Raiderdamus disclaimer: The following is a work of humor and satire about the Las Vegas Raiders. It may contain offensive language and imagery, and due to its content, it should not be read by anyone.
Greetings, Raider Nation! It is I, the hole in your donut, the pop in your tart, the captain of your crunch, Raiderdamus the Great and Powerful. It’s been a long week in Raider Nation, with the season appearing all but over due to injuries and poor effort by the Silver and Black. Al Davis always said the greatness of the Raiders is in its future, but it’s obvious now that the greatness of the Raiders was in 1980, and the future of the Raiders looks very similar to the future of the Oakland Coliseum they recently left behind.
The future can be a hazy thing, but to get a better sense of it, I’ve once again contacted the all-knowing Great Beyond to peer behind the veil. Here is the message I received:
“Even the most pessimistic observer couldn’t have foreseen what happened in that Panthers game. Maxx Crosby, if healthy, could have made a difference, but he was hopping around on one leg, doing about as much damage as Captain Ahab did to Moby-Dick. A pitiful scene, to be sure. Now who you got this week? Cleveland? My ancient nemesis.
As any longtime reader will know, the Great Beyond hates three things. Ohio, Cleveland, and the Browns. All three are poster children for failure and emblematic of the farcical human desire to seek hope when none can be found. The worst part about the Browns is that there have been two of them, and they both suck. Imagine if you had a friend named Jeff, and he was kind of a loser, but in a charming way. Then he got arrested for public drunkenness and moved away. Then you got a new friend, also named Jeff, and he seemed cool, but it turned out he sold crack in school zones and cold-called senior citizens to steal their social security numbers. That’s what it is to be a Browns fan.
When the Browns left Cleveland for a less depressing and crime-riddled city like Baltimore, the city of Cleveland kept the history and team image of the Browns. This was fine with every other city in the country, as none of them wanted to be associated with the Browns in any way. The team’s logo and brightly colored helmet honor the founder of the franchise, a true titan of the sport and one of the most influential figures in football history—Paul Orange, a man so indelibly tied to Cleveland football that his idiot son owns the Cincinnati Bengals to this day. The Browns’ jerseys reflect their play on the field, in that they both look like s***.
Sunday’s game will be a battle between the two NFL teams stupid enough to have hired football anarchist Hue Jackson as their head coach. Never forget that Jackson attempted a hostile takeover of the Raiders following Al Davis’s death and sold the future for Carson Palmer. Never forget that he went two years with the Browns winning only one game, which was against the Chargers, so it doesn’t count because they’re not a real team anyway. These days, Hue Jackson only serves as a warning to underperforming junior varsity high school teams that if they don’t start winning, Jackson will be brought in to turn things around.
Jackson’s reign of terror in Cleveland came at an opportune time and netted them Myles Garrett and Baker Mayfield. The Browns’ treatment of Mayfield was downright criminal, and the Browns were so bad that it made Tampa look like an appealing and stable enough place to call home. Tampa, America’s own Island of Misfit Toys, a place run by pro wrestlers and scientologists, where just this week scores of people drove through the ocean itself to escape a hurricane. Tampa is a bastion of psychosis and devilry, but compared to Cleveland, it’s a cozy cottage in rural Wisconsin.
The Browns’ total aversion to having anyone as competent as Mayfield on their team led them to their new greatest sin—their pursuit and signing of Deshaun Watson. Plenty of other teams were inexplicably after Watson when he became a free agent, including the Falcons, and we must never let them forget that. But it was the Browns who were stupid enough to include so much guaranteed money that Watson could do whatever he wanted without consequence, which is how Watson conducts himself on the regular anyway.
Prior to the Watson signing, the Browns were lovable losers, a team that had been so bad for so long that you couldn’t really hate them. After they signed Watson, the Browns became Public Enemy Number One.
They have lost any sympathy, like a husband who cheats on his wife while she is in the hospital. Signing Watson wasn’t just typical Browns incompetence; it was malicious towards their own fanbase and towards half the population of the Earth.
Deshaun Watson is to women what a deer tick is to hiking in the woods, what hepatitis is to a junkie, and what an alligator is to a golf course. Signing him to play football, and for such a lofty sum, after the legal troubles he’s brought on himself, is indefensible. It would be like if Bank of America broke Chiefsaholic out of whatever federal prison he’s being buggered in right now and made him their CEO. If only the Patriots had signed Watson instead of the Browns. If Watson had given Robert Kraft all those massages, neither of them would have gotten in trouble.
Both of these teams are missing almost all their good players and will do their damndest to lose this game. It will be an absolutely diabolical shitshow—a demolition derby where nobody wins, and everyone goes home dirtier than they were before. No outcome would surprise me, but I suspect the Raiders suck just a little more than their opponent.
Browns win, 16-13.
*Top Photo: Getty Images
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