Raiderdamus disclaimer: The following is a work of humor and satire about the Las Vegas Raiders. Due to its content, nobody should read it because it might contain offensive language and imagery.
Greetings, Raider Nation! It is I, the quickest draw in the West, the man who shoots my clock because I’ve got time to kill, and the World’s Most Dangerous Football-Related Humorist, Raiderdamus the Great and Powerful. I come to you today after a week away, anxious to get back to doing what I do best, which is making the intense pain that sports fandom brings us all a little more tolerable. The Raiders still have an outside shot at making the playoffs, mostly because the Steelers are awful, but they’ll have to run a gauntlet to earn the right to go get crushed in Miami one more time.
Raiderdamus’ Sunday Foretelling: Vikings vs. Raiders, Week 14
That gauntlet begins on Sunday, and I’ve asked the Great Beyond to share his thoughts regarding the game. Here is the message I received:
“They say that good is the enemy of great. I guess that’s why the Vikings are the enemy of the Packers.
The Minnesota Vikings have a franchise win percentage well north of 56 percent in their history, which makes them the best franchise to never win a Super Bowl by a wide margin. The Vikings have been to four Super Bowls and lost them all, making them bigger chokers than a Minneapolis Police Department officer who sees a black man minding his own business. The Vikings were forced to build their new stadium after the Metrodome roof collapsed in 2010, and the Vikings commemorate this event by collapsing themselves every January.
If you, like any decent human being, hate the Cowboys, you have the Vikings to thank for their fans’ insufferable entitlement syndrome. The Vikings were the first victims of the “Hail Mary” pass, when Roger Staubach sent a pass deep down the field to Drew Pearson in the 1975 playoffs, which the Vikings were unable to defend because Pearson committed blatant offensive pass interference. That play gave the Cowboys a win, and it was they instead of the Vikings who would lose to the 1975 Steelers in Super Bowl X.
In 1989, the Vikings decided that they needed Herschel Walker instead of being a good team ever again, and so they traded a boatload of picks to the Cowboys for Walker. Those picks eventually turned into Emmitt Smith, Russell Maryland, and Darren Woodson, which was the main reason the Cowboys won three Super Bowls in the 1990s. It is also the reason huge trades in the NFL are rarely seen anymore and are generally limited to draft-day deals.
We saw this with the Bears and Panthers just last year, where the Panthers traded four picks and DJ Moore to Chicago for the opportunity to draft Bryce Young and become the worst team in football. It’s generally not a good idea to be awful and have no first-round pick to show for it. Just ask Denver after they traded for Russell Wilson.
The Vikings rarely have a roster that makes you think they should be very good or very bad. They’re just kind of there, fooling their fanbase with a 13-4 season last year where they were outscored by three points on the year. They are the reason Daniel Jones is still the quarterback of the New York Giants and is being paid handsomely to lose every divisional game he plays in.
Despite all their regular-season success, the Vikings are still forced to start Kirk Cousins in the playoffs. Every time he starts a playoff game, Viking fans will yell after the game what they would rather have been doing during the game: “F*** Cousins!”
Minnesota does not have a long history of success in sports, with their most recent championship being a 1991 World Series win by the Twins. The Wild are a deeply unserious hockey team, and the Timberwolves let Kevin Garnett wallow in futility until he won a ring in Boston.
This is reminiscent of Vikings great Randy Moss, who joined the Patriots in 2007 and in 2007 reached the Super Bowl and almost won until God used his servant Eli Manning to remind Vikings fans that anyone associated with them cannot have nice things.
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Fortunately for the 2023 Vikings, Kirk Cousins and his insurance salesman/youth pastor *ss are injured, and Josh Dobbs is the new man under center. It’s fitting that Dobbs plays for Minnesota because he has a degree in aerospace engineering, and like all residents of Minnesota, a place where people use made-up words like “ope” and where the state bird is the mosquito, he doesn’t want to be on Earth any longer than he has to be.
Minnesota, like Ohio, is an awfully densely populated place where nobody was ever intended to actually live. The Vikings’ most famous head coach, Bud Grant, very nearly died in a blizzard in 1940, which should tell you all you need to know about the place. Grant got into coaching so he’d have a reason to visit safer places like Chicago.
Josh Dobbs looks like Little Bill and Sam Cassell had a child, and though he’s playing well now, he’s due to crash back to Earth like a Soviet rocket. Dobbs will be the latest in a long line of Vikings f*ckups, including Jim Marshall, Gary Anderson, Blair Walsh, and Brett Favre. If there was another direction in which the Vikings could miss a kick besides wide left or wide right, they’d find it.
They haven’t tried Wide Short yet.
Maybe they can do so now, since they cut Daniel Carlson years ago just to watch him become a big damn hero for the Raiders. On Sunday, they’ll get to see it up close and personal.
Raiders win, 20-17.
*Top Photo: USA Today