By Drew Gallagher, ADVANCE COLUMNIST
Another NFL season is upon us which means that 31 teams and their respective fan bases have the dream of lifting the Lombardi Trophy on Valentine’s Day in 2027—a dream that might not be shared by significant others hoping for something more romantic than wings and stuffed crust pizza.
For those of you wondering why only 31 of the 32 NFL teams have that dream, it’s because the Cleveland Browns’ dream ended about 1:05 pm on September 13th when their season kicked off against the Jaguars. Let the Arch Manning sweepstakes begin!
One of the storylines fans are sure to follow this season is whether Kansas City Chiefs’ kicker Harrison Butthead will talk to Mr. Taylor Swift (aka, Chiefs’ Tight End Travis Kelce) on the sidelines, since he was the only teammate not invited to Kelce’s nuptials this summer. I’m sure that when my homegirl and the future Hall of Famer sat down to go over the guest list the conversation went something like:
“But Tay Tay, kickers are people too,” said Kelce with little to no conviction.
“Oh, sweetie, I understand that and you can invite the punter, but I’d like to remind you that women are actually people, too, and not simply baby factories who are baking barefoot in the kitchen when not giving birth, as your kicker proselytized at a high school graduation that included women,” said the songwriter, who has been known to write the occasional anthem about liberated women and the power that lies within.
Another person who was not invited to the biggest wedding of the summer was Pittsburgh Steelers’ quarterback Aaron Rodgers, who recently revealed his theory on why people like my wife absolutely hate him, and could be why he never got an invite to the Swift-Kelce nuptials.
Rodgers opined that people detest him with a white-hot passion not because he is a liar (he lied about getting his Covid vaccine which put opponents, teammates, and fans at risk) or because he is incapable of throwing a 15-yard out and keeping it inbounds. Rather, Rodgers says that he is largely detested because he was right about the Covid vaccine being unnecessary. To him, it was a worldwide psychological operation to see how many people would blindly follow the advice of medical professionals instead of a washed up quarterback who was smoking ayahuasca in a Costa Rican villa to learn more about self-love.
Mission accomplished. He certainly does love—and talking about—himself.
Even though Rodgers seems to have spent a lot of time on the dark web and in dark caves to formulate his psyops theory on the pandemic, and since he cannot blame his receivers or offensive linemen for any holes in this theory, he does not provide a lot of detail. And we have questions.
What Rodgers is suggesting, I think, is that when the Coronavirus was introduced to the world in 2019 it was done intentionally just to see how many non-multi-millionaire NFL players—in plain speak, the common man—would be led to contemplate their mortality and place their faith and survival in science. More fools us.
This lemmings-to-the-cliff or sheep mentality––use your animal of choice––was just to pave the way for future psyops, according to Rodgers, even though 7.1 million people died in the so-called experiment. The coordination among nations that hate each other more than my wife hates Aaron Rodgers would seem to be nearly as impossible as an NFL quarterback uncovering this worldwide coordination while spelunking in Peru during the offseason.
By Rodgers’ theory, China and the United States would have had to agree to allow their populations to be decimated and petrified with fright at the possibility of global annihilation just to see how it goes—an off-Broadway production of The End of the World As We Know It to iron out some wrinkles before the real headliner.
Of course, China and the United States do not control everything. Elon Musk does through NDAs. So say a country like, I don’t know, Italy balked at the idea of stacking their dead like cordwood along the Appian Way for a couple of months. Doesn’t it seem likely that someone might have alerted the AP or at least NPR that the Italians were not consulted on starting a pandemic for shits and giggles?
And there is no way Putin was going to stay quiet about bragging that he got to sit at the big boys’ table without having to wear a shirt. This all seems farther fetched than Rodgers trying to muscle up on a throw to a wide-open DK Metcalf 38 yards away.
I am certain that Rodgers has a corresponding theory that the world is run by a small conglomerate of the wealthy and not governments whose leaders and presidents are merely puppets—a theory that he will likely share at some point on his weekly appearance on ESPN’s Pat McAfee program where he is paid over $1 million annually to talk about unscientific nonsense while auditioning for Fox News since no NFL pregame show will touch him once he retires.
One thing I don’t think Rodgers realizes, though, is that if the world is run by conglomerates who can control pandemics, then those conglomerates can also control the NFL and must be Ravens’ or Bengals’ fans, because both those teams have young and exciting quarterbacks who can throw a ball more than 20 yards in a tight spiral. And those conglomerates are going to continue to make myself and my fellow Steelers fans suffer through the mediocrity of Aaron Rodgers and his seemingly concussed brain for at least one more season. I wish science would develop an immunization against Aaron Rodgers. I’d be second in line for that vaccination…behind my wife.
"Past a certain age, a man without a family, can be a bad thing." Marty -
True Detective, Season 1