It’s that time again- time to examine the biggest NFL felonies (real or metaphorical) of the last couple of days weeks (gimme a break, new fatherhood is a bitch). It’s CrimeBeat! and you will listen to EVERY LAST WORD I SAY!

ACCUSED: Corbyn Nyemah

CHARGE: Attempted Home Invasion, Property Damage, Cuckoldry

Who is Corbyn Nyemah, you ask? Sounds like a shitty character from some Star Wars Expanded Universe novel. He’s not an NFL player, although apparently he did play defense for East Stroudsburg University for at least one year.

No, Corbyn is the subject of CrimeBeat! because he ran afoul of Fletcher Cox, four-time Pro Bowler and Very Large Man for the Philadelphia Eagles.  Nyemah allegedly showed up at Cox’s house with a baseball bat looking for his ex-girlfriend of two years, who is now apparently dating Cox.  When he broke several windows and tried to enter the garage, Cox pulled out a shotgun and called the police. Nyemah fled and a police pursuit ensued. Corbyn was later arrested by US Marshals. When asked about the incident by the press, Nyemah stated that he wanted to talk to his ex-girlfriend and believed they were working on rekindling their romance.

Baseball bats: when flowers and chocolate are just too cliché.

Cox has been largely silent on the incident and the team has closed ranks, calling it a “personal matter”.  The NRA is currently sporting a confused half-boner, because they love a story about using a gun to defend your home against a large young African-American man but don’t know how to cope with the fact that the homeowner was an even larger, darker-skinned young African-American man.

This is not the first public conflict Cox has had with another man claiming he stole their woman.  Cox was previously sued for alienation of affections by a gentleman in North Carolina.

Joshua Jeffords alleged that Catherine Cuesta Jeffords and Cox met and commenced an affair while she was in Philadelphia on business and continued via text. When he confronted her and demanded she stop following Cox on Instagram, she instead blocked Jeffords and moved to Philly. Commenting on the case, Jeffords stated that Cox “basically ruined my life, because I thought I was gonna be with this woman forever[.]” Yes, because she obviously wasn’t going to cheat on you with anyone else…

North Cackalaky is one of six remaining US states to continue to recognize this tort (bad news for Lotharios and Lothariettes in Hawaii, Mississippi, New Mexico, South Dakota, and Utah).  Each state has its own version and standards, but North Carolina’s elements are relatively standard:

1. You and your spouse were in a valid marriage with genuine love and affection;
2. The love and affection between you and your spouse was destroyed and alienated;
3. The wrongful and malicious behavior of the third party was the cause of the destruction and alienation of your spouse’s love and affection;
4. The wrongful and malicious behavior occurred prior to the separation of you and your spouse; and
5. The alienation damaged you (i.e., led to the dissolution of your marriage, separation, depression, economic loss, etc).

These cases are fun (if you’re not involved) for two reasons. First, it doesn’t require an affair, just that someone came between you and your formerly-beloved “wrongfully” and “maliciously”.  That means that (unless your specific jurisdiction has law on the books otherwise) you can sue people like his best friend, your meddling sister-in-law and even an employer (seriously- Illinois allowed it before abolishing the whole thing in 2015 and North Carolina had to pass a statute immunizing employers in 2009).  Second, the plaintiff has to prove genuine love and affection before the intervention of the defendant, which means you get things like anniversary cards and sappy love-notes entered as evidence. It’s simultaneously deeply depressing and horrifyingly interesting, like a Robert Kraft police report.

Cox later settled with Jeffords, which makes some sense given that losing such a claim can be quite costly in North Carolina.  The Washington Post did a piece on these suits after a judge awarded a man $8.8 million in 2018, noting that a jury had awarded a woman $9 million in 2010 and a judge hit an alleged mistress with a $30 million judgment in 2011. While North Carolina’s approach may be considered quite harsh, legal scholars remain divided over its superiority to Texas courts’ approach.

ACCUSED: Seattle C-HOX

CHARGE: Grand Theft L(ion)arceny

THE TRADE DEADLINE HAS PASSED! EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN! PANDEMONIUM REIGNS!

Time was that the NFL trade deadline was the most dead (deadest?) of the Major North American Sports. In the 80s there was some excitement, with Eric Dickerson and Herschel Walker each being dealt in October. However, things largely quieted down after that because:

1. the advent of modern NFL Free Agency in 1993 made teams more gun-shy about parting with draft picks for a guy who might walk in relatively short order, and

2. no executive wanted to take the chance of being the Rams or Vikings in the Dickerson and Walker trades.

