the main thing is Christian Ponder is not fucking up. At this point of the season, the key is to have a QB that does not fuck up. (See Atlanta Falcons.) The one flaw in Aaron Rodgers over-commercialized armor is he will fuck up. Sure, he’s not The Ol’ Gunslinger just flinging ‘em down the field for whoever. Rodgers is more of a precision fuck-up, where he has large incompletion amounts as opposed to a couple of big INTs. Actually I don’t really know that. I don’t look up statistics for dumb shit my brain thinks, because my brain is attuned to my gut, which has intuition based upon a millions years of existing as well as millions and millions of microflora kicking it inside of us all. This is why too much antibiotics is stupid, literally, because it makes you stupid. But I know that other than the one Super Bowl, Aaron Rodgers hasn’t done shit, other than be in a lot of commercials. Early exit after early exit. He is prone to this shit. He makes mistakes, or else Green Bay would’ve won three Super Bowls under him. He gets slobber-knocked. It is easy to say, “Whichever QB doesn’t fuck up will win,” because that’s the truth. And if All Day Adrian Bug-eyes is dashing fat chunks of yardage, then Ponder will have more space to not fuck up.
Speaking of Adrian Peterson, they are talking of having him return punts. Why? Why would you fuck with what got you here? You are here already. You don’t fuck with shit like that unless you are trying to get to the playoffs. Once you are there, don’t start mixing the chemistry different. Also Purple Jesus is not Adrian Peterson; it is DJ Screw. Stop saying otherwise, or the ghosts of codeine-slurred dead rappers will freestyle about rims just barely audibly at a slow speed in the background of your mind forever. Trust me.

#5: INDIANAPOLIS COLTS (11-5; 10th overall, up two from last week) – Usually in this space I make fun of the Colts, but I know a dude who has connections to Stanford football and thus is a big Andrew Luck fan. And I know that friend reads this column fairly regularly. But I have to ask you, unnamed friend, have you ever done speed in a shitty hotel room with shitty Indiana people in shitty Indiana towns before? Have you ever fallen in love with a beautiful young woman named Kaylee, who you know that’s exactly how you spell her name even though that’s a common white underclass princess name, because she had a homemade necklace with her name spelled out she wore? Did you meet her and her aunt at the karaoke in a run-down bar attached to an even more run-down hotel in Clarksville, and then spend time with them in their room along with her aunt’s man, who Kaylee also referred to as her step-daddy? Did you kind of figure Kaylee’s aunt was actually her mom most likely and not aunt, but you guys all partied, except Kaylee, who just smiled and hung out and occasionally would touch you on your hand and you’d feel everything that was so ugly inside of you turn okay? Did the step-daddy, who went by Lucky, but also was called Andrew by the aunt when she was pissed at him, talk to you constantly through a scruffle face and one half-chipped tooth about all the big plans he’d done in the past, and how each of the seven crudely tattooed horseshoes on his left forearm for each “criminal masterminding I done did”? And let me ask you this, unnamed friend, did Lucky try to steal your sock money while you were taking a shower being you hadn’t had one since the truck stop in Cincinnati a week earlier, and did a hazy altercation ensue, even though for the previous 32 hours it seemed like everything was cool with everybody, although tenuously, except for Kaylee, who was so sweet and pure? Oh man, that walk up to the package store for two more suitcases of Old Style, just you and her in the strange Indiana night around midnight. Did you carry both cases of beer and she joke and laugh that laugh of her’s, only for you guys to get back and Lucky to be raging after he and Kaylee’s aunt fought over something yet again, but the aunt left this time, probably back to the karaoke bar most likely, where that fake biker looking dude she was flirting with last night was probably at again? Did a guy named Andrew also called Lucky push Kaylee back against the door as she tried to calm everything down, and you flip out because shit man, how much abuse can you tolerate from some old ass redneck fucker? Apparently more, because did you get cut along the left shoulder with a busted double deuce Miller Genuine Draft bottle? And what the fuck man, why did Lucky think MGD was a good beer, like he was living the high life (no pun intended) in some shithole hotel room in Clarksville? Did the cops come get you both, and you had an outstanding warrant for failure to appear in Richmond court on something you didn’t even know about, so once the cops saw your broken bottle stab wounds weren’t that bad, you got sent off to the local jail, with nobody you knew to bail you out, nor anybody to care, except maybe Kaylee you wished? And there she was, standing reflected in the blue strobe lights of law enforcement, on the free side of the glass, looking at you with those unblemished eyes – such a pure soul stuck in such a foul hole… how long before it all ate her up and pissed all over that innocence? How did she even get this far with it intact? Was she an angel, if such things exist on this manmade hell of a planet we are forced to exist upon? And fucking Lucky, he was bailed out almost immediately, probably by Kaylee’s aunt, probably with your fucking sock money for traveling, and you just sat there on that concrete bench, glad you had already taken a shower back at the hotel because there seemed to be a lot of Mexican/Salvadoran gangsta wannabes with MS13 tattoos and shit in here, and you didn’t know the structure inside, or even outside in stupid fucking Indiana, so the more you could avoid the dark chaos of the showers, the better. Do you still have that scar on your left arm, in the half curve of part of a beer bottle, thick and puffy like a black fraternity scar, and does it always remind you of Indiana every time you see it, every day of your life? If so, then maybe you’d be a little rough on the Indianapolis Colts too.

#6: BALTIMORE RAVENS (10-6; 11th overall, down three from last week) – Ray Lewis is retiring, and all the sports media is like, “What a great career! What a great testament to the human spirit and pro football and blah blah blah.” You know what? Fuck Ray Lewis. Dude looks like a mongoloid and his dance is stupid. He’s supposed to be so motivational and shit like that. Frankly I’m kind of sick of the reformed gangster motivational Christ-soldier types in pro football. Reform that wack ass slide step in your dance you old caveman looking fucker.

