“My brother and I used to watch a lot of Jet Li movies, so we used to always do quick things like kickboxing or catching things with our hands. One thing I remember we always used to do—we always used to catch flies with our hands. I was the only one that could catch them. I actually studied it, and I grew with it. I was like, ‘How do I catch flies?’ Flies always fly up. I would always just hit over it. And I thought: If I can catch flies, I know I can catch anything.”
–Deandre Fucking Hopkins, quoted in Peter King’s amazing breakdown of the “Hail Murray.”
He sure as shit can catch anything. You don’t have to tell me twice. I picture this little anecdote like a kids’ karate movie montage, ending with D Hop finally snatching one after another after another – his eyes fierce, his brow glistening with sweat, a sly, determined smile on his lips, in the background his brother and friends gaping on in wonder.
Now I want to see an NFL wide receiver fly-catching contest. Odell, Julio, Davante, Thomas, Keenan, Lockett, Diggs… and of course the magic man himself. Even crazy AB could have a crack, though the likelihood of him just smashing the shit out of the poor buggers with a nail-spiked baseball bat is unfortunately not out of the question. Now, you might be tempted to put your money on DeeHop given his past success at it, but who knows what dark horses lurk in this crowd. I wouldn’t put it past Julio to instinctively know how to catch those fuckers while flying backwards through the air with one hand tied behind his back and wearing a blindfold. Larry Fitz might quietly snatch his HOF-worthy fill and then move on to something else with zero fanfare and hardly anyone the wiser. Keenan would certainly run the best route to get to the flies in the first place.
But back to the play itself. I mean, they call it a Hail Mary for a reason, because it’s a one in a million moon-shot that prayers themselves can hardly touch. But the “Hail Murray” is its own distinct, one of a kind phenomenon (in fact, Lil Kyler is trying to trademark the phrase). Even beyond Hopkins’ one in a gazillion catch – snatching the ball out of the heavens, with three Buffalo defenders hanging off him, like it was the biggest fly anyone had ever seen outside of the Amazon Basin – it was an exceptional play.
The standard procedure for just about any Hail Mary is to pack the end zone with as many offensive (in this case red-colored) jerseys as possible and hope that when all the bodies go up it somehow gets tipped into a receiver’s hands. Luck (and the chaotic randomness of physics) is the core element of its design, rather than precision, or even brute force. It’s like trying to land a ring around the neck of a Coke bottle at the county fair – you’re not really meant to succeed.
Now, while the first option on this play was supposed to be 20-yard drag route to Isabella (and then get the fuck outta bounds), it was clear from the snap that it was all about the go-for-broke from Kyler to Hopkins. Get it to the best player now in the end zone, and don’t worry a shit about trying to make a second play. Fitz, Isabella, and Kirk all split out from the right side of the formation, none of them headed for the end zone itself – their routes intended to pull coverage away from Target Zero. It sorta worked. Three defenders still clung to Hopkins, who ran the lone route from the left and was the only Cardinal in the end zone. But who knows, maybe there woulda been five otherwise.
For a second or two, it looked like Kyler might not even get the throw off. As he rolled left, Bills DE Mario Addison broke through the line and appeared to have him dead to rights. But no dice, Mario. The way he flew past the scrambling quarterback at an odd angle made him resemble a tackler from an early 90s Madden game. Murray was pinned right up against the sideline as he launched a 43-yard pure fucking dime, hitting the exact spot where only his ace receiver (and nobody else) could catch the ball. It also helped that in addition to being a straight baller who earned his stripes catching flies, Hopkins had an inch of height and 3 inches of vertical on the next closest defenders, as well as famously gigantic 10” hands (the only receivers’ hands that have measured larger at the combine since 2013 were Kelvin Benjamin and Henry Ruggs III).
Hopkins against those three dudes…
Just downright unfair for those poor schmucks.
“Greg Roman is like if the new iPhone came out a year later and there was nothing different.”
-Craig Horlbeck, from the Ringer Fantasy Football Show. Aw, c’mon now Craig, you’re speaking ill of the former Niners OC who made Kaepernick a superstar and took us to the Super Bowl in 2012 (okay, so we lost that one too – to the fuckin’ Ravens, no less!). But homer distractions aside, I get your point. Everybody wants to know what happened to Lamar Jackson and the unstoppable, high-powered offense that was one of the highlights of last season. Well, besides COVID, that is (man, this fucking horrid year — get well asap, dudes!).
