There are sixteen weeks a year when I don't have to fake it, and this is my love song to that wonderful, glorious time. It looks like we made it. It's football time. I ordered the teams by how I think they'll finish in their division. This is part one of two. Part two will be up Friday. Will the season have already started? I don't claim to be perfect...
AFC East
New England Patriots --
It's a curious thing when in the wake of the NFL Hungry-Hungry-Hippos style free agency grab, Bob Kraft, Chad Ochocinco, and 1950's French suspense film end up together in the same thought space like a hideous Venn diagram.
Undoubtedly, the Pats are the master artisans of transforming NFL garbage into a trash cathedral. New England boasts a sterling record of restoring long forgotten greatness to the NFL's most toxic damaged goods. Turn Chernobyl over to the Pats front office, and they'll have that thing Starbucks-ed and Condo-ed in three months...tops. It's a mystery how it works. I've always wondered if the Corey Dillon thing was an accident, and as a result every washed up NFL no-good-nik believes NE is a true clean slate. Maybe it's the food, a subject Randy Moss--basically an orphan who got too attached to his foster family only to realize they were there to help him, not love him. Wicked sad--is very passionate about. Maybe, and I know it's a stretch, but maybe the Pats just know what they are doing, which is why this recent turn gives me pause.
Lord knows I count the minutes to Ocho's annual melt-down-a-thon, and Albert Haynesworth is a terrible person, like...a vintage piece of shit, but even for New England, it seems like a reach. No two head cases define all that is despicable about NFL millionaire man children than this motley pair. Ocho is like a six year old who wants something so bad, when it's out of his grasp, his only emotional language is temper tantrum. I'm taking the under on week six for when the Pats have to start using a little kid leash just to keep Chad in check. Haynesworth...well I don't know if face stomper, waitress groper, road rager, and all around malingerer are the resume builders you're looking for in starting DT, but sounds like champion material to me.
These moves are eerie. They creep me out. It's as though some Pats clone wearing an evil twin beard made these acquisitions. It all makes sense, but the risk senseless. This go round, the dangerous mix of ego and ambition, the unbecoming sense of an overplayed hand, the analogy practically writes itself.
Wages of Fear is a 1953 French thriller that did white knuckle before color film. Equal parts suspense and satire, this Cluzot film tells of the lengths risk takers will go to get a job done. A fools cargo, a pass too treacherous to pass, and a crew of men cast off from the societies they've left behind. The absurd, tragic, and sublime are held in volatile balance as the best of these men is tested. The prize is worthy, but the journey is long, and a truck packed with nitroglycerin forgives few mistakes.
I won't spoil the end, but you're welcome Pats fans. Ask for the Criterion version for Christmas. It'll all make sense by then.
New York Jets --
There is no team that looks like a bona fide contender more shrouded in mystery. I mean...if the Sanchize hit the open market today and your team picked him up, how excited would you be? When your number one receiver is Santonio Holmes, and your other receiver is billed as "this year's Santonio," is that a warm fuzzy? Do you really know what was lost in the 15 million plus the Jets had to shed in salary cap? Was anyone happy when they picked up Shonn Greene in your league's fantasy draft? Are you one of Antonio Cromartie's nine kids? I think this is a ten to eleven win team, but I don't have answers to, or feel good about any of those questions. It's like a zen koan wrapped in a riddle bundled in uncertainty, and since I don't have any real predictions, I'm gonna be a dick about it and write haiku. Get it? Cause it's smart... (Oh, and on the peeps, my kigo and kireji are totally on point. Drop that shit on the boring girl you're trying to fingerblast who "loves poetry". No. Big. Deal.)
A football season in four haiku:
winters bone shattered
by bullets path cut anew
redemption revealed
the color of spring
frailest youth frocked in proud green
some roots take, many fail
unyielding, summer
immovable sun to shine
defense against dark
fall foliage bluster
heavy sounds on silent air
hide the shaking leaf
Buffalo Bills --
Chan Gailey and I have a ...complicated relationship. He, fairly or unfairly, is remembered as the man who destroyed the empire. When he was hired in Buffalo, the Siberian gulag of the NFL, Memaw King described him as "The man you hire when you're going out of business". But an Ivy League quarterback and a WR that blames dropped passes on God later, that was one watchable four win team. So yeah, the win-loss column doesn't tell many lies, but there are some finite details lost in the black and white.
Of the Bills 12 losses (oof), 6 were decided by one score or less. I don't know what it's like. I can't grasp the pain of not only waking up in Buffalo everyday, but having to go to work for Ralph Wilson, and those kids were sold out every Sunday. From the outset Gailey said he was gonna do it "his way". As much as that seems like code talk for "take a three time Super Bowl winning behemoth and destroy them," he's stayed away from toxic, over the hill free agents, focused on hard work, and with the close aid of new GM Buddy Nix to put together a provocative youth movement.
