A tale of two Blues fans

Eight days ago, Tony X was just some guy with a Twitter account. Tony, whose Twitter handle is @soIoucity, had a little over a thousand followers last Monday night and as of the moment I started typing this sentence, he had 85,692.

The genesis of Tony's spike in Twitter followers, for the uninitiated, is that he turned on Fox Sports Midwest hoping to watch a Cardinals game, but instead found Game 7 of the first round of the NHL playoffs between his hometown St. Louis Blues and the Chicago Blackhawks. According to Tony, he had never before watched a hockey game, but he nevertheless kept his TV on the channel and, as he live-tweeted, fell in love with the game. He was mesmerized by the sport's intensity and the drama of the event.

Granted, most hockey games aren't tightly-contested playoff game sevens between bitter rivals, one of which is your hometown team, and Tony probably got a bit lucky that this was his first exposure to the sport, but Hockey Twitter fell in love with his enthusiasm. He was naive to the specifics of hockey, but he had an enthusiasm which was infectious.

For as jaded as adults can get online about sports, Tony revealed a different perspective: somebody who discovers something new and just wants to tell everybody about how great it is. It doesn't have to be a sport--I discovered Oasis after they'd been selling out soccer stadiums in Europe for over a decade, but that didn't mean I didn't want to scream to everybody I know about how OH MY GAWWWWD YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO SUPERSONIC RIGHT THIS INSTANT.

I was seven when I watched my first hockey game. Tony was an adult. There is a cavalcade of people best described as "haters" who clearly resent Tony's rise to pseudo-fame, which I do not understand whatsoever--I understand not being interested in seeing some random guy learn hockey on the fly, but the sense of "What did this guy do to earn this attention?" is odd to me. He entertained people and in many cases, reminded people of themselves.

In a strange way, he reminds me of my dad.

My dad is a generation older than Tony, and unlike Tony, has watched hockey before. He used to be a somewhat big fan: the first sport I ever watched was hockey, and it was because I watched the first home game of the Wayne Gretzky in St. Louis "era" (it's a footnote in Gretzky's career, but it was a formative experience of my sports fandom) with him that I eventually started following other sports.

But not long after I took to hockey, my dad stopped caring about it. He has always cited the Blues trading his favorite player, Brendan Shanahan, as the inciting incident which dulled his hockey fandom (this predates the Gretzky trade, but I'm willing to accept that the 1995-96 season was a transition year in a vacuum). But this always seemed strange to me, especially after Shanahan netted a 20 year-old Chris Pronger, an eventual Hall of Famer whose number will rightfully be retired by the Blues.

A month and a half after the Brendan Shanahan trade, the St. Louis Rams played their first game.

My dad was always a bigger fan of the Rams than the other St. Louis sports teams, including the Cardinals. Remember a few years ago when the Cardinals played in Game 5 of the World Series while, at the same time, the 3-4 Rams played the Seattle Seahawks on Monday Night Football? Most people I know ignored the Rams game. I didn't, but the World Series took priority, with the Rams getting my attention during commercial breaks. Dad watched the Rams exclusively. He wasn't at the game or anything--he just cared about the Rams that much more.

Tony X, it appears, was similarly passionate about the Rams. I don't know Tony's age, though it seems that, like me, he doesn't remember a world in which the Rams were not in St. Louis. For all of the national talk about the Rams' brief time in St. Louis, if you're under the age of 30, you remember the Rams in St. Louis as ubiquitously as you remember the Packers in Green Bay or the Steelers in Pittsburgh.

Rams left me ........ @StLouisBlues saved me 🙌 https://t.co/SIlJ5heFjb

— Tony X. (@soIoucity) April 26, 2016

The Cardinals are great and wonderful. Hell, I write for a Cardinals blog. I'm not exactly ambivalent to their existence. But fans have a different relationship with the Cardinals, a ubiquitous local brand, than they do with less successful teams.

A little over a month ago, I wrote about how the Cardinals should specifically court alienated ex-Rams fans, though in fairness to the Cardinals, this was always going to be a less intuitive courtship than one spearheaded by the Blues. Fandom of the Blues, or any hockey team for that matter, is less casual. Say what you will about attendance for the Rams or Blues during lean years (of course, owners dangling the franchises to other cities didn't help the matters, either), but the fans who did show up and who did loudly rep their teams were hardly passive fans.

It had been well over a decade since my dad watched a Blues game. The only hockey I can recall him watching beyond my elementary school years was the last two minutes of the 2009 Stanley Cup Finals, and even after Marc-Andre Fleury's absurd performance stopping a flurry (pun unintended but nevertheless kept) of Detroit Red Wings shots, I could barely get him to muster more than a casual noting of impressiveness.

He usually goes to bed around 8 on weeknights, but he stayed up and watched every minute of Game 7 against the Blackhawks. He made sure before Game 1 against Dallas to know what channel NBC Sports was. During overtime of Game 2, he texted me about how nervous he was. It was the first time he had texted me about an in-progress sporting event since the final game of the St. Louis Rams.