Craig and co-hosts, Danny and Danny, posit that it isn’t really poor Lamar at all, but an offense that changed little scheme-wise from 2019 (if it worked then, why wouldn’t the exact same thing work again?!). Hollywood Brown’s breakout never came. Mark Ingram II disappeared. Mark Andrews has had a few good games, but nothing like we expected. And JK Dobbins, the one new element in this scheme, fizzled before he even started.
Whatever opposing defenses couldn’t solve last year… welp, they seem to have solved this year.
Now, LJ is still on pace for like 950 rushing yards, and something in the neighborhood of 5 or 6 rushing TDs. And he will likely fall well short of his 36 passing TDs from last year, but the passing yardage is on pace. So we are getting like, what 75-80% of peak Lamar? Which is still pretty badass, of course. But in fantasy, it’s like Superman when he gives up his powers to be with Lois Lane. At some point, with the fate of the world at stake, Clark Kent ain’t enough to get the job done. Especially in a year when Kyler and Russ and Mahomes are doing the shit they’re doing, scoring twice as many fantasy points as everyone else, you can’t compete when your QB is seemingly all floor and very little upside. Especially when you took him as the first QB off the board (by the way, what more evidence do you need? Don’t do that).
I think it’ll shake out. Hopefully LJ will not have any lasting effects from the COVID and Greg et al will learn their lesson from this year’s stumbles. I’m pretty sure we haven’t seen the last of the Ravens powerhouse days, or Lamar’s fantasy domination.
Now as a random, sort of non-sequitur postscript to this, there’s a certain (former?) Ravens beat writer I used to follow on Twitter. She was obsessed with Flacco, was all Go Ravens! all week long, but when Lamar came on she never seemed to get on board. Even with his amazing season last year for whatever reason she still beat the drum for ol’ washed up, ain’t never been elite no matter how thin you slice it Flacco. Which fine, like who you like, I don’t care, even if it clearly has nothing to do with your team being good. It’s just football.
But, in addition to stanning for Flacco, she never missed an opportunity to rip on Matt Ryan. She fucking hates Matt Ryan, because… the Falcons picked him instead of Flacco, I guess? Something like that, I never fully gathered. The facts about that situation and her feelings about it don’t seem to make a lot of sense, but then again, that describes just about every aspect of sports fandom.
And as you can imagine, being a woman – and a rather comely one at that – on the internet, not only talking about football, but talking mad shit about basically an entire franchise (via its franchise QB) and its 28-3 collapse in the Super Bowl, she got… well, a lot of flak. From snotty condescension to the horrible, twisted shit dudes say to try and silence women. So – not because I think I’m chivalrous or anything, but because football bros fucking suck and deserve as many cowpies as can be thrown at them – I often liked her shitposts and chimed in on her side, because fuck ‘em.
But I admit it all became a bit tiresome after awhile. It was the same hullabaloo over and over, and she would complain out loud about how raw of a deal she had being a woman in the world of football (which yes, absolutely), but it also seemed like a lot of the friction she encountered was self-made. And the shit-talk, no matter how clever, starts to feel pretty stale when it eventually becomes clear that you only have like three things to say. But it’s just Twitter, after all, so whatever. I follow plenty of tiresome people.
Anyway, one day someone (a woman, no less) had the audacity to joke that the reason she was so obsessed with Flacco and could care less about superstar Jackson turning her team into a juggernaut, was on account of the former’s looks (I mean, he is pretty damn dreamy, after all). That must of touched a nerve because she had a complete meltdown about how sexist that was, etc., just digging in and firing off at everybody who dared respond. I should have kept my trap shut, but I jumped into the fray and mentioned (to somebody else, not even her) something about Mallory Rubin – Editor-in-Chief of The Ringer, a diehard Ravens fan, the world’s biggest Lamar stan who had long since put Flacco out to pasture in her heart. And who also happened to be a woman.
Well, that did it. I stopped reading at like her fourth all-caps response and eventually unfollowed her. Wasn’t mad, just over it. I finally realized that what had been so galling about her wasn’t that she dished out mountains of shit all day. It was that she could not take a pebble of it back in kind. From anybody. Even as part of a friendly give and take.
Anyway, that was last year sometime. Had seen neither hide nor hair of her since, but then I happened to see someone else I follow’s response to one of her posts last weekend. It was a selfie she’d taken, and the caption said “Gameday.” She was wearing head to toe Jets gear, including a green Flacco jersey.