Will they be the last place team in the AFC East again? It seems as sure as a 25 point loss to the Dallas Cowboys in Super Bowl XXVII, but winter is coming, and there is talk of white walkers in the north. (#GoT) That and Miami is going to be f*cking terrible.
Miami Dolphins --
Black coffee on an empty stomach and the Fins depth chart makes for a punishment unkind to even the lowest toilet.
Booing the already fragile 4th year QB in preseason practice. Longing for the days when Chad Pennington was working on his second 'Come Back Player of the Year' award (<---- which I cannot articulate the sort of left handed compliment bukkake that sentence adds up to). Channing Crowder retires. Jason Taylor unretires. Brandon Marshall is seeking treatment for borderline personality disorder. Reggie Bush...
It's like the football version of Hurricane Andrew, just funnier...and more forgettable. Put on those #13 jerseys and dust off your favorite brown paper bags...it's football time in South Florida!
AFC North
Pittsburgh Steelers --
The fear clutched my chest as I flew awake. An icy sickness hung on my neck. As I pulled the sheets down from my mind, one thought persisted in my mind. On Madden 2012, when the Steelers are down, Troy Polamalu plays harder. A thoughtful and subtle touch that reinforces my worst fears. The Steelers are my nightmare. A black and gold phantasm impossible to kill and forever lurking in the shadows. It's not enough for them to be villains, I fear them because they are villains with a plan. For almost five uninterrupted decades, the Steelers have managed to take a band of human monsters, point them in the same direction, and win.
After garbage can, what's the second term you use to describe the Steelers? Big Ben? Even if the rape thing had never happened, I still wouldn't like that dude. I can see every kid he bullied in junior high etched into his sociopathic face. James Harrison? He is a dangerous person. All snark removed, I have grave concerns he'll take a human life someday, and it won't be on the football field. Hines Ward? Not just a cheap shot artist, but making the cheap shot an art form since 1998. Oh, and hey...Hines, Brett Keisel. One fedora per crew. And Ryan Clark? That guys Twitter feed cloggery is crime enough. These clowns are lucky they have peace warrior Polamalu there to answer the door when the cops show up.
Baltimore Ravens --
I'm a defense first guy. It's one thing to make an argument, but I admire the refutation of an argument so much more. Over the past decade, few organizations represent the power of that refutation more than the Baltimore Ravens. Not only is BMore (that's what we call it on the streets) the hardest city in the States, name another city thuggish-ruggish-bone enough to make their team name a literary reference? I was a huge fan of the New England 'To The Lighthouses', but we all knew it wouldn't stick.
The only downside of a decade of greatness is it's ten years long. Men who slugged out those ten years on the gridiron wear those battle scars. The Ravens know these consequences. The pieces of an offensive revolution appear to be in place for the sad, sad day when "All about tha U" legends Ed Reed and Ray Lewis hang up their cleats, but that makes for a critical nexus. This year is the the second of maybe four - five tops - "this year is the year" years the Ravens have left.
Joe Flacco and Ray Rice are on a team that wins. They help win games, but it's hard to say if they are good ball players. It's a vast improvement over the ghouls on Baltimore's offensive side of the ball in years past, but the D still carries the purple and black banner. It's time for the leap. I want Joe Flacco to get made fun of as much as Eli Manning when he calls himself an elite quarterback. I want Ray Rice to seem worth 25% of a fantasy team budget. If the offense can match their climb with the defense's gradual decline, this year will be magic in Baltimore. Because after that defense is gone, the only peer to the Steelers juggernaut, rebuilding a squad like that could take another decade. To find another #52 could take a franchise lifetime. I'm not even hack enough to piece it together, but some sort of terrible "Nevermore" allusion should be here. Do your own, I'll leave a space.
Cleveland Browns --
January 7th, 2010 is a sports memory which holds a place so unhappy and bizarre in my recollection, it almost breaches into the surreal. Colt McCoy was the winningest QB in all of NCAA history. He held the NCAA record for highest single season completion percentage, a galling 76.7%. The guy clutched it out in big game after big game and helmed the greatest Red River Shootout victory of my lifetime. #12 was total class. Then the big night, with the world looking in, life happened all over that kid's shoulder, and four years of impeccable work was incinerated.
Colt McCoy went to the Browns in the 3rd round with the 85th pick of the 2010 NFL draft. At the end of training camp, there was a lot of strong chatter out of Cleveland that the McCoy wasn't gonna make it in the NFL. To pile it on, there was word he might even get cut before the regular season. He made the roster as the third quarterback and when the two men before him went down to injury, Colt got out there and did what he'd always done, win football games. Two to be exact. He lost five others, and got injured in week 11 and missed three games, but as with all good 85th pick legends, there's gonna be a trial here and a tribulation there.
