A Promise: I Will Use The NFL Offseason To Become An Even Worse Person

Drew Magary’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday at Defector during the NFL season. Got something you wanna contribute? Email the Roo. And buy Drew’s book, The Night The Lights Went Out, through here.

Well, shit. It’s Thursday afternoon and there are no more football games left to be played. Not even a shit-ass Pro Bowl for me to check out for three minutes before wanting to off myself. This is horrible. Why didn’t any of you tell me that the NFL season ends? I wasn’t ready for this shit. The fuck am I supposed to do now? Read?!

Now would be the perfect time to go out and expand my horizons: travel to new places, enjoy my family, find out if Dov Kleiman is a real person (I legitimately don’t think he is, and I am not alone), discover new hobbies, attend worship services, etc.

I will be doing none of those things. Instead, my plan for this NFL offseason is to become a true piece of shit.

For a long time, I’ve always thought that I’d make a good CEO. And I don’t mean that in the Defector-y, “Let’s run an ethical company where everyone is treated with respect” kind of way. I mean a real CEO: the kind that slashes job on a whim, has no clear vision outside of doing whatever will make stockholders happy, and gives myself an obscene bonus every year while my workers are paid in discarded chicken bones. I can do all of that. You think I’m not capable of it? I went to a prep school AND a NESCAC school. I was groomed for evil, and I love my money. I could do that job and still sleep like a baby, I tell you.

As for hobbies, I plan to buy lots of shit for myself strictly to buy it. Everyone pooh-poohs retail therapy in 2023, but guess what? Buying myself $40 worth of sushi on a random Friday afternoon for lunch makes me fucking ECSTATIC. So does shopping for new clothes at the Nordstrom Rack, throwing impulse purchases into my Amazon cart, and talking my wife into getting a bigger TV for our basement. The current one is only a 55-incher. Unacceptable. We will upgrade to one of those big curved fuckers and then I’ll watch Plane on it 500 times. I’ll quote it endlessly on Twitter and you’ll have NO idea what I’m talking about.

I won’t read. I won’t make new friends. If you call me to say hi, you will be able to sense, in my voice, that I’m dying to get off the phone. I have a new novel I wanna write but I’m gonna spend all of my time daydreaming about that novel selling 50 million copies rather than actually writing it. I’m gonna drive like a complete asshole. People will complain about the bad news story of the day and I’ll openly grouse that all anyone does these days is piss and moan.

And I’m gonna get back into vandalism. When I was a kid, I used to pull flowers out of neighborhood flowerpots and stuff them into mailboxes. It kicked ass. Gotta get back to that again, because the best feeling in the world—no matter who you are—is doing illegal shit. Ask any bank robber or sitting president.

On the sporting front, I’m gonna boot up the sports talk radio gland in my brain and spend the next seven months laying out future roster scenarios for my team that have NO CHANCE of ever coming to pass. In any given year, I’d say that 98 percent of my NFL thoughts are about things that never end up happening. I’ll savor real wins and stew over real losses for the appropriate amount of time. But once that offseason hits, I’m in fucking Candy Land. I’m moving up in the draft, and then moving back down in the draft, and then taking a call from Aaron Rodgers’ agent and laughing out loud at him before hanging up, trading for a different quarterback, and then cutting all of the dead weight on the roster, and then fortifying that roster with guys who won’t hit the free-agent market for another two years, and then topping ESPN’s power rankings for 568 consecutive weeks. And then I’m buying the team. Yes, me. Mr. Magary: CEO of General Mills and owner of the Minnesota Vikings. Reporters try to corner me in my luxury box to get a quote and I nobly tell them Listen guys, I’m just the owner. I trust my football men to do their jobs. Then I leave the stadium to get laid.

This is why the offseason is even more fun than the actual season. There are no rules here. No flags. No timeouts to save. You are in the devil's sandbox, so you may as well make full use of it. I know I will. Here’s your final Jamboroo of the NFL season. Hit the music!

Let’s shut ‘er down and get to chillout time.

The Games

Zero. None. There are probably some NHL games this weekend, but who gives a shit. Let’s talk about some random crap instead:

• Like the rest of the free world, I was less than enthused that the Super Bowl ended with a wet fart of a holding call. But I’m a grown adult and also NOT an Eagles fan, so I’m prepared to move on with my life. The same can’t be said for the Eagles themselves:

Nor for former Eagles who aren’t even welcome in the city of Philadelphia anymore:

Freddie, you’re not one of them. You are one of the worst receivers in NFL history, and you are now retired. All of you should take your L and go the fuck home. Why can’t anyone take an L anymore? It’s not that hard. I lost $10 on that game. Do you see me suing DraftKings to get it back? No, because I’m hoping to get in on some sweet class-action money down the line. But until then, I’m taking my loss like a MAN.

