The NFL Achieves Parody

This is the dumbest NFL season I can ever remember. To be clear, what I mean is that it’s a dumb season because all of the teams are dumb, even the good ones, which does make things interesting, to be sure, but also a bit frustrating.

In a normal season, there is a Mahomes or Brady that you can count on to be there in the end. They are the villain that everyone else is shooting for, and they provide us with the general narrative for the season. This year is more like the movie “Sing,” a terrible kids movie where none of the anthropomorphic animals in the singing contest are really bad guys per se, except for Seth McFarlane’s mouse, but he’s less an overall movie villain than a good proxy for the NFC South.

(The actual villain of “Sing” is Matthew McConaughey’s Koala, Buster Moon, an incompetent, union-busting thief with no talent of his own, who plans to exploit his labor up to and including not paying them their promised prizes in order to continue to fund his unearned lifestyle. The league refused to confirm or deny whether Roger Goodell was involved.)

The NFC, in particular, is just a collection of rag-tag teams trying their best not to screw up on stage. The Seahawks are the current one seed despite a severe case of Darnolding over the last few weeks. The Rams were, by most metrics, the best team in the conference, but they’re in third place in their division, and they just lost to the Falcons, which should disqualify you from playoff contention altogether, and they’ve lost three of their last five games overall.

The Eagles may end up as the two seed, but they are also the subject of this hilarious chart.

These hilarious charts.

I mean, I know they won the Super Bowl last season, but I don’t really think you can be a contender and also be on these charts.

The Bears are looking pretty good and may actually have something with Caleb Williams, but they also can’t stop anyone, including the 49ers, who just destroyed them in a shootout, and do you really trust them to actually shut down a real NFL offense?

The best team may actually be those 49ers, but they also got lit up by the Bears’ offense, and while they’re on a fun little six-game winning streak, it was mostly against the Shadeur Browns, the Titans, the Cardinals, the Colts with a 45-year-old grandpa at QB, and a member of the NFC South. It’s not awe-inspiring.

Speaking of the South, it would be nice if they actually decided to play like a real division at some point. The best team in this division over the second half of the season is probably the Saints, who actually have the best defensive EPA in the league since Week 10. The Panthers have beaten the Rams and Packers, so nothing is impossible, but generally speaking, it would be beyond parody if the South made the Super Bowl, and we’ve only achieved regular parody.

And the AFC is just as bad if not worse. The Patriots and Texans are like evil bizarro versions of each other. The Chargers can’t block anyone, the Broncos have a Colts’ logo lodged somewhere, the Bills have no defense, the AFC North is the NFC South, and the Jaguars are the Jaguars. And the Jaguars should maybe be the favorite over there? But no one is willing to publicly commit to that quite yet.

Which leaves the Packers in an interesting spot because they’re absolutely as compromised as all of those teams if not more so. Derrick Henry took Carrington Valentine home with him after the game to use as a stress doll, and Rico Dowdle is jealous he didn’t think of it first. But because the league is hilariously broken, even a broken Packer team has a shot, and being locked into the seven seed with one game to go may be the most ideal solution possible.

They’ll get a warm-up game with as many backups as possible against evil genius Brian Flores next week, and so they’ll be able to take a good look at some young guys who may need to fill holes. They’ll get to rest everyone important. They’ll have an extra week for seriously dinged-up guys like Josh Jacobs, Zach Tom, and Dontayvion Wicks to get healthier. And while they won’t be getting Parsons back obviously, a healthier, well-prepared Packer team is still one of the best in the league, especially without Derrick Henry on the other side of the ball.

If there was some Patriots/Chiefs-level juggernaut lurking out there, I’d be the first one to tell you to start planning for next year, but that is NOT what we’re dealing with! Look, I know the Packers keep screwing things up. I know they’re beaten, battered, and that the phrase we use most frequently to describe them in our Slack chats here at APC is “kicked themselves in the dick.” But have you watched the rest of this league? Like, really watched it? It’s not just YOUR team that seemingly screws up in every single game. It’s everybody.

Including the officiating, which has deviated from the sought-after quality of “consistency” to more of a Dungeons and Dragons guild-based system. You have your Judge class that specializes in calling holding, while most other crews just ignore it now. You have your pass interference Paladins, your blind-to-false-starts Clerics, your Mages who can conjure taunting penalties but cannot blow whistles to end plays promptly, and of course, the ever-popular Monks, who have taken a vow of flagging even the smallest contact on quarterbacks, even after they’ve left the pocket.

And so, the Packers will have a week to essentially just rest. They’ll be facing either the Eagles or Bears outdoors in god knows what elements. They’ll have some categorically insane refereeing crew tilting the balance either for or against them, depending on the whims of Hochulus, the absolutely jacked, but completely blind god of officiating. And whatever teams they do end up facing will have some comically obvious weakness along the lines of the first two circuits of Punch-Out. They’re not ferreting out secrets here; this is “hit King Hippo in the stomach” level stuff. Seriously, go look at the Eagle’s charts again.

The Super Bowl winner is going to be dumb this year. And so I say, why not us?