#7: WASHINGTON REDSKINS (10-6; 13th overall, same as last week) – When this Redskins season started, I never anticipated the playoffs even as a possibility. I was high on RG3, sure, but the amount of picks given up for him was concerning, and even more so, the fact he was coming to the Redskins concerned me. Dan Snyder is a huge force of epic shittiness, and it was my fear that yes Robert Griffin III might be the best prospect to come out in a decade, but his goodness, at such a young and vulnerable age, would easily be overwhelmed by the immense darkness of Dan Snyder’s ways, which permeates everything Redskins, so much so that most of the fanbase reeks of cell phone store salesman douchiness at this point. And when they were 3-6, I was emailing my Redskins buddies, and we were wondering if they’d be able to win 5 games total. But RG3 is a far more powerful force than I realized, powered by his God worship (the kid says “prayerfully” instead of “hopefully” for fuck’s sake), as well as his incessant optimism. And shit got turned around. I put this heavily upon RG3’s psychological back, as his spirit was strong enough to at least stymie Dan Snyder’s overbearing spirit, for the time being. We will have an off-season and who knows what happens then, but for now, we are in the playoffs.
Here is the thing though: RG3 is not 100%. That was obvious last week. And yet he’s able to win games, and to motivate the team, including guys like Santana Moss who I’ve never really thought gave too much of a fuck about the idea of team. It’s been truly amazing to watch. But how long can it go? How strong is this guy’s spirit? And being he’s not a caveman spirit warrior like a Marshawn Lynch, but a Christ-fueled Spirit Warrior, how quickly will worldly sentiment turn against him? He’s on a lot of commercials, and likes God; that’s a one-two punch that will get most of our godless society hating on him right away. Shit, if he wasn’t on my team, I’d be dogging the hell out of the kid, mocking him left and right (see Andrew Luck). But that’s not the situation. He’s on my team, and we’re hosting a playoff game for the first time in forever, against the team that’s knocked us out of the playoffs the last two teams we made it in over the course of our meager recent history.
I don’t know man. I’m really stoked they made it this far, but like I said above, I fear First Nation Beast Mode energies may overwhelm the corporate Redskins. But then again maybe this young disciple of Christ, a more approachable and fun-loving and multi-cultural Tim Tebow, Robert Griffin the Third, maybe he is a force stronger than that. Perhaps this is not just native vengeance against the horrible Redskins legacy but also primitive culture doing battle with organized religion and corporate entities who In God We Trust. There’s some crazy shit in the psychic realm going on with this game, and I don’t even know what the fuck it is; I’m just along for the ride at this point.

#8: CINCINNATI BENGALS (10-6; 16th overall, up two from last week) – Perhaps you will note that the Bengals are only 16th overall in the NFLuminati Index. That is after a huge bump over the past two weeks with wins over division rivals Pittsburgh and Baltimore. But this is an NFL illusion, engineered to make things exciting. If there is one team that does not belong (other than the Redskins), it is the Bengals. They may hang tough this weekend, but if you were to ask me, “Raven Mack, I want to bet my entire life’s savings on one game this weekend, to Russian mafia guys in my area, who once murdered a cousin of mine with cheap Uzbeki explosives over something stupid like a $600 debt. Who should I bet on?” I would answer you the Texans, without thinking twice. Of course, if they lose, and you lose, it will not be me who is dead or sold into the white slave trade. But trust me, I’ve been there before (on both counts) so I can relate. Thus my pick is made with that in mind.

NFL 2011: Week 19 – Divisional Round (OT)