•But here’s one area of life where I do NOT endorse taking your L and going home:

I feel lousy for Eric Bieniemy, and not merely because he’s won two Super Bowls and appears set to be rewarded with a lateral move to the Commanders(???) for it. The talk behind the scenes is that Bieniemy can’t get a top job because he’s an unpleasant person (his Colorado tenure is of no help in the matter), but how many unpleasant white guys have gotten these jobs instead of him over the years? How many of those guys were outright lauded for being surly pricks? The Lions hired Matt Patricia knowing that not only was he a fucker, but that he also had allegations of sexual assault in his background. It’s a neat little trick to deny Bieniemy and other coaches a chance to run things because you hold them to a higher standard than the guys you actually give those jobs to. If Bieniemy really is a fraud and a red-ass, I’d at least like him to get a chance to suck as a head coach to prove it. That is fairness. Everyone in this country should be free to fuck up equally. Instead, assholes like Mike McCarthy get a runway 50,000,000 miles long while Bieniemy gets to be the unwitting poster child for a cause that shouldn’t even have to be a cause to begin with.

I find this irritating not merely for moral reasons, but also football ones. I don’t want my team, or any team outside of Green Bay, letting racism get in the way of being GOOD. There’s a talent pool of black coaches that’s both underdeveloped and untapped. That’s football malpractice. Hire these men so that I can watch better fucking football. What’s right and what’s practical aren’t always mutually exclusive.

•But here’s an example where they very much are. Earlier this week, the New York Times ran an investigative piece that revealed that the College Board watered down its new AP Black Studies course essentially at the behest of Nazi-ass Republicans, particularly Ron DeSantis:

And there was a preamble that the College Board said will now accompany other A.P. courses as well: “A.P. opposes indoctrination. A.P. students are expected to analyze different perspectives from their own, and no points on an A.P. exam are awarded for agreement with any specific viewpoint. A.P. students are not required to feel certain ways about themselves or the course content.”

Again we have another blatantly transparent move in the bigotry playbook, where you tell people that you’re denying them a full education because you’re being SENSITIVE to everyone’s point of view. Fuck everyone involved in this little escapade.

•I’ve got old-man vision setting in. Things have only gotten worse since this tweet:

I have to wear drugstore reading glasses when I work now. If I look at my phone without those same glasses on, I gotta hold it at a slight distance or else shit starts doubling. Sometimes my sunglasses are too dark for me. At night, opposing headlights are all too bright for me. My TV (the pitiable 55-incher) is never bright enough. I’m closing in fast on the bifocal life, and that’s not fun to reckon with. I’m already deaf, man. When I made all those Helen Keller jokes in grade school, it was because I secretly feared being both blind and deaf. Now it’s gonna happen! THIS IS BULLSHIT. DAMN THESE EYES.

•Guess who finally dropped his phone in the toilet for the first time after all these years? -->THIS GUY<-- The good news is that I hadn’t yet used that toilet before the aforementioned incident, so my poor iPhone took a dip in clean(ish) toilet water. I fished it out, wiped it off, and it still works just fine. Didn’t even have to do the CPR thing where you dunk your phone in a pile of rice to bring it back from the dead. A true rite of passage. I am a man now.

Super Bowl pick: 0-1

Postseason picks overall: 8-5

Song For The Offseason

“Spiral To Oblivion” by Ophidian I. There’s no more football on, which means we’re gonna bring down a few levels for this section so you can CHILL. And what’s more chill than three minutes of soothing riffage straight outta Iceland? I say nothing. Reader Brendan concurs:

Icelandic death metal for a 16-bit video game boss battle. Many are calling it Segadeth.

That is a kick-ass name for it. Now I wanna go play Guitar Hero. And guess what? I CAN. I got the time now.

Great Moments In Poop History

Reader Tom sends in this story I call FRENCH LAUNDRY:

I was in France one bleak December and was eating at some touristy restaurant on Avenue des Champs-Élysées. After a few minutes I detected seismic activity and went to the bathroom before things got desperate. I felt another gurgle followed by a rumble, but I was OK. I'd taken action and would prevent impending doom.

