Nurse the Hate: The Second Time I Saw Bowie or NFL Week 6

 

There are some real downsides of aging.  I especially enjoy when I wake up in the morning feeling absolutely crushed by a massive hangover only to remember “Wait, I didn’t drink last night.”.  My right heel has some sort of plantar situation that flares up without any warning leaving me hobbling around like a peg legged sailor for an hour until it loosens up.  I woke up last night with my elbow screaming out in pain like I was Sandy Koufax after throwing 11 innings in 1966.  As I scan back to the potential cause of the injury, such mundane events as “carrying some groceries” cannot be dismissed as potential causes.  Yet, this is a worthwhile trade just for the wisdom of age.

 

I often know what is going to happen before it happens.  This is not because I am a gypsy fortune teller like Little Steven Van Zandt, though I will admit he might not be a fortune teller either.  He might just have taste in clothes like a Romanian immigrant woman in 1912.  No, I know something is going to happen because I have seen it before.  I remember hearing a big buzz about the band Of Montreal, so I stuck around the Beachland to catch their set.  The young audience was jacked up to see them, their enthusiasm sending an electricity through the room.  Once the band started playing, I took me moments to realize “Oh, this is a take on David Bowie.  I get it.”.  I was sort of bummed I didn’t have the same glow on my face like “the kids”.  The “been there, done that” mindset is tiring but still beneficial.  Sure, it makes it harder to regain the excitement when you see something “new”, like when you were 14 and heard George Thorogood and the Destroyers on SNL before understanding they were a blues cover band.  “Wait…  He didn’t write that Bad To The Bone riff?”  Everything came after something else, except Devo of course, which has just always been.

 

It is this memory of what has come before that leaves me confident that the Pittsburgh Steelers will beat the Browns on Sunday.  Since the Browns “returned” in 1999, they have won in Pittsburgh once.  Once.    Tim Couch was the QB and the #1 song in the country was “Working For The Weekend” by Loverboy.  (That Loverboy part isn’t true, but I was just thinking about the time I loaned the guitar player a quarter to get a soda out of a radio station vending machine where I worked, so it was the first song that came to mind when I thought about “crappy old radio songs that still make you feel good in a guilty way”.)  The bottom line is the Browns don’t win in Pittsburgh.  This is because the Steelers always shove the Browns around, hurt a bunch of their players, and then go eat Primanti Brothers sandwiches afterwards.  Here’s all you need to know…  Baker Mayfield does not play well under pressure.  Hell, who does?  The Steelers average 5 QB sacks a game.  Baker Mayfield hurt his ribs last week, and only practiced yesterday.  If you had hurt ribs, would you want a 275 pound man hitting you as hard as he could?  How many turnovers is he going to make?  Pittsburgh -3.

 

I have seen the horrifying Dak Prescott injury over and over, perhaps more often than the Zapruder film of JFK’s assassination.  Over and to the right.  Over and to the right.  The market will completely overreact to Dak’s season ending injury and assume Dallas will never win again.  Look, Andy Dalton isn’t great, but he IS a legitimate NFL starter.  Out of all the backups in the league, he is the one guy I would take.  Yeah, maybe Jameis Winston, but we want to win real games not fantasy football.  I am on board with The Red Rifle to provide enough for the Cowboys to win games they are supposed to win, like this one at home against a wildly overrated Arizona Cardinals.  This line has already moved 4 points towards Arizona.  When they zig, we zag.  Dallas +1.5

 

I don’t think there has ever been a team fielding as many key injuries as the San Francisco 49ers.   Any player you can think of on that team is either out, or playing with an injury so bad that if you had it, you would call off work for a month.  They have three crappy QB options, no D line, no O-line and a banged up secondary.  The Dolphins just beat those guys 43-17, but when you get down to it the Dolphins didn’t really beat the 49ers, they beat some strangers wearing 49er outfits.   With the salary cap, it’s impossible to have the depth necessary to field a good team with those injuries.  Meanwhile the Rams are quietly winning games.  They just destroyed Washington 30-10 and made Alex Smith look like he’s never even seen a football before.  I will be stunned if the Rams don’t win this game.  Rams -3  

 

Season Record:  8-6