Yes sir, we all pick our ships to go down with.
“Well, he was open.”
Speaking of sinking ships… God Bless Ya, Bruce. I was beginning to worry that I wouldn’t have a suitably caustic Arians quote this time around, even after the Rams edged out the Bucs 27-24, and showed once again how precarious their place is in the NFC. But then somebody, thank the fiery football gods, asked the loose-tongued coach what he thought accounted for Antonio Brown’s poor performance in that game, despite getting thirteen targets. Skipping no opportunity to publicly thrust the knife between his Hall of Fame QB’s rib slats, he let his one-sentence response trail off into the only logical conclusion: Antonio could have had a great game if only his aging, swole-headed quarterback could have accomplished the very simple task of getting him the fucking ball.
Oh, I am embellishing, sure. You’ve read this blog before, yes? It’s sorta what we do. Still, BA seems to relish the unceremonious dressing-down of the world’s most knob-polished football player. One of the legends of the Brady/Bellichick partnership was that Brady was never immune to being called out during player meetings. If he had a fuckup on film, they broke it down just like they did for everybody else. The difference, however, was that unless Seth Wickersham was in the room, those discussions stayed behind closed doors. Arians on the other hand, loves going into the locker room, gathering up all the dirty laundry he can find, and tossing it all around the press room.
I’ve searched high and low for retaliatory Brady quotes, but to no avail. Maybe he’s eternally committed to the NFL Omerta, even if Arians isn’t. Or maybe he knows that this was part of the bargain when he joined the team, and is just putting his head down and riding it out. Or maybe he realizes he’s 43 years-old and tied with Daniel Jones for the 4th most INTs this year at 9, and should probably just keep his fuckin’ mouth shut (to be fair, in 3rd with 10 is early-season MVP Russell Wilson). Whatever the reason, the greatest gift of the NFL season would be to see that steel trap Brady mind finally melt into a boiling puddle as he busts into Arians’ post-game presser with an axe, snarling like Nicholson in The Shining as he hacks the fucker to (well-deserved) pieces (metaphorically speaking, of course).
Either way, in the spirit of Thanksgiving, I continue to be grateful for this flaming rats nest of a team. It hasn’t reached the utterly self-destructing level of the AB/Le’veon-era Steelers, but that don’t mean we all ain’t got our fingers crossed that it can get there sooner rather than later.
Speaking of dumpster Fyres in the making, behold the NFC East – a shining beacon of… flaming, putrid garbage. Last year it was already the butt of a million jokes when Philly went limping into the playoffs with a middling 9-7 record, only to be be buzzsawed by an actual playoff-worthy football team in the first round. Well by golly, none of that shit this year, baby! The entire division is leaning all the way into being unadulterated shit stew from top to bottom.
Carson Wentz, the Number Two Overall Pick in 2016 and a leading MVP candidate the next year (until he broke his leg), has fully imploded, with a league-leading 14 INTs in 10 games and a QBR that hovers just above those of Jake Luton and Nick Mullens. In one season, Daniel Jones went from being Danny Dimes to Dann-o Fistful of Grimy Pennies. Saquon made an early season exit, depriving us of at the very least the consolation of his scampering wizardry. We all saw what happened to Dak, the poor bastard (if you haven’t, whatever you do, do not Google it), and were deprived of a possible reboot of that first take ‘em by storm Dak/Zeke season.
Alex Smith has had the opposite trajectory of Dak and Saquon, coming back after an absolutely horrendous injury two years ago that not only could have ended his career, but nearly killed him (necrotizing bacteria caused his body to go into sepsis – which sounds like science fiction, but unfortunately is not). A series of 17 surgeries and 4 hospital stays over nine months saved his leg from being amputated, but whether he would play again was in serious doubt. He did, of course, and it was an inspiring story, and would have been so even for someone not as easily likable as Smith. Still the Washington Football Team may have a whole new name (or new no-name), but they are the same sorry old team, ever destined for their best case scenario in any season (despite the illusory optimism of say, hiring a competent, one time 15-1, Super Bowl contending coach) to be mediocre also-rans. They don’t deserve ol’ Ron, by all accounts an eminently decent human and a good coach, nor their barely superglued-back-together golden boy QB.
