Peyton Manning, Bountygate, & the Washington Redskins

First off, apologies for the lack of anything ACLB-related, all you Armchair Linebacker backers out there. Neil is burned out and working on some sort of psychosis-induced novella about sasquatches and Russian women taking over Michigan’s upper peninsula in some sort of apocalyptic thing (set two years from now, so be forewarned bros). And I am just I, sort of sick of humanity and sharing medicine with native shaman as often as possible because I can see the underlying concentric circles that unite us all molecularly, but seem to be frizzed by the electrosmog. I also had my neighbor’s son who used to live in her basement and has a backhoe come help me bury a shipping container in the hill in my pasture, which I’ve turned into my “lab” for writing-related endeavors. Which has meant I’m writing a lot, but outside of the nefarious reach of wi-fi or internet (and I’ve purposely positioned exactly 36 orgone generators in an hexagonal shape around the top of it), so none of that is here or now.
But I have kept abreast of all the wonderfully depressing developments of the NFL’s offseason. Who the fuck even played in the Super Bowl? Oh yeah… that actually took me about 13 seconds to remember it was Eli Manning and Bradyboy Bodean.
So yes, the two big topics of discussion are the Bountygate non-scandal of a scandal, which is actually a completely different and depressing scandal than you realize, and Peyton Manning, which has only depressed me to no end because if the Dan Snyder era of football ownershipping has taught me anything, it’s that if there’s a famous name who is half-crippled and will probably be a hollow shell of his self for the rest of his professional career, Dan Snyder is going to give him an extra two years and 39 million to come play for the Redskins. Which has meant I have actually gone through the process of emailing my man Will and we both going, “Will this be the end of our fandom of Redskins?” to mocking everything ever to begrudging acceptance to where I actually had at one point convinced myself that Peyton Manning would help turn the Redskins bad luck around and we might be a viable franchise again, right away, magically. This might be because I work with a lady who is a HUGE Peyton Manning fan, and in an office full of boring squares and normals, there’s a hidden quirkiness to her, so of course I love her in the secretive ways of a mental predator.
But honestly, now that the release has happened, and the Redskins are bandied about as a possible landing spot and making a hard pitch to Peyton, I am like, “C’mon Miami! C’mon Seattle!” I’m not sure there’s been a player in the past 15 years I’ve disliked as much as Peyton Manning, and probably no one before since Deion Sanders, and to have both of them sporting the maroon and black would just further piss on the grave of my football optimism.
Oddly enough, as the questions about Peyton’s ability to come back from multiple surgeries and experimental European treatments outlawed in America, Tony Dungy and his freakishly freckled face said he thought it all started with a Redskins tandem sack of ol’ Peyton a few years back, and how Peyton was never the same. This filled me with pride, as I remember that sack, because it pumped me the fuck up at the time. That game was painful, because you just wanted to see Peyton crushed left and right, but that dude avoids sacks like a champ, there is no doubt about that. But on one play, he got stuck, and in comes Andre Carter from one end and Philip Daniels from the other, Carter goes low which crumples Peyton just in time to catch a menacing Road Warrior Hawk clothesline from Daniels right across the neckbones. Sadly Peyton jumped right back up, and called a TO, but you could see he was visibly shaken, even if he was not in a crumpled heap between the hash marks. And if that was the beginning of the end, then so be it; we could proudly say that this Redskins team put both Peyton Manning and Troy Aikman into their final football chapter. Shit man, that’s about all I can hang my hat on from the past fifteen years.
But then the Bountygate story became a media moment of politically correct shocked hysteria, and Gregg Williams was cast as the NFL’s coaching boogieman, who cared not about the honorable tradition of playing football, and was a nefarious coaching Hitler with some sort of twisted pyramid scheme that rewarded maiming innocent people. But really, it’s not like Williams or this scandal was an extraordinary situation. I would imagine a ton of guys like Jack Del Rio and Mike Singletary and Jerry Glanville and Rex Ryan and even respectable dudes like Jeff Fisher and the Harbaughs and even probably Bill Belichick did the exact same thing, in one form or another. It’s not about paralyzing people, but if you can knock them the fuck out, then so be it. That’s what football is.
Or that’s what football was, I should probably say, because ultimately this has nothing to do with player safety, nor outlaw coaches. It is entirely about liability in regards to the poor health, specifically mentally, even more specifically neurologically, of former players. You see, I am a scientist, and at an army sponsored meeting regarding new trends in battlefield neurological assessments of blasted soldiers a couple years back, I had the joy of seeing a dude who was the Pittsburgh Steelers team neurologist speak. And I won’t tie any specific claims to him directly, but the gist of what I got from it was that the concussions and mental injury players were receiving was something no one really understood completely even six or seven years ago. But the MRI data is overwhelming – dudes are fucked. Which means dudes from every previous era of football are also fucked. Which means when dudes go off on suicidal binges or become raging drug addicts or just completely wreck their own lives like a textbook post-traumatic stress disorder Vietnam vet, there is a very identifiable cause to this – constantly bumping brains with dudes. And NFL helmet technology is pretty much based on army helmets from earlier world wars, which is designed to protect the cranium from projectile impact, not cushion the skull from jarring blows. So players have been playing unprotected to an extent, even with the new rules.
