Mid-season Psychic Rankings intro

What up yo? I almost had convinced myself to be all talking about the
Redskins, as I kinda tuned in a little but saw it was just dredgery,
and then two weeks later yep it was dredgery and falsetto prophets and
shit again, so I saved myself the trouble. That got me to thinking on
how soulless and killed off by a thousand psychic stab wounds that
team is now, which pointed me back to the Football Metaphysics for
Enlightened Degenerates book that I think is still in the sidebar over
to the right, of which I wrote some serious knowledge and life science
going into this season. That shit is timeless and applies to all of
eternity, even in universes that don't know American football, or
America, or earth, or humanoids even. That is what life science is.
Also of note, I had been doing research on medieval football forms
where basically two towns tried to maul each other until one had
forced an inflated pig bladder into the church bell tower of the
other, which to me is the most pure and idealist form of football
possible, and came across this quote:
"Bruised muscles and broken bones
Discordant strife and futile blows
Lamed in old age, then cripled withal
These are the beauties of football"

No doubt motherfuckers. So on this Election Day of theatrical pretend
freedoms on 2012 Roman calendar year, I'm here to tell you for the
rest of the week, I'm gonna run through the 8 divisions, and lay out
where they stand psychically. Though I have not been doing my weekly
NFLuminati updates, I've been very impressed with how right on it can
be, how weak teams do not shoot up by record, and strong teams do not
die with losses. The NFL has started to really smoke-and-mirror screen
a ton of shit to make you think more teams are worthwhile than they
really are. Shit man, even the good teams aren't that good, and
honestly, this year more than any in my recent decade of NFLuminati
studies, one conference is completely irrelevant, being the AFC. No
AFC team is going to win a Super Bowl as they are immersed in
irrelevant sub-standard competition for the most part, and would be
like a Big East team thinking it can win college football title game.
A joke.
But nonetheless, I am going to roll through where these teams are in
the official Raven Mack Armchair Linebacker Football Metaphysics
NFLuminati scale at this mid-point of the season, but more importantly
point out where these teams are psychically within their division,
starting with the lesser psychic divisions and working our way
upwards, ever upwards.
Please comment with your thoughts and input as I love interacting with
the multitude of fake programs pretending to be real people inside
this new-fangled elaborate TV program I'm watching called internets.

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.

the Universal Magnetics of Positivity (aka More Preseason Delusions)