Oh wait, what’s that you say? They’re in first place?! That’s right, after trouncing the hapless Red Rifle and his Lonesome Cowboy Posse on Thanksgiving (Raggedy Andy ending the game by pretty much handing the ball to Montez Sweat), the WFT Whatthefuckers are a lofty 4-7! The poor dickless (sorry, I meant Dak-less) ‘boys fell to 3-8. Before Thursday’s games, Philly was first in the division (if you can call it that) at 3-6-1. The other three teams were tied for second at 3-7. Somebody finally decided to take control by winning 4 whole games!
There is no guarantee that any of these teams will win any more games that are not against each other, so we could be looking at a 5-11 or 6-10 team not only going to the playoffs, but hosting a motherfucking playoff game!
Goddamn I love the NFL. Only here in America could something so grand, so ingenious, and so beautiful be so fucking stupid.
Ah, but also in America, you don’t have to stay in the doghouse for long. Land of proverbial bootstraps, land of endless “opportunity” – anybody can go from the bottom to the top, so long as they work hard enough, care enough, and get lucky enough. Right? As Steinbeck once said, the reason socialism never took root in America, is “because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” In the 21st Century, make that billionaires.
And in 2020, make that:
I am writing this on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, from a condo in Bend, Oregon. I was going to travel to surprise Raul in Arizona for his 75th birthday on the 29th of November, but, well, we decided after everything to skip participating in the Nationwide Holiday Weekend Mega Super Spreader Event. I mean it’s cool, they didn’t really need us anyway. 5 million people still traveled through airports and boarded airplanes and went to visit far-flung elderly family members to laugh and eat and spray invisible mucus drops all over them and their green bean casserole, so they were totally fine without us.
“Over the dead bodies and through the cemeteries, to Grandmother’s house we go…”
Okay, that’s not totally fair. I get to sound all superior because I finally decided in the end, after much deliberation, to not risk my or my family or anyone else’s health for even a major milestone. But believe me, I clung to the possibility for far longer than was safe or reasonable, trying to find any and every way to make it there during a massive resurgence of the virus, where I’d be trapped in small spaces for long periods with a bunch of other stressed-out Americans, some 40% of whom think that being required to wear a mask to ensure the safety and health of others (while also not overwhelming our precarious healthcare infrastructure or, you know, eventually toppling the fucking economy) is the equivalent of being sent to a Siberian gulag. This self-obsessed death cult philosophy versus basic human decency falls almost exclusively along partisan lines (go figure), with the Republicans essentially saying they’d rather shit bloody, cyanide-infused diarrhea into five hundred thousand people’s mouths rather than be minorly inconvenienced for a few hours or forced for one moment to engage in self-reflection or even a fleeting sense of charity or community (go ahead and deny it, Repugnants, everyone knows if it came down to it, you would absolutely do exactly that).
So yeah, we didn’t go. But it wasn’t until the Governor of Oregon was basically begging our entire state to not travel and not spend the holiday with anyone else that we truly came to our senses. So while I don’t necessarily approve of all of you flying the fuck all over and exponentially spreading this goddamn motherfucker of a virus, I certainly sympathize with the dilemma (and if you had no dilemma, well then fuck all y’all). Still, we had the time off and we needed to get outta Portland for a minute, so we rented this place for a few nights and are spending the holiday as far away from anyone else as we can manage. We had a nice Thanksgiving dinner, just the two of us – stuffed squash and roast pork and polenta and greens – and basically resolved, with the exception of cooking dinner and taking a few moonlight walks in the snow, to do absolutely as little as possible (and to certainly not think about how – if we’d had a halfway competent administration in charge, and a culture that prized unity and sacrifice for the greater good even half as much as the gluttonous obsession with acting on every impulse and hoarding every precious resource possible – nine months into this crisis, we might actually all be able to travel safely this weekend to see family for a momentous, once-in-a-lifetime occasion.
But hell, I’m still plenty grateful. I’m grateful for relative health for me and my family, for my wife, for my dog, for my job, and to live in a state that isn’t completely imploding under the yoke of greed, mass ignorance, and hubris. I’m grateful to be here in this beautiful part of the country, with a fireplace (even though it just set off the fucking smoke alarm about an hour ago), surrounded by forest and snow, and to have to time off to watch lots and lots of football, something I rarely get to do these days!