Something is happening here. I had assumed when the Rams moved, St. Louis would collectively find another NFL team, but as it increasingly appears the entire league left us out to dry, this ceased to be an option. So in the end, our new Rams will not be the Chiefs nor the Bears nor the Colts. It's the Blues.

I was a Blues fan anyway, but it was only in 2016 that the Blues saved me.

The Weird Cardinals Twitter Bracket Finale

Two weeks ago today, @FWBluesFan and I launched the Weird Cardinals Twitter Bracket, a more (metaphorically) regionalized version of the Cardinals Twitter Bracket from @RooCourtSTL which had swept St. Louis baseball fans by storm. And today, going into tonight, we are proud to conduct the championship round of our bracket between 3-seed @lil_scooter93 and 8-seed @VanHicklestein.

As has been tradition, I will make no formal endorsements on the matter and instead focus on proctoring the vote in as fair of a manner as I possibly can. I would, however, like to congratulate both Twitter accounts on their resounding success to this point.

@VanHicklestein has traversed a difficult road to the final, defeating the nearly four times as followed @HighSock_Sunday in round one, Weird Cardinals Twitter insider favorite @crying_birds in the Elite Eight, and another more followed account in @turpin4prez in the Final Four.

@lil_scooter93 defeated each of the founders of this event, people with an inherent and systemic advantage in this competition, in the first two rounds, and then bested worthy up-and-comer @2xBirds to make the championship round.

Each of these accounts is worthy of its spot in this competition. If, by chance, you do not follow one or both of them, you should rectify that situation immediately. Voting runs until 10 p.m. In the event of each side receiving 50% of the votes, a 69 minute run-off will be conducted Sunday afternoon at an exact time yet to be determined.

We appreciate your support on this stupid idea we had and I believe I speak for the Fort Worth Blues Man when I say that we are overwhelmed and giddy to have seen so many people be so entertained by this little experiment.

The Weird Cardinals Twitter bracket

In an era in which "St. Louis Cardinals fan" turned into a pejorative, Weird Cardinals Twitter gives Cardinals fans a sense of community which the team's widespread popularity tends to undermine. By reputation, Cardinals fans are corny and self-righteous at best and deplorable racists at worst. But Weird Cardinals Twitter adheres to no such ideology. We exist as consumers of the Cardinals, not branches of them. We are first and foremost just a big group of friends cracking jokes and not taking itself too seriously. On March 15, @roocourtstl unveiled its Cardinals Twitter bracket of 64 Cardinals related Twitter follows. It has been a tremendous success, motivating hundreds to vote for their favorites (or, as was often the case, vote against their least favorites). And in the spirit of their wonderful idea, @FWBluesFan and I are proud to announce the 1st annual Weird Cardinals Twitter bracket. The initial list of 69 candidates has been cut to 17. Difficult decisions were made and hopefully those who did not make the field are not too offended that we deemed them as having too much of a life to crack this. The seeding is semi-arbitrary and more weight is given to setting up interesting matchups than to editorializing about the worthiness of each entry. Voting on the play-in matchup between the two 16 seeds will begin later today, March 19, with the Sweet 16 to begin not long after. Methodology will be a series of Twitter polls. Here is the bracket (and no, I didn't write my own preview):

16: @vexedtechie earned his way into the field by coining "Sabermattrics", which he used to track how Matts Carpenter, Holliday, and Adams batted in 2015. As a whole, this epitomizes the analytics-leaning WCT in its irreverence. Twitter isn't about serious statistical research or identifying significant trends to predict future outcomes. It's about stupid puns. 16. @cardsnationjnky on the surface has leanings towards mainstream Cardinals homerism, but it is in his earnest commitment to his persona that Sean defines his brand. After all, if you're going to argue Michael Wacha over Clayton Kershaw, you might as well be really freaking adamant about it. 1. @crying_birds at first glance seems to be a non sequitur machine, but make no mistake: he knows exactly what he's doing. What he's doing is supposed to have killed Twitter by now but instead, it stripped Twitter of its pretense and self-serious #hashtag-ism and now is a form of performance art on a medium forever improved by his presence. 8. @VanHicklestein is a GIF artist and he has #stlcrads (sic) in his bio and he nearly toppled the awful @Total_CardsMove, in every way the antithesis of WCT, in the Roo Court STL bracket. Also he makes good tweets sometimes.

9. @HighSock_Sunday once asked the GOP front-runner for its 2016 presidential nomination if Joe Flacco is a elite quarterback...and he got an answer. @PFTCommenter is wildly influential on the sarcastic tone of WCT and in this instance, the latter took the former's lead and made the actual news because of it.

.@HighSock_Sunday #asktrump pic.twitter.com/qVakUzXZAb

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 21, 2015

5. @turpin4prez combines intelligent commentary on everything from sports to sociopolitical issues with an impossible-to-deny fluency in Weird Twitter conventions. This is his embodiment: 

I don't know if all Cardinals fans are racist meth addicts, but I know that I sure am

— Schmendrick Lamar (@turpin4prez) December 10, 2015

12. @grobot05 serves the pivotal WCT rule of whipping boy, and he deserves credit for willingly taking abuse for when he has a bad sports opinion, when he is accused of hitting on young women, and for his relatively good nature when his most earnest tweets are roundly mocked.