So I have to warn you going into this week’s NFLuminati Index of a few things… Namely, this time of year it usually becomes painfully obvious to me (as I am ultra-aware) that the NFL is fixed. And it’s important to remember that this means “engineered” typed fixed and not “choreographed” type fix. It’s hard to find smart employees nowadays, regardless of the industry, and there’s no way you could actually have like 45 dudes per football team truly understand a full script of a game, memorize, and actually perform their roles well. But you position a few key insiders into key roles and the whole affair is easily pushed in desired directions. I also feel like that the feeling of this is not so strong during the regular season because at that point, a lot of it is wide open at times. The NFL does not need to engineer every detail, or else it would become obvious. But come the playoffs, a lot of it does seem engineered, and has seemed so to me for over a decade now. Can’t help it… I’m naturally distrustful of things.
This is because most of my life has felt like me vs. the World, and it is only the past couple months that I think I’m finally ready to say the World has won. I’m whooped. My dreams are dead. There will be no great future for me; I’ll be lucky to die where I’m not too far in debt that my shitty budget life insurance policy can pay it all off. Some dude sent us a $50 donation, specifically for Neil, I used it for gas, then out of this paycheck became overwhelmed by my financial drownings, and didn’t even paypal that shit to Neil. $40 fucking dollars. (He was gonna pay to renew the domain for the year out of his donation.) What a pathetic piece of shit I am. But that’s the row I’ve hoed, and I’ve hoed it well, albeit halfheartedly at times.
And then I get mad, because I feel like I’m saying strong shit inside this interweb, maybe not on the prolific level Neil has kicked the past couple years, but fuck man, I’m nearing 40 and realizing MY DREAMS ARE FUCKING DEAD! There is work, sleep, die in my future. That’s it. All the Real Man shit that’s been written, it means nothing. But little weasel-faced halfwits get paid blogging gigs or shine from false witticism dens like Grantland, and we just sit here, nonsense gibberish which is actually perfectly sensible dissection of the world around us, yet we don’t pretend to be so holy and righteous about sports. So we don’t get shit, except older and weirder. And then one day you wake up and look in the mirror and realize the Great Dream was all a fucking lie to distract you from the day-to-day, and once the haze clears and you see the day-to-day, there’s really nothing left to do but fucking wish for a hollow point to bore a hole through your head.
This is where the NFL comes in, and most great cherished forms of mass entertainment. It was Stanislav Zizek who said, “religion is the opiate of the masses” and he was right. But of course, no one cares about religion anymore because our god is now the Shine of the New as ordained by Science & Technology. (It should be noted that I am technically a scientist by trade, and through extensive personal research will tell you that actual opiates make a much better opiate than religion.) But the great sports entertainment is a distraction/opiate for us to forget our real lives we are uncomfortable inside of on a full-time basis, and at this time of year during the playoffs, important psychological memes are driven home, whether we realize it or not. But it is happening.
I am against engineered reality. I’m against reality to be honest with you, and frankly with the depressing realization that this is it, I am against all things. Blow up the world for all I care. Unleash Cormac McCarthy’s worst nightmares as filtered through the minds of a thousand primates poisoned by Philip K. Dick-style angel dust. Let it fucking go. Which I would imagine is a popular unconscious sentiment in this world right now, festering just below the surface of the electrosmog, which just like Kesey laid out in the first few pages of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, they will cut up, this weekend, as what I heard the stupid AM radio call “the greatest football weekend of the year” goes into full press on our collective brains.
Now I’m sure many of you are like, “Man, football isn’t fixed, and this is a bunch of jibber jabber bullshit.” But be open-minded friend, and watch this weekend’s game with even just 10% of your thought stream thinking of these things. Note the strange ways things play out during the games. (And somebody paypal $50 to neilabfree at hotmail.com, to bail my shitty ass out, or else Neil can get in line with the collection agency from North Carolina and the hospital bills from last year’s Super Bowl and the creepy gypsy Jew lady who hovered back into my life to try and reclaim my trailer camper from the past this last month. I promise, I’ll square everything up when I do my taxes – the Earned Income Credit: a poor man’s grant to buy off another year of life.)
Fuck it, let’s just jump into this…
#1: GREEN BAY PACKERS (15-1, 1st overall, 10.0 rating on a 10-point scale) – A good example of how the NFL engineers things is this Giants at Packers game, which echoes the great storyline from a few years back when the Giants beat the Ol’ Gunslinger himself in Green Bay in weather so cold that your face could freeze and your nose break off which is what they used to do in the old days, Packers breaking off the noses of opposing RBs in the bottom of the pile. But this is the new NFL and what they didn’t tell you is the Frozen Tundra actually has heating coils going underneath of it, so the ground is warm and supple, like a vagina, and for as cold as it was, the players only really suffered briefly, like walking from your warmed car to the entrance to Whole Foods on a winter day.
But the Giants Super Bowl win that year, as well as the Packers win last year, as well as a lot of Super Bowl victors of recent memory, have come from the wild card ranks – the all-American tale of coming up from below championship level, working together, peaking at the right time, and being the best. That is the illusion of the American Dream right there, that patience is a virtue and you will overcome, even if not as ordained great as others around you. But last weekend, that was shot, and no wild card team won at all, so we are left with nothing but the eight division champions. I am not entirely sure what this tells us about the future direction of the American Economy, but I am sure it’s not a good psychological conditioning we are undergoing right now. The Republicans are shaving retards off the fringes of their mock nomination process, and Obama is cooking up his very own war-mongering October Surprise with Iran, and between Bush’s Executive Orders and the powers granted Obama over the past 12 years, straight dictatorship has been given legal backing for the position of President, if necessary by emergency (but who decides the emergency?), and the economy certainly still seems to be teetering not settling. I have been looking for a schoolbus on govdeals.com to buy for cheap and turn into our own Joad family jalopy. Times are weird, and uncertain.
So yeah, all home teams won last weekend – all champions. And yet somehow the storyline is being pushed that the Giants are this year’s “peaking at the right time” football team that could go into Green Bay and pull off the upset. At least that’s what the TVs and radios were saying this week. But it was only a few weeks ago that everybody was like “lolol one of them has to win I guess” about the Giants and Cowboys. And the Packers were, by far the best team this season (as displayed by my NFLuminati Index rating). There’s no one even close.
Thing is, like with the wild card teams of note in previous postseasons, the NFL does not like to crown the King come playoff time. The most notable example of this was when the otherwise perfect Patriots dropped that Super Bowl to stupid Eli Manning and the Giants. The NFL just does not make the supposed King be the actual King. It’s bad for business.
I have not decided whether this will play out like that again, or if the NFL is looking to crown Aaron Rodgers our new Brady Manning, as we don’t really have one right now. One Super Bowl championship does not do that. But supplanting the Ol’ Gunslinger, and then winning back-to-back titles? That would seal Aaron Rodgers.
I don’t know. It’s hard to say what the NFL will push upon us. But I do not see them pushing the Giants over the Packers this weekend. This was an elaborate ploy to build up an alleged top-flight opponent for the Packers to dispatch of in their opening playoff game. There will be some highlight-ready Lambeau leaps, and Eli Manning will do his frustrated Manning Family Yuckface at some point in the second half, and then we will see how the unspoken plans develop in regards to the Packers in the next week or two.
#2: NEW ENGLAND PATRIOTS (13-3, 2nd overall, 8.5 rating) – The Patriots being pushed to high heaven as the greatest thing ever, right around 9/11 when we were all encouraged to “let’s roll” against Islam and fixed rate mortgages and things like that, that was when I started to really distrust all of this NFL madness. How could a guy like Tom Brady – a failure to some degree as a collegiate starter – become the Greatest QB of Our Generation? Sketchy tuck rules and snow games and all sorts of bullshit contributed to the process.
But it’s been a few years. And one thing to remember as I talk of these shadow conspiracies is that the entire network of Illuminatis is not a well-organized, streamlined machine. It’s a great bureaucracy. This is why you can’t have every player know how things must play out. This is why local dudes joining the local Freemasons look at it as a fraternal organization where they do charity work. Because it is. So it’s hard to understand if one tentacle of the beast can easily tap into the other tentacle of the beast and be like, “You know what Brother Goodell? It’d be great if we could have people rally around the term ‘Patriot’ one more time.” The bureaucracy is large and inefficient, which ultimately will be what enables its demise.