I got to the bathroom and opened the door. There was one stall. I grabbed the handle. It refused to budge. Occupado.

This restaurant sat like 250 people. One toilet, for the entire place. I wanted the owner over a guillotine. The rumbling in my stomach increased. It was about to go down. I was standing there clenching, my anxiety raising by the second for every moment that stall door remained closed. I tried to remain calm, but anxiety had a way of speeding up the process and I was in crisis.

Guy in the stall, no one else in the bathroom. I looked around and I saw a urinal. Is it really going down like this? Shit was literally starting to break containment. In desperation, I dropped trou and unleashed hell into the urinal. Mind you, anyone, ANYONE could have come into the bathroom and seen me. That asshole in the stall taking his damn time could have suddenly emerged from the stall to see a grown man with his ass smashed into a urinal.

Seconds passed. No one came. When I was convinced I’d evacuated all I could within reason, I pulled up my pants and got the hell out of there. I couldn’t let anyone put a face to what I just did. As I was rushing out of the restaurant and towards my hotel, I could feel something coming down my leg. I looked down and saw little poop balls running out of my pants and onto the floor, people eating a few feet from my path. 

I rushed out of the restaurant, disappeared into the Parisian night, and managed to get to my hotel room without encountering another soul. Delousing yourself in a tiny European shower is not the easiest thing in the world. I had to smash a couple lingering poop balls through the drain and my destruction of Paris was complete.

Never in my life have I heard of a guy pulling a urinal dump out of necessity and not as a prank, but there’s a first time for everything.

Which Idiot GM Is This?

You know your team is in good hands when the man in charge of the roster is a professionally sweaty guy who MEANS BUSINESS. Which team does the man below hold in his meaty paws?

That’s new Cards GM Monti Ossenfort. Will I call him Monti Ossenfart for as long as he holds this job? I will. Anyway, Ossenfart here looks like the Cardinals were searching for a version of Steve Keim that was 10 percent handsomer and not an incorrigible drunk. They succeeded on both counts.

Cheap Beer Of The Offseason

Bear beer! This beer is from Denmark, but was spotted by reader Kevin in Russia. Is good, yeah? Is time for drink much beer and throw up into trash can? Consumer of blog Kevin says is very much time!

I'm currently living in Moscow, Russia, and they have all sorts of random beers from all over the world that I've never heard of back in the America, but Bear Beer has to take the cake. Thanks to the ruble tanking, at the current exchange rate this costs about one dollar.

Still seems overpriced. When you see STRONG on the can of any cheap European beer, they mean it. That beer will fuck you up good. Two tall boys of Bud and you can keep on partying for another eight hours. Two tall boys of this and you’ll end up passed out with another person’s shit smeared all over your face.

Movie Of The Week For Colts Fans

The Menu, which I watched specifically because a lot of the behind-the-scenes talent from Succession (director Mark Mylod, screenwriters Seth Reiss and Will Tracy, EPs Adam McKay and Will Ferrell) were behind it. That’s right, blog readers: we’re just a month away from Succession season starting up yet again, which will give all of your favorite NFL writers (myself included) something to tweet about endlessly while there’s no football on. I can tell you’re excited. I can tell you’re ready to cream your jeans!

So I was looking to get a Succession-esque fix before Season 4 debuted, and The Menu doesn’t disappoint on that front. It has all of the same story contours as the show, plus the same brilliant art direction. The latter was detailed here by The Ringer’s Alison Herman in one of the best things I read from 2021. Herman meticulously detailed how that show’s art directors created an atmosphere on screen where all of the rich characters are surrounded in opulence at all times—in the form of décor, food, clothing, and even other people—but don’t actually CARE about any of those things. Every luxury good depicted on screen in Succession is rendered offensively disposable, the same way real rich people treat their own possessions.

The Menu takes that aesthetic one step further by making it the centerpiece of the story. Everyone wants to go to the fictionalized Noma in this movie not because of the food, but because they want to be seen, by both other people and by their own selves, eating its food. And then karmic payback comes visiting, and then I laughed out loud several times thereafter. Three-and-a-half stars.

Gratuitous Simpsons Quote

“Tell me more! I want to know ALL the constellations!”

“Well, there's ... Jerry the Cowboy. And that big dipper looking thing is … Alan the Cowboy.”

Enjoy the offseason, everyone.