4. @Apartment_2F is an outstanding complement to his law school classmate Turpin. If the former, who leans right, and the latter, who leans left, hosted a political discussion show, any good and righteous American would watch. 2F loses some points though for abandoning his "John Daly in American flag pants smoking a cigar" avatar.

13. @prefix6 has always been good for timely Simpsons references, but it was during the all-too-brief Golden Age of Ditty that his star truly shined.

Repost, because so appropriate. pic.twitter.com/UphCuBUdWw

— Hercules Rockefeller (@prefix6) October 12, 2015

6. @FWBluesFan slowly evolved into a bizarre observer of all sports, displaying a jaded irreverence towards sports simply by reducing them to platitudes such as "(player/team) tried their best." Oh, and for asking everybody he sees if Joe Flacco is elite. 

Man when I vote later today I REALLLLLLLLLLY want to find a person wearing a "Make America Great Again" hat and ask him the Flacco question

— Fort Worth Blues Fan (@FWBluesFan) March 15, 2016

11. @thestlcardsfan4 has recently carved a niche as a TV blogger but he remains a blunt Cardinals follow. Mainstream Cardinals Twitter says Mike Matheny is good, and a certain type of intellectual fan will explain why he might not be. At WCT, we can just SAY he sucks because what difference could it possibly make what we think? 3. @lil_scooter93 is the only woman in this bracket, and while a simplistic approach would be to say that she is "one of the boys" among WCT, this is the opposite of the case. Heather doesn't try to hide her personality. She loudly and vociferously is what she is: a passionate and intelligent fan who makes tweets and goes about the WCT grind like everybody else. 

14. @johnjf125 is a mesh of smart and witty commentary on baseball, as well as the torch-bearer of Bridge Twitter. He takes pop culture references and uses them in brilliant analogies to all sports. His WCT brand was devalued when he became an actual serious writer at Viva El Birdos.
7. @azta110790 takes time between his day job shifts counting prairie dogs for the gummint to serve as president of the Tommy Pham Club. Also, he kind of looks like his avatar in real life.

10. @elmaquino is a former Cardinals blogger who departed from the writing game in favor of good baseball observations and jokes on Twitter.

Mike Matheny being ejected should show up in the win expectancy chart

— Maq (@elmaquino) June 3, 2015

2. @2xbirds, run by @dcwoodruff, provides a unique take on baseball-meets-politics. He took Maq's "Piscotty for President" tweet and has taken it brilliantly too far. Also, Chase created this video of Drew Magary dancing to "How Soon is Now?" by The Smiths, which I think about at least three times a day. 

@elmaquino @johnjf125 pic.twitter.com/uW8znmZ3KH

— Chase Woodruff (@dcwoodruff) October 19, 2015

15. @mstreeter06 is a top-flight GIFster but also is a pronounced WCT team player. Perhaps nobody more consistently replies "nice" when somebody uses the number 69 nor as consistently will reply to mentions to Alfredo Simon how he killed a guy. Just...just check the replies to this tweet.

#BigPasta cooked up a gem: http://t.co/LPaQuuiqCN pic.twitter.com/LUyiQJ7ylX

— MLB (@MLB) April 16, 2015

For those who felt marginalized in the big Cardinals Twitter tournament, I hope you enjoy our weird take on it. Matchups will be posted in the coming hours and days.

Life and the St. Louis Rams

I just want it to end.

I'm tired of waking up in the middle of the night, thinking about it, and not being able to go back to sleep. I'm tired of it crossing my mind every so often throughout the day and it paralyzing me, rendering me ineffective at work or unable to enjoy my leisure time. I know what's going to happen. Whatever naivete I previously had about the situation is gone. The St. Louis Rams are going to move to Los Angeles. There is not even a shadow of a doubt in my mind anymore.

And I just want it to end.

Ever since the Rams season ended, (of course) on a heartbreaking loss to a bad team which could have easily been a victory, being a Rams fan went from depressing to exhausting. It's not comparable to losing football games. If losing a game is the equivalent of your child getting a bad grade in school and watching your team go 15-65 over a five-year stretch is the equivalent of your child failing a grade, having your team given away to another city is the equivalent of your child being kidnapped.

For me, being a Rams fan is what I have. It isn't a matter of watching a football game sixteen times a year. If it were a matter of filling an extra 50 hours or so of leisure time a year, I could do that easily. Being a Rams fan is a fundamental part of my identity. It's not a thing I do; it's a thing I am.

I'm not going to try to convince anybody reading this about the politics of the stadium situation, about the wisdom or lack thereof regarding spending taxpayer money to finance a football field for a billionaire. Frankly, if your opinion on it is swayed by what I'm saying, it says to me that you didn't have a very well-reasoned opinion in the first place. What this is about is why it matters so much to me, and why it matters to a lot of people like me.

