#1: NEW YORK GIANTS (10-1, 1st overall) - In this year's booking of the NFL, the Giants seem to be playing the roll of last year's Patriots, except the NFLminati realized the perfect season thing was a cheap gimmick if they couldn't push it all the way through. And once you do that, those old Dolphins players - 33rd degree footballmasons in abundance - don't have that solitary record of a perfect season anymore. A few more of those guys are gonna have to pass on before that record will be broken. The Giants seem to be an unbelievably deep team where guys just show up and plug-n-play at a top level. It seems almost inevitable they will cruise to a repeat Lombardi Trophy, which is probably they won't. The true question is how will the NFL marketing wizards and old school football minds who imagineer things into a most profitable story end this run? Will it be in the NFC playoffs to send two new teams to the Super Bowl this year, or will they go to the big game to job out to an AFC team? Is there an AFC team big enough to hold that title over the Giants? Right now, I'd say no, but last year's Giants at this point were hardly a team you thought would ever be considered the best team the NFL had to offer, was it? The Jets seem to be building to some sort of power play for merchandising mechanisms, but I doubt very seriously the NFL would fix things to be a NY Giants vs. NY Jets Super Bowl. Maybe we'll get Manning Bowl I, although I would expect that to be a one-time only affair, and probably at the twilight of Peyton's career. I am excited to see how it all plays out though. My Sunday stories has been good this year.
#2: DALLAS COWBOYS (7-4, 3rd overall) - Man, I hate me some Cowboys. Last week, it was the return of Tony Homo. This week, T.O. can successfully repress his latent homosexuality for another couple of weeks after getting all the glory he needs to beard reality. It's disgusting. And now they have to commit their yearly parade of cocky, self-important Thanksgiving Day douchery, while I try to enjoy a nice fat natural turkey brined in a contractor's bag for 2 days, and a homemade pumpkin pie my wife made utilizing such old school methods as squeezing pureed sugar pumpkin guts through a cheesecloth to get the juices out. It's so much fun seeing the kids use hand beaters to whip the heavy cream into pie-worthy fluff. Why does it have to be fucked up every year by Jerry Jones Parade of Worthless Humans. I hope Texas Stadium gets blown up by the Al-Jarreaus.
#3: TAMPA BAY BUCCANEERS (8-3, 5th overall) - The NFC South is sort of this underrated clusterfuck of high mediocre teams in a highly mediocre year of the NFL. The Bucs are playing the part of that crafty, wily veteran team with no real marketable young superstar, just a bunch of dudes who might've been Pro Bowlers a few years here or there. The defense is led by the last aging members of that crushing group Tony Dungy built, and the offense is just Jeff Garcia doing whatever it is he does. I won't revisit my love triangle thing from last Bucs blurb about how their success will hinge on how well Jon Gruden and Garcia continue to get along, working through feelings that can complicate the jobsite, whether it be a pro football team or an insurance office or a pizza parlour. The return of Cadillac Williams from a 14-month long knee injury sabbatical is great though, because I love hearing people say Cadillac Williams. Cadillac, like a Playboy bunny tattoo, is classic street player (as in notching pussy, not gaining yards) aura.
#4: CAROLINA PANTHERS (8-3, 8th overall) - It's actually pretty amazing the Panthers have had as good a season as they've had, considering Steve Smith, after being inactive the first two weeks for breaking his teammate's face, has been less-than-stellar for most of the season. He certainly hasn't been what you'd expect from a guy who got NFL MVP talk a few years in a row. The double-headed backfield of Hall & Stewart has been good, but not as dominant as many expected, and Jake Delhomme probably isn't regarded as affectionately as a simple Cajun boy made good by Carolina fans as he was a couple years back, yet somehow through it all, here are the Panthers, poised to make the playoffs yet again. If someone was to start a new NFL franchise in L.A. in the next few years, I'd say the best two lessons they could follow is to mimic what the Panthers have done in their first 15 years, and try to do the opposite of the Houston Texans as much as possible.
#5: WASHINGTON REDSKINS (7-4, 9th overall) - I am a Redskins fan, through and through, but I will not deny the fact that this team is a fraud, built upon the lowered bar of the 2008 NFL season. I have never seen a more frustrating offense than this one, which is far more like its 2007 Al Saunders over-complicated shift-happy shittiness, than it would easily admit. Will they ever actually have a game put away early? Fuck man, I feel like they could play a high school team and still need a missed field goal to win by 2. Luckily though, they did release Shaun Alexander this week, thus lowering their overall Pussy Factor by 2.378 points. And I also must admit, I really look forward to, ten years from now, London Fletcher being a defensive coordinator somewhere in the NFL. He is an all-time classic.