Ah yes, the new rules. Many like myself and what I assume is your average ACLB reader are like, “Man, this is bullshit. What happened to football?” And you are right in the sense it is not like the football you knew. But the change in rules and Bountygate’s eventual sacrificial lamb of Gregg Williams is the beginning of this new era of football, where the NFL is looking to establish a very public record of Zero Tolerance for head blows or on-the-field trauma to players, so that it can say – legally – that as soon as it knew from a scientific view that this was an issue, it did everything in its power to stop the trauma. Thus, the NFL avoids what could possibly be a crippling class action lawsuit from previous players and their families. That is what this all boils down to. There’s no real care for the players or anything like that. So the NFL will take steps towards making the entire season more like the Pro Bowl game, which I’m sure is going to require a good amount of re-training on all our parts to try and enjoy.
The NFL does a good job of encouraging beat writers and TV NFL guys to follow the league talking points though. Imagine you are a local reporter for like the Cleveland Browns, and you want to take the stand that the new NFL is fucking pussy, but then the Browns are like, “Look, you talk that shit and we’re going to limit your access to the team,” which then causes that reporter trifles in his ability to do his job. That shit happens all the time, and is why most “news” reports are nothing more than a re-wording of press releases with some googled-up stats thrown into the mix. And because of this, I would imagine your local NFL columnist, or the dude you like on the sports TVs, has already come out and been SHOCKED and GASPED at what Gregg Williams did. He’s supposed to react that way.
Mostly I feel bad for Gregg Williams. When Joe Gibbs retired again, I was a Redskin fan who really wanted Gregg Williams to be the head coach, but Snyder went with the Jim Zorn era instead. Yeah, Gregg Williams is a nut, but when he’s your defensive coordinator and you have guys like Sean Taylor and London Fletcher just salivating to crack a skull, on every play, you know, it hypes you up. The ol’ adrenal gland gets to pumping, which is one of the great benefits of a quality football product.
A Pro Bowl-style NFL football, which we were also conditioned towards last season with the exuberant passing performances of Brady and Brees and Rodgers and others, that doesn’t exactly get your adrenal glad pumping. It’s like watching the NBA, which is unfortunate for football fans, as well as the NFL ultimately, because most people don’t watch the NBA. But Williams is about to be laid out as a warning to everybody else, that this won’t be condoned by Sheriff Goodell, who really needs to not be thought of as a Sheriff so much as a dude just trying to completely recreate the backbone of an established sport. It’s wrong to me, and it’s wrong to you, but it’s what’s going to happen.
So basically forget about this being shocking, because it ain’t to anybody who, you know, has actually watched football for more than three years. And forget about thinking football is going to go back ever to that hard-nosed rugged smashmouth way. It’s over, bros. The lawyers have gotten involved and doled out the proper ass-covering warnings, and that era is as dead as Justin Strzelczyk and Rickey Watters.
But back to Peyton Manning and the Redskins… Thinking about Gregg Williams being overlooked for the head coaching job when Joe Gibbs retired, so that Snyder could hire Jim Zorn as an offensive coordinator, and then promote to head coach, that was a painful thing to endure as a Redskins fan. But I’ve come to expect that. Which is why I imagine even though it would be terrible for Peyton Manning himself to come to Washington, that’s exactly what will happen. Dan Snyder makes offers you can’t refuse. And Peyton’s doing an “aw shucks” routine like always, asking if you’re supposed to go take tours of teams or what, as he’s never done this before. That motherfucker knows the deal. He just got let go by his owner of forever, and he’s being as publicly classy as possible, to maximize his value to another team. A disgruntled crippled QB looks like the new Brett Favre, but a dude who is like, “Hey, I just want to keep playing football, and I understand why this happened but I’ll always love the fat ugly white people of Indiana!” is working the marks and being a company man so that another owner knows just how hard Peyton will work to try and be a good player, but at least be pleasing to the type of white people who pay $95 for a jersey with a number 18 on the motherfucker.
Which is funny too, because the Redskins have tried the savior routine so often it’s like the little Russian boy who cries “FIREWOLVES!” in a crowded school bus, I just don’t believe it. Just like football itself has changed forever, and will not go back, perhaps the Redskins have too. I mean, what’s the likelihood of me outliving Dan Snyder. That dude probably eats organic arugula daily, and I do peyote with drunkards. I’m doomed. So maybe it’s for the best the NFL is becoming the new NBA, because I certainly wouldn’t give a fuck about the Redskins if they were an NBA team. Maybe the Universe is doing me a favor, and maybe it’ll further do me a favor and make Peyton Manning a Redskin, to help aid and abet my break from this godawful pro football road I seem to stumbling down.