Oddly enough though, the Patriots find themselves against Tim Tebow and the Broncos, in a rematch of a game that was a blowout a few weeks back. Tim Tebow is the Jesus freak guy – homeschooled born again super athlete. And think back on America’s historical origins, where Christ-based fringe churches were willing to float across a seemingly endless fucking ocean to find freedom from the oppression of the Catholic church. That religious freedom was mostly for religion about Christ, sure, but not the fancy gilded brutality of Catholicism. And yet you can’t throw a pissy snowball in the greater Boston metropolitan area without hitting some alleged Catholic. Tons of grandsons and daughters of immigrants who hold onto the Catholic ways, despite the torture and molestations and obvious historical hypocrisies.
And here comes the homeschooling lover of Christ spirit, who feels a Jack Chick pamphlet tucked into a phone booth is just as righteous a path to the Good Lord as fancy sacrament in satin robes. And the Brady/Belichick genius machine is certainly the football kin to the Catholic church – as respected an entity as there could be. And the ragtag Tebow option offense/wacky Bronco defense is as perfect a pagan church to that football tradition as you could conjure up. The fucking option, in the NFL. Long fucking pass plays off the option, against the vaunted Steelers defense last week. (It should be noted, for those that still refuse to believe the engineered NFl talk I talk, how the Steelers/Broncos game last week conveniently went long, into primetime, for an almost perfect at 8 pm exciting overtime finish, where Tebow dropped to a knee in celebration to his Lord. You couldn’t have timed that shit better if you taped it beforehand and edited it to fit. And of course, it was the highest rated wild card game in nearly 20 years. Which means the NFL can now ask for even higher rights fees next time around.)
I can’t cypher the tea leaves on this game. You have to figure the Brady/Belichick machine will get one last hurrah at some point, being it is the most illuminated chapter of the NFLuminati process’s recent history. I mean they fucking got the former Broncos head coach as their assistant in the past two weeks. What kind of bullshit is that? But also I did not think the NFL would push Tebow past last week, and they did. I feel like there may be more to this Tebow thing underneath the surface than meets the eye. Perhaps somewhere in Alabama they have finally bred the flawless red heifer and there are those who are ready to rebuild the Temple of the Mount in Jerusalem to usher in the final days of conflict, thus the build-up to war with Iranian Shi’ites (essentially the Catholics of Islam), and Tebow is all part of our conditioning. Divine intervention, on the football field, to a level never before known. Even wonderboy Brady was forced to bow to His Greatness. I don’t know. I feel like the Patriots will win, as they are the second best team in the NFL, despite their defense, but it really seems hard to say with this strange Tebow factor. And John Elway is no stranger to the secret halls of the NFL hierarchy. I know it will get big ratings though.
#3: NEW ORLEANS SAINTS (14-3, 3rd overall, 8.3 rating) – The Saints are this weekend’s big question mark game, as you will see from the ratings, they are the 3rd and 4th best teams in the NFL. But as we move into the real NFLuminati mode, it’s important to remember that the Saints are not a powerful franchise. In fact, they’ve been shit for most of their existence, and were only given a Super Bowl in order to regenerate the tourist economy of New Orleans. And sure, they’ve got this Madden Bowl style of new school NFLineering down pat, but they also lost to the fucking Seahawks last year. It is also of note that the two games they played on real people grass this year were two of their lowest scoring games. And the 49ers have an opportunistic defense. Actually, fuck that, as “opportunistic defense” is one of those chump ass phrases; the 49ers are an odd collection of man-beasts, the type of man-beasts that could pressure past that Saints O-line and get an INT or two to break up Brees from “Drew Brees great dude” to “Drew Brees, every now and then he has a game like this.”
The real test is the throwback 49ers offense that leans heavily on a RB. If they can beat up the Saints defense, could be a great game. But if they fall behind even slightly, you can’t do the “let’s let Frank Gore fuck shit up long enough for Alex Smith to make a couple passes” thing. It should be an interesting test, though just as the Saints are not a great NFL franchise in the powerful sense, the 49ers are one of the big ones. Shit man, Bill Walsh practically took over the NFLuminati for about 20 years. Seems to me the NFL would probably set up a Saints/Packers rematch like the opening kickoff, but they like to not do what you would expect.
#4: SAN FRANCISCO 49ERS (13-3, 4th overall, 5.9 rating) – Actually the real key, underneath the surface, to this game is how high shall the NFL push the Jim Harbaugh star? He’s gotten the background hype, ordained as the new Ditka due to his Bears ties, and ordained as the new Bill Walsh because he’s in San Francisco. Do they hotshot this asshole straight to the Lombardi Trophy stand? I don’t see that happening just yet, and the 49ers haven’t had a playoff game in a few years, so it would be completely respectable – in both an NFL is real sense as well as the engineered way – for them to lose out this game and still be strong as fuck in the psychic mind of the masses. That defense look hongry at times.
#5: BALTIMORE RAVENS (12-4, 5th overall, 5.0 rating) – The Ravens/Texans game is the worst game of the weekend, because neither is a realistic contender. The Ravens get media hype like they could be, and if every game was played in Baltimore, then they might be, because at home they are a dominant NFL team. But on the road, they are like the fifth member of the AFC West. They did win the AFC North to get a long-wanted home game, so I would imagine things go well for them this weekend. But as soon as they end up playing somewhere else, they will be exposed as the fraud that they are, even though we’ll get 39 stories about “the last run for Ray Lewis”. Man, fuck Ray Lewis and his stupid fucking pre-game dance. And don’t get that twisted, because I have never in my life ever thought negatively of a man who would wear a full length white mink coat and get caught up in a stabbing death. In fact, I generally respect people with that type of back story. But somehow Ray Lewis, despite those facts, has shown himself to be a shitty and false human being. Let’s not forget that even though he wore a full length white mink coat and was caught up in a stabbing death, he testified against those who actually done did the stabbing. And also let’s not forget that stupid pre-game dance.
Anyways, the best hope for the Ravens is that the Broncos win so Baltimore can have another home game and not be exposed until the Super Bowl.
#6: NEW YORK GIANTS (10-7, 8th overall, 3.6 rating) – Eli is the only stupid member of the stupid Manning family cluttering up my goddamn January football. I can’t stand the Manning family, ever since that dog rape story got buried by the media. Sure, Mike Vick punishes a couple of underperforming pet athletes and gets sent away to federal prison and becomes public enemy number one, to this day, for a lot of folks, who respect the lives of dogs more than humans. “I hope they throw him in a cage, like an animal, to punish him for treating dogs like animals, because that is wrong.” I always loved the hypocrisy of that thinking, that by treating animals badly you should be treated like an animal. That’s like the thirtysomething hipster’s version of the “against abortion but for the death penalty” thing Republifuck candidates do. But nobody gave a shit about an actual incident of bestiality. I don’t know; maybe we’ve progressed. I would be happy with that, because we have two pygmy goats, one white named Sugar and one brown named Nutmeg, and with their fluffy winter coat, I kinda want to fuck them sometime. They’re just so damned cute, and usually when I see cute things I want to jam my penis into it.
#7: HOUSTON TEXANS (11-6, 11th overall, 2.4 rating) – I was surprised the Texans won last weekend, not because of any rookie QB factors or none of that “let’s pretend this is real” bullshit. I just didn’t think the NFL would allow such a shoddy franchise with such shoddy unmarketable uniforms. But they did. Really, this Texans/Ravens game is gonna be an uninteresting foreplay into the late game on Sunday. I don’t even really want to talk about it, though it should be noted that despite their crappy uniforms, I am probably even more disappointed in the Ravens uniforms when they started. My birth middle name is Raven, so I expected in my honor something chill as fuck. Instead, black and purple, and yet somehow screwed up. How do you screw up the colors of malevolence and codeine cough syrup? You be from Maryland, and thus retarded, that’s how.
#8: DENVER BRONCOS (9-8, 15th overall, 1.3 rating) – I am rooting for Tebow at this point, because I am rooting for End Times. Like I said, my dreams are dead, and if my dreams must die I would hope it is at least exonerated in the cleansing chaos of an apocalypse. If my dreams are dead and there’s no divine intervention or world war or something to distract me from reality, then I will be forced to actually retrace my own mistakes. I don’t want to do that, and right now I’m having trouble finding actual opiates. I guess there’s always painkiller abuse (like always), but there’s something so blissful about the hazy dream world of smoking actual opium. And to smoke opium and watch football where some weird barely good QB somehow keeps winning? Even better. And to smoke opium and watch some weird barely good QB somehow keep on winning, over stupid Tom Brady, with shitty Phil Simms on mute and pumping DJ Burn One’s The Ashtray so goddamned loud shit is vibrating off the desk? That would be a real nice way to spend a Saturday night. But no actual opiates. Just fucking Bibles and football. Fuck this world.

