AFC WEST
Denver Broncos Why can’t Kyle Orton get any fucking respect? First he plays pretty well on a kind of dismal Bears team, then they trade him just as the awesome fun offensive coordinator is hired. Then he gets to Denver and they immediately trade away the fourth-best running back in the league for a guy to compete for his job. Then his best receiver develops Borderline Personality Disorder and takes his talents to South Beach. And then they draft another guy to compete for his job in the first round. If any of the holy scriptures are to be believed, Kyle Orton must’ve really, really fucked up. Either that, or he’s Job reincarnate. Or the holy scriptures aren’t to be believed. Or maybe he peed in the wrong kind of fountain.
Kansas City Chiefs I am a huge fan of Dexter McCluster, for two reasons: The first is that he sounds like the main character in an Irish buddy-cop movie; the second is that he almost single-handedly justifies the continued use of the phrase “find a way to get him touches,” one of my favorite NFL commentatorisms. Followed closely by “student of the game,” calling someone “a football player” and smashing the suffix “-ability” onto random nouns (“Phil Simms has incredible nonsensabilityâ€). Plus, the whole concept of tracking “looks and touches” not only sounds sexual, it could be perfectly applied to sexual performance: in college, I got lots of looks but not that many touches. The possibilities for extending this metaphor are almost endless—there are the obvious ones, like “completion percentage” and “yards after catch,” and there have to be some pretty rich SABRmetric possibilities, too. Aren’t we all just plodding through life, trying to find a potential mate with as high a VORP as possible? Somebody stop me when this stops making complete fucking sense.
Oakland Raiders I didn’t even know who the Raiders’ head coach was. Google says it’s someone named Hue Jackson, which I can only assume is just Hugh Jackman after a race transplant. Anyway, the Wikipedia page for “List of Oakland Raiders Head Coaches” has learned me the following: 1) The last five Raiders coaches (Tom Cable, Lane Kiffin, Art Shell, Norv Turner, and Bill Callahan) would make a hilarious replacement cast for The Usual Suspects; 2) someone named “Marty Feldman” was once an NFL coach (in 1961, presumably before good athletes had been invented); and 3) Al Davis himself coached the Raiders for three seasons. This is hilarious for me to imagine, since I’m only 26 and for as long as I can remember Al Davis has been a snappish Brylcreemed iguana. When he went 23-16 in three years without making the playoffs, did he call a big press conference to question his own intentions?
San Diego Chargers The constantly-quoted stat about the 2010 Bolts is that they had the #1 ranked offense and the #1-ranked defense, but still managed to miss the playoffs. For most people this raises the question, What happened to the 2010 Chargers? For me it raises the question How the hell are they calculating team offense and defense? Also, if the couple of interviews I’ve seen with Philip Rivers are any indication, someone in his life finally managed to get through to him that he stands to make a lot more money by being an aw-shucks southern gunslinger than a childish, capricious bullying prick. I can imagine his sister sitting him down and giving him a two-slide PowerPoint presentation: Do you want to be this? [slide of Peyton Manning doing a commercial with Justin Timberlake] Or this? [slide of Ryan Leaf]
