Everything Stupid Is Alive, and Everything Stupid Can Kill You: Welcome to Goodell World

Note: This piece originally appeared somewhere that is not here. It was taken down for a project. (DO NOT ASK WHAT THE PROJECT IS.)

Here's a horrifying game you can play during this Sunday's Super Bowl and the nearly 12 hours of pre- and postgame content: count the number of times you hear some variation of "deflated balls" and compare that to the number of times during Super Bowls XLV or XLVII you heard the phrases "two-time accused rapist" or "accused co-conspirator in a double murder." Or just compare "deflated balls" to "brain damage." Then see if the first number dwarfs a combination of the last three by an order of magnitude. It will.

Naturally, this comparison isn't meant to equate accusations of equipment tampering with accusations of rape and murder or mental destruction. The latter three are so vastly more repugnant, which is why you will hear about them as little as possible. That silence ultimately stems from the NFL's inevitable trajectory toward a vertically integrated entertainment-capital complex that also happens to include football. It is a spectacle machine and an ATM that reflects, promotes and admires itself. For all the talk of harsh gridiron realities, the NFL hasn't been in the reality business for a while. Reality is its enemy, and the Super Bowl—the largest spectacle of the game—is paradoxically its most vulnerable creation. It is an event ballooned so large that the slightest puncture threatens to send it deflating into a long, suffocating series of fatal escaping farts.

And Yet More Things I Want to Do When I Grow Up

As you may know, we the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo? conduct an annual personal test of our abilities. We do not remark upon things as we see them and ask, "Why?" We look at things as they have never been—a machine that makes my ex-girlfriend STACY think about me when she hears any song on the radio, even "Thick As A Brick"—and ask, "Why not?" Then we create that machine.

In the above case, that machine is called the simple human heart.

Nevertheless, the conundrum facing the Destructo crew for several years was this: How do we find newer feats of mental daring and near-impossibilities of time and space that we have not already accomplished? And how, given our 100% success rate in meeting our goals, can we ever outline new goals in which our readers might see the faintest glimmer of failure? What happens when a shadow no longer falls between the idea and the reality?

An idea presented itself in January, 2013 when journalist David J. Roth wrote to regret that his submissions for January, 2012, sent by passenger pigeon, had been unavoidably delayed by that species' extinction for 99 years and that he would try to forward them via "interior crocodile alligator." The denial of an object or goal seemed to be a goal in itself.

We thought of embracing the noble truths of the Buddha, but abandoned that concept when we realized that there is no documented evidence of that man ever wearing a shirt. Instead, we chose to embrace a state of post-accomplishment, a place beyond goals, neither above nor below metrics but askance from them. We chose a heaven where nothing ever happens.

Needless to say, 2013 would have been an unqualified success if indeed success or failure had been possible. And, despite the overwhelming likelihood of each pledge below being satisfied thoroughly, early and often, 2013 opens 2014 to the possibility that maybe—just maybe—what you're about to read may, this once, just be words.

Everything below was written by Jeb Lund, General "Bro_Pair" Ze'evi, Cory Harris, Justin Shapiro, David J. Roth and Mark Hengge. We renew our respects to our fallen comrade, Mark Brendle (RIP), who at this time in 2013 was killed in a tragic midchair collision.

Yet More Things I Want to Do When I Grow Up

Imagine the curse of writing for Mr. Destructo: doomed not only to set perilously high expectations but constantly to exceed them. Such is the case with our annual event, "Things I Want to Do When I Grow Up," a litany of challenges posed to ourselves and handily dispatched by the following year.

Consider an iron resolve that can only hesitate at obstacles devised by its own will. That previous sentence describes Volkesgeistes so formidable that all the terms in it would be terrifying if they were in German. Ours is a spirit that climbs Mt. Everest not "because it is there," but "because we thought of Mt. Everest."

You're welcome.

Again, as with last year, 2012's edition involves a collaborative effort from many of our writers. General Ze'evi handled our graphics, while Mark H. and Cory H. (no relation) pitched in with fresh ideas. MLB postseason fixture JShap joins us for the first time. Mark Brendle was killed in a catastrophic bridesmaid accident.

