One man gathers what another man spills.
“There’s no argument… we’re going where Zeke goes. He’s that integral to our success.”
Jerry Jones, talking about how (snicker) Zeke Elliott (snort) is still the (lol, you have to be fucking kidding me) starting running back for the (har har) Dallas Cowpokes, immediately after a game where (I just can’t even) Pollard played in such a dynamic, explosive manner, running for 131 yards and 3 TDs, that it proved without a doubt what any of us who have seen the Cowshits play for more than fifteen minutes over the last year and half have already known, which is that Zeke has long been washed and Pollard is a fucking superstar.
The man was either 27 Johnnie Walker Blues in when he said this or he’d recently had a series of mini-strokes from having poured an entire shaker of salt on his daily Sausage McMuffin, which is basically a greasy slab of sodium, every morning for the past 225 years, or however fuck long he has been alive — because how the fuck else do explain this absolute blithering nonsense? Who the fuck asked him anyway? He’s not the coach. And even if he was, he better get those fucking cataracts checked because you could be standing on the moon and still see that Pollard is at least a thousand times better than that mediocre, woman-beating piece of shit with the gratuitous half-shirts, idiotic belly tattoo, and stupid nose-ring.
Oh my God. Why does this make me so fucking mad? I have loathed the Reverse Cowgirls for 40 straight years and actively root against them every chance I get. Jerry being an absolute stubborn senile dumbass and stifling the potential for a wildly dynamic offense because he somehow thinks he will look less stupid that way, should be both hilarious and encouraged. “Do it!” I should shout from the rooftops. Waste your quarterback’s prime even more after you already pissed away a good chunk of it making him play with Jason Garrett for 42 interminable seasons, then hired Mike McDumbfuck to call a run play with 12 seconds left on the clock in the Division round, no timeouts, at midfield, blowing yet another chance for Dem Butt Boyz to go deep into the playoffs. I should be happy that these Texas-sized numbnuts are going to once again torpedo this team and alienate all their obnoxious fans, while getting the fuck out of my team’s way in the NFC, all because Jumpin’ Jerry’s fragile pride demands that he micromanage every single thing his drunken, shriveled pervert hands ever touch until he inevitably suffocates it to death.
But it just fucking boils my blood even thinking about it. First of all, I absolutely detest that drawly old crone and every word that comes out of his mouth in that little bullshit folksy accent. But more so I loathe what he represents. This is a situation where it is oh so clear that the NFL is run by the dumbest fucking people alive. Mega billionaires ruined this fucking country and they will forever do everything in their power to ruin the sport of football. It is monumentally infuriating. Pollard is a genuine talent who for absolutely no good reason has been stuck as a backup behind somebody who very clearly sucks and is never going to unsuck, and he finally gets a chance to show you exactly how amazing he is and you tell him to go fuck off back into his dark, grimy little hole?
I dunno, man. I guess the amount of mega-rich jackasses in the world destroying everything good and real with their egomaniacal stupidity (just take a look a Twitter collapsing as we speak) has finally made me snap, because I feel incredibly violent right now. I am literally going right now to go carve a Jerry Jones jack o’ lantern and smash the fuck out of it because I have no idea what else to do with myself right now.
Don’t worry, I will film it.
FREE POLLARD YOU MISERABLE OLD BAT!!!
“What the fuck are we doing?”
-Aaron Rodgers to Romeo Doubs (and lip-readers everywhere), after the rookie dropped a third down pass in the midst of a 23-21 loss to Taylor Heinicke and the Washingtonian Commies in Week 7.
I’m gonna assume that Doubs did not answer this question to the disgruntled QB’s satisfaction, but I feel like I can take a pretty good crack at it: Ahem. Uh, let’s see… spiraling the drain of an already lost season after only 7 games [ed: Now 8, after getting hammered into paste by the Bills the following week]? Losing to Daniel Jones, Zach Wilson, and Taylor Heinecke in consecutive weeks? Hmmm. Oh yeah, averaging only 18.7 points per game, despite having entered the season as the betting favorite to win the top seed in the NFC? Drunktexting Taylor Swift lyrics to Davante at 3 AM? Smoking spice and trying to figure out where Hulk Hogan and Kelsey Grammer fit into the Illuminati? Finally acting our age, which is a creaky and perpetually sourpussed 38 going on 90? And obviously, I don’t mean maturity-wise, as our QB’s’ interests, critical thinking skills, and ability to emotionally regulate seem to be on par with this writer’s – when he was a sixteen year-old Deadhead dropping acid and skipping 5th and 6th period to go play guitar in the woods every other week. No I’m referring to the inevitable entropy of aging. As in “things fall apart, the center cannot hold.” (Yeats, via Chinua Achebe – aw shit, he’s getting all collegiate again.) As in: “He not busy being born is busy going from back-to-back MVP seasons to being 27th in QBR and looking on the sideline like he’d rather be getting his nuts waxed by a chimpanzee than to have to throw the ball to another generically ineffectual MVS clone ever again.” (My absolute favorite Bob Dylan lyric.)