Like a typical University of Texas fan, I lack a little perspective, but that kid is a winner. Cleveland isn't there yet. The Browns will be the third best team in a savage division but...Peyton "White Thunder" Hillis and the small blonde kid from Texas with the football name...then I tell you they got the NFC West draw?! Shiiiiiiit. You just need the 'fidence.
Cincinnati Bengals --
There is a Japanese novel from 1962 called Woman in the Dunes. The book had a second, and far more relevant life as a Japanese art house film, but the internet cut me break. Wikipedia says it was a book first, so I don't have to lay two art house cinema references on you in one NFL blog post, and still look my self in the mirror. Everyone wins....except, of course, the Bengals.
As the story goes, there is a young entomologist sent to the dunes in search of a rare beetle. His work complete and snared in one of those missed-the-last-bus setups, he's invited by the villagers to stay the night. When bedtime arrives, they send him down a rope ladder (uhhhhh) into a pit (...wait) where a young widow (how young?) lives alone (grep).
Come morning, to your utter shock, the ladder is gone. He is sentenced to a life forever digging the hole deeper into the sand. After that, he and the widow run a pretty typical relationship model. He tries to escape. He takes her hostage. The usual stuff. On the eve he does escape, unfamiliar with the hidden dangers of the desert, he becomes trapped in quicksand. The villagers find him, and return him to the widow. At last, resigned to his fate, he accepts his life forgotten in the sand.
Thanks, Carson Palmer, it's been neat. Oh, and hey, Andy Dalton. No...you're totally good. Just go down the ladder...
AFC South
Indianapolis Colts --
Of all of the football privileges I've enjoyed over the years, there are few that I treasure more than Brady vs. Manning. When the dust settles, I believe this will be one of the signature story lines in all of NFL history. I've always been firmly in the Manning camp. Among the many reasons I love old Peyter, he's unattractive and square jawed and drawls in long southern tinged quips. A future 1st round pick, he grew up enjoying the charmed life of NFL royalty. Peyton was put on this earth to not to simply play football, but be a quarterback. Since then, 4000+ passing yards in ten of twelve NFL seasons. 4 NFL MVP's, 1 Super Bowl MVP, and the big fat ring that goes with it. The T-1800 is some sort of football robot we may never see the likes of again. That, and he's like my 4th favorite actor. (Someday I will make a version of King Lear with Archie and the three Manning boys.)
The Tom Brady story should appeal to my underdog bias. 6th round pick, all hard work and hustle. A modicum of humility coupled with gridiron excellence. His pregnant, and super hot, actress wife he dumped for his future supermodel wife. It's perfect, it's all there, but I couldn't forgive "the tuck". I know he didn't make the call, but the better team got robbed that night. Tom became my scapegoat. For years, the vitriol was pungent, but as with all betrayals of the competitive spirit, there must penance. A perfect season erased from memory by the most improbable play in one of the greatest Super Bowls of all time reduced him to fallen God. A knee injury in the first game of the next season made him just a man. After that, I learned to love old Tommy B. The scope of his greatness finally occurred to me. My view unclouded, I was ready to appreciate one of the most elegant quarterbacks I've ever seen win the game -- and win he has indeed.
Those paragraphs might ring with a sense of finality--and I'm sure Bryn ColtsFan is filled with murderous rage as to why I've cluttered #18's turf with such unseemly Brady love--but I sense an era slipping through our fingers. An era typified by two players whose stories can't exist without the other. Peyton and Tom are going to play this year and hang up numbers and make the playoffs, but the peak is behind us. I don't worry about Tom, he'll know when to walk away. As Peyton was put on this earth to play football, he'll hang on far too long. I think the NFL should create a rule that Tom and Peyton have to retire the same year so we can go to the best HOF weekend since Rice and Smith went in, but alas, somethings are too beautiful for this world...
Oh, my analysis? The Colts will win the AFC South if Peyton starts 9 games....which he'll start16 errr...15 games. He'll start 15, right? You owe me a nickel.
Houston 8-8's --
There is nothing that makes me happier than the Texans year long march toward mediocrity. I still remember when they won 9 games in 2009, totally missed the playoffs, and then actually popped actual champagne bottles in the locker room. The head coach and the owner shared a tearful embrace like they were about to hoist the Lombardi Trophy. The next year they offset that excellence with six wins which brings their W/L average after five seasons under Gary Kubiak to an august 7.4 wins and 8.6 losses. Let's just split the difference and call it 8-8, because I'm kind in that way. Though there is something to be said for consistency.
So how will they do it this year? Will it be a week one pantload setting the table for a meaningless year-end three game win streak into 8-8? Perhaps a week one win over the Colts sending the hype machine into a "this year is the year" fueled frenzy? How many times will the phrase "Garsh!" be uttered by dough boy/retread D-coordinator Wade Phillips as he looks on befuddled? When will Schaub's most tragic, game destroying INT be? When the despair and frustration set in, will we get Andre Johnson vs. Cortland Finnegan II, "The Redeathening"?