Redskins Mid-Season Progress Report

We suck. Not in a "maybe it'll get better next year" type suck but a deep down ain't got shit to look forward to suck, that makes 3-5 feel like 0-1000. However, Brian Orakpo & Ryan Kerrigan can salvage this season by crippling some motherfuckers, and having not only footballs but quarterback heads roll out of the crumple zone and then somebody comedically great like Truck Neild rumbles in to score a TD with an opposing QB's head.



Oddly enough, by getting involved in the hit Rocky McIntosh kind of fucked up that Alex Smith crushage, by interfering with the natural physics Ryan Kerrigan learned at Purdue. Maybe McIntosh should've mixed in a few science classes in between trips to the strip club with that Devin Hogshire dude or whatever who is in jail for his Fonzie scheme who used to make beats for Fat Joe.

Steelers-Dolphins Breakdown

Alllllllrighty then.....

So here we are, in the wake of Harrisongate it's easy to forget there is a game to play today. This all went down while I was moving, so I missed the chance to do a Neil style balls out rant, but here's the condensed version: the NFL has seemingly just now figured out that playing a game that sometimes causes you to take a hard shot to the dome can scramble your brain for later in life. Since the NFL has apparently decided that hitting anyone with the ball is grounds for a fine (but not necessarily a penalty), it should make for an interesting game. Of course all the talk of tackling fundamentals is bullshit, no one watches the game to see a proper wrap-up tackle. People watch football to see fools get lit the fuck up. Hell, when you see a WR break to the middle of the field, there's that part in every fan that goes "oh man, he's about to get knocked the fuck out" and to be honest you get a little disappointed if it doesn't happen.

See, there I go again, forgetting there's a game to play today. Then again, the Dolphins are probably the most forgettable team in the NFL. They haven't really been relevant much since Dan Marino retired, and they've spent most of the last few years battling Buffalo for last place in the division. After hitting rock bottom with a 1-15 season, they have actually been improving as of late. Chad Henne seems to be at least a serviceable QB, and they are primary responsible for the resurgance of the Wildcat formation in the NFL. I can only surmise one of the coaches went to a pee wee football game and saw the ball being snapped directly to a RB, and a cartoon-like light bulb went off over his head.

