PERTINENT DATA: 10-6 last year, won AFC West, lost at home against Ravens in wild card round of the playoffs; 40 to 1 odds to win Super Bowl XLVI.
BEST CASE SCENARIO (Neil): I actually like what the Chiefs have put together and I think the best case scenario is something along the lines of those old Rams teams that used to run all over everybody. Yeah, yeah, that’s kind of ridiculous but this is a best case scenario, you know? It’s bound to be at least a little unrealistic. Matt Cassel proved that he wasn’t a complete fuckup last season, and he seems like a dude who can be one of those really good system quarterbacks. Like, he’d probably be a dud anywhere else, but here he knows the offense and what to do with the ball at all times which can cover up a lot of physical deficiencies. And don’t get on me about the Chiefs being in trouble without Charlie Weis running the offense because that dude is a goddamn buffoon. If anything, I think without Weis there fucking things up, the offense could be even better. Of course, it helps that the Chiefs have Jamaal Charles. He might be the most explosive player in the entire league right now. Seriously, the dude averaged, like, 6 yards a carry last season which for a running back is fucking insane. And they still have Thomas Jones there to do a lot of the grunt work and keep Charles fresh. They’ve got two big, physical receivers on the outside in Dwayne Bowe and rookie Jonathan Baldwin and they’ve got Stevie Breaston and Dexter McCluster flitting about like coked up electrons working in the slot. There are a lot of weapons on this team and if everything breaks the right way – and remember, that’s what this section is all about – the Chiefs could build on last year’s surprise season and become one of those offensive teams that gets a dumb nickname and humiliates some poor saps along the way. The defense has got some dudes too, like Tamba Hali and Eric Berry and again, if everything breaks right, the Chiefs could have the foundation for a legitimately good team. Also, it occurs to me that this is the most in these previews I’ve talked just about football and not a bunch of other weird gibberish. You’re welcome? I’m sorry? Fuck it. Vampire apes. Werewolves on acid. Uh, The Great Willie Young. There.
WORST CASE SCENARIO (Raven): Let's be realistic here... These are the Kansas City Chiefs, and although they have a long storied history as a football team, including a Super Bowl victory back in the black-and-white days, they are still a second-tier team. Sure, they have the latest "maybe it wasn't just Belichick but also this guy's influence in New England" experiment going on with the former Patriot GM Scott Pioli in charge, who brought in the fake Brad in Matt Cassell, and they ripped it up last year and somehow won the AFC West before remembering they were the Chiefs and laying an egg in the playoffs. But two things about that... First, they had like 49 first and second round picks the past half a decade or so, so they were bound to accidentally have enough talent on the field to look halfway competent. And secondly, that used up pretty much all the accumulated mojo the Chiefs might have gotten. Everything about this team, and in fact this place, is second-tier. It's a city named after the state it's not even most prominently located in. They claim barbecue as a big deal, but shit man, any true dude who eats food like a pig is gonna be all about the Carolina or Texas argument, not some fucking Kansas City barbecue. I don't even know what makes their barbecue special or different. Is it beef slabs dry rubbed with the dead dreams of wayward midwesterners? I briefly went through this shithole one time, and it just had an uneasy feel about it, not good nor bad. You can go bad places and get heavy aura vibes off it, off the adrenaline of hanging out with crackheads outside of bus stations or fucking women who have tiger tattoos right at their crotch without a condom. Kansas City is the type of place where you like go to Big Lots or remember because the public access station in the motel had a Mr. T public service announcement from 1984. And that's about it. As for this team, they will probably be as successful as "hand the ball of to Jamaal Charles" allows them to be the first half of the season. Then in the second half when everybody sees what's going on, or Charles's MCL is ripped to shreds, they'll nosedive back where they belong. (By the way, I looked up Kansas City barbecue and realized it's ribs. Look, I raise my own pigs, in fact was having to wrestle one back into his pen this afternoon with a strained gut muscle, but I did it because I am a man, and when shit has to be done, I do it. I cook all parts of my pigs, and my wife makes herbal salves from their lard. We are real people doing real things. So as a real man, let me tell you that ribs are the stupidest fucking thing, except maybe chicken wings. Both involve dudes being way too melodramatic about their process of preparation, take forever, and then the meat comes off the bone, true enough, but it kind of leaves you realizing that for every ten pounds of cooked ribs or wings you have, there's only about 9 ounces of actual meat there. That's fucking stupid, and a goddamned waste of my time. I have to be wrestling pigs and raising my half-feral children, not to mention homeschooling them and stockpiling homemade arms. I got no time to sit around while a slab of bones with slivers of meat cooks for 19 hours so that I can act like some fat fuck VFW dumbass about how good something is. You know what's good? Not being a dumbass about stupid shit like barbecuing ribs.)