I'm so effing excited I can almost taste the pedestrian performances as real as Chinese buffet food. Find a Texans fan and have them tell you about the coming season. It's like watching a six year old tell a joke. Precious. You'll hear a jumbled mass of 3-4, Arian Foster, and Brian Cushing, followed with a heavy dose of Andre Johnson. All roads lead to Andre, and as with any irony worth its salt, it's appropriate. Down in Houston the combination that makes the money go is Schaub to Andre. Or as fate would have it, #08 to #80.
Tennessee Titans --
Bud Adams: What school's he from, again?
Tennessee GM: (measured) he's from...the University of Washington, Bud.
His eyes widen pushing his white cowboy hat to the crest of his bald head.
Bud Adams: That's where Warren went to school, right?
He whips around the room looking for a response. Faces both sullen and afraid meet his glance.
Tennessee GM: (defeated) Yeah Bud, that's where Warren went to school.
Bud Adams: Well shit, that's who I want. They both went to Washington, get me? Makes perfect damn sense.
And with the 8th pick of the 2010 draft the Tennessee Titans select Jake Locker! And hey, I'm not knocking on the kid, I just think it's stupid.
Jacksonville Jaguars --
If a football game is played, and no one is there to watch it...has the game been played at all? We'll find out at least six times this year. And please, for the sake of aesthetic value, change the logo and color scheme when you move the team.
AFC West
LA San Diego Chargers --
The longer the lockout went on, the longer I had to stay away from football, and important details fell from my memory. I didn't forget that San Diego had a team, per se, but you can imagine my shock when I found out/re-remembered that Norv Turner was their coach. I know, even reading it there it seems totally implausible, but I promise it's true.
It's the "she's still with that guy?" phenomenon. Norv seems like a solid dude: top-rated offense and defense last year, four consecutive AFC West championships, a neck that looks like a scrot, but his jib is cut all sorts of crazy wrong. He's got those weird James Woods pock marks that I perhaps unfairly characterize him by, but there is a hole in the Chargers resolve. Year after year, the same results eventually have to be traced back to the vision's engineer.
So the Chargers are about to undergo one of my favorite break-up chrysalises of all. The season will fall just short again. Phillip Rivers and VJax can only be expected to do so much, and the rest of the team might as well be dubbed ? and The Mysterians. If you wanna take that riff to it's illogical conclusion--You San Diego fans are gonna need a lot more than 96 tears. Boom. Anyway, after a prolonged breakup, fraught with what might have beens, the Chargers will do what so many who couldn't escape a bad boyfriend have done before them--dump his ass and move to LA.
Oakland Raiders --
"For 20 years, I've asked dozens of insiders, including commissioners, owners, and those I felt had accurate inside information: 'What is the Raiders succession plan? Who will own and run the team when (or maybe, if) Al Davis dies?' No one has the answer. Even people who like to brag that they're wired on the inside can't give me an answer."
Kansas City Chiefs --
I hope Todd Haley drives a Ford F-250 with a minimum of six tires. In my dreams, it has glasspacks. A lifted frame holds the body up like some god swaddled in a Kansas City Chiefs truck wrap. One mudflap reads, "Go Chiefs." The other reads, "Don't let me f*cking break you!!" I know it's a far off wish, but if the NFL's great compensator drives a Prius to work, I can't live in that world.
Todd Haley is the infamous tough guy who couldn't bust a grape in a fruit fight. I've stepped over tougher guys than Todd Haley running away from said fight. He yells and growls and stalks the sidelines like el commandante, but it's all so paper tiger. He's a cartoon of a football coach that exists in some naive Bill Parcells fantasy. It's okay to be tough, but his demeanor is not that of a leader. Lest we revisit the handshake debacle of November 2010, his freak-outs on the sideline don't reflect the behaviors of a guy worthy of leadership. Where's the poise? Why do I need to be convinced you care? What are you overcompensating for?
I'll take a stab. Todd never played college ball or in the NFL, so maybe it's the only way he can prove he's tough enough. It's a little one-dimensional, but it works. It could be a little Scott Pioli inferiority, as Pioli brought all this talent to KC yet Haley seems the buffoon who can't put it together. And KC does have talent. Cassel isn't the guy, sorry Chiefs fans, but the number of exciting young prospects on this team should buoy even the faintest hope. So where does that leave Todd Haley? I think he's compensating for the fact that he's not a good coach, and his team mirrors those frailties. Last year, come big boy football time, the Chiefs crumbled like an insecure, irrational, half-man built on phony gusto. Where'd they learn that stuff? To quote the immortalized words of the greatest PSA ever made: "You, alright! I learned it by watching you!"