While watching the Redskins preseason game against the Pittsburgh Steelers on Friday night, feelings of positivity started to wash over me, which made me feel strange and distrustful of my own self. First off, we all know that finding greatness in preseason games is like falling in love at a bar - it will end up ugly, one way or another. But more importantly, I know Dan Snyder and his sneaky, incompetent ways. If something is going well, it will be forced to go well faster, or a key part will be relegated to something else. It will be sabotaged. This is a psychological condition often seen where, even though there is no real reason to, a person causes themselves to fail, in the subconscious hopes of having someone call them out for failure. It's like they can't do it themselves, so they have to do it a roundabout, dramatic, idiotic way. That seems to be Snyder to me.
Friday night's game made me feel good though, not because they scored more points than the Pittsburgh Steelers, because I am no fool. This is preseason. But I felt good because players looked crisp at times (for the most part). Some things that were glaring issues last year seemed to at least be on the radar of being addressed, not ignored, or coddled with a fancy-named replacement. It looked like someone was actually building something for the first time since Joe Gibbs first came back.
Yesterday's Washington Post Sunday paper (which I buy in physical form because I grew up in a strange ancient world where you would sit around naked with a woman in bed half the day on Sunday, sharing sections, having sex, feeling the late summer breeze blow through the window just enough to barely ease the sweat comingling together on each other's skins; you can't do that with smart phones) had a long piece about how though Shanahan is happy with the direction things are going, he is not satisfied at all, and he told Snyder if he wasn't here for five years, then don't hire him.
Now, I understand probably more than most how newspapers (and websites) are used as propaganda. Governments have done it forever, and it built the Hearst empire, and even though people are like, "OMG Fox News is so full of shit!" all news has been partially full of shit forever, as it always has an angle, especially if it's motivating factor is a profit margin. So a post-preseason victory followed up by a prominent "Rah Rah Redskins masterplan" piece in the Sunday paper has Redskins front office fingerprints all over it, in my opinion. These things are cranked out by public relations trained monkeys who know exactly what particular demographics they're trying to tweak up to get the most out of their dollar, meaning turn that one dollar into the most multiple dollars. It's scientific, insidious, uses all forms of information to set the conditions, and is what it is. So I don't think this "Hey, Mike Shanahan has a plan, let me get behind this thing," line of thinking I seem to be flirting with is necessarily smart of me. But it is what is happening.
(What the fuck? I asked my boy Will if I was too jaded at this point? I mean, I don't trust anything about the Redskins now. This is what it's come to. Even when I feel good, I feel like a goddamned fool for feeling good, like there's an elaborate joke being played on me, or I'm in a looking glass and all the rest of you are watching, waiting for me to feel positive about anything regarding this team, and then you go, "Hahahaha, you dumbass, they're going 2-14!" and it happens and I cry the sad tears of a fat kid in fifth grade with no humor skills to compensate for his obesity.)
But it certainly does seem like Shanahan is building something. And this does not mean I think the Redskins could shock the world and get a wild card. This does not even mean I do not think Rex Grossman and John Beck are about the shittiest pair of QBs to have a QB battle that I've ever seen in my entire life. But it does mean that it looks like the roster from positions 11 through 55 is getting fleshed out like it hasn't been fleshed out in nearly a decade. Back-up players seem like they are more than a Sunday newspaper fluff piece about how great they might end up being. None of this has start potential, though one might sneak through, and it doesn't change the fact we are most likely the fourth-best team in the NFC East this year. But it gives me hope that someone actually knows what they are doing, long-term, beyond the next big-name press conference.
How this affects me is I am a deep student of the metaphysical sciences, and understand the psychic fabric of the NFL. I have done extensive internet nerd research into these things, and it's shocking how often the tangible data backs up these psychic theories. On top of that, I know that each individual fan's psychic abilities come into play during games, and thus the collective psychic abilities cause universal energies to swirl in more beneficial patterns. This is written off by many as simple superstition, but hey, superstitions work for a reason. Even if it is just psychological, does that make it any less real? And a major problem with the Redskins since Dan Snyder took over is not just how he damaged the team itself through bad decisions, but he damaged the fans' collective psyche as well. I am a pretty good example of that.
Think about it... If you have a Steelers game where some dude who got cut from the Redskins is about to kick a game-winning field goal, and there's millions of Steelers fans around the country who not only want the guy to make the kick, but they know in their heart of hearts and down in their casein-encrusted soul that he is most definitely going to make the kick, that Shaun Suisham kick is infinitely more likely to go through the crossbars. Thus, when you have a fanbase with a damaged psychic factor, it in turn causes the team to get less of those breaks going their way, and becomes this self-perpetuating cycle of frustration. It's a hard thing to break out of. My man Neil's writing over the years of this website is a fucking documented example of how difficult it is to transcend that cycle, and the Lions are just now getting to where he can be confident they could go 8-8. That's only fucking .500! But that's how it happens.
(I always go back to the Monday night game a few years back where Mark Brunell through two late TDs to Santana Moss to beat the Dallas Cowboys. I consciously told myself during the end of that game they were going to do it, shot it into the universe, and those magnetics swirled around the aetherworlds and came back down into Texas Stadium and that shit happened. I do not pretend that I made it happen, because I know I am but a small finite piece of these Universal Magnetics, but I know for fact that it was less likely to happen had I not told the Universe from my decrepit little living room that it was meant to happen.)
So where do I put my psychic abilities as a fan? I can't get behind Dan Snyder, and I don't want to falsely prop him up with minor successes that feeds his enormous little-dicked ego into another free agent spending frenzy next off-season, mistakenly believing he is again "only missing one more piece." There are always those with minimal talents, whether it be at music or photography or really anything, and all they need is "one more thing" to make the music they've always dreamed of, or take pictures like they claim to see in their mind's eye. But you go back to them in two years, and they're still one piece away. The piece has changed, but the personal shortcomings have night. Lack of vision never gains focus with a new, high-priced lens to filter that lack of focus through. It's still lacking focus. That's Dan Snyder, and minimal success with a hodgepodge of players will only cause him to mistakenly think he's right there all of a sudden, yet again.
But I have to care. I was a fan of this team before any of these players played for them. I was a fan of this team before Dan Snyder owned it. What should I feel good about feeling good about?
I can feel good about a pack of dudes on this team who are not shit really, no super big names, a lot of fringe guys, performing as well as they can perform. If they have heart, I will feel heartened by it. Fuck man, if they lose every game this year (which has been suggested to me as a possibility by friends), if they are right there and show signs of being an actual competing football team, I think I can handle that positively. Last year, even most of the games the Redskins were close, they were not very close in the psychic sense of the game. In fact, a number of games they won they did not really win at all, as they were very obviously devastating psychic losses. Those things damage my hope, and the collective hope of all Redskins fans.
But Friday night made me feel better. It looked like something was different, whether it was real or engineered. And though the Sunday paper fluff piece made me automatically assume it was engineered reality and I am being tricked into thinking this team has somehow turned the page towards a new leaf, I am going to momentarily remain cautiously hopeful. This year will be a good year, even if we finish last in the NFC East, even if we are lucky to win five games. If this collection of players who seem to have actual heart for something more than a Snyder signature, if they can win or lose in competitive fashion, and show compassion for this stupid fucking distracting game of professional football, then I can follow along with that. But it's not following, it's joining, because just as the collective psychic abilities of the fan can (and has) helped cause the downward spiral, it can pull it back up as well. And I guess that's why I felt so good about a stupid fucking preseason football game on Friday night, because I felt like we were moving towards actually repairing our damaged collective psyches for the first time in a long time, and I felt like there was actually compelling reason to believe that yes, this Dan Snyder is still in charge, and yes he is a Hurricane Katrina of an owner, hoping to flood us with an endless barrage of over-marketed idiocies, but we are Redskins fans, and together with a full army of players, not just four or five marketable names, we can overcome this little man, though it will take years. But when you pause for a second and look up at the clouds and try to gauge whether you're actually feeling those Universal Magnetic patterns start to shift ever so slightly back in the proper direction, it makes you feel good, and there's no scientific explanation for it, but you know in your heart, yes good lord indeed that's right motherfuckers, we shall overcome.