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.

No one plans on becoming a morning person. We all have morning people in our lives, and they tend to be an unappealing lot. They openly (proudly!) declare themselves to be morning people, almost as a warning to others. They can’t wait to start their day with an enthusiasm unknown to mankind, so that they get on with the process of 21st-century self-optimization: Waking up at 3:00 a.m., doing 900 crunches before breakfast, updating multiple life goal spreadsheets, making every call while on speakerphone while on a Peloton, and drinking oddly colored protein shakes for “body fuel” every other hour. Real Marky Mark shit. Teenage you would vomit in horror at the idea of ever morphing into this sort of creature.

So when I tell you that I have become a morning person, it feels more like a confession than a boast. I grew up lazy, and had every intention of staying that way. I worshipped both Garfield and Al Bundy in equal measure. My nickname was Couch, because I could always be found on the couch. Even now, as a professional, I get things done specifically so that I can do nothing afterward. Free time is my only goal. If I could sleep till noon every day—a superpower I swear I once possessed—I would.

But I can’t. When the clock strikes 7:00 a.m. every morning, my ability to remain asleep vanishes. I’m just up. I try to sleep in and my back starts to hurt. So I get up and commence the business of my day. And I can tell you that I’m not like all of those other morning people when I get up and go, but you’re not buying that. You know that I’m one of them. I know it, too. I’m a morning person, and I love it. And do you know why? Because football, that’s why.

Given that I write about football for a living, you might think that I’ve watched every primetime game the NFL has offered up over the span of my career. I haven’t. Prior to this year, I practiced a clumsy form of sports triage in which I stayed up only for the most compelling primetime matchups, while either skipping shittier games outright or bailing on them before the half if the score was already lopsided. If you know your NFL, you know that this method has its drawbacks. Two great teams can play a dud while two dogshit teams can turn on the afterburners against one another. The only way to find out is to watch these games in full, and the only way I ever wanted to watch games was live. Even if I was watching from the game from home, by myself, I had to be there. In the moment. I had to be awake when everyone else was awake. I had to follow along with my Twitter feed to make sure that everyone hated that punt as much as I did. My wife found this absurd. She’d ask, “Why don’t you just watch it on the DVR?” or, much more ignorantly, “Why not just watch the highlights tomorrow morning?” And I’d be like YOU DON’T GET WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A TRUE FAN, LADY.

For these Football Guy reasons, and because replaying shit on DirecTV was possible but also lightly annoying, I was against saving entire games for the morning. Instead, I’d check the score on my phone and go, “Wait, the Chargers WON that game?” like a lobomotized Rip Van Winkle. Then I’d head to the office and work. This was my methodology for years, if not decades. It was suboptimal for both football knowing and personal entertainment, but I figured it was the best I could do.

Then the NFL told DirecTV to fuck off, which meant that I got to tell DirecTV to fuck off. The satisfaction was immense, especially when my new service made recording and replaying games one degree easier: the kind of digital convenience where you’re more willing to do something because it only requires one click instead of three. Around the same time, Elon Musk bought Twitter and turned it into a scrolling chumbox, rendering it a chore to look at during games rather than a welcome supplement. I told Google to record every NFL and college game and then, one fine morning, I sat in my chair before work (SCANDAL!) and watched the previous night’s game, the result of which I hadn’t looked up, in a single go. It was beautiful: no ads, no extended replay breaks, no sideline digressions, all football. A religious experience, if I believed in any religion. I couldn’t surround myself with beer and chili at such an early hour, but that didn’t bother me. I had the game, and that was all I required.

So I did the same thing the next morning, and then dozens of mornings thereafter. I’d already worked movies into my morning viewing habits (weekends only), because that’s when I can have a movie all to myself. Getting older tends to flip your free-time schedule on its face. You no longer have the energy, nor the logistical ability, to party all night long, so you have to cobble together your Me Time from open daylight hours. I was never gonna become the worst of us in using this time, drinking mushroom tea and posting my bicep curl numbers on the internet. I was going to make nothing out of something, and by God I did.

