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 top of the muffin, the straw that stirs the drink, and the fromage in your omelette. I come to you today fresh off a correct prediction of a Raiders loss to Pittsburgh, and it seems that the Raiders, after alternating wins and losses, have settled into a comfortable routine of just losing. This is a good thing for the Raiders and their fans, because we can all stop caring, and the Raiders can try to draft their quarterback of the future. There are no less than six quarterbacks in college right now who are better than anyone on the Raiders’ roster, and there may be a few in high school and junior high who fit that bill as well.
Tank Commander Aidan O’Connell will lead the Raiders this week as the Raiders head to Los Angeles for the second time, and the Great Beyond has plenty to say about this upcoming matchup. Here is the message I received:
It’s nice for the NFL to schedule the Raiders to play twice in Los Angeles so they can have some of their fans at their games. There were so many Steelers fans at Allegiant last week it looked like the Allegheny County Jail. There are still several dozen Steeler fans at the stadium who were unable to get out of their seats at the end of the game because they ate a few too many hot dogs.
The Rams are a poverty franchise in the sense that, like poverty and crime, they destroyed the city of St. Louis. Stan Kroenke made a great business decision by marrying into the Walton family, but made a terrible one by building SoFi Stadium just to be the sixth-most popular football team in California. SoFi cost almost 3 billion dollars, and the Rams have sold about seventeen tickets to their own fans since it opened. There are third-division Estonian soccer teams with more fans than the Rams.
I think that’s healthy, though. Rams fans aren’t the type to buy team merchandise or go to a championship parade. They simply check the results of the team’s game online or in the newspaper, go “Huh, how about that,” and then go back to selling timeshares, screwing senior citizens out of their pensions, or getting aspiring actresses hooked on meth. These people have the kind of peace of mind that Raider fans will never have.
Rams fans don’t live and die by football. That detached apathy will serve them well when Matt Stafford finally keels over and the Rams go 2-15 and still have no draft picks because they traded Jalen Ramsey for a ham sandwich and a diet soda to be named later. The only disappointment Rams fans will feel is because the Cowboys still didn’t win the Super Bowl.
I don’t really blame the Rams for leaving St. Louis. Nobody in their right mind would live in Missouri on purpose. But I do blame them for the vacuum they left when they departed; that created more Chiefs fans than Taylor Swift ever could. It must suck to live in a place like that, and your fandom choices are the Chiefs, the Bears, the Missouri Tigers, or a life of stealing cars to buy fentanyl.
The Rams had visions of sharing their shiny new stadium with another team, which ended up being the Chargers for some reason, and being the Lakers to their tenant’s Clippers. In truth, the Rams and Chargers are both the Clippers, and the Raiders, who don’t even play in California, are still the Lakers and always will be. The Rams’ business strategy was like Field of Dreams, that if they built it, people would come, but instead of Shoeless Joe Jackson, we got Stetson Bennett III.
The idea that another team is bullying the Chargers by virtue of their very existence is hilarious, but the Chargers’ existence makes Stan Kroenke look like less of a sh*tbird by comparison, and that simply will not do. Fatcat landlords like Kroenke are why Marx wrote Das Kapital, why Castro took over Cuba, and why Stalin and Mao killed hundreds of millions of their own people. Surely, yelling at clouds will make the Rams and Nuggets and Avalanche and Arsenal less profitable one of these days.
Fortunately for the Raiders, the Rams are currently more injured than the French Army after Verdun. If you buy a ticket to this game, there is a non-zero chance you will be conscripted to play for the Rams. And you will still probably be enough to beat the Raiders.
Rams win, 29-16.
*Top Photo: Getty Images