Welcome Back…to THUNDERDOME! Your Hall of Fame Game Open Thread

Listen all! This is the truth of it. Fighting leads to killing, and killing gets to warring. And that was damn near the death of us all. Look at us now! Busted up, and everyone talking about COVID Variants! But we’ve learned, by the dust of them all… DFO learned. Now, when teams get to fighting, it happens here! And it finishes here! Two teams enter; one team leaves!

And then the other team leaves. No one’s actually gonna die unnecessarily.  It’s preseason football, not Florida.

It’s been a long strange Spring and Summer since the Super Bowl.  We laughed! We cried! We got jabbed in the arm so that bunkering in our homes being antisocial was optional instead of mandatory! The draft came and went, several big trades were made, the Texans became the Greatest Shitshow on Turf without even setting foot on the field and Indianapolis decided to hold training camp in the middle of a fucking minefield. It’s a brand new year, with brand new football to opiate your masses.

Welcome home, you magnificent bastards.

For starters, we actually have a preseason this year.  I admit that I kind of enjoyed last year’s “Fuck it, let’s just start the regular season” approach.  It added spice, and we avoided the spate of Avoidable Training Camp Injuries that routinely kill at least one team’s season before it even starts.  This year, each team plays three preseason games instead of the four that were played in The Beforetimes.  It’s unclear how different teams will use their players under the new system– some will want their starters to tune up, others will continue to use at least one game to evaluate “bubble” players and work out depth chart issues.  I anticipate Dan Campbell will use at least one game to evaluate players’ willingness and skill at kneecap-biting.

To The Game!

Dallas @ Pittsburgh: Well fuck.  Yes, we have football back, but it’s a fucking dud between two of the least likeable teams in the last 4 decades.

The Non-Gendered Cowpersons (Dallas, or “NGCPs”) got rid of Jim Tomsula and kept Mike McCarthy, which is just fucking daft.  DAK! Prescott has gone from loveable yogurt-shill fighting The Man for just compensation to just another coy HIPAA-citing fuckwit who is either too stupid to guard his own multi-million dollar health or too scared of alienating the seething mass of Texas shitkickers who already barely tolerate an “urban” quarterback running their beloved team.  Their defense is still shit.  McCarthy is apparently thinking he can outscore his own defense’s ineptness like he did at the start of last year, which will result in Prescott getting crushed into tiny boneless cubes of ham by midseason.

I wanted to love the Steelers.  Mike Tomlin seems like a mostly-respectable guy.  They had a 3-4 defense when everyone else was reliant on 4-3 maulers.  Shittsburgh continues to trot out the corpse of Ben Roethlisberger at quarterback.  The upside is that the beatings he has taken mean he is probably too slow, shambling and sore to rape anyone in a bathroom.  His backups are a racist who got savagely beaten by Myles Garrett and an idiot who got savagely beaten by his wife for giving another woman $20k in gifts.  The rest of the team is completely without personality, except for Watt the Younger, whose personality is Grit.

Fuckit.  Any football is good football

LET’S DO THIS!