You can, too. Shit, you probably made the discovery long before I did. But for those of you who still burn the midnight oil to get your sports fix, I’m here to tell you it’s less necessary than you might imagine. I still stay up late to watch MY team play, as they will this Sunday night. But for all neutral events, the game starts when I say so. I don’t need the pregame shows (never have). I don’t need to follow along on social media, because I don’t REALLY give a shit what some rando thinks about what just happened. I don’t even need to be sedated. None of that external shit matters. All that matters is me and the game.

Because the communal benefit of sports is something you can only really get from watching with it other people in the room, or at the bar, or in the stadium. You can attempt to replicate that feeling with an iPhone in your hand, but it’s not the same. You and I live in a world that’s constantly trading away the tangible for the ephemeral, and sports suffers from that tradeoff as much as any other aspect of life. If I’m alone watching a game, I’m alone. No amount of scrolling is gonna remedy that. In fact, I’m probably just gonna zero in on someone pissing me off with their knee-jerk take, missing the next play because I didn’t think to look back up.

Morning football obviates that problem, leaving just me and football (and the dog, who doesn’t care) alone, together. I watch closer. I see more. I actually study the replay instead of using that moment to play a quick game of phone Yahtzee. I get more football in a shorter time frame. Most important of all: I don’t lose any sleep. Because I fucking love to sleep, and I remain quite good at it. If I can duck under the covers before the clock strikes 10:00 p.m. and still get all the football I can eat the next day, then I really have self-optimized, and without having to move to the Pacific time zone to do it. This is the right way to live. The only way to live, really. I’m just sad I didn’t start on this path earlier in life. Lord knows I had enough available morning hours to give it more thought. But regrets are only so useful, so I’m just happy to be where I am now.

I know you may not work from home, as I do. Becoming a morning football devotee may take a bit logistical jiu-jitsu on your end, especially if you were never a morning person to begin with. But it’s worth making the initial effort to change your circadian sports rhythms and watch these games with fresh eyes rather than heavy ones. You get up, you have your breakfast and coffee, you leave your phone on the counter, and you dig in. That’s how to be a proper morning person, and that’s how you never have to watch another fucking State Farm ad ever again.

The Games

All games in the Jamboroo are evaluated for sheer watchability on a scale of 1 to 5 Throwgasms.

Five Throwgasms

Vikings at Lions: One sub-take from this game is that the loser will be a 14-3 team that will unfairly have to play at least two road playoff games if they hope to reach the Super Bowl. This is because NFL playoff seeding is dumb, but I’ve long given up on the idea that the owners are gonna do anything about it. Owners like having division champ banners to hang, and they like the extra gate revenue that comes with hosting a Wild Card game. They’re not gonna change any of this shit just because a few teams get hosed by it now and then. This is America. You will end up being forced to fly to Tampa at some point in your life here, no matter who you are.

Four Throwgasms

Bengals at Steelers: Joe Burrow is poised to single-handedly destroy the rest of the AFC if the Bengals sneak into the playoffs, but it’ll only happen if Cincinnati wins this game and Denver loses to a Chiefs team that is resting all of its starters. I can’t trust Carson Wentz to buy me a hat, much less win a game he isn’t supposed to.

Three Throwgasms

Saints at Bucs: Here’s your Tom Brady game, if you were keen to avoid his booth work. Brady has evolved over the course of the season, going from being unable to say anything during the telecast to being the hectoring schoolteacher who isn’t happy with how those kids are playing outside. Listen (for as long as you can) to him yammer on right after someone has fumbled the ball and your eyes will roll right out of your skull. You just can’t do that if you hope to win games in this league, KB. If I’m Spencer Rattler’s teammate, I’m not gonna trust him if I see him being so careless with the football!

Browns at Ravens

Panthers at Falcons

Chiefs at Broncos

Two Throwgasms

Dolphins at Jets: The Dolphins can also still make the playoffs, and who doesn’t want to watch this team endure yet another forgettable first-round exit? Beats seeing Sean Payton happy!