And . . . Curtain

I actually sat down to do this late last night, half drunk, completely insane, filled with a whirlwind of conflicting emotions, but I was just too wrecked, both physically and spiritually, to do anything other than pound my keyboard like some pathetic half-mad ape and the final result would have no doubt resembled a cuneiform version of a succession of hoots, grunts and whistles and throughout it all there would have been a terrible eerie soundtrack playing through all of our heads, the ghostly sound of me weeping like a faithless man from far away. Terrible, terrible . . .

And so I decided to put it off until today when I would no doubt be refreshed and re-energized. Instead, I am vaguely hung-over, my eyes burn and so does my soul. There will be a time when I look back upon this season with happiness, when I give it the fond farewell it deserves, but it still hurts too much and so all I can do is try to explain what last night felt like, which is kind of impossible because in order to do so I would have to die and then be reincarnated as Edvard Munch’s “The Scream”.

The weird thing is, is that it wasn’t all horrible. Hell, the Lions actually led at the first half and I managed to tweet some gibberish about the team playing well, and even as I wrote it, a vague thought was flying through my mind which resembled something like “No, stop, you fool, you are only setting yourself up for something ridiculous.” I promptly ignored this thought because it seemed a product of old fear based thinking and then I went back to watching the game. And then the world caved in on itself, my head melted like at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark and I’m pretty sure I traveled back through time and was crucified by Pontius Pilate. Or maybe it was by David Bowie playing Pontius Pilate in The Last Temptation of Christ. Who can say?

Anyway, sacrilegious babble aside, there was still never a moment when I lost faith, which I suppose is a good sign. After all, I’ve seen too much wild and crazy shit this year to completely fold in on myself, too many comebacks, too many manic adrenaline fueled “Holy shit, I can’t believe this is happening!” moments, and so I kept my heart alive for as long as I could, a dangerous decision given that I should have disconnected and gone into protectionism mode far earlier.

After all, I was a goddamn beast last night. During gamedays, I am continually thankful that my neighbors don’t regularly call the cops on me. After all, during the course of your average game it probably sounds like I’m doing everything from strangling a goat to singing death metal – while strangling a goat. I am not what you would call a cool, calm, composed fan while the action is actually happening. So . . . yeah, following a game I always feel like I both survived a war and thankful that nobody had me arrested or committed.

But this game . . . this goddamn game . . . well, I wouldn’t be surprised if my neighbors went into hiding at some point in the second half. Shit, they’re probably all in the Witness Protection program while the feds try to build a case against me. “Yes . . . yes, sir, that’s the man . . . that’s the one I saw wrestling a bear in his living room and then eating the bear’s heart while punching a puppy. That’s him!”

At various points in that second half of woe, it probably sounded like I was wrestling with the devil while simultaneously arguing with God like we were some sort of dysfunctional couple on Cops. “You said you were gonna stop all this nonsense, God! This is fucking bullshit! Never again!” That sort of thing. If someone would have looked in the window, it probably would’ve resembled the scene from Highlander right after he chops a dude’s head off – just lightning flashing everywhere, people screaming, headless bodies flopping on the ground, swords slashing, madness, just . . . utter madness. At one point I lost my shirt. I ripped it off like some sort of degenerate street thug getting ready to throw down. A couple of hours later, I couldn’t find it. I finally found it earlier today. To be honest, I forgot I was ever wearing it. It was just a sweatshirt and I still had a tee-shirt on so it wasn’t completely absurd, but . . . okay, fine, it was but I just don’t want you to think that I was just stomping around bare-chested and violent all night long. I’m a civilized man, after all.

Not that anyone would have been able to tell last night. Had the cops actually been called, they probably would have broken down my front door and then tied me to a chair and called in an exorcist while I swore at them in tongues and spit pea soup and vile, vicious words, my head turning 180 degrees while I vowed to eat Drew Brees’ soul and to banish Aaron Berry to some dark corner of hell.

So . . . uh . . . yeah, it wasn’t the best night. I’m an emotional dude, a passionate dude, and I make a goddamn ass out of myself watching this thing we call football. I scream and I yell and I carry on like a freak. I scream “Fuck you!” at the television like a goddamn petulant child, I try to bargain with all manner of deities and I’ll even change clothes during the middle of the game because I think that it somehow makes a difference in the outcome of the game. My adrenaline spikes, I shake like a junky, I weep like a faithless man when things are going bad and I cheer like a Roman Coliseum fan hopped up on crank and blood when things are going well. I do not temper myself because this is sports fandom and sports fandom is carnal and wicked and beautiful and completely unreasonable. It exists completely within its own sphere, its own world, and this world is insane and has no laws other than the laws of the beast. It’s feral and strange and completely fucking insane and I revel in it because why not? Why not? It’s perhaps the only socially acceptable way to touch the madness, like scream therapy for the crazy.

I’ve begun to ramble and I haven’t touched on the actual events of the game nearly as much as I probably should, but I suspect this is just my way of protecting myself. After all, I don’t exactly want to relive what went on in that second half, you know? Some part of me still believes that it’s halftime and that the score is 14-10 Lions and the biggest thing I can be pissed off about is that the ref blew the whistle and caused the play to go dead after The Great Willie Young ate Drew Brees’ soul and knocked the football loose. A part of me is huddled in that memory, clinging to it like the last rickety life-raft in a storm from hell.