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I would estimate that of all conversations I've had with my father in the last five years, about 80% of them have been about football. The only reason I don't estimate it as closer to 90% is because we occasionally talk about baseball, as well. But football is the driving force. We texted yesterday, and it was about football. We texted on Saturday: again, about football. Same for Friday. Our last correspondence before that was on January 3, during what was likely the final game in the history of the St. Louis Rams. The last time we talked about something other than sports was when he texted me a traffic update on December 28. This includes seeing him in person since then, when we discussed football almost exclusively. Some baseball, but again, mostly football.

Honestly, I don't know what we're going to talk about anymore. Football is the lingua franca which has allowed two very different people with two very different personalities from two very different generations to communicate. Similarly, most of my best friends are also Rams fans. They are Cardinals and Blues fans, too, but this isn't the language we speak. EVERYBODY knows about the Cardinals. Being a Rams fan has long been a unique identifier.

I'd compare it to discussing The Beatles and discussing The Velvet Underground (and I say this as somebody who prefers the former, mind you)--my grandmother can hold a conversation about a dozen or so Beatles songs. Saying you like the Beatles, even saying you like specific songs or albums, says nothing in particular about who you are. If you can hold a conversation about VU, though, it is a statement on who you are. I could walk up to a random St. Louisan in a grocery store and talk to them about Jack Buck and Mike Shannon, but if instead you are able to speak in reverential tones about Jack Snow and Mike Bush, you're my kind of person.

I don't really like to talk too much about my social inadequacies, because I find it uncomfortable (and you probably don't find it all that pleasant either), but it matters an awful lot when it comes to this situation with the Rams.

I grew up very insecure about myself. As a child, I was always bright for my age and I did reasonably well in school, but there was a lot of self-loathing. I didn't have a lot of friends--I still don't, but as an adult, I don't think it's nearly as strange to have a small group of confidants rather than considering your entire list of Facebook friends to really, truly, be your friend. I was unathletic, overweight, and socially awkward. I didn't feel good about myself. I still don't sometimes.

When I entered high school, I knew maybe a dozen people in my class of 512 people. I was in an oddly gerrymandered district with two high schools and three middle schools and, thanks to a little help from lots of public middle school to private high school changes, a very small sliver of the middle school at which I at least had made some friends went to a different high school from everybody else. And I was one of them. I didn't have a single class freshman year with a single person I had ever met before. I ate lunch alone almost every day that year. Everybody is awkward their freshman year but at least the other people were awkward with their friends also being awkward.

But the Rams went 12-4 that year. Of course, they haven't had a winning record since that year, but they were 12-4 that year. So I was happy.

I've improved a little bit socially since, in that I no longer fear talking to somebody I don't know more than death. I went from 217 pounds entering my senior year of high school to peaking around 270 pounds in late 2013 to weighing around 160 pounds today. But two weeks from today, I will turn 27 years old, and I have never had anything that could even liberally referred to as a girlfriend. I doubt a study on the matter has ever been commissioned, but I would assume that the odds that I ever marry or have children are very low.

I've kind of thought this might be what would happen to me for a long time, starting back when it was just a complete lack of self-confidence and leading into days where it's just basic probability. And for a long time, I taught myself to be content with it. I wouldn't grow old alone because I would grow old with my Rams.

This isn't hyperbole--this is what the Rams have meant to me. They've been THAT important. My junior year of college, I was so disconnected from sports as a whole that I didn't even bother to watch any of the three Cardinals playoff games (in my defense, I didn't have cable and I did listen on the radio, though I can assure you this would not happen today) but I did stake out a prime viewing spot in the Student Union Building to watch noon NFL games I didn't care about so that I could watch the Rams lose 35-0 to the San Francisco 49ers at 3:15 alone.

Some people don't care. And I'm not even talking about fans of other teams that feel the need to troll Rams fans about what is literally heartbreaking--an extremely loud minority, but certainly a minority nonetheless. I'm talking about casual Rams fans, people who watched with intensity when the Rams were good but don't watch as intently now. 

And I'm not talking about bandwagoners, per se--I'm talking about people who maintain allegiance to the Rams and only the Rams but opt instead to spend their Sundays doing other things. People who go to the park or take a walk on nice early autumn days or focus on raising their children. People who, I'm sure, are much more happy and balanced people than those of us who devoted countless Sundays to an abysmal Rams team in the late 2000s and, even more appallingly, devoted Sundays to a mediocre Rams team that couldn't care less about us, or our hometown, or how miserable what amounts to a money grab for them would make us.

Some of us don't have these alternatives. This is what we have. Or, in a day or two, this is what we had.

I don't know what I'm going to do. Thinking about it makes me feel dizzy. I can defect to another team--not a small reason I tried (and failed) to develop a secondary allegiance to the Kansas City Chiefs this year was because that's the team my dad rooted for when St. Louis didn't have a team and has stated he will root for again next year. I'd like to think I'll just watch way less football next year, but it's not like I have a whole lot of other options. It's sad but it's true.

Like I said before, I'm not expecting to convert anybody, nor do I really want to do that. I know it's stupid that I care as much as I do. I know that spending $350 million in public funds to buy an asset for a man worth $7.7 billion is an objectively stupid thing to do anyway, and that while the Rams do provide measurable value to St. Louis by their mere existence, the city and the area will be better off without that additional expenditure. But that doesn't mean I, individually, will be. 