#6: ATLANTA FALCONS (7-4, 14th overall) - You have already heard about what an amazing turnaround year the Falcons have had, Matt Ryan aka Matty Ice blah blah blah, Michael Turner revitalized offense, new coach Mike Smith all that shit ad nauseum. But I would like to talk about Michael Vick, who was this past week back in his and mine home state of Virginia, to plead guilty to state dogfighting charges, and get forgiven to an extent with a lighter sentence that will allow him an earlier start at reclaiming his life. And you know, I feel bad for the prominent, athletic, semi-ignorant black QBs like Vick or Vince Young and the like. All their life, they are thrust into this position of importance, getting by on their raw athletic ability. Shit, you look at the national title games in college that Vick played in (and lost) and Young played in (and won), and in both of those games, their teams were doomed outside of the performance of them alone. So you are put on this pedestal all along in life, then you get to the NFL and suddenly you are expected to be Bobby Fischer on the complex analogy scale. Never are the GMs who draft guys who get by on raw talent blasted like the guys themselves get blasted. Vick has been made a pariah, and not even three years after he was supposed to be the face of not only the Falcons' future, but the NFL itself. Now, he's riding out his time until parole hearing in Leavenworth, and nobody gives a shit about him anymore, because he was involved in stupid fucking dogfighting. (By the way, in my opinion, there are many things worse than dogfighting, including people getting indignant over sensationalized dogfighting stories in the newspaper in between whoofing down supersized McDonald's value meals.) I did think briefly this past week though, that I was glad that Vick, who has been abandoned by pretty much everybody who claimed to be down with him (including the halfwit dude who snitched on him and his cousins), had a brief appearance in the regional jail in Hopewell, just over an hour from where he grew up, the week before Thanksgiving, so some kinfolk could come visit and give him a little love. Federal prison might be cushier on many levels, because you're not in with the riff-raff that state maximum security jails have, but being so far away from your support foundation sucks. So that's the end of my Thanksgiving week pro-Michael Vick diatribe. When Matt Ryan starts throwing interceptions in two years, or looks like he doesn't care enough about the game to please unsatisfiable football fans, start booing him too. I'm sure the next big thing will be the real big thing this time.
#7: PHILADELPHIA EAGLES (5-5-1, 15th overall) - The downfall of Donovan McNabb can be entirely traced by his previously ever-present smile. Before, even when things were down, he was always smiling, except for that one season with T.O. where it all went bad. He always had a great attitude, exuding confidence or at least joy, much like the Ol' Gunslinger Brett Farrvrer. But this year, even before McNabb started tossing pick-sixes, even before he looked like a fool for being a starting NFL QB who didn't know the rules of overtime, he was never smiling anymore, it being lost somewhere between the end of last season and the middle of this year. Philly is a more brutal place than most anywhere to be a prominent pro sports figure, but they were turning quick on both he and Andy Reid. And I can't help but think the fact the story got leaked right away that Reid had talked to upper management about benching McNabb as early as a week before it happened was Andy Reid's way of preserving his own career. In a league where coaches and GMs routinely suicide each other in the name of self-preservation, Reid had no such luxury, being both the grocery shopper and the head chef in Eaglestan. But luckily, the overweight sausage-engorged drunkards that make up the Eagles fanbase were teetering on turning on Donovan McNabb, so old Andy - an overweight sausage-engorged walrus-haired man himself - threw McNabb under the bus. So regardless of what happens the rest of this season, whether they pull it together and make the playoffs or continue to implode, whether Kevin Kolb is worth half a shit or not, Andy Reid bought himself another year. Donovan McNabb, however, will probably be playing in Minnesota next year.
#8: NEW ORLEANS SAINTS (6-5, 17th overall) - The Saints are like a Madden football team. They might score like 50 points with four different guys having what would normally be considered a career day all at once, or they'll just not be able to do anything at all, what with the game's artificial intelligence working completely against them, and they'll struggle to simply lose by a respectable five or six points. I have found it amusing that one of the few teams tripping over themselves to get Jeremy Shockey's punk ass now are indifferent towards him completely. Usually, with him being an overhyped under-performing cocksucker, this would mean he'd be playing in Dallas next year, but they've already got Jason Witten, who is better at the good things than Shockey is, and without all the muss. The Saints might want to find some sucker ass team to trade him too for a couple of draft picks and try to build a little defense. Or pay off Deuce McAllister to come back for a couple more years, because without that guy plowing through motherfuckers, all the fancy-footed skill position weapons the Saints employ wouldn't be freed up enough to run up fantasty league rankings everywhere.
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