May your 2012 be prosperous, and may your January have been horrible.

DEADSPIN: The Lovable, Impish Bill Belichick

I always find it a bit suspect when people have too many contrarian opinions about sports figures. It seems like they're fishing for column ideas or more interested in being provocative than in being informative. So please believe me when I say that I blurted out, "I think Bill Belichick is hilarious," without any opportunistic intent. I think I'd just been watching some patiently trolling effort of his during a press conference and found myself grinning at how subtle it was. Either way, my little outburst resulted in being told to "write that down."

To gear yourself up for the Super Bowl, please enjoy my paean to Bill Belichick's sense of humor and intolerance of bullshit by clicking on the gray coaching golem below:

Twitter Ephemera: Mike Florio

I'm not sure what Mike Florio's purpose is, but his weekly appearances on NBC's Football Night in America are keeping him from discovering it. Each week, he faux-banters with Peter King while trying to make reading a Huffington Post listicle of the day's football news off an iPad2 seem natural. Usually it seems the opposite.

Unengaged by news or analysis, the viewer is left to stare at Florio's complexion and let his mind wander. Instead of someone like Collinsworth or Dungy breaking down film, Florio reveals that some vampires aren't sexless teens, sexless Victorians or street-brawling brutes who also have sex. For some, the Dark Gift manifests as little more than looking like a pallid, venial, social-climbing CPA who apparently cannot die.

This isn't entirely fair to Florio. If he could glitter in sunlight, we'd at least think of him as a lovable, portable rave. And it's true that his site, MikeFloriosExtremeFootballZone.com (I'm guessing), breaks some news among the rumors that it breaks and then forgets about when they get embarrassing. He occasionally even mounts the righteous steed of Costasness, but that doesn't work out too well. Some people are just too small for that ride.

Five Stupid Arguments About Josh Lueke

Rooting for the Rays is an easy and likable activity. They have a smart manager and players with positive or at least neutral personalities. Their front office embraces critical thinking and new ideas. And sitting in the AL East with teams with monstrous payrolls, bigger fanbases and better stadiums makes rooting for them seem somehow just. Being an underdog by dint of fewer opportunities gives them an air of superiority in terms of baseball-fan morals.

Trading for Josh Lueke changes the gravity of the Rays' baseball universe.

Lueke has pitched all of 32 innings in the big leagues, and he may develop into a fine reliever, or he may not. It doesn't really matter. What matters is that the Rays might have obtained yet another undervalued player. Only, in this case, he's undervalued because he probably raped a woman.

In 2008, while pitching for the Class A Bakersfield Blaze, Lueke and some teammates brought a woman home with them. All of them were drunk. The next morning, feeling violated, the woman went to a hospital and requested a rape kit. The last thing she remembered before waking up with her pants off was a man ejaculating on her back and hair while she vomited into a toilet. DNA tests later proved that Lueke had sodomized her, despite his initially claiming that he'd had no sexual contact with her.

Already, the Rays' trade has created endless discussions no fan or human being really wants to have — the kind that foist a sudden need for armchair forensics, jurisprudence and politics onto people who'd rather just talk about baseball and would rather not discover the sexual politics of those around them. A lot of them are predictable and will probably be rehashed over the course of the season, and a lot of them are ugly. For all our sakes, let's get rid of them:

Completely RedZoning Out

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Penn State: 'Did They Do Enough?'

Note: unlike many guest pieces on Et tu, Mr. Destructo? today's article comes from a real, live person: the mysterious Mr. Awesome, an underemployed law school graduate. He wants a job, very badly. He will also do part-time writing or editing work. He would like to be paid money. He would also enjoy health insurance, but nothing fancy. He fears nothing and has great credentials.


Pretend Moral Quandaries for People Who Don't Know Anything
by MR. AWESOME

From the outset, news coverage of the Penn State scandal has baffled me. Like all good law students, I sat through Legal Ethics 101. The practices and procedures of internal reporting requirements are burned into my brain. I saw correspondents and talking heads going on about whether Joe Paterno, Mike McQueary, et al "did enough" by internally reporting these allegations in and through the Penn State bureaucracy.