Go ahead and call me selfish--I probably am. But if, in order to save your job, the government were forced to spend $10 million, I would be opposed to doing so. Yet I wouldn't blame you for not being a good soldier about it. And that's all I hope, is for people to understand that this isn't just a football team. This is an identity.

My 2016 NFL Playoffs Likability Rankings

GAMBLING TIP: Bet the teams which rank the lowest on this list, as they are the teams which will win the Super Bowl. All sports are bad.

12. Arizona Cardinals: In another year, this might not be my least favorite team for the playoffs. But in light of present circumstances: a conniving billionaire-by-inheritance wiener who is incapable of being loved trying to leverage St. Louis's football team so that a western city will pretend to like him...nope. Not happening. I have no issues with the Arizona Cardinals, their coaches (Bruce Arians seems unpleasant but he's an undeniably terrific coach), nor their fans, but as long as a Bidwill owns them, I will root for them to fail.

11. New England Patriots: That a team could sign one of my five favorite football players ever in Steven Jackson, a player who is extraordinarily worthy of playoff success and overall football happiness, and that they could still not crack my top ten of likable playoff teams says an awful lot about their history of crimes against football. Rob Gronkowski is fine, even if his act has grown a bit tired, but with the exceptions of him and Jackson, there's not a likable player in the bunch. Also, their coaching staff still includes Bill Belichick and Josh McDaniels. There is a 100% chance this year's Super Bowl is Arizona vs. New England. I might just re-watch Super Bowl XXXIV on DVD instead. The way football has gone for me lately, the Titans will probably win it, but that's still a whole lot better than either of these teams winning.

10. Green Bay Packers: They have their share of steroid users, but that's not a deal-breaker for me, really. Mike McCarthy is, thanks to Jim Caldwell not winning the Super Bowl he was in, the worst Super Bowl winning coach I can recall, but that doesn't make me hate him. The real problem with the Packers is their sanctimonious, obnoxious fans. In my experiences, no fan base has been less sympathetic to the Rams relocation than Packers fans (including local Packers fans), which was sadly predictable--Packers fans buy relentlessly into their own hype as The Best Fans In Football and seem to believe they are fans of a morally superior way of life rather than "oh hey, here's a football team that's absolutely never bad, let me be a fan of them." Screw these honkies.

9. Seattle Seahawks: Remember last year when the most likable thing about the Seahawks was Marshawn Lynch? He may not even play on Sunday. Without Lynch, we are stuck with their dog-whistle-inducing quarterback, their proven cheater (in college) truther coach, their overrated 21-st century Boz cornerback, and the 12TH FAN, another fan base totally wrapped up in the idea that their fan base has a divine right to football success, blissfully unaware that the team nearly moved to LA (which, to be fair, this applies to half of the NFL) in the 1990s thanks to the mediocre attendance the Seahawks had back when they weren't good every single year.

8. Washington R******s: Seriously, change your nickname. Also, Dan Snyder sucks for reasons which do not include their morally reprehensible nickname, but also for their morally reprehensible nickname.

7. Pittsburgh Steelers: The only team in the playoffs that I saw play in person this year, I had the great honor of sitting in the visitor's section. I tried yelling some trash talk about the Pirates to no avail, which is because they don't air a ton of Pirates home telecasts in their homes in St. Peters. Fun fact: I had a coworker one time who was an avid Pittsburgh Steelers fan who was eventually fired for telling a coworker (not me) that she was going to kick their ass. Also, the Steelers have a quarterback who was once jailed for murdering countless dogs, which makes him their second least likable quarterback. Redeemed largely by virtue of having Antonio Bae, the greatest wide receiver in NFL history.

6. Kansas City Chiefs: They have a few genuinely likable players: Jeremy Maclin, Eric Berry, Justin Houston. They don't really have any unlikable players: Alex Smith is boring but ultimately harmless. Andy Reid's ability to look like a tomato in team colors is charming. But that stupid Tomahawk Chop, man. They should be relieved that Washington's nickname deflects all negative attention that doing a mock-American Indian chant, at Arrowhead Stadium, with the nickname Chiefs, should cause. Also, this. And nobody cares about how loud your stupid crowd is. Also, the propensity for Chiefs fans to troll St. Louis for possibly losing the Rams (they're second only to Green Bay) in spite of tickets being available, in December, to see two playoff teams (they were playing the Bengals), FOR SIX DOLLARS. Yes, it was rainy and cold outside, but if the Rams owner actively trying to move the team isn't an excuse, why is this?

5. Cincinnati Bengals: A compelling reason in and of itself to root against the Bengals this week is A.J. McCarron. Look, I have nothing against A.J. McCarron--he was an overrated college quarterback in the sense that he was a game manager, but he was a GREAT game manager. He was on a team where all he had to do was not make mistakes and he NEVER made mistakes. But if he wins a playoff game before Andy Dalton, it's going to get unbearably stupid. No, McCarron should not be starting over Dalton. Dalton is good. You weirdos. Also, Jeremy Hill is the Mike Tirico of NFL players--in a field where there are a ton of awful people, granted, this guy tends to REALLY slide under the radar for being an awful person. Google Jeremy Hill if you must. And Mike Tirico, for that matter.