But I know that that second half happened and so do all of you. We all watched it and even though it caused me to descend into the heart of darkness, whispering The Horror, The Horror over and over and over again to my beleaguered soul, there was still that rational human side of me that stayed reasonable (well, sort of, anyway) and wondered over and over and over again “What if?” What if that ref hadn’t blown the whistle and the Lions were allowed to return that fumble for a touchdown and a 21-7 lead? What if the refs didn’t inexplicably spot the ball a yard further down the field thus giving the Saints a key first down following a third down pass which only netted nine yards instead of the ten they said early in the second half, which would have forced the Saints to punt? What if Eric Wright or Aaron Berry would have caught just one of the interceptions Drew Brees tossed into their arms? Just one? What if the Saints didn’t convert every single third down or all 168 (I believe this is the exact number if I remember correctly. You can trust me, I’m a professional.) 4^th down conversions? What if Sean Payton had behaved like every other caveman coach and punted on those 4^th downs? What if Titus Young wouldn’t have fallen down on that first Matthew Stafford interception, which in retrospect, was basically what ended the game? What if the Lions understood how to properly tackle? What if the refs decided to do their job and call holding on the Saints offense line just one goddamn time? What if, what if, what if, what if, aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarfggggggfhkjkhjloksiflhweygfliwefi

And so it goes. So it goes. In a sense, I suppose there’s something macabrely good about all those “what ifs”. Even being able to ask them is a sign that the Lions were at least competitive, that they showed up, that an outline exists – no matter how hazy – for a different story, a story, a world, an alternate reality in which the Lions actually won the game. But it also makes it hurt more. It makes it more frustrating. The closer you get to heaven, the more bitterly painful the flames of hell feel licking at your feet. Because I can see that alternate reality, it makes it more maddening that it never actually happened and that I am forced to live in this world with its bullshit outcomes.

After the game, as I always do, I calmed down and began to channel my wild emotions into something approaching coherence. I tried to be philosophical, to put it all in its proper perspective but to be honest, I couldn’t. I still can’t. Not really anyway. I admire everyone who was able to do an immediate about-face and remind everyone else that this has been a hell of a season, a magical season, and hey, I’m right there with you. But last night is still too fresh in my mind, in my heart, my soul, to do anything other than grieve for what could have been but isn’t because of all those goddamn “what-ifs”. Later, I am sure that I’ll be able to summon something worthwhile and human to wrap up this amazing, wild, weird, fantastic season. And we’ll all smile and laugh and say things to each other like “Man, what a ride!” and “I can’t wait ‘til next year!” Those are things that are undeniably true, and maybe a part of me is starting to crawl into that place already. I don’t know. But the majority of me is just gritting its teeth and remembering all of the things – both big and small – that happened last night and caused the Lions to lose that game and that part of me is too big and too tough to conquer right now.

I do want to say this: for as much as the Lions lost that game (well, defensively anyway), and for as much as the refs stuck their little knives in, helping to bleed us to death while Sheriff Goodell cowered in Houston, shining his tin badge with a smug smile on his liar’s face, the New Orleans Saints won that game. They were pretty damn good and so was their coach. For as much as it rankles me that Sean Payton went for the jugular every damn opportunity he got, I respect him like hell for it. That’s what a real coach does. That’s what a winner does. That’s what allows a team like the Saints to reach their full potential and I commend him for it. Besides, I take that jugular hunting as a sign of respect. He knew he had to do that in order to put the Lions away. That was his acknowledgment that the Lions are a real team, a dangerous team, a damn good team capable of beating his Saints in their own building. He played to win because he knew that playing not to lose would have just meant that his team would be walking around in a daze after the game, wondering how they got knocked out of the playoffs in the first round for the second straight season.

But enough about all that. Nobody wants to hear that shit today and I feel unpleasant even acknowledging it. Today is a day for us, a day to try to purge our own pain, not to celebrate the joys of another’s soul.

I have spent a ridiculous amount of words lately hyperbolically comparing this last month of the season to arriving in a New World or to Wild West shootouts at the OK Corral but today metaphors just seem cheap and trite. Today, the feelings are too real, too raw, too big, to explain away with some pithy imagery. There is nothing symbolic about any of this. There is just an open wound. I know I just said “No metaphors” and then with this open wound thing I, well, I just gave into the welcoming arms of metaphors, but this is just the way I think. Everything is a goddamn play, an opera of the mind, heart and soul and I don’t know what to tell you. My brain is a drama queen.

I guess the difference is that while my brain keeps searching for metaphors, for symbolism – and keeps finding it – last night’s game exists in that same brain as something separate, something that cannot be summed up with gunfight metaphors. Everything else – including my feelings (hell, especially my feelings) - is fair game for the symbolism addict that is my brain, but the game against the Saints exists as its own thing, immune to symbolism, to stories, to metaphors, to imagery. It does not fit in some grand narrative in my head. It just exists by itself, the facts cold and hard and brutal, the memories raw and untouched by anything other than themselves. I kind of just want to wrap that whole goddamn thing up in chains and dumb it to the bottom of the sea of my brain but that can’t happen and we all know it. I’ll always remember this game and I’ll always remember how much it sucked and that’s that.

I should never, ever, say that I’m not going to give into symbolism, to metaphors, because as I’ve already demonstrated, I am completely incapable of doing so. I don’t just write in metaphors, in symbols and dramatic imagery, I think that way too. This is what makes me the creative super-beast that I am, but sometimes it gets in the way. Sometimes, I just want to think in clear, concise terms and I want everything to be simple, easy, black or white, up or down. This is how I feel about last night’s game. I just want it to be a dead thing, not something that lives and blossoms and flourishes in my brain, taking untangleable (spellcheck says this isn’t a word but fuck it, I just made it a word) root, something that will pop up in epic terms later on, something that will inform the rest of my fandom, the way that the last 50 years of failure has. I desperately don’t want this to happen. I don’t want it to become some epic dragon, flying through the halls of my brain, breathing fire and laying waste to everything in its path. As you can see, it’s too late. Too late.

So, I guess all I can do now is try to put it into its proper context, to allow the metaphors and the symbols and the imagery to grow but to watch over them and make sure that they don’t grow into something too ugly or monstrous. Obviously, I’m rambling, but this is what happens when you write at the exact same time that you try to gather your thoughts, that you try to contextualize everything. In the end, I suppose I have no choice but to acknowledge this game’s place in the epic opera of my mind. It happened, but I have to remember that it is but a scene – a scene that marks the end of an act but not the whole damn opera. It is a scene that marks the end of an act, but there is more than one act in any play, in any opera, and even though this one is over, I don’t hear a fat lady singing, and even though the lights just dimmed and the singing just stopped and the curtain momentarily closed, I know that soon enough, it’s going to open up and there will be Matthew Stafford, at the height of his powers, and there will be Calvin Johnson and my God, what beauty, what a fucking show, and I can’t wait. I can’t wait.