But times are different now, and the last several years have seen much more mobility toward the end of October.  I, in my completely uninformed but internet-infallible Outsider’s Perspective, ascribe this to three factors:

1. teams performing above expectations at mid-season now recognize that the window for success is usually fairly small, so they are more willing to mortgage future assets if they can try to Ride the Lightning,

2. teams with executives on the hot seat have one more opportunity to save their jobs with a promising pick-up, and

3. “rebuilding” and tanking are now accepted and widespread practices.  If your team is unexpectedly out of it and you have a good player who is on an expiring contract (or a heftier-than-you’d-like multiyear deal), the expectation is now that you will abandon hope for the rest of the season and shop him around to try and get some return.

This year, we got what can only be termed The Johnny Manziel Experience: lots of hype, but it wasn’t the Big Deal it was supposed to be and everyone went home disappointed or abused.  And what better transition can there be to a story about the Lions?

The Lions traded safety Quandre Diggs to the Seahawks for a brown paper bag of slightly warm vomit. Although not a real household name outside of Detroit (and those of us who cover the Fuck Lions for Recreational Purposes), Diggs was one of the few genuine bright spots on the Lions over the last several years.  And we all know that when the Lions organization is presented with a positive spark, the only thing they know how to do is take a giant soupy shit all over it and then roll around in it to make sure that spark is well and truly smothered.

A Pro Bowl alternate in 2018, Diggs was one of those NFL success stories that teams (and fans) dream of. Despite recording four tackles and an interception in the Senior Bowl, a highly decorated college career at Texas and a pretty good pedigree (he’s the younger brother of pretty good That Guy Quentin Jammer), Diggs was drafted in the sixth round because he was relatively small (5’9″) and slow (4.56 in the 40) for a cornerback.  He worked earned his spot on the Lions roster as a nickel-dime corner and hung around until he was forced to fill in at safety in 2017 and blossomed. They liked him so much they signed him to a 3+ year, $20.4 million extension last year. Hell, they put him on the cover of their 2020 calendar.

Despite being .500ish (2-3-1 at the time) and positioned above the Trendy Preseason Super Bowl Pick Bearistocrats! in the NFC North, the Lions decided that they were going to jettison one of their homegrown stars (plus a seventh-round pick) for a fifth-round selection from the Seahawks. This is currently projected as Pick 155. Over the past 20 years, the best Pick 155 was inarguably A.J. Feeley. The second best was inarguably John Skelton. That is…not encouraging. Sure, some teams get lucky with late round draft picks (or make deals with The Robot Devil) but this is insane for a Lions organization that has proven that it cannot be trusted to pick a restaurant for lunch, let alone its own future players. Detroit won $100k in the lottery and has decided on plowing all of that back into Powerball tickets.

Oh, and in what can only be described as a Diaper Fire Double Whammy, the trade also managed to piss off Diggs’ best friend and the inarguably best player on their defense, Darius Slay. Thank god moving up two rounds at the end of the draft is more important than team morale!

The Seahawks, meanwhile, continue to be the half-bright team that looks brilliant by taking advantage of the Chronically Stupid. You may recall that John Schneider worked a deal on the eve of the season with the Texans after Bill O’Brien’s Chinhole was appointed general manager. Houston got the corpse of Barkevious Mingo, A Guy and a third-round pick for Clowney, who was important enough for the Texans to franchise tag.  The Texans also stapled a check for $7 million (out of a total $15 million salary) to Clowney’s ass to get him out the door.  Dear fucking Alvis, why can’t the Bills work trades with people this inept?

BAKER MAYFIELD

CHARGE: Woke Up Feeling Dangerously Incompetent.

Baker Mayfield has been one of the Feel Good Stories of the Season. What, schadenfreude doesn’t make you feel good?

A preseason Media Darling because he’s charismatic and always good for a quote, The Dudebro Who Would Be King was supposed to lead #Hardland to the #Promisedland this season. They got him Odell Beckham to go with Jarvis Landry, David Njoku and Nick Chubb.  Marketing Departments made him the star of every fucking ad you see during a game broadcast, which is hilarious during Browns games when the last live picture before the break was him walking off the field after a terrible turnover. Mayfield is last among regular passers with a completion percentage of 58.7% and a Bleergh-awful touchdown-to-interception rate (0.58).  Even worse, he’s thrown 6 touchdowns to 10 interceptions when he’s NOT being pressured.  While there is some very legitimate argument that those numbers don’t tell the whole story, it’s still pretty damning that under as-ideal-as-conditions-get-in-the-NFL you have a statline that would make Nathan Peterman blush.