4. Houston Texans: The runaway train of J.J. Watt love went off the rails way too quickly. There's nothing to dislike about him, still: he just never was the amazing beacon for all that is good and right that people have tried to make him out to be. He's just a guy who plays football at a very high level. They get bonus points for Sanctimonious Internet Atheist Arian Foster being out for the season (after generations of obnoxious Evangelical Christians in the NFL, it seems like poetic justice that the first openly atheist NFL player would be totally insufferable about it to Ricky Gervais-esque levels). I still don't know anything about Brian Hoyer. You could tell me he was on the Rams for three seasons and I'd probably just nod and smile.

3. Minnesota Vikings: Adrian Peterson is an obvious unlikable player (though his punishment from the NFL was an example of Roger Goodell exacting loud justice to make up for his previously lax justice with regards to Ray Rice), but aside from that, there's a lot to like. Teddy Bridgewater is fun because, as a black quarterback who happens to be a slow runner, some people are irrationally confused by him (never forget). Stefon Diggs is going to be a really fun player for years to come. The team is largely anonymous but this adds to their appeal. Also, they're an oft-tortured fanbase. But man, I hate that horn..

2. Denver Broncos: I'm really sick of this revisionist hatred of Peyton Manning. What's the logic of this, Snarky and Cynical Sports Internet? That he does a lot of commercials (are they preempting commercials you'd prefer to watch instead)? That he probably votes Republican (his main historic rival is a DONALD TRUMP supporter and Peyton probably supports Ted Cruz or something but the point is NOT TRUMP)? That in 2016, I can throw the ball harder than he can? This only adds to his appeal. How hilarious would it be if arguably the greatest quarterback in NFL history, notorious for sucking in the playoffs, won a Super Bowl with a throwing velocity somewhere in the vicinity of 1880s Federal League pitcher?

1. Carolina Panthers: Did you know people still hate Cam Newton? How weird is that? It was one thing to root against him in college, when his possibly accepting money from boosters is against the rules, whether you like the rules or not. But look at what he is now. He's more hated nationally than Ben Roethlisberger, somehow. He's a dual threat quarterback but he's huge, so he's far less susceptible to the injury risks normal about dual threat quarterbacks. And he led his team to a 15-1 season with his best wide receiver being TED GINN. Also, there's "Third Leg" Greg Olsen. There's  owner Jerry Richardson, a fierce advocate for the NFL in St. Louis. There's Luke Kuechly. There's the fact that if this 15-1 team wins the Super Bowl, they will have equaled the '85 Bears, and by definition, you have to put them in the same group. And Michael Wilbon will freeeeeeeeak out about this. Go Panthers.

Meditations on the Rise of Bro-Country, the Death of Rock and Roll

No song better epitomizes current-era country music than Jason Aldean's “She's Country.” The song's in-earnest beginning is an extraordinarily simple riff which is more in the vain of AC/DC than of Conway Twitty. The lyrics are a mix of southern regionalisms (this girl is apparently from 7-8 different states, depending on which “Brunswick” you interpret as the location mentioned in the song) and the new country cliches (jacked-up trucks, mildly sexist tropes about how the titular daddy's girl couldn't afford to add her own pointless accessories to her truck, cowboy boots; you know, store-bought things to convey what kind of person you are). If “She's Country” had been released in 2014 or 2015 rather than in 2008, it would be assumed to be a parody of, say, Luke Bryan's “That's My Kind of Night” or Florida Georgia Line's entire catalog. It is the definitive modern country song. And you know the weirdest part? It's not even a country song.

At least not in the traditional sense it isn't. It's a rock song. This is the sort of thing that annoys rock fans to hear, so let me be perfectly clear—it's not a good rock song. Just like it's not a good country song, in a universe where it's labeled a country song at all (so, this one, I guess). But songs along the line of this have always existed. They just weren't performed by “country” artists. Last year, I heard a bar band perform “She's Country” within a song or two of performing “We're An American Band” by Grand Funk Railroad, from 1973 and categorized by both Wikipedia and everybody I've ever met as a hard rock song, and it felt right that this band was performing the two songs together. A band like Grand Funk Railroad would be the ones doing this song in 1973 if that's when it were written. Or maybe Nazareth. Or, in a moment of weakness, Thin Lizzy or Bad Company. But hard rock bands in this sense do not exist anymore.