Last night happened and there’s nothing anyone can do to change that. My mind still reels, and my heart still thunders against the ravaging horrors of it all, but it’s over now and maybe this is what people call acceptance, or at least something like it, or the faint whispers of it. I don’t know. What I do know is that as soon as I am done writing this, it will be time for my mind and my heart to move on, and I will begin watching that curtain, waiting for it to open, and I will remember that despite the way it ended, this act was a ton of fun, fucking incredible, awe inspiring really, and I’ll smile a faint, hopeful smile and I’ll remember that this opera is destined to be amazing, because it is my opera and all my operas are. And finally, I’ll remember that this is just a beginning, the birth of a star, and that soon – very soon – this star will shine and on some distant planet, someone will look up, see it shining up in the sky and they’ll wonder where this star came from, and what it actually is, and my soul will whisper that it came from my heart and what it is, is the Detroit Lions and it will never die.

NFL 2011: Week 18 – Wild Card Round (OT)

So I have not exactly been keeping up my NFLuminati duties here at the ArmChair LineBacker, but life has been a motherfucker, which ultimately is the point of the normal Illuminaut, and translates into the NFLuminaut as well – to deplete the warriors of right, in the name of profit and gold to be held out in honor of Moloch the Luciferian Owl God. Of course, I’m not helping my cause coming out the gates with conspiratorial jibber-jabber, but it applies now, more than ever during the playoffs, because the way my system is weighted, you really see the powerful and unpowerful teams, beyond record, and beyond the normal “oh they lost so I’ll move them down automatically, which is how Buffalo was a top ten team at one point even though they weren’t.” I base my rankings on science, math, and the metaphysical realities of these franchises. The metaphysical is the hardest of all to overcome, and perhaps part of the reason I have disappeared is I realize deep down inside that my beloved Redskins are not a prominent NFL franchise, in the psychic sense, and we have been pilfered down to the level of the have-nots. Not just bad for a spell but bad for an ever.
Allow me the tangent of just outright proclaiming we are doing the Lord’s work here at ACLB. Maybe not the Lord of Christian Spending or the type of Lord politicians pretend to be in service for. But we are doing the work of the Lords of Lounge, the Lords of Righteousness, and the Lords of Football in the name of the fans aka the Football Gods, who recognize the awesomeness of Keisel’s beard, of Ickey’s celebratory footwork, of Riggins’ brutishness, of Barry Sanders’ immaculate shiftiness, of Kenny Stabler being the real man’s Joe Namath, of it all man. All the things that make football something you are like FUCK YEAH about, which is not the same as the things that make you buy a new football pullover or like Drew Brees but not the Saints because of your fantasy team. We are real as fuck, and doing the real work here.
Some dude sent us $50 through the Paypal donation button on the sidebar there the other week, and from his message it seemed that it was in honor of Neil’s amazingness, which is understandable. Neil’s visions have carried the site as myself and Harpo and The Baron struggle for motivation. It has carried the site while new voices like Whiouxsie and that Jets dude that showed up briefly find their place. But we are all the same voice though.
And I was gonna pass that money along to Neil, but keep $12 to renew the site’s domain name for another year, and then I used it for gas because I had no money, and felt terrible, even though I shouldn’t, and promised Neil when I got paid today I would Paypal him $40, so he should get good and drunk for the Lions on some random dude with an email like whitetiger420 at hotmail.com or something sent us money. Which I will right after I finish channeling all this that I’ve been taking notes on scraps of medical record files at my temp job when no one is looking. I am doing my work, both for the money that the fake Gods of football and god and politics and Moloch the Owl God and all them worship, that helps me continue to sharecrop for credit systems and keep the lights on in my actual house. But I am also doing the real work of knowing, and of knowing that I don’t know, so always looking to understand things in the proper light, whether that be football or the pistons on an engine or how peyote makes you feel in 20 degree weather. We are all doing that at ACLB – the real work. On one hand, I want to condescend to you and say something like, “I hope you fucking appreciate it,” but you are already here, so you are with us, and instead I tell you I fucking appreciate you.
So let’s get to it, with these wild cards for this weekend…
#1: NEW ORLEANS SAINTS (13-3, 3rd overall, 7.6 out of 10.0 rating) – The Saints are the one team playing this weekend that should have gotten a bye. I understand the NFL’s system, and a team always fall, but this team is on a separate level than a majority of the teams playing this weekend. Drew Brees is one of the main figureheads of the new school NFL that is more like a game of Madden that the old school smashmouth style. The problem with that mode of football is, much like Madden when the game’s artificial intelligence gets all shitty on you because the 1s and 0s line up just so, it can fail you. See last year when the Saints lost, on the road granted, in the wild card round against a 7-9 Seattle Seahawks team that saw Marshawn Lynch shift into the Beast Mode that he has so adoringly ran with ever since. I do not think that will happen this weekend, as the Saints are in New Orleans, and the NFL – after Hurricane Katrina – loves nothing more than to be able to have a party in New Orleans. The NFL Gods that love merchandising and money and shit like that love Hurricane Katrina because it got all the negroes out of NO, gave the league reason to allow the Saints to win a Super Bowl to exorcise themselves of the Failure Demons on a psychic level, and run endless commercials of dogs wearing expensive Drew Brees gear wobbling down Bourbon Street. The money comes in, and the Saints help bring that money. They should win, as their offense is full of quality skill players, and if there’s one weakness to the Lions, it’s that secondary, as seen last weekend.
#2: DETROIT LIONS (10-6, 6th overall, 4.7 rating) – And yet, note the overall ranking – the Lions are the 6th best team in the NFL, according to the NFLuminati Index. That is no mistake, and is not tinkered in Neil’s favor. That is science. However, at this point in the season, science falls back to only 50% of a game’s influence when compared to psychic factors (during the season it’s usually 67% science/33% psychic factor). The Lions psychic factor is shit, and it’s an egg and chicken type situation. Are the Lions such a suffering franchise because they are held down by the NFL, or are held down by the NFL because they have always sucked? I know this much though – their ascension to more-than-respectable started last season. Remember Calvin Johnson’s non-TD catch last season? Remember the officiating during the Thanksgiving game this year? Remember how Sheriff Goodell was calling out Ndonkykong Suh before he even did anything, and helped create this “dirty player” reputation? Why was Matt Millen allowed to remain GM for so long? Were factors higher than the Lions involved? And go beyond that…Why is Detroit so neglected? Did the auto industry really get too big to fail, or did it squeeze profits from machines and leave men abandoned behind? Once the Detroit of men was replaced by machines elsewhere, did the auto industry really give a fuck about Detroit the city?