Denver Broncos --
Let shoddy "the last hot shot QB from Stanford the Broncos landed was a guy named John Elwayne" comparisons begin. And by begin, I mean destroy Andrew Luck.
AFC East
It's a curious thing when in the wake of the NFL Hungry-Hungry-Hippos style free agency grab, Bob Kraft, Chad Ochocinco, and 1950's French suspense film end up together in the same thought space like a hideous Venn diagram.
Undoubtedly, the Pats are the master artisans of transforming NFL garbage into a trash cathedral. New England boasts a sterling record of restoring long forgotten greatness to the NFL's most toxic damaged goods. Turn Chernobyl over to the Pats front office, and they'll have that thing Starbucks-ed and Condo-ed in three months...tops. It's a mystery how it works. I've always wondered if the Corey Dillon thing was an accident, and as a result every washed up NFL no-good-nik believes NE is a true clean slate. Maybe it's the food, a subject Randy Moss--basically an orphan who got too attached to his foster family only to realize they were there to help him, not love him. Wicked sad--is very passionate about. Maybe, and I know it's a stretch, but maybe the Pats just know what they are doing, which is why this recent turn gives me pause.
Lord knows I count the minutes to Ocho's annual melt-down-a-thon, and Albert Haynesworth is a terrible person, like...a vintage piece of shit, but even for New England, it seems like a reach. No two head cases define all that is despicable about NFL millionaire man children than this motley pair. Ocho is like a six year old who wants something so bad, when it's out of his grasp, his only emotional language is temper tantrum. I'm taking the under on week six for when the Pats have to start using a little kid leash just to keep Chad in check. Haynesworth...well I don't know if face stomper, waitress groper, road rager, and all around malingerer are the resume builders you're looking for in starting DT, but sounds like champion material to me.
These moves are eerie. They creep me out. It's as though some Pats clone wearing an evil twin beard made these acquisitions. It all makes sense, but the risk senseless. This go round, the dangerous mix of ego and ambition, the unbecoming sense of an overplayed hand, the analogy practically writes itself.
Wages of Fear is a 1953 French thriller that did white knuckle before color film. Equal parts suspense and satire, this Cluzot film tells of the lengths risk takers will go to get a job done. A fools cargo, a pass too treacherous to pass, and a crew of men cast off from the societies they've left behind. The absurd, tragic, and sublime are held in volatile balance as the best of these men is tested. The prize is worthy, but the journey is long, and a truck packed with nitroglycerin forgives few mistakes.
I won't spoil the end, but you're welcome Pats fans. Ask for the Criterion version for Christmas. It'll all make sense by then.
New York Jets --
There is no team that looks like a bona fide contender more shrouded in mystery. I mean...if the Sanchize hit the open market today and your team picked him up, how excited would you be? When your number one receiver is Santonio Holmes, and your other receiver is billed as "this year's Santonio," is that a warm fuzzy? Do you really know what was lost in the 15 million plus the Jets had to shed in salary cap? Was anyone happy when they picked up Shonn Greene in your league's fantasy draft? Are you one of Antonio Cromartie's nine kids? I think this is a ten to eleven win team, but I don't have answers to, or feel good about any of those questions. It's like a zen koan wrapped in a riddle bundled in uncertainty, and since I don't have any real predictions, I'm gonna be a dick about it and write haiku. Get it? Cause it's smart... (Oh, and on the peeps, my kigo and kireji are totally on point. Drop that shit on the boring girl you're trying to fingerblast who "loves poetry". No. Big. Deal.)
A football season in four haiku:
winters bone shattered
by bullets path cut anew
redemption revealed
the color of spring
frailest youth frocked in proud green
some roots take, many fail
unyielding, summer
immovable sun to shine
defense against dark
fall foliage bluster
heavy sounds on silent air
hide the shaking leaf
Buffalo Bills --
Chan Gailey and I have a ...complicated relationship. He, fairly or unfairly, is remembered as the man who destroyed the empire. When he was hired in Buffalo, the Siberian gulag of the NFL, Memaw King described him as "The man you hire when you're going out of business". But an Ivy League quarterback and a WR that blames dropped passes on God later, that was one watchable four win team. So yeah, the win-loss column doesn't tell many lies, but there are some finite details lost in the black and white.
Of the Bills 12 losses (oof), 6 were decided by one score or less. I don't know what it's like. I can't grasp the pain of not only waking up in Buffalo everyday, but having to go to work for Ralph Wilson, and those kids were sold out every Sunday. From the outset Gailey said he was gonna do it "his way". As much as that seems like code talk for "take a three time Super Bowl winning behemoth and destroy them," he's stayed away from toxic, over the hill free agents, focused on hard work, and with the close aid of new GM Buddy Nix to put together a provocative youth movement.