I thought to myself, "Self, this is a corporate lawyer question. Why are these journalists asking corporate lawyer questions?" This news coverage confused me, gave me distorted, sideways flashbacks to the legal ethics course, only with everything just slightly off — like talking to an old friend in a dream, and he was an accomplice to decades of rape.

CLASSICAL: Tim Tebow, Magical White Person

A few weeks back, I was invited to contribute to a sportswriting startup called The Classical. They liked an article idea I sent in, and rather than respond to an email asking me for a fuller outline, I ignored it for two days and instead submitted a complete and entirely unrelated thing about TIM TEBOW.

Click on the Football Jesus to be taken to The Classical:


Right now, The Classical exists only in preview format, but it should launch next month with full bells and whistles. For now, you should check out the roster of staff writers and Google and track down their back catalogues. It's a pretty fantastic group.

Tim Tebow's Passion Play

Tim Tebow is doomed. I don't mean that metaphysically, because I'm sure he's going to Heaven. Although, for humor's sake, I hope it's 99% full of Muslims and unprepossessing socialist members of the Church of England.

I don't even mean that from an athletically evolutionary level, although pairing him with John Fox virtually guarantees that whatever abilities he develops will be stamped out of existence by two runs, an obvious heave on third and long, a punt and repeat. Fox evinces a native disinterest in aerial yardage that suggests he won't mind if it germinates independent of his efforts, but until then he'll refuse to nurture it. (Only he could have been more surprised by Jake Delhomme's 2003 performance than Jake Delhomme.) Meanwhile, Tebow's NFL youth plays out like he's been sent to The Ayn Rand School for QBs: Do you know what a quarterback says when he reaches for drills and game tape? He's saying, "I am a leech."

But if anything's doomed Tebow, it's coverage.

Al Davis and the Media's Poison Jobs

Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis died yesterday at 82. For most of you, that means the end of the scabby creature who ran the Raiders and leavened seasons of humiliating losses with employee firings suffused with Nixonian paranoia and loathing. Skimming Twitter reveals pretty much exactly what you expect from the internet: "jokes" linking Davis to Lovecraft monsters, fantasy monsters, sci-fi monsters, other permanently arrested-development genre monsters.

I can't claim to have done much better. Years ago, I wrote out a kind of silly thought-experiment likening Davis to Hitler. I didn't mean to sincerely equate the two, nor to rehabilitate Hitler in any way. At the time, it was funny to compare the Raiders' hermetic and endlessly back-biting front office with Hitler's last ten days:

Davis' ending has yet to be written, but it's currently playing out with the same drama of palace intrigue.... Messages go out from the Davis bunker: this is the year!—we are winning! Like Hitler's movement of paper armies in the face of the Soviets' overwhelming forces, the gestures are empty and futile. Conflicting reports emanate from underground: this one is out of favor. This one shall be the successor. No!—we were presumptuous: the leader has not named a successor. Davis has taken to issuing public comments to pressure head coach Lane Kiffin to resign...; the gestures echo Hitler delusionally promoting Paulus to Field Marshal to drive him to suicide.

This wasn't an obituary, though, and was never meant to be. This was clowning around with gossip and strange newsbites.

I still feel a little ashamed of it, because it sounds like a slightly less boneheaded version of the "he was a crazy skin-cancer goblin who sucked!" narrative I've spent the day reading on message boards and the last few years pushed by a lazy and easily sated media. I felt like I was re-pimping an already cartoonish pimp job offered on behalf of Paul Tagliabue and Roger Goodell in exchange for ample buffets and token opportunities for "access."

Derrick Mason Isn't Helping

Thursday night, the NFL Network aired part one of Bill Belichick: A Football Life, a two-part documentary of the New England Patriots 2009 season, whose primary appeal is seeing the season through head coach Bill Belichick's eyes and hearing him mic'd for every game, practice and coaches meeting.