When people speak of Nirvana's impact on music, it's often reduced to “it killed hair metal.” But it also killed the notion of a rock star being a desirable thing. Which is a shame, because while Bret Michaels might make being a rock star look boring, Freddie Mercury made it look utterly amazing. Ironically, it's less the actual actions of Kurt Cobain (while he may not have been a dynamic rock star in the mold of Mercury or even Bono, that's just who he was—it's not as though he actively campaigned against specific artists) and more the narrative. It's been 21 ½ years since Kurt Cobain died and there still aren't rock stars in the literal sense (well, not literally rocks, but you know). Liam Gallagher had the stage presence but also had an ambivalence to his fans, though at least it wasn't the contempt of Axl Rose. Billie Joe Armstrong never had the transcendence to go beyond his own guitar to truly reach a screaming crowd. The closest thing to a “rock star” post-Cobain, ironically, is his former bandmate, Dave Grohl. And the Foo Fighters are an rare example of a band that's allowed to just be a hard rock band without being tangibly “alternative”. I suppose they got grandfathered in. But when a hard rock band comes in without having apparently listened to a Talking Heads album in their lives, they're dismissed and mocked. Like Nickelback. Like Creed.

The yesteryear equivalents to Nickelback or Creed were arena rock bands like Journey, Styx, Foreigner, REO Speedwagon, and Bon Jovi (the latter is often miscategorized as “hair metal”, which is arguably even more ridiculous than categorizing Guns N' Roses as such). And all of these bands had and still have their critics. But it wasn't universal. And you know what? Nickelback's the best selling band of the 21^st century other than The Beatles, who broke up in 1970 (if you hadn't heard). But they're the exception. Artists don't want to be stigmatized as much as Nickelback, but Chad Kroeger and company are smart enough to realize that if you can make as much money as they have making extremely average, party-line rock, it's worth it. I give them credit for that.

But perhaps the most staggering difference in rock now and rock before I was born is that rock music used to have solo artists. Even beyond the obvious pre-Beatles rock stars, almost all of whom were solo acts (Chuck Berry, Little Richard, James Brown, etc.), we had Bruce Springsteen. We had John Mellencamp. Hell, we had Bryan Adams. Who's the major rock star post-grunge to be a successful solo artist without having initially been part of a successful band? Keep in mind that Dave Matthews was part of an eponymous band and wasn't actually a solo artist until 2003. Who is it?

So what we have had was two former forces in rock music which barely exist today: simplistic balls-to-the-wall riff rock, and solo artists marketed by dynamic stage presences. Rock doesn't have those. But country has those. Boy, country has those. And the reason that “country music”, however it's defined, has never been bigger. Country music in 2015 is still closer to being country music in 1980 than rock music or hip hop music or top 40 in 2015, so it's not like the people who like old-school country defected. And if they're still hung up on listening to Hank Williams Jr. music constantly, they were probably unlikely to embrace new music no matter what it was. Meanwhile, people who were buying up Sammy Hagar records in the 1980s don't have an equivalent to Sammy Hagar in modern rock. That guy's not welcome. And even though I'm not personally a Hagar fan and I am a fan of alternative rock, I don't necessarily think this is a good thing. True weirdo bands like Talking Heads don't get enough play—the closest thing to that kind of band getting play even on rock radio would be somebody like Queens of the Stone Age or Arctic Monkeys (both of whom I love, for what it's worth), semi-oddball bands who nevertheless remain firmly entrenched in conventional-ish alternative rock. In 1983, rock fans got the silly mainstream rock of Def Leppard's Pyromania, it got the truly alternative Murmur from REM, and it got things like The Police's Synchronicity, which fall somewhere in between. And everybody was happier because if the Stipeheads didn't dig “Rock of Ages”, they could ignore it. But in 2015, it's a somewhat homogeneous group of a fairly small number of bands releasing rock music.

Anyway, while the weirdos can't get play, the dumb rockers (meant mostly with affection) can't either. So they play country. People who have musical tastes in the same vicinity as mine don't understand how Luke Bryan and Blake Shelton are as popular as they are, but I totally get it. The reason Luke Bryan and Blake Shelton are popular isn't because people had an awakening and would've bought Johnny Cash albums in droves back when he was doing concept albums about the plight of Native Americans (Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian). It's because people do have an appetite for simple songs they can sing along to, and as the moody post-grunge bands that had only a peripheral idea of what Nirvana represented with about a hundredth of the musical talent failed to understand, a lot of people also like their musical heroes to smile a little. Ozzy Osbourne on a good day is a mediocre vocalist and his career has been built on two things: his uncanny ability to hitch his wagon to three of the greatest metal guitarists ever, and the fact that people love him because he's always happy and smiling. And this is the so-called Prince of Darkness. And while it's corny as hell (and soooooo corporate) for Luke Bryan to open concerts while standing on a pickup truck, it gets people excited. I guarantee you none of his fans can rationalize it as a great artistic statement, and frankly it doesn't matter.

But perhaps the strangest thing about the modern country revolution isn't that it's essentially big dumb rock—it's when it isn't. As much distaste as I have for the Big Dumb Rock Charismatic Solo Artists, their music isn't stagnant. These artists are doing something that all good artists do—they incorporate new sounds. And this is a good thing. Even if their efforts fall short, which they often do in miserable fashion, they do deserve some credit for trying. Hell, even Blake Shelton's “Boys Round Here”, a tribute to country dudes not listening to the Beatles and not knowing how to dougie and chewing tobacco and spitting, is spoken-word pseudo-rapping. Jason Aldean had freaking Ludacris perform with him on his biggest hit. Florida Georgia Line had their biggest hit remixed by Nelly. Luke Bryan name-dropped T-Pain in a song. I recognize that country artists are stopping well short of working with Run the Jewels or even Kanye West (who would TOTALLY do it, by the way), but they also aren't just trying to sound like Buck Owens and Glen Campbell forever. The genre isn't just stagnating; the people who are at the forefront of what we call country music are listening to other music and trying to work those influences into their product. And this is the thing that annoys the establishment. Not the sexism, not the stupidity of the lyrics, none of that. The fact that, against all logic, the silly men who act as the musical caretakers are actually TRYING is what offends people.