Will they be the last place team in the AFC East again? It seems as sure as a 25 point loss to the Dallas Cowboys in Super Bowl XXVII, but winter is coming, and there is talk of white walkers in the north. (#GoT) That and Miami is going to be f*cking terrible.
Miami Dolphins --
Black coffee on an empty stomach and the Fins depth chart makes for a punishment unkind to even the lowest toilet.
Booing the already fragile 4th year QB in preseason practice. Longing for the days when Chad Pennington was working on his second 'Come Back Player of the Year' award (<---- which I cannot articulate the sort of left handed compliment bukkake that sentence adds up to). Channing Crowder retires. Jason Taylor unretires. Brandon Marshall is seeking treatment for borderline personality disorder. Reggie Bush...
It's like the football version of Hurricane Andrew, just funnier...and more forgettable. Put on those #13 jerseys and dust off your favorite brown paper bags...it's football time in South Florida!
AFC North
Pittsburgh Steelers --
The fear clutched my chest as I flew awake. An icy sickness hung on my neck. As I pulled the sheets down from my mind, one thought persisted in my mind. On Madden 2012, when the Steelers are down, Troy Polamalu plays harder. A thoughtful and subtle touch that reinforces my worst fears. The Steelers are my nightmare. A black and gold phantasm impossible to kill and forever lurking in the shadows. It's not enough for them to be villains, I fear them because they are villains with a plan. For almost five uninterrupted decades, the Steelers have managed to take a band of human monsters, point them in the same direction, and win.
After garbage can, what's the second term you use to describe the Steelers? Big Ben? Even if the rape thing had never happened, I still wouldn't like that dude. I can see every kid he bullied in junior high etched into his sociopathic face. James Harrison? He is a dangerous person. All snark removed, I have grave concerns he'll take a human life someday, and it won't be on the football field. Hines Ward? Not just a cheap shot artist, but making the cheap shot an art form since 1998. Oh, and hey...Hines, Brett Keisel. One fedora per crew. And Ryan Clark? That guys Twitter feed cloggery is crime enough. These clowns are lucky they have peace warrior Polamalu there to answer the door when the cops show up.
But as much as I hate, and that belies the sentiment, the Steelers organization is like a rock. The seamless transition from one Super Bowl winning coach to another to yet another is outside the realm of possibility. The Rooney family seems cool as hell. I really like head coach Mike Tomlin. Last year at Canton, I felt honored to get to see Dick "I have the entire 'Night Before Christmas' memorized" LeBeau inducted into the Hall of Fame. The Steelers are assholes, but they are assholes with a voice, an identity, and desire. It's redundant to speak of the Steelers as a contender, but that combination will always make for daunting opposition.
I'm a defense first guy. It's one thing to make an argument, but I admire the refutation of an argument so much more. Over the past decade, few organizations represent the power of that refutation more than the Baltimore Ravens. Not only is BMore (that's what we call it on the streets) the hardest city in the States, name another city thuggish-ruggish-bone enough to make their team name a literary reference? I was a huge fan of the New England 'To The Lighthouses', but we all knew it wouldn't stick.
The only downside of a decade of greatness is it's ten years long. Men who slugged out those ten years on the gridiron wear those battle scars. The Ravens know these consequences. The pieces of an offensive revolution appear to be in place for the sad, sad day when "All about tha U" legends Ed Reed and Ray Lewis hang up their cleats, but that makes for a critical nexus. This year is the the second of maybe four - five tops - "this year is the year" years the Ravens have left.
Joe Flacco and Ray Rice are on a team that wins. They help win games, but it's hard to say if they are good ball players. It's a vast improvement over the ghouls on Baltimore's offensive side of the ball in years past, but the D still carries the purple and black banner. It's time for the leap. I want Joe Flacco to get made fun of as much as Eli Manning when he calls himself an elite quarterback. I want Ray Rice to seem worth 25% of a fantasy team budget. If the offense can match their climb with the defense's gradual decline, this year will be magic in Baltimore. Because after that defense is gone, the only peer to the Steelers juggernaut, rebuilding a squad like that could take another decade. To find another #52 could take a franchise lifetime. I'm not even hack enough to piece it together, but some sort of terrible "Nevermore" allusion should be here. Do your own, I'll leave a space.
Cleveland Browns --
January 7th, 2010 is a sports memory which holds a place so unhappy and bizarre in my recollection, it almost breaches into the surreal. Colt McCoy was the winningest QB in all of NCAA history. He held the NCAA record for highest single season completion percentage, a galling 76.7%. The guy clutched it out in big game after big game and helmed the greatest Red River Shootout victory of my lifetime. #12 was total class. Then the big night, with the world looking in, life happened all over that kid's shoulder, and four years of impeccable work was incinerated.