However all well and good that might be, they're playing the Steelers today. Not only that, their main defensive standout is pissed off over being fined. Harrison's a miserable bastard on a good day, today may end with him gnawing Chad Henne's femur at midfield. The Miami offense most likely would have had problems with the Steelers D anyway, but now it's going to be like going to the zoo and agitating the gorillas. They may look like they're just sitting there quietly, but they're plotting how to pull your stupid ass into their world and go to town on you.

It's possible that Miami might take advantage of all the controversy and sneak up on the Steelers, but even a distracted team shouldn't have too many problems here. The Dolphins just don't have enough to win, I say. An average QB, one breakout WR, and a gimmick run game everyone has figured out aren't going to cut it this week.

28-14 Steelers, and I'm only making it that close since I think Miami will probably get a garbage TD at the end of the game.

Manifest Westiny

Look, I am no naïve idiot. There is no such thing as a moral victory because ultimately morality is a made up fairy tale of emotion containment much like God and Science. So fuck feeling good about the Redskins losing to the Colts, and fuck feeling stoked about 3-3. I am a fan and will not be happy until we stomp through teams, 16-0, and concuss so many people out each and every game that the other teams actually refuse to play against us in the playoffs until the NFL changes the rules to make us not the most awesome fucking thing ever because the world is made of pussies and the Redskins are the only Real Men left. I mean, that’s the goal for all of us, isn’t it?
But yes, I did not feel so terribly depressed after the game. I did not want to kick my dog or wake up my wife to argue over something trivial. I was all like, “Well, we lost, but we were playing the cyborg hillbilly Manning, and were able to at least confuse his rapid computations enough so that he had to speed up his processing faster than ever before, and a few breaks a different way and we would have won.” I can at least feel good about this team’s overall direction psychologically, as opposed to most recent years where after games I would drive around with my .22 Magnum sitting on the passenger seat, swerving through unpainted back roads, looking for people wearing Cowboys gear to pistol whip for living in rural Virginia and being a cocksucking Cowboys fan. (Side note: I never wrote about getting in an actual fistfight a few weeks back with a construction worker whose hard hat was one of those mock football helmet styles of the Cowboys. Not much came of it really – after I hit him with a piece of pipe from behind and he didn’t go down completely, we sort of clutched and punched, which never gives you enough open space to get a good solid ‘bow in on somebody, and then his construction worker friends broke it up, but they are construction workers so nobody wanted to press charges or even call the cops, and a dent in the back of his head was probably equivalent to him tearing up my nice yellow dress shirt and me having to go back to work like that. After the Cowboys self-imploded, I never felt like writing about it.)
Anyways, when you look at the NFL standings in one of those windows with like 39 different categories of W-L stats, there is one very beautiful sight, even if it is after a 3-3 overall record and we are floating in the bottom half of the NFC East with those aforementioned cocksucking Cowboys – it is a big fat 2-0 in the divisional record column. And when one beady-eyed Michael Landon Shanahan came into D.C., the first thing he emphasized to his locker room was kicking the asses of divisional rivals first, everything else second. The very simple thinking behind this is you fuck up your rivals and punk them out, you naturally will be near the top of your division once the smoke clears, thus, you stand a good chance at the playoffs, even if you are a somewhat flawed team. This is a philosophy common amongst the West division teams and allows the Chargers to not really try too hard most of the regular season or the 49ers to be 1-5, and both still legitimate playoff threats. You do not have to beat the league, just your division.
So with this in mind, let us review the NFC East division, and where this somewhat flawed and even steven 3-3 Redskins team stacks up to them – one-on-one.