PLAYER TO PULL FOR (Neil): I like Jamaal Charles. I think he’s got style. Sometimes that’s all it takes to win my heart. Now it may not be Get Coked Up And Steal A Car kind of style, which as you all know I have a certain level of admiration for, but it is an elegant I’m gonna run for 6 yards or maybe 60 and there’s nothing you can do about it kind of style that I like. He’s sort of the anti-meathead. He has a sleek, elegant grace to the way he plays that I find aesthetically pleasing. This, unfortunately, leads to him constantly being hated on by the media types who jackoff to old tapes of Vince Lombardi beating the hell out of fat linemen with a giant ham and who think the only way to win is through sumo wrestling and buff construction workers in tight pants and manly hardhats taking a jackhammer to their opponents’ genitals. But if anything, that makes me root for him even more. He didn’t ask for it, but he’s a symbol of resistance in these strange and terrible times, an elegant light in a savage and stupid wasteland and that’s why you should root for him.
PLAYER TO HATE MOST (Raven): Being this team is an odd collection of guys who were kind of good on some other team or notable in the college level or just a giant rosterfuck of better than mediocre but not quite great talent, I'm just gonna say you should hate Todd Haley, because he is one of these self-proclaimed coaching geniuses that never really earned the stripes, and gets blasted into these prominent roles, only to fail. He just looks like the type of shithead who drives a convertible all-white BMW, and hassles servers at restaurants about minor things, then demands an entree be taken off the total, all because he can. Those types of dudes are very prominent in America, and they should not be respected or indulged. They should be beaten by drunken mobs of biker types. In fact, being most normally-minded people understand basing hatred on racialisms is a played out thing, I would encourage the more violent and drunken underclass sub-cultures in our lives to hate upon douchebags like the way I'm imaging Todd Haley to be in real life, and beat and torture and drag them behind trucks in chains and hang them from trees and fight them outside of bars and restaurants and pick fights with them for no reason. It might seem crazy, and might make for some uncomfortable moments, but ultimately it will make America a better place. And what with the economy the way it is, and the end of the American Empire, even though our leaders are making one last land grab in the middle east in the hopes of staving off China's rise to prominence, we should be very concerned about what we can all do as individuals to help America return to it's rightful place, as the true awesome leader of the world, free or not, and return to our roots of being run by Viking drunkards who hate fake Gods and love hairy vaginas, not to mention earning their red wings. (You'll have to read Hunter S. Thompson's Hells Angels if you don't know what that means. Seriously, you should read that. And also The Revolt of the Cockroach People by HST's lawyer, Oscar Zeta Acosta. I'm not fucking joking either. Fuck football. Do mushrooms and read on Sundays this fall, and carve meandering poetry into rocks. That'll make America a better place too. And I can't tell you how important that should be to us all right about now.)
BEST NAME ON TEAM: Amara Kamara. Yes, that's a real dude.
IN A PERFECT WORLD (Neil): In a perfect world, everything clicks for the Chiefs and they put together one of those Cinderella seasons that sees them bumrush everyone and walk away with a Lombardi Trophy. But that’s their perfect world, not mine. In my perfect world, Jamaal Charles gets his back broken by Ndamukong Suh in Week 2 and then his head is mounted on a pike outside of the Lions locker room as a warning to anyone who tries to defy the rule of the Lord of the House of Spears. It’s a harsh lesson to be sure and I don’t exactly relish the idea of Jamaal Charles being dragged behind a chariot driven by Kyle Vanden Bosch all around Ford Field while my brethren shout obscenities and demand his blood, but these are strange and terrible times and they demand certain sacrifices. Look, it’s not up to me to decide. If I had my way, Jamaal Charles would just throw down his helmet and refuse to play for the Chiefs once he saw my man Suh and then he would immediately switch sides, but that act would also mark him as a coward and a traitor to his people and then I couldn’t respect him. No, we are enemies, for that is what the fates have ordained. So be it.
PROGNOSIS (Raven): The AFC West would be the worst division in football if there wasn't another West division in the NFC. With all the B-rate talent the Chiefs have, combined with a lackluster AFC West schedule, they should be able to stumble into a lackluster 8-8 record, and just sort of keep existing on this even plane until next season.
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