Colt McCoy went to the Browns in the 3rd round with the 85th pick of the 2010 NFL draft. At the end of training camp, there was a lot of strong chatter out of Cleveland that the McCoy wasn't gonna make it in the NFL. To pile it on, there was word he might even get cut before the regular season. He made the roster as the third quarterback and when the two men before him went down to injury, Colt got out there and did what he'd always done, win football games. Two to be exact. He lost five others, and got injured in week 11 and missed three games, but as with all good 85th pick legends, there's gonna be a trial here and a tribulation there.
Like a typical University of Texas fan, I lack a little perspective, but that kid is a winner. Cleveland isn't there yet. The Browns will be the third best team in a savage division but...Peyton "White Thunder" Hillis and the small blonde kid from Texas with the football name...then I tell you they got the NFC West draw?! Shiiiiiiit. You just need the 'fidence.
Cincinnati Bengals --
There is a Japanese novel from 1962 called Woman in the Dunes. The book had a second, and far more relevant life as a Japanese art house film, but the internet cut me break. Wikipedia says it was a book first, so I don't have to lay two art house cinema references on you in one NFL blog post, and still look my self in the mirror. Everyone wins....except, of course, the Bengals.
As the story goes, there is a young entomologist sent to the dunes in search of a rare beetle. His work complete and snared in one of those missed-the-last-bus setups, he's invited by the villagers to stay the night. When bedtime arrives, they send him down a rope ladder (uhhhhh) into a pit (...wait) where a young widow (how young?) lives alone (grep).
Come morning, to your utter shock, the ladder is gone. He is sentenced to a life forever digging the hole deeper into the sand. After that, he and the widow run a pretty typical relationship model. He tries to escape. He takes her hostage. The usual stuff. On the eve he does escape, unfamiliar with the hidden dangers of the desert, he becomes trapped in quicksand. The villagers find him, and return him to the widow. At last, resigned to his fate, he accepts his life forgotten in the sand.
Thanks, Carson Palmer, it's been neat. Oh, and hey, Andy Dalton. No...you're totally good. Just go down the ladder...
AFC South
Of all of the football privileges I've enjoyed over the years, there are few that I treasure more than Brady vs. Manning. When the dust settles, I believe this will be one of the signature story lines in all of NFL history. I've always been firmly in the Manning camp. Among the many reasons I love old Peyter, he's unattractive and square jawed and drawls in long southern tinged quips. A future 1st round pick, he grew up enjoying the charmed life of NFL royalty. Peyton was put on this earth to not to simply play football, but be a quarterback. Since then, 4000+ passing yards in ten of twelve NFL seasons. 4 NFL MVP's, 1 Super Bowl MVP, and the big fat ring that goes with it. The T-1800 is some sort of football robot we may never see the likes of again. That, and he's like my 4th favorite actor. (Someday I will make a version of King Lear with Archie and the three Manning boys.)
The Tom Brady story should appeal to my underdog bias. 6th round pick, all hard work and hustle. A modicum of humility coupled with gridiron excellence. His pregnant, and super hot, actress wife he dumped for his future supermodel wife. It's perfect, it's all there, but I couldn't forgive "the tuck". I know he didn't make the call, but the better team got robbed that night. Tom became my scapegoat. For years, the vitriol was pungent, but as with all betrayals of the competitive spirit, there must penance. A perfect season erased from memory by the most improbable play in one of the greatest Super Bowls of all time reduced him to fallen God. A knee injury in the first game of the next season made him just a man. After that, I learned to love old Tommy B. The scope of his greatness finally occurred to me. My view unclouded, I was ready to appreciate one of the most elegant quarterbacks I've ever seen win the game -- and win he has indeed.
Those paragraphs might ring with a sense of finality--and I'm sure Bryn ColtsFan is filled with murderous rage as to why I've cluttered #18's turf with such unseemly Brady love--but I sense an era slipping through our fingers. An era typified by two players whose stories can't exist without the other. Peyton and Tom are going to play this year and hang up numbers and make the playoffs, but the peak is behind us. I don't worry about Tom, he'll know when to walk away. As Peyton was put on this earth to play football, he'll hang on far too long. I think the NFL should create a rule that Tom and Peyton have to retire the same year so we can go to the best HOF weekend since Rice and Smith went in, but alas, somethings are too beautiful for this world...
Oh, my analysis? The Colts will win the AFC South if Peyton starts 9 games....which he'll start
Houston 8-8's --
There is nothing that makes me happier than the Texans year long march toward mediocrity. I still remember when they won 9 games in 2009, totally missed the playoffs, and then actually popped actual champagne bottles in the locker room. The head coach and the owner shared a tearful embrace like they were about to hoist the Lombardi Trophy. The next year they offset that excellence with six wins which brings their W/L average after five seasons under Gary Kubiak to an august 7.4 wins and 8.6 losses. Let's just split the difference and call it 8-8, because I'm kind in that way. Though there is something to be said for consistency.