THE COWBOYS – Well, even if it was on a holding call at the end of the game, we beat them once this year, and they are fucking ridiculous. Like seriously, the wheels have completely come off that Super Bowl bandwagon. They have two penalties for excessive celebrations and only one win. They seem to be stuck in the normal Redskins mode of “we have the talent, more than anybody, so we should be winning, but I do not know why we are not, most likely it is us just not letting ourselves win because dude, we’re totally more awesome than everybody else so we can’t possibly keep losing.” It is great to see that mentality so deeply entrenched in Dallas, and also that Jerry Jones has the same risk in finding an actual philosophy-shifting head coach that Dan Snyder had – namely they are both overbearing dickheads who will interfere at any opportunity they can. So, for this year at least, I will write the Cowboys off as a non-credible threat, even though they’ve only played one division game thus far, and that was on the road.
THE EAGLES – Also lost to us, but at home, in a physical ass-kicking Meat and Potatoes game that we barely won. Still though, scoreboard you drunk fucking philly degenerates. Plus we killed Mike Vick for a few weeks, which creates more QB controversy for Chinese buffet master Andy Reid to be all, “I’m a happy man, I got 2 good quarterbacks, and my son hasn’t done crack for three months straight!” I am not afeared of this Eagles team, especially when we stole one from them on the road, although they have a grand tradition of stealing ones from us at Jack Kent Cooke Stadium as well.
THE GIANTS – This is the conundrum, because Tom Coughlin has been a practitioner of this “fuck the world, beat up your division” mentality for a number of years in NYC by way of NJ. And they haven’t had a divisional game yet this year, yet have broken off a positive 4-2 record even though they’ve played mediocrely with a few flashes of destroying motherfuckers (poor poor Jay Cutler… he finally comes back from getting brain damaged by the Giants, and has to look across the field at Laron Landry drooling down his face mumbling war chants while staring intently like a red laser sight on a sniper rifle). The true key to the Redskins season will be to use what they learned trying to keep up with the cyborg hillbilly Manning brother of last week, and use him beating them as motivation, so that when they face the non-cyborg big city hick Manning against the Giants, we can paralyze him with a couple of well-placed $25,000 fine hits on that ass. This is key. Being he does not have the cyborg implants in his brain like his older “brother,” jarring hits will, you know, jar him, which etymologically means like you put a brain in a jar and shook it around. That’s not good for brains, but it is good for defenses.
And let’s be honest, what with the hard hits being the trend of the moment in NFL babbletalk, being able to legitimately give opposing players concussions is going to be a valuable commodity on any defense. This makes Laron Landry a key player this year, although his increasing reputation will probably start to draw him unnecessary fines in the coming weeks. But the simple fact of the matter is, as hodgepodge as this Redskins team is, Mike Shanahan has already dumped a few precocious draft picks and kept on some high profile blue collar “what’s that guy doing in the NFL”ers and given this team a Punch-a-Motherfucker-in-the-Jaw mentality, just barely. It is a good start. And we are really just a couple of punches to that motherfucker named Eli Manning’s jaw from taking a shaky stance atop the NFC East. From there, you make the appropriate changes to your flawed team to maintain that spot, simply against the three divisional rivals – the cocksuckers from Dallas and the degenerate common law wifebeaters from Philadelphia and that team from New Jersey whose fanbase sweats Italian sausage grease – and then fuck the rest of the league, you’re set.
Of course, we have two roads games against the sub-par NFC North coming up, which in a righted world, we would simply chloroform and skullfuck both the Bears and the Lions, but the NFL wants parity and encourages equality so that pussy franchises are allowed to have equal footing with teams made of Real Men. So in two weeks, I may be riding around looking to drunkenly pistol whip people, yet again.

Meat and Potatoes

(all a motherfucker needs!)