It's entirely possible that modern country is in its hair metal stage. That awful minor stars like Cole Swindell will soon be forgotten; that artists who have half a foot in bro-country and half a foot in less objectionable territory (Sam Hunt, Dierks Bentley) will survive with a few adjustments; that Jason Aldean and Luke Bryan are in for a precipitous decline that will eventually gain some salvage value when a weird sense of retro pride sets in. But hopefully the end result isn't that country, one of the few non “pop” popular genres to have any sense of fun, doesn't lose theirs. It's bad enough that hip-hop is plagued with a self-serious sense of duty to pound and scream about REAL hip-hop and that the parameters for what is allowed in a rock band are so exclusive that nobody is allowed in the club anymore. Music is supposed to be fun and even when it's bad, I don't want that to be lost.

I Guess It's Happening Now--A Preview of the 2015 St. Louis Rams Season

The day that I have been dreading since early last January is finally here--the day during which the St. Louis Rams make their 2015 regular season debut at the Edward Jones Dome against the Seattle Seahawks. Fuck.

Fuck the 2015 season. Fuck absolutely everything about it.

Fuck Stan Kroenke. Fuck Stan Kroenke's parents for giving him the names of iconic St. Louis figures without giving him any sense of loyalty to anything but his big fat fucking bank account. Fuck Wal-Mart and fuck Wal-Mart's heirs for allowing this anthropomorphic mustache to hold the hearts and sleeves of metropolitan St. Louis in his probably tiny hands. Fuck Quin Snyder for succumbing to Walton family influence and regularly starting Josh Kroenke, who was barely qualified to be Mizzou basketball's mascot, on basketball teams that were one actual shooting guard away from making actual noise in the tournament. Fuck the Utah Jazz for not yet figuring out what a toady dipshit Quin Snyder is yet. Fuck Kevin Demoff. Fuck whoever failed to teach Kevin Demoff even the slightest sense of community as a child, whoever allowed an adult man to become such an incontrovertible kiss-ass that he would be perfectly willing to travel across the country and vouch for countless of his coworkers to lose their jobs, because it's not like Stan Kroenke has a propensity to spend money so large that he would pay for stadium vendors, security, et cetera to relocate. Fuck any company in St. Louis that gives Kevin Demoff anything better than an entry-level job once he's canned by the Rams.

Fuck the homer local football media that spent the last five seasons before this one ridiculing St. Louis fans who worried about the future of football in their town as a paranoid, fringe minority. Fuck the homer local football media who then seamlessly transitioned into trying to convince a predominantly working-class fan base that they are obliged to give money to an owner that we all know damn well has zero interest under any circumstances of spending that money on keeping the Rams in St. Louis instead of, I don't know, mustache combs I guess.

Fuck Jeff Fisher, who has made the last (presumably final) four seasons of St. Louis Rams an unwatchable mess. Fuck Steve Spagnuolo for being such a disaster in 2011 that the Fisher era looked good enough that it wasn't worth immediately canning him. Fuck a team having such gall, before a season in which the team desperately needs to get off to a fast start, to draft a running back that all reasonable people knew would miss the first month of the 2015 season. Fuck Janoris Jenkins; if the Rams are indeed moving to Los Angeles, I hope they fucking trade him to Buffalo. Fuck that in a season where on paper I should be optimistic--a new quarterback, a healthy Brian Quick, no Brian Schottenheimer--I find myself writing this.

Fuck anybody who tries to reassure me "At least you have the Cardinals." Fuck Cardinals fans who try to tell me this, especially. Fuck the Cardinals for giving a generation of spoiled St. Louis assholes an unrealistic sense of how good their sports teams should be. Fuck my dad for instilling in me a sense of community, which has kept me tethering to this awful, clusterfuck of a franchise that doesn't even want to be here. Fuck the people who don't have this sense of community and get to feel happy every fall because Their Packers, Their Cowboys, or Their Steelers are in playoff contention again.

Fuck that I still care. Fuck that I haven't found something else in my life, anything else, into which to funnel the passion I have for the Rams. Fuck people with wives and kids and shit that enables them to pay just a little bit less attention to their football team. Fuck that once noon rolls around, I'll be yelling and screaming and laughing and crying and probably watching the Rams get absolutely demolished by a team which, unlike them, actually bothers to prepare during the first month of the season. Fuck the 2015 NFL season and that I'll have a harder time getting through these 16 games than I had getting through the 162 games of mediocre Cardinals seasons or the 82 games of outright bad Blues seasons.

Fuck.