So how will they do it this year? Will it be a week one pantload setting the table for a meaningless year-end three game win streak into 8-8? Perhaps a week one win over the Colts sending the hype machine into a "this year is the year" fueled frenzy? How many times will the phrase "Garsh!" be uttered by dough boy/retread D-coordinator Wade Phillips as he looks on befuddled? When will Schaub's most tragic, game destroying INT be? When the despair and frustration set in, will we get Andre Johnson vs. Cortland Finnegan II, "The Redeathening"?
I'm so effing excited I can almost taste the pedestrian performances as real as Chinese buffet food. Find a Texans fan and have them tell you about the coming season. It's like watching a six year old tell a joke. Precious. You'll hear a jumbled mass of 3-4, Arian Foster, and Brian Cushing, followed with a heavy dose of Andre Johnson. All roads lead to Andre, and as with any irony worth its salt, it's appropriate. Down in Houston the combination that makes the money go is Schaub to Andre. Or as fate would have it, #08 to #80.
Tennessee Titans --
Bud Adams: What school's he from, again?
Tennessee GM: (measured) he's from...the University of Washington, Bud.
His eyes widen pushing his white cowboy hat to the crest of his bald head.
Bud Adams: That's where Warren went to school, right?
He whips around the room looking for a response. Faces both sullen and afraid meet his glance.
Tennessee GM: (defeated) Yeah Bud, that's where Warren went to school.
Bud Adams: Well shit, that's who I want. They both went to Washington, get me? Makes perfect damn sense.
And with the 8th pick of the 2010 draft the Tennessee Titans select Jake Locker! And hey, I'm not knocking on the kid, I just think it's stupid.
Jacksonville Jaguars --
If a football game is played, and no one is there to watch it...has the game been played at all? We'll find out at least six times this year. And please, for the sake of aesthetic value, change the logo and color scheme when you move the team.
AFC West
The longer the lockout went on, the longer I had to stay away from football, and important details fell from my memory. I didn't forget that San Diego had a team, per se, but you can imagine my shock when I found out/re-remembered that Norv Turner was their coach. I know, even reading it there it seems totally implausible, but I promise it's true.
It's the "she's still with that guy?" phenomenon. Norv seems like a solid dude: top-rated offense and defense last year, four consecutive AFC West championships, a neck that looks like a scrot, but his jib is cut all sorts of crazy wrong. He's got those weird James Woods pock marks that I perhaps unfairly characterize him by, but there is a hole in the Chargers resolve. Year after year, the same results eventually have to be traced back to the vision's engineer.
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| You totally see it... |
Oakland Raiders --
"For 20 years, I've asked dozens of insiders, including commissioners, owners, and those I felt had accurate inside information: 'What is the Raiders succession plan? Who will own and run the team when (or maybe, if) Al Davis dies?' No one has the answer. Even people who like to brag that they're wired on the inside can't give me an answer."
I hope Todd Haley drives a Ford F-250 with a minimum of six tires. In my dreams, it has glasspacks. A lifted frame holds the body up like some god swaddled in a Kansas City Chiefs truck wrap. One mudflap reads, "Go Chiefs." The other reads, "Don't let me f*cking break you!!" I know it's a far off wish, but if the NFL's great compensator drives a Prius to work, I can't live in that world.
Todd Haley is the infamous tough guy who couldn't bust a grape in a fruit fight. I've stepped over tougher guys than Todd Haley running away from said fight. He yells and growls and stalks the sidelines like el commandante, but it's all so paper tiger. He's a cartoon of a football coach that exists in some naive Bill Parcells fantasy. It's okay to be tough, but his demeanor is not that of a leader. Lest we revisit the handshake debacle of November 2010, his freak-outs on the sideline don't reflect the behaviors of a guy worthy of leadership. Where's the poise? Why do I need to be convinced you care? What are you overcompensating for?
I'll take a stab. Todd never played college ball or in the NFL, so maybe it's the only way he can prove he's tough enough. It's a little one-dimensional, but it works. It could be a little Scott Pioli inferiority, as Pioli brought all this talent to KC yet Haley seems the buffoon who can't put it together. And KC does have talent. Cassel isn't the guy, sorry Chiefs fans, but the number of exciting young prospects on this team should buoy even the faintest hope. So where does that leave Todd Haley? I think he's compensating for the fact that he's not a good coach, and his team mirrors those frailties. Last year, come big boy football time, the Chiefs crumbled like an insecure, irrational, half-man built on phony gusto. Where'd they learn that stuff? To quote the immortalized words of the greatest PSA ever made: "You, alright! I learned it by watching you!"
Denver Broncos --
Let shoddy "the last hot shot QB from Stanford the Broncos landed was a guy named John Elwayne" comparisons begin. And by begin, I mean destroy Andrew Luck.
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