Commanders at Cowboys

Seahawks at Rams

49ers at Cardinals

One Throwgasm

Bears at Packers: Kyler Gordon is an extremely good defender. This has been your One Good Thing About The Bears Season, presented to you by Marshall Field’s.

Chargers at Raiders

Texans at Titans

Giants at Eagles

Bills at Patriots

Jaguars at Colts

Pregame Song That Makes Me Wanna Run Through A Goddamn Brick Wall

“Closed Gate,” By Firebreather! From Andy:

Everything about this band lives up to its incredible name. The bellowing vocals manage to be absolutely throat-lacerating and also super melodic. The riffs are massive and catchy. The drums are thunderous. Just kick-ass doom metal. Tony Iommi would be proud.

Since Andy mentioned the Black Sabbath guitarist, here’s one of my favorite heavy metal dad facts: throughout Sabbath’s entire run, Iommi played guitar without two of his fingertips, which he lost in an accident he suffered while working at a steel mill:

The future Rock and Roll Hall of Famer went back in to find that another worker, who operated a guillotine further up the assembly line, had no-showed. “They said, ‘You’ve gotta go on the machine yourself because there’s nobody else to do it,'” he recalled. “So, as I’m pushing the metal through the press, the machine came down on my hand, and in the action of pulling my hand back quick, I pulled the ends of my fingers off.”

After pulling a double Ronnie Lott, Iommi started playing again while using two false fingertips on his right hand. Here’s a photo of that steampunk hand. Dan Campbell has that photo framed on the wall behind his desk.

Fire This Asshole!

Is there anything more exciting than a coach losing his job? All year long, we’ll keep track of which coaches will almost certainly get fired at year’s end or sooner. And now, your potential 2024 chopping block:

Robert Saleh—FIRED!

Dennis Allen—FIRED!

Matt Eberflus—FIRED!

Antonio Pierce

Doug Pederson

Brian Daboll

Mike McCarthy

Zac Taylor

Kevin Stefanski

Shane Steichen

Brian Callahan

Jerod Mayo

Dave Canales

I was holding out hope that Black Monday would come a week early this season, given that so much of the Week 18 slate is garbage time for teams that tapped out long ago … but no! No, we’re all gonna be treated to 17 full games of Doug Pederson spiritually coaching his team in flip-flops. Even worse, I only count four certain firings out of the above group (Pierce, Steichen, Pederson, Daboll). Everyone else, the Beav included, could potentially get a stay of execution because their owners are dumb, cheap, indifferent, insane, or all of the above. I’m already disappointed.

Also, let’s call it: Now that he has some actual coaching on his resume, Josh McCown will get a head coaching job before Brian Flores does. Takes are a flat circle.

Great Moments In Poop History

Reader William sends in this story I call LAKE FLACCID:

I spent the summer before my senior year of high school on a work crew for a kids camp in Colorado. Probably the best job I ever had: New group of campers every week, everything my crew did was outside in high-country August, and it was gorgeous. I put on 15 lbs. of muscle just eating the food and breathing the air.

Except for one thing: The latrine system. I don’t know how long this camp had been around, but the plumbing system relied almost entirely on gravity. The camp itself was on a promontory nestled under a 900-foot peak, and the back end of the camp sloped down into the underbrush. Flush anything down the toilets at camp, and the contents of that flush would take a short trip through the pipes like Pennywise the Clown, arriving eventually at The Lagoon: an open-air, Olympic-sized pool of piss, vomit, used tampons, used condoms, and of course, shit. Logs of shit everywhere, like tiny Loch Ness monsters lurking in the murk.

The Lagoon was hidden behind some scrub pines and barricaded by a 10-foot hurricane fence. When we looked closely at the “water” in the pool—gagging from the stench, of course—we could see little red globules swimming around and banging into each other. That’s the bacteria breaking down the waste, we were told. The rest leaches down the hill into the ground. Don’t fall in, we were told. You’ll be dead before we get you to a hospital.

Fall in?

Yep. They put us in rowboats, two to a boat with a big barrel in the middle and a pool skimmer. Our job was to remove all the non-natural items: the condoms, tampons, and any large free-range turds that may happen by. They had overbooked the camp, see, and The Lagoon was overstressed.