Oh yeah! Also, motherfuckers, did I mention I am grateful as all shit to be in FIRST PLACE in Astral Geeks! After 11 straight weeks of reigning over the rest of the league, Lovejoy FC not only gave up the top spot to yours truly, but dropped to fourth! In a single week! Even if it only lasts one week, the taste of glory was worth it. This is a tight league, and staying on top ain’t easy, regardless of how that Lovejoy kid made it look. Everybody’s huntin’ for ya, and the target on your back is bright shiny neon orange. Second-place road warrior animal and 3rd place Raul’s LV Raiders share my same 7-4 record and are only behind me in the standings by virtue of less than a hundred total points. In our league, the Number One Seed wins $150, regardless of whether they win any more contests, so it’s worth it to put any and all effort into hanging on. I probably gotta not only win out, but do so while scoring a bundle of points.
Which is why I am the most grateful for Will Fuller!! I was watching the early game on Thanksgiving as we packed up our room on Mt. Hood (we stayed there Wednesday night), and watched with horror the 35-yard Will Fuller TD that got called back by a holding penalty. Oh my God, just typing it now makes my blood curdle with rage. That shit makes me so insane, I had to restrain myself from chucking a snowshoe through the window of the hotel room (fortunately, we didn’t have any snowshoes with us). As always, I bitched on the chat about it to my leaguemates, garnering zero sympathy. I mean, I don’t do it for sympathy. I do it because who the fuck else am I gonna tell? You’re stuck with me, you bastards. Deal with it. Anyway, we were driving three hours to get here, and I was the one at the wheel, so I didn’t get to see much of the rest of the game. Which was fine with me, because I was on vacation, I didn’t need to see any more shit that was going to make steam come shooting out of my ears like Wile E. Coyote. But then when we took a pit stop a few hours later in Madras, I clicked over to Yahoo and saw that the glorious motherfucker had 171 yards and 2 (not called back) TDs! 36.1 Fantasy Points! Which means he will absolutely break six collarbones next week because Will Fuller is made of eggshells!
Not a bad start to the week, though I ain’t counting Rona Lisa out for a second. Mahomes, Evans, Keenan, Kamara, even RoJo. That team ain’t fuckin around and I ain’t holding my breath for a second until Tuesday night, when the game ends because half the Ravens and Steelers have fallen dead from disintegrated rona lungs. And even after mass COVID death come stat corrections, so, you know… don’t count no rona chickens before they… kill everybody. (I feel like I lost the thread of that metaphor somewhere.)
There are two weeks left in the regular fantasy season. There are 6 playoff spots, the top 2 earning byes. Three teams at 7-4. Four at 6-5. And two at 5-6. It would take an unlikely miracle, but even those 5-6 teams could grab the top two seeds if they had a couple blowup games and everybody else stumbled at the pole. They could most definitely snag a playoff spot without too much crazy shit happening.
The best part of all of it is this is “Rivalry Week.” Yahoo likes to insert an arbitrary Rivalry Week into the schedule, but I figured I would create one myself and put it in the 12th week, after everybody has already played each other once. Of course I had no idea before the season started what the specific playoff implications would be, but it is coming down to the wire with two sons playing Oedipal spoiler by knifing their pops in the gut just before they reach the finish line. Barbie’s Basement (formally Barbie’s Bitch Busta), officially eliminated from playoff contention, is still taking it upon themselves to have an uncharacteristically good game and knock Raul around some, just as he is getting comfortable in the top tier of the standings. Herd Virginity, who has spent most of the season drifting around the top half of the standings, is suddenly outside looking in at 7th Place, and his kid is having a banner week with Deshaun, Washington DST, and McLaurin in his lineup. Not looking good for Black Diamond Dave.
This is my favorite part of the season. The fight to the finish. I’m grateful to be in the mix. I’m grateful for all of you, league mates and readers alike. I’m grateful that this nightmare year is ending soon, though I did read a Tweet the other day that said 2021 is training up in the Himalayas to come kick our ass harder than we’ve ever had our asses kicked. I sure as shit hope not. But we’ll have to be ready. Hopefully, Donnie Dump will finally choke on a fucking wishbone, and we’ll have at least that to celebrate. Someone sneak one into his McNuggets. I bet his Secret Service loathe the fuck out of him. They’d look the other way.
Hope you had a pleasant and safe holiday. Hope you continue to stay safe and take care of each other. Don’t fuck around. You don’t want this thing, and you sure as hell don’t want to give it to someone vulnerable that you love.
Hang in there. Someday this pandemic’s gonna end.
Till then…
Gear Byes, Awl Carts, Cunt Loose,
tg
GO JAGS!!!!
ASTRAL GEEKS FFL 