It’s miserable to watch. Not because it’s the Packers, because obviously, fuck the Packers with a 2 by 4 full of splinters. And not even because I drafted Rodgers in one of my leagues, hoping to mine another late round QB steal for a three’s a charm MVP season (MVP of Ass, maybe). Football just sucks more when one of the most talented QBs to ever play the game and several of his generational compatriots – Brady, Ryan, Wilson, Stafford – all seem to be hitting the wall at once. Look, we all saw this coming at some point. But I’m not sure any of us were ready for it to happen quite like this. Brady tricked us all into forgetting that getting your ass beat all day by superhuman beasts who are literally half your age has a clear and finite expiration date — and it usually comes on a lot quicker than any of us ever expect. Lest we forget, in the course of 12 months, Peyton Manning went from having one of the greatest QB seasons ever to looking like grandpa Matt Damon shaking and weeping in a cemetery at the end of Saving Private Ryan.
Once again, despite having fervently rooted against most of these guys in nearly every game I’ve watched them play (with few notable exceptions) and generally disliking them as people, there’s no real pleasure in watching them fall apart like this… Okay, that’s not entirely true. Wilson’s evolution into his pure unadulterated Super Kook Final Form as he becomes more and more of a liability at quarterback has been one of the 2022 season’s most entertaining storylines. And watching Brady and Rodgers frisbee Microsoft Surfaces at the heads of random assistants and scream at their teammates like a couple of elderly royals chastising the help has certainly inspired a schadenfreude-laced chuckle or two.
But in particular, whatever Brady is going through right now is not the kind of thing I would wish on… well, even him. As a recovering addict myself, I feel pretty confident saying that the guy is behaving like a straight up junkie. Addicts consume their drug at the expense of everything else in their life. And it only gets worse when the drug no longer works the way it used to. In the depths of end-stage alcoholism, you get no pleasure or relief from drinking, which only makes you drink more in the insane hope that you might find even the tiniest bit of either. Every alcoholic’s self-annihilating quest comes from chasing the ease and comfort of that first drink, when troubles melt away and the world and its possibilities open up wide. But in the end, all we ever find is tragedy and oblivion. The insidiousness of addiction is that it is not only a fatal obsession, but as it destroys everything in a person’s life it becomes one’s only purpose for existing. We drink to live and we only live to drink.
If you substitute football for booze, does this not sound exactly like our man? The guy has had more success than anyone who ever played the game, and yet it’s still never enough. Except the harder he tries, the further away he gets from how football used to make him feel. Now he’s determined to wring every drop of dignity and respectability from his career, as long as he can get just a little more juice. He begrudgingly “retired” after last season, and then like a drunk who has yet to admit his own powerlessness, he relapsed after only forty days. That was the final straw that broke his marriage, and now he is divorced from his beautiful wife and estranged from his family. And for what? To be stuck on a 3-5 team with an O-line he can’t trust and receivers who routinely drop touchdown passes, out there scrambling about like that 102 year-old Thai man who went viral for running the 100 meter “dash” in a fleet 27 seconds. The dude is at rock bottom, which would be when any sane person would quit for good. Go home and try to salvage what little is left of life outside of football.
Not ol’ TB12. Now that his family is out of the picture, he may keep at it till he’s fifty, out there thin as a sheet of paper, wearing adult diapers, and bleeding from every orifice, and hell, who’s gonna tell him no? The NFL is like the all-time enabler organization that ever existed. You know fuckin Jerry Jones will hire him in 2025 and never let him quit: “Tom’s our guy for forever and a day, ain’t a dog-diggity thang gone’ change that. Not even when he gets to poopin’ his adult man-diapey more than I do, which is pretty frickin’ often.”
*sharts and fills his diaper* *screams at the top of his lungs* *23 year-old super model dressed as a slutty nurse enters the room to help him change it* *weeps, remembering the time his own fans murdered his best friend Zeke in cold blood so that they could finally see their team get more than 35 yards rushing per game*
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