Look, I am listening to The Grapes of Wrath on book on CD in my daily commute lately, and I think that is the truest fucking American novel of forever, and applies just as much to our 2011 world, where – like I said – most of us are sharecropping for credit cards and loan payments that balance out more than what they are for, and where we, as people, may never get back on that footing we once thought was our birthright at Americans because we drank the wonderful Kool-Aid of public school political science training.
I have always been a Lions fan, even before I felt this psychic bond with Neil at this site. There are two embroidered fancy pants NFL jerseys of actual players I have – Sean Taylor and Barry Sanders. I dig this team, and dig them even more now that they are good. I liked Calvin Johnson before he was a pro, so was stoked he went to Detroit and not some godforsaken scumtown like Philadelphia or Seattle or Denver or something. And Detroit is a lost place, but that is the type of place that could spark a rebirth of a new America, where men don’t give a fuck about sharecropping for Moloch anymore, and start doing the real work that is still left to be done on this Earth. And the Lions – with what they have on their roster right fucking now – could be the perfect team to symbolize that, much like the Oakland Raiders of the 1970s. It makes me sad there’s no Al Davis type to own the team, and embrace this reality. But it won’t happen. The NFL has shown they are against them. Detroit and the Lions are not profitable, they are not able to bring money to the evil Learned Elders of Capital that the new NFL is in allegiance to. Sure, the real football Gods, they’d love this Detroit team. But it didn’t come together in an age of football as battle; it came together in the age of football as sports entertainment. It’s a fucking shame too, because I’d like to see some real fucking football and not just some QB standing back there tossing TD passes like an arena game. But I imagine that’s what we’ll be seeing, along with those dog-in-Brees commercials, and probably the Chrysler car things that act like Detroit has resurrected the auto industry, when really Chrysler is just oiling more machines with the blood of the masses, and the real men of Detroit are fighting off wolves and psychic chupacabras for the scraps of survival. I am right there with you, bros. And just like you, I will be watching free TV and praying to my Real Gods that Ndonkeykong Suh paralyzes fucking Drew Brees at some point before halftime, so that we can have a real fucking football game.
#3: PITTSBURGH STEELERS (12-4, 7th overall, 4.5 rating) – When you think of psychically powerful teams, none have more aura than the Steelers. I know NFL television heads have tried to encourage this belief that somehow the Broncos will find a way to beat the Steelers, because of Tebow and because the Steelers are injured and all. But come the fuck on… are you kidding me? This is ridiculous to even think about. And sure, someone will say, “But what of the Saints at Seahawks you spoke of last year? Is this not the same thing, with the same potential?” No, it’s not. Even in their newfound elevated state, the Saints are nowhere near the NFLuminati factor of the Steelers, though the Broncos and Seahawks are comparable. I just think the NFL would rather feed the beast of the Steelers, to appease people like me who know what football should be, because the Steelers are really the last successful example left, and they can say, “The Steelers – old school football!” and show some fat dude with no shirt on in the crowd who is drunk and obviously one of us wrestling with the same Failure Demons of Regular Real Life that we all wrestle with. The Tebow glamour sold enough jerseys and magazine covers this year, and the NFL won’t continue to push that, because the ramifications are too high. After all, why would they want to create a second-rate Kurt Warner? They already have to keep Kurt Warner on-staff at the NFL Network to keep him placated.
#4: ATLANTA FALCONS (10-6 8th overall, 3.8 rating) – The Falcons are the perfect example of the type of team that is great this weekend, but in over their heads next weekend. It’s hard to understand how you transition beyond being a playoff-potential team to being a playoff-successful team. But the Falcons don’t seem to have made that transition. Matt Ryan and Joe Flacco are both dudes who have not sold the World on their alleged awesomeness, beyond the greater metropolitan areas of where they throw footballs professionally. Same thing with Mike Smith as a head coach. And the Giants are always a psychic heavyweight, especially in January.
#5: NEW YORK GIANTS (9-7, 9th overall, 2.9 rating) – Tom Coughlin is an old cockroach of a head coach, whose teams continually barely perform up to snuff, rarely to their potential, but somehow they won the NFC Least, which makes it so the old man probably won’t get fired. And if they win the only home game that the new Whatever It’s Called Stadium in New Jersey, then they’ll never get rid of that old dude. Relatedly, you know what sucks? Michael Strahan on Fox. Also Justin Tuck is a very strangely shaped dude.
#6: HOUSTON TEXANS (10-6, 11th overall, 2.0 rating) – Someone will win this early game tomorrow afternoon, and that team will be able to pretend, “We made it to the final 8 teams of the NFL season of 2012, and therefore we are a team that is to be considered great.” But that won’t be true. The Texans very well could be that team, though their psychic factor is at 0%, and they are starting their 3rd string rookie QB. Honestly, I think this game is established for a Bengals upset, to justify Andy Dalton, and give us all a great time tripping out on the Double Beast Mode that is essentially the Bengals backfield. The Texans are a collection of great players who do great things, but aren’t really a notable team. They are NBA-mentality, but in football. Ultimately even the greedy money-hungry sports entertainment barons that now control the NFL do not respect that come January, when the cold weather sets in.
#7: DENVER BRONCOS (8-8, 17th overall, 0.6 rating) – Have you ever been to Colorado? There is not a more perfect place for a do-good Jesus freak QB to become a star. And there is not a more perfect place to have a late Sunday afternoon football game, combining the Football Gods with the Christian God, in the Rocky Mountains. The last few years of his life, most of his writing was complete crap, including his ESPN columns, but at times like this I wish Hunter S. Thompson was still alive, and I could do mushrooms with him and watch the game. Actually fuck that, I wish Oscar Zeta Acosta was still alive and I could do peyote with him somewhere in the Pacific ocean, watching the game with drunkard Samoans who all love Troy Polamalu but wonder if he ain’t a gay.
#8: CINCINNATI BENGALS (9-7, 19th overall, 0.6 rating) – The Bengals always seem to make themselves relevant every couple of years, but just barely. But look at the overall rating according to my system – 19th overall. This team has never been higher than like 13th all year long, and is the worst playoff team on a real scale. But yet they have that strong second-tier psychic factor, that goes back to Boomer Esiason and Ickey Woods and even that one run with Carson Palmer where his ligaments were sacrificed to a higher power as some sort of public penance for the Brown family to contemplate. Finally, the Brown family is back in line though, and they have been rewarded with a playoff position, and Andy Dalton and A.J. Green and that Samoan Swat Team defense, plus the aforementioned Double Beast Mode at RB, will help the Bengals play another weekend, because in the eyes of both the Football Gods as well as the Sports Entertainment Gods, the Texans are not actually a real team yet.