The following is a work of satire and humor about the Las Vegas Raiders. It may contain indecent or offensive language and/or imagery and due to its content it should not be read by anyone.
Greetings, Raider Nation! It is I, the butter on your cornbread, the Long Island in your iced tea, the bite in your Barq’s, and the world’s most dangerous hermit, Raiderdamus the Great and Powerful. I come to you today triumphant, fresh off a correct prediction of a Raiders victory over the annoying yet ultimately irrelevant Miami Dolphins, who could only repress the greatness of the Raiders for so long.
The Raiders get an extra day this week before their Monday Night contest, but the Great Beyond never misses a workday, just like Santa Claus and Lou Gehrig. By custom, the Great Beyond sent me his message regarding Monday night’s game. Let us receive his words.
Pull the plug on the Chargers
“You’re back again! Another week, another win for the Raiders. 3-0 and at the top of the division alongside the Denver Broncos, who are currently experimenting to see if they can win any games if their receivers’ knees have all fallen off. I don’t like their chances!
Who you got this week? The Chargers? Wait, I know a guy in the electronics department at Wal-Mart. Do you need a regular Micro USB or USB-C? I keep losing mine all the time, so it’s important to keep some spare chargers handy.
Oh, you mean the football team! The Los Diego Chargers of South Central Milpitas. They got lucky last year, you know. No fans were allowed at football games, but they were the only team for whom that rule didn’t affect their attendance figures at all. It kept the Chargers from getting booed in their stadium, which must have been nice for them. The team should have piped in some boos through the stadium PA so the rookie players could get the home game experience.
The Chargers are one of the biggest scams ever perpetrated upon sports fans in this country. They are always much better in theory than in real life, much like eating kale, or listening to smooth jazz. Smooth jazz and the Chargers serve the same purpose, and that’s to make sure their audience gets screwed.
A legacy of fraudulence
In 2020, the Chargers drafted Justin Herbert to be their new quarterback. He was quickly pressed into service when the Los Angeles team doctor treated then-starter Tyrod Taylor like Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction, collapsing his lung with a needle. Herbert played great and never stopped playing great, which led some to count the Chargers as a serious contender. Not I! I am not afraid of the Chargers becoming a real franchise, because unlike these Johnny-come-lately’s in the media today, I remember what the Chargers have done in the past.
I remember how they stormed the league with the Air Coryell offense led by legendary coach Don Coryell, who looked like he always smelled dog poop on the bottom of his shoe. No Super Bowls for Don. That offense was helmed by Hall of Fame quarterback Dan Fouts. No Super Bowls for Dan. Lance Alworth is one of the best wide receivers ever. No Super Bowls. Kellen Winslow Sr. died at least seven times and was resurrected by Mr. Miyagi or whatever necromancers the Chargers had on staff during a playoff game against Miami in 1982. What did Winslow die for? The Chargers lost the next week in Cincinnati, 27-7, in the coldest football game ever played. Winslow gained nothing, except the opportunity to pass his massive brain damage onto his son.
The Charger defense in the 1990s was fierce, with Junior Seau and Leslie O’Neal, and Rodney Harrison. Nothing. They had Drew Brees and Philip Rivers under center for nearly 20 years. Total failure. They had LaDainian Tomlinson, Michael Turner, and Darren Sproles in the same backfield. They came up short, time and time again. Tomlinson, perhaps the best player ever to play with a lightning bolt on the side of his helmet, has a Jets tattoo.
Partners in failure
There is only one division in football where every team has won a Super Bowl: the NFC East. There are three divisions where three teams have won the Super Bowl- the AFC East and the AFC and NFC West. The NFC West, hampered by the fact that they house the Cardinals, who despite being founded in 1898, have never won a goddamn thing that they didn’t steal from the Pottsville Maroons in 1925. They started as the Morgan Athletic Club and became the Chicago Cardinals, the St. Louis Cardinals, the Phoenix Cardinals, the Stanford Cardinals, the Yakult Swallows, the Barcelona Dragons, the Washington Generals, and the Montreal Expos before settling into their new Glendale stadium/giant UFO as the Arizona Cardinals. They have never won anything, and they never will.
The AFC West has three great franchises and the Chargers. The Chargers reached the Super Bowl once and were beaten worse than Mankind in Hell in a Cell by the Undertaker. San Francisco threw them eighteen feet down to the ground through an announcer’s table in 1995, and the Chargers have never been heard from again on the Super Bowl stage.
They got close a few times but were unable to get past Tom Brady and Bill Belichick. That has happened to plenty of teams. However, only the Chargers turned losing to the Patriots in the playoffs into such performance art. It was like watching Jordan’s Bulls lose to the Pistons, except the Bulls never came back and won eventually. The Pistons just kept winning, forever and ever, their boot stomping on Jordan’s face in the mud. San Diego could have ended the oppression of Tom Brady, but they did not, and they will be forever losers for that alone.
Turning tail and running
Eventually, the San Diego fans got the message that this team was going to suck forever and just stopped caring. In the way that Dallas Cowboys fans should get that message about their team but are too dense to understand. So the Chargers did what any sensible team would do and moved to a city that doesn’t give a crap about them. Sometimes this works out well (Baltimore Ravens), and sometimes it does not (Baltimore Colts). For the Chargers, it has not. The Chargers are not even close to the most popular football team in Los Angeles and are to Los Angeles football fans what the Sacramento Kings are to Los Angeles basketball fans.
The Raiders are and always will be the most popular football team in L.A., followed by the 49ers, USC, UCLA, Cowboys, Rams, and the L.A. Galaxy. Nobody cares about the Chargers, who play the role of the Clippers as a tenant in their building. Though without a fraction of the Clippers’ popularity or success. However, they have all of the Clippers’ injury luck, with all the knee problems of Blake Griffin, Paul George, and Kawhi Leonard.
Charger fans, all twelve of them, are like Waldo in Van Halen’s Hot For Teacher video, just painfully uncool and unwanted. Oh, mom! I’m not like the other guys! I’m nervous, and my socks are too loose! Well, sit down, Waldo, and go stuff yourself into a locker and save the rest of us the trouble of doing it ourselves.
Nobody cares…
Fans of the Chiefs, Broncos, and Raiders all hate each other but respect the teams’ success, except the Chargers. Nobody cares enough to hate them; they’re just kind of there. They’ll never be good enough to be truly despised. And that’s the real tragedy of the Chargers; they’re too milquetoast to be loved or hated. They’ll fade back into the obscurity in which they belong.
Raiders win, 31-27.
*Top Photo: Associated Press/Rick Scuteri