There is a thing that is happening here with this 2010 Washington Redskins that has not happened for a number of years. No, I am not all geeked up on Homer McFanboy Kool-Aid thinking we are playoff bound and will return to Super Bowl glory. I mean, with the NFC the way it is, and the whole NFL really, the playoffs are not out of the question for anybody. And I guess somebody will have to back their way into a Super Bowl, but I certainly don’t see the Redskins doing it. The offense has been too hit or miss and is missing a full cast of playmakers plus is playing with like an expansion franchise’s offensive line basically, since nobody bothered to draft anybody worth a shit for the O-line the past ten years until this past spring.
But the defense has got me geeked as fuck. And not because they shut people down, because shit man, people been throwing like mad on us all year long. But when necessary, the defense shuts down the scoreboard, which is all you can really ask for. But even more awesome than that is how they’ve been crushing motherfuckers. Two weeks ago, Michael Vick got knocked the fuck out. He’s been gone ever since with his ribs separated from his heart or some bullshit. Last week, Aaron Rodgers got concussed, and they are saying it was on the last play of the game for the offense, but there was a shot earlier in the game where Rodgers looked pretty dazed and confused afterwards. With new NFL concussion rules, they have to act like they took people out immediately, but you know the deal. But that’s two weeks in a row where the opposing team’s starting QB is gone from the fucking line-up the following week. Gone.
This is Meat and Potatoes football, which is a played out cliché that people use for blue collar types, eating simple man meals and putting in work all day every day. “Meat and potatoes” became famous around Redskinsland because it is a phrase that Laron Landry pretty much says all the time. “Meat and potatoes” means just putting in work. He uses it so much that last week on Saturday night before the Packers game, a little before midnight, he posted a picture of actual meat and potatoes inside his Twitters, saying he was gonna eat and then work out. Apparently it is his custom, in the team hotel, to order a steak and fries right as room service is shutting down for the night, get his eat on, and then holmes works out late into the night, alone in his hotel room, pumping slow jams. Seriously. And this is not a euphemism for having sex. Holmes is crazy intense and pumps fucking booty-knocking music while working out like a madman in his hotel room the night before games well into the early morning.
That intensity does not diminish during games. If you have not seen the Redskins play this year yet, let me just tell you that Landry is on some next level shit. There are deep secondary headhunters who take shots a couple times a game and get a rep, but Landry is seriously lurking on every play looking to decapitate a motherfucker. I said the other day how this season for Landry is reminding me of Sean Taylor’s breakout season, but there was a difference. ST 21 seemed like a dude who could be chill off the field, at least after he had a kid with that chica caliente. But Laron… I don’t know. I seriously expect this guy to be involved in some sort of ridiculous criminal enterprise at some point. He seems slightly sociopathic, which, for me at least, in the context of football, is completely a positive.
I know in this era of brain damage concussions and IED caused problems, we are supposed to be extra cautious with shit like this. But I say fuck that. First of all, it’s football, and really this is the final era of real football. The brain damage shit is coming to light, and in twenty years time, to choose to be a football player will seem as retarded and reckless as choosing to be a boxer. But in this transitionary period where the NFL has concussion posters in every locker room, having a motherfucker on defense set the pace with a crush or be ashamed attitude, this is a great boon to our Redskins. Fuck other teams and their players. Also, earth is overloaded with the self-important and overly indignant. Perhaps what we could use is some more mentally decapacitated people to take us back to the simpler things in life. Fuck all these smart phones and bitly urls and 3g wi-fi zaps to our sub-unconscious. Every retarded and autistic and half-wit child born to our grand village is the gods saying “fuck you assholes,” nudging us back the other way.
So L-Double (all the great young players getting me hyped seem to have double initial – Laron Landry, Brandon Banks, Anthony Armstrong) brings the Meat on this Jim Haslet defense. What of the potatoes?
Potatoes are a simple tuber and a staple of many diets. Shit fills you up, so you can slice up a small chunk of pork, fill the meal out with potatoes and cabbage and a little salt, and you and the fam are set. Bake you a loaf of bread in the wood cookstove, and yall is set for three days, and feeling good enough that you make the kids sleep downstairs by the fireplace so you and the ol’ lady can try to loosen the bed ropes holding up your goose feather mattress one time. Feeling good.
Potatoes are also a slang bareknuckle fighter term – you know, those dudes who wear suits from the Goodwill but without a tie and ride freight trains and have fights for wine bottle money in abandoned stockyards – for a knock-your-ass-back punch.
In my brain, I consider the potato of this defense to be one Mr. London Fletcher, small college alumni, and unheralded master of the middle linebacker position. In the time he’s been in the NFL, defenses have become far more complicated, and the MLB position has become considered the defense’s equivalent to the QB – a highly cerebral and ultimately important roster spot to fill.
London Fletcher is not a homegrown talent, having put in work in St. Louis and Buffalo before coming here as Gregg Williams right hand in the huddle during that time. And the Gregg Williams era of Redskins defense, featuring one ST 21, gave us some swagger on that side of the ball, and had some solid moments, but never really hit the NFL big time. Once Williams got run off so that Snyderratto could fuck the team up with their Jim Zorn puppet, and Greg Blache (who was one of the Cosby Show’s 19 grandfathers), the team sort of coasted on their talent, basically playing not to fuck up too badly on defense, which of course left them fucking up. You can’t play to not lose; you gotta take that shit from somebody. Smash a motherfucker in the jawbone and make what’s his your’s, and dare him to look at you funny. That never happened with Blache, which is why a guy like Albert Haynesworth was in 7th Heaven, because he really didn’t have to do anything except be a big name who performed every now and then.
Fletcher stayed on and was fiercely loyal to Williams, and then Blache, and then Jim Haslet when he rolled into town this offseason. That’s #59 – the consummate professional football player. He understands what’s going on two steps ahead of most others – the consummate MLB. And he finally got a Pro Bowl invite last year after another dude dropped out of the game since it was only in Miami, after 12 years and leading every team he played on in tackles every year he has played in the NFL. He is where the ball goes.