During the Week Four game on October 4, in which the Patriots went on to defeat the Baltimore Ravens 27-21, Ravens wide receiver Derrick Mason trash talks at the Patriots sideline, prompting Belichick to fire back in kind: "Oh, fuck you, Mason, just fuck you. Why don't we talk after the game, all right? Just shut the fuck up." Mason laughs and pulls a quasi-"u mad, bro?" face, at which Belichick notes that the Pats have the lead by adding, "Can you look at the scoreboard?"

Here's the thing: none of this mattered for almost two straight years. Nobody commented about it; Mason didn't complain or consider it worth putting on the record in any serious way. So it's seems doubly asinine that he tweeted this yesterday:

Scholarships and Compensation: The Intercollegiate National Lie

Aside from reminding Americans for the next 15 minutes that history has actual value, Taylor Branch's devastating article, "The Shame of College Sports," finally fully legitimized the discussion of paying college athletes for their performance. It certainly didn't approve the notion by fiat, but simply allowing it to enter the conversation as an equally reasonable proposition was triumph enough.

Prior to its publication, it sometimes it took actual effort to find someone willing to entertain the idea. Proposing that college players take home paychecks usually provoked reactions that ran the gamut from mocking laughter to intense moral outrage. It's hard to explain why. In a country where you can monetize your Twitter feed, exploit your pop-star child, and have people applaud the commodification of virtually anything, college football has nestled in a protective embrace of absurd reverence for amateurism, swaddled in flimsy excuses for innocence.

Beautiful Returns: NFL Kickoff, 2011

Whenever the first NFL game of the year comes on TV, I completely slacken in my chair, let my mouth fall open and emit a narcotized "aaaahhhhhhh" noise. Mostly I do this to bug The Wife, whose loathing of football I've never managed to lessen with cajoling, barbecue, beer or desperate garment-ripping (mine, not hers) pleas. I like to play to every addiction stereotype she already believes football induces.

If I'm honest with myself, I admit that this play-acting isn't entirely insincere; I really am incredibly happy to see football back on TV. Perhaps not slumped irremediably on a sofa and drooling with a soporific smile on my face, but I get excited about the start of the game and notice myself relaxing, happy, when it starts. Make of that what you will, traders in "bread and circus" metaphors. The producers of the NFL on NBC certainly mined the event for all they could.

If they were cowed by the negative response to last year's show, opening with Taylor Swift and Dave Matthews Band, they certainly didn't show it, going this year with Maroon 5 and Kid Rock. The first one seemed an obvious choice; I'm actually surprised that NBC didn't run a crawl during the Maroon 5 performance with, "Catch lead singer Adam Levine on the next season of The Voice, only on NBC!" Then again, doing this might remind viewers that Cee Lo Green is also on that show and make them wonder why no black musicians were available (again) for this event. Maroon 5 edged dangerously close to provoking this realization with the presence of a black guy playing keyboards and uncomfortably representing the antithesis of Maroon 5's kind of music.

More Riches for Dynastic Sports Paupers

The Boston Bruins won the Stanley Cup last night, pulling off a city's exacta of being insufferable in every major sport.

Assuming you were once fond of Boston sports fans, watching them this last decade has felt a lot like watching episodes of The Simpsons after the eighth season. A few clunkers aside, they both delivered a reliable product — one angsty heartbreak, the other comedy. You grew up with both of their charms. Then at some point, there came an inexorable process of encrappening that eventually everyone had to admit would devour the greater body, the last human and appealing bits subsumed by dickheaded metastasis.

In both cases, smart people better able to see inevitability coming at them like a thunderhead convinced themselves that this wasn't happening, that everyone else had gone Chicken Little and lost perspective. Clever people rationalized The Simpsons' having covered every practical storyline and needing to move to extremes to seem novel. Boston apologists pointed to cases of other teams with bandwagons to marginalize the odium of deep-south Pats fans, held up The Evil Empire's payroll-lusty fans as evidence of the smaller and necessary evil of Boston's funds-fueled die-hards. Conversely, a drunk could have made a far more astute observation: "These guys are assholes."