We did the job, three times.

There was a pipe across the middle, and one day a boat bumped it. The guy in the boat (alone for some reason) lost his balance and fell on the pipe. The boat almost scooted out from under him, but he snared it with one foot. We got to him immediately, but for several long seconds he was braced on that pipe maybe two feet above a shit lagoon that would kill him, and the only thing keeping him alive was that one foot clutching the prow of his boat. I can still hear him screaming.

The third time was after barbecue night. A real emergency. They had overbooked again, and everyone in camp had eaten corn on the cob the night before. Corn does not digest. We took to our boats that morning on a sea of yellow, and accounted for every floating kernel… but not before one of the boys snapped. He just couldn’t take it anymore, and I don’t blame him. He started using his pool skimmer to lacrosse-throw logs of shit at us with all his might. Among my most vivid memories in life is hiding behind a tree, feeling the impact of projectile shit on the trunk as he yelled THIS IS SUCH BULLSHIT GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME until someone got the skimmer out of his hands. We finished without him that day.

Whenever I tell that story, I feel like Roy Batty. I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.

I believe you.

And Now Let’s Go Down To The Sideline And Check In With Charissa Thompson

“Drew, you mentioned Tom Brady earlier—I actually had a chance to speak with Brady before this Bucs/Saints game. I asked him what the key to victory was for the Bucs, and he told me, ‘CT, I’m just happy be back in Tampa with KB and EA to do this game.’ He also told me that he expects ‘BM’ and ‘ME’ to put on a show against ‘DR’ and the ‘NOS.’ And, after the game, he’s looking forward to a rare trip to DQ to get some ‘IC.’ Back to you, DM.”

Thank you, Charissa.

Gametime Cheap Beer Of The Week

Sapporo Beer Surprise! We all love big surprises anytime we ingest a food or liquid, don’t we? From Bradley:

The first is a Sapporo beer I picked up from a convenience store in Japan. I wasn’t even looking to pick up a beer, but when you walk by one labeled “Beer Surprise”, you’re not left with much choice. I was equal parts intrigued as to what the backstory behind the creation of a “surprising flavor” would be, while also thinking ignorance may be bliss on that front. 

“A brilliant harmony of refreshing flavor” is really doing it for me. Reminds me of when my brother somehow ended up with a Japanese version of Van Halen’s 1984 album, and all of the lyrics in the album sleeve were translated by the 1980s equivalent of AI. You’ve got to row row row with the bounches…

Gameday Movie Of The Week For Patriots Fans

Sean Baker’s Anora, which is winning top honors from just about every critics’ association while being one of the most irritating movies I’ve ever seen. For those of you unfamiliar, Anora’s logline is essentially, OK, what if Pretty Woman like, really happened for real? with a New York stripper (Mikey Madison) getting a quickie marriage to a billionaire Russian failson (Mark Eidelstein), only for the kid’s parents to find out and send a couple of lackeys to get their union memory-holed. The setup is perfect, the acting is on point, and the photography is gorgeous. I get why this thing is gonna win some hardware.

The problem is that the story itself goes fucking nowhere for a solid 90 minutes in the middle. The groom disappears and you, the viewer, have to accompany Anora and the Russian/Armenian goons as they canvas Brooklyn in an attempt to find the little brat. Nearly all of the dialogue comes in the form of screaming. So much screaming. I wanted someone to pull a gun and use it early in this movie just so that I could get some fucking peace and quiet. I wanted suspense, I got a fight between reality TV contestants who have been sent on an errand.

And I know people who loved all of the screaming in Anora. All you have to do is cite Uncut Gems to justify having characters unload their voice boxes on one another. But that’s only a good way of building up tension if, as in Gems, you feel as if all that back and forth is moving the story forward. In other words, screaming works in a crime movie, and not in what ultimately turns out to be a character study. I respect this movie, but I didn’t enjoy it much of it. Get a better editor, Sean. Two stars.

Gratuitous Simpsons Quote

“Don’t worry, Homer. Nine out of ten religions fail in their first year.”

Enjoy the games, everyone.