(two weeks ago, bitch ass - REAL MEN FIGHT COCKS!)

Which is what makes this year’s defense seem like some next level shit for a Redskins fan. Because the headhunter Landry is commandeering tackles all over the field, playing like a London Fletcher, but with rabies. And London Fletcher has hit people a couple times very much unlike a dude with over a decade in the league. He’s looked like a tinier Ray Lewis more than a couple of times this year. Meat and Potatoes. And that shit spreads throughout the 11 on defense. Neither of these high profile dudes were involved in the hits that knocked out Mike Vick or Aaron Rodgers. But the defense has that mentality now. You will not score, and we will break you. We will fuck you. Shit, you are probably better than us, but we are going to cripple you and then fuck you in the end.

(last weekend, punk ass bitch looking my sister's crackhead ex-boyfriend!)

All of this has me excited as hell for this week. Sunday night football, which means I have all day to prime myself with homemade fermented beverages. I have some gruit ale I made, which is a mildly psychotropic beer bittered with herbs instead of hops made by Norwegians. It gets nasty the longer you have it, and mine has been sitting in the hall closet for close to five months now, and I’ve still got like 15 24 oz. bottles of it to kill. I have found it is not so foul-tasting at this point with a bit of ginger ale mixed in, and I plan to drink it in abundance, starting around 10 am on Sunday morning when I cook up some of my slaughtered pigs out of the front porch freezer, make a nice omelet with some eggs straight from the coop in the back yard, get myself feeling good about life. Shit man, with a night game, I’ll probably drag the radio into the back yard and stand around playing horseshoes with some homeboys during the day, try to win me a few $5 bills, and get amped and amped and amped for Colts vs. Redskins.

(welcome to D.C., fuckwad!)

Understand two things about this… First of all, it is Tuesday and I am anticipating the following weekend’s game. I do not remember this feeling as a Redskin fan from my adult years. I am excited. And secondly, I do not think the Redskins are better than the stupid Indianapolis Colts. In fact, I fully expect us to lose. But Peyton Manning has lived a relatively unblemished career so far as the injury report is concerned. He is like an Americanized European explorer, forcing his way onto the natives he conquers every week, every year, plundering defenses for whatever the fuck he wants, and getting all the glory. But he’s running into some headhunters this weekend. And it will be a night game, hopefully giving whatever faggots can afford to be in-the-stadium Redskins faithful a good chance to destroy their inhibitions with alcohol. And giving Laron Landry plenty of time to work his way through a few Sade playlists on his iPod all afternoon, getting jacked the fuck up. Precious Peyton Manning is gonna run into some motherfucker headhunters this weekend. And he may roll out with 5 TD passes and blow us out in the first half. But we will see what type of condition Peyton Manning’s condition is in come next Monday morning.