Just like those two hilarious gags in even the worst Simpsons episodes, Boston apologists have plenty of rationalizing details to cling to. No matter how egregious the Sox become, it's absurd to think they'll approach the Yankees in gross revenue. Teams can't really control their bandwagons, or at least that's what (to take a wild "for instance") every Idaho-born Steelers fan has claimed when condemning bandwagon fans without a trace of irony. But there's still plenty of behavior for which they can be held accountable.

Jim Tressel: The Kind of Satan Who Sends Whitman's Samplers

Even if you don't follow college sports, surely by now either workplace conversation or your friends' Facebook walls have brought you up to speed about Jim Tressel, former Head Coach of the Ohio State football team, a "wholesome good guy" who resigned amidst a cloud of ethics violations.

There was something almost awesomely square about Tressel, with his Transitions Lenses and ties. He was like a football Mr. Rogers, the only man in America who could come home from a sweater-vested day at work and change into something even more impossibly Protestant. You pictured him removing his loafers and putting on boat shoes, swapping out the sweater vest for an even goofier sweater, like Donald Sutherland's high-collared job in Animal House (only without his bare butt hanging out). Jim Tressel looked like the kind of guy who put on a bowtie to take a shower.

All of this makes him a wonderful target for shoddy sports column hand-wringing about propriety. Such high-minded considerations have drenched newspaper op-ed sections with the familiar ooze of column inches that slide by with Plaschkean carriage returns for each sentence and the kind of affectedly tightassed shock and dismay that — even in print — somehow makes you think of people who tell you Important Things with such emphasis that you can hear the capital letters. There's a lot of poor thinking and hypocrisy at work here, which Deadspin's Tommy Craggs neatly skewered yesterday:

The Box We Want Boffo Big Ben to Bust

Normal people of any stripe should not watch Super Bowl pregame shows. They offer bad history, bad biography, bad analysis and bad logic. Just when they finish laying waste to all of these, they also manage to be a bad version of Entertainment Tonight, country music concerts and daytime talk shows.

If you managed to overhear this year's pregame show while getting ready for a party or waiting seemingly forever for the game to start, you probably heard a lot of faulty analysis and logic about Pittsburgh Steelers starting quarterback Ben Roethlisberger. Most fans of American sports can diagnose the bad analysis easily enough: "Ben Roethlisberger is one of the all-time greats because he just wins ballgames." But the bad logic was the more compelling. FOX NFL host Curt Menefee kicked off a theme that was carried throughout the pregame and into the game broadcast: this was Big Ben's "redemption season," and winning the Super Bowl would complete that redemption.

It takes an awful lot of question begging to construct any scenario wherein winning a particular ballgame can redeem anyone of anything, let alone two separate accusations of rape. What's more interesting is the converse implication, one the broadcast didn't address. To wit: if winning a Super Bowl morally redeems an alleged two-time rapist, then doesn't losing it confirm that he's just a piece-of-shit rapist? More importantly, why would anyone have any interest in an argument that tortured? What do they earn from that, and from whom?

Even More Things I Want to Do When I Grow Up

We here at Et tu, Mr. Destructo? have but one aim every year: to pioneer new strategies and set new benchmarks in being awesome, by employing new rad dynamics. At the beginning of each year, we establish standards for our comportment and limits on the human body's ability to always be totally crushing it, and each year we surpass them.

In 2009, we smoked myrrh with Lil John and righted the centuries of wrongs created by grave-robbing by grave-donating. (The secret: little paper coffins handed out to trick-or-treaters, who then asked for coins. Thanks, kids!) In 2010, we reenacted Fox in Socks with a rescued and diseased animal, took Brittany Murphy's death virginity and created MILF day.

Indeed, if a shortcoming can be found in our ambitions for ourselves and for Mr. Destructo as a journalistic organ, it is that we may be running out of potential goals due to the shortcomings of the physical universe. May that time never come. May we press on today. May you join us or die. Can you do any less?

Even More Things I Want to Do When I Grow Up:
I'm gonna tell everybody you drink Dr. Thunder.