To Mayfield’s credit, he gets it, and he feels remorse.  To Mayfield’s discredit, he’s still an insufferable dudebro.  So he’s chosen to express his shame publicly through the medium of facial hair.

He showed up to the stadium in Denver with his normal beard. Then he decided to go with the U-shaped Not Quite Fu Manchu.

After shitting the bed against Hippo’s Donks, he showed up to the post-game press conference looking a bit more…Trestmany…

Yesterday, he finally addressed the issue, saying that the “original thought for me, do handlebars,” because he “was undefeated before Sunday with the handlebar mustache.” “So I shaved it off because I didn’t deserve it.”

God, what an unutterable tool.

First off, your first thought after getting your ass beat by Brandon Fucking Allen should not be about your facial hair.

Second, that wasn’t a fucking handlebar mustache. A handlebar curves up. What you had was a Lemmy where the sideburns were not keeping up their end of the deal.

Frankly, the best race of the season so far has been Mayfield vs. Mitch Trubisky vs. Sam Darnold to see which top-3 quarterback can make their team regret their decision the most. Darnold is (mostly) getting a pass, because the mono thing was hilarious and because his team may legitimately jump up its own rectum and disappear in an Implosion of Suck.  He’s also reacting to it fairly well even in the face of the New York Media- he even handled the “seeing ghosts” thing better than his coach or management.

Trubisky has not been the active disaster for the Bears that Mayfield and Darnold have been for their respective teams. Rather, he’s more like a giant yawning void at the game’s most important position. At 5 touchdowns, 3 interceptions and 1200 yards, his statline is downright respectable…if he had only played 4 games.

But the Bears came into the season with High Expectations and Chicago fans were pretty chesty after their second-year quarterback had been named a Pro Bowl alternate and come within a double-doink of the first Bears playoff win in quite a while. The defense is not the monster it was last year, but is still a consensus Top 5 unit.

So it comes as quite a shock to many of the Bears faithful to be sitting at 3-5 in the basement of the NFC North. They can’t pass. They can’t run- they’ve only broken the 100 yard mark as a team twice this year.  Much of the blame has been placed on offensive line issues, key drops by receivers and Matt Nagy’s Ahab-like fixation on the mistakes in that playoff loss. But (puts on Old White Sports Reporter hat) at the end of the day, if you give up two third-round picks and a fourth rounder (one of which turned into Alvin Kamara) and spend the second overall pick (ahead of Mahomes and Deshaun Watson) on a guy, you expect that he can carry an NFL offense to at least mediocrity on his own merits. (Takes off hat, burns it).

Perhaps more telling is that Trubisky has shown Signs of Cracking Under the Strain. While the Chicago media does not have the same reputation for brutality as some other markets (at least since Jay Mariotti got drowned in a vat of Malört), they are still not shy about asking hard questions.  The rumbling started (as it will after losing 4 straight) with whether the team is wasting the efforts of a defense that could carry them to the playoffs if given even token offensive support.  While this ignores that Chase Daniel was not exactly a world-beater in his two appearances this season, Trubisky made an unforced error yesterday that may actually cost him his job. Before practice, he said he was “[t]rying to get some of these TVs in the building turned off because you’ve got too many people talking on TV about us and what they think about us — what we should do, what we are and what we’re not[.]”

Oh, you dear sweet tittiess-kissing dumbfuck…

There are many things Chicago sports fans will tolerate. Bill Wirtz. Century-long losing streaks. Troughs instead of urinals or toilets. Old Style beer. But one thing they Will Not Stand For is perceived weakness on their football team. Toughness is All. Middle linebacker is the sacred position on this team. The idiots still talk about Bear Weather as if the cold is some sort of advantage, despite the team being 46-48-1 in games below freezing since 1960 (thanks, Pro Football Reference). So for Trubisky to suggest that media talk and criticism is Getting To Him to the point that he wants TVs turned off…that’s not going to play well with Bob from Calumet City.

Unfortunately, this in turn required Nagy (who is fighting for his own job) to come out and pretend that he loves high expectations and tell the press that “[i]f you don’t crave that pressure and you don’t crave that [expectation], then you shouldn’t be on this team.” That, ladies and gentlemen, is how a coach trying to be a Tough Guy paints himself into a corner. If the Lions pull one off this weekend and Mitch shows any sign of weakness, look for Nagy to bench him. Or maybe make Trubisky spend all of practice kicking field goals from 43 yards out.

So there you have it. And remember kids: Foxborough Delenda Est