I want to make all steampunk clothing accessories suddenly viable working machinery. I don't care how many people are scalded with burning oil and dropped to the ground by hundreds of pounds of metal.

I want to sneak into an elementary school and hide notes in every lunch bag that read, "Your father and I are getting divorced."

Harry Potter and the NFL Wild Card Weekend

Somewhere around hour #6 of the first day of NFL Wild Card weekend, I began to suspect that I'd been cured of my loathing of sports announcers.

Nearly two years spent luxuriating in the NFL Red Zone channel's absence of commercials and its frenetic jumps from game to game and from big play to big play meant that I'd experienced unmediated football. When big important things are happening in the game is when most announcers are too focused to go on inane time-filling mental jags. I had been spared about 30 weeks' worth of ads about THE ONLY TRUCK WITH A HEMI, Lipitor and dick medicine, and also "end zone" reporting from the obese Tony Siragusa, who needs to have a heart attack from mistaking his dick medicine for Lipitor — then have his corpse dragged into a ditch by a truck.

I was cheerful and, at times, a little bit rueful. This was fun. Who could fail to have total fun while watching football, and why had I failed at that so long? Could it be that I hadn't given people a fair shake?—that so much familiarity over so many years bred such contempt that I willfully blinded myself even to some announcers' good qualities? Were they actually good people, and was I actually just the jerk?

On the second day, during the fourth game of the weekend, Joe Buck and Troy Aikman dispelled all my doubts in less than three minutes. They didn't just suck; they sucked expeditiously. They sucked like they'd just gotten hired at Suck Co. by the Director of Suckery, and they were still in their 30 day probationary period wherein they could be terminated instantly for failure to suck hard, suck often and suck with vigor. Their ratio of minutes spent talking to minutes in which they were sucking approached one. They were truly doing yeoman's work, if "yeoman" is old English for the blowjob caddy on a ship that's falling apart because the people who built and run it are all assholes.

What I had forgotten to take into account was that minor but cherished delight of the NFL playoffs: that networks send out their best people to cover games because their limited broadcasting access allows them to know which is the game to cover. (For instance, of the four games this weekend, NBC covered the first two, while CBS and FOX covered the next two.) Generally, the people who have been around the longest are the people who viewers complain about the least, so networks send out the veterans expecting to satisfy the viewership.

This can still get screwed up, though. FOX Sports, for instance, is categorically horrible, which is how their premier announcing team can be universally regarded as the worst one on their payroll. Buck and Aikman have reached the top of the pyramid — and with any luck they will be entombed in it soon — but it's as if Egyptian civilization was based on the glory and immortality of turds. FOX Sports' national football (and baseball) empire is a ziggurat of cowpats lorded over by retards.

Let's go to the games.

Some Suggestions for Madden NFL '12

On Sunday night, as the Indianapolis Colts hosted the San Diego Chargers, I watched in amazement as San Diego quarterback Philip Rivers took off and ran up the left side of the field. It was a smart play; Indianapolis' coverage in the secondary was all over his receivers but was also drawn far back enough to allow him about ten easy rushing yards. What was startling to watch, though, was that Rivers squared his shoulders and ran toward the left sideline for a few steps, turned at the waist to make his shoulders face upfield, as if looking to make a throw, then squared his shoulders to the left again, then lifted his head and looked upfield again, then back to the left, then back upfield — again and again, seemingly after every second step.

Right then, I had one simple epiphany: "He needs to do jazz hands."

It was one of those plays that seems totally normal until you watch a lot of football. To the disinterested person at the sports bar, to the wife stuck with this shit on, in the background, for yet another Sunday, it was just predictable. Rivers was going to get the first down. Other people weren't there; he ran. That was that. It was how he ran that looked ridiculous. Just as he appeared seriously focused on the sideline, his whole body twisted upfield and seemed uplifted, as if he were gleefully shouting, "HEL-LO!" If he was playing against anybody, it was the Jets — not the team from New Jersey but the gang from West Side Story. If you told me that he'd actually been snapping his fingers left and right in rhythm, I would have to believe you.