1:21 PM EDT on October 31, 2024 Share on Bluesky Comments 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. You! You’re a football fan. You have a team. Your team has a head coach, and you’re not entirely certain if your coach knows what the fuck they’re doing, or if they’re just a clueless asshat. How do you tell? Do you wait out the length of the coach’s contract and see if there’s a Super Bowl win along the way? Do you make sure they blitz a Hail Mary instead of sitting back and letting the magic happen? Do you ask the nerdy data nerds? These are all viable options, but what if I told you that there was an easier, and ironclad, way of testing your coach’s mettle? Because there is, and it involves people like this: That’s New York City Mayor Eric Adams, currently the subject of 500 different Amerigo-Turkiyan investigations. Some head coaches are presidents: smart, authoritative, aggressive. Some are senators: old, boring, uninterested in progress. Some are congressmen: eager for the spotlight but in desperate need of more experience running things. Your results will vary with all of these political avatars. But that won’t be the case if your coach is a MAYOR. If your head coach is a mayor, you are fucked. You should be frightened. Very frightened. Because mayor is now a distinct personality, one that deserves its own place in the modern lexicon of slang, like “boomer,” “Karen,” and “Cody.” The next competent American mayor I encounter will be the first. But what makes someone a mayor, and how can you tell if the dude running your favorite team is one? Well, here now is a quick primer on how to determine it. 1. Does your coach possess a towering self-regard? 2. Are they grandiose about unimportant accomplishments, such as a new train station opening next to a landfill (“I thought our special teams were really strong today”)? 3. Do they engage in personal behavior that constantly oscillates between criminal and outright bizarre? 4. Do they look like a ghost? 5. When facing an urgent crisis, is their solution always increased physicality toward those responsible for it? 6. Do they have strange habits, like never wearing shoes while eating fruit? 7. Are they flanked by strange lackeys at all times? 8. Will they park directly on top of your own car? 9. Are they horny but in inexplicable ways? 10. Do they SUCK at apologizing? If the answer to more than 50 percent of these questions is yes, you have my deepest sympathies. Maybe you think that Sean Payton, currently guiding Bo Nix to a winning record with an average depth of target that registers on the Kelvin scale, is still a great coach. Wrong. That man has Giuliani all over him. And what is Nick Sirianni but a mayor who sics the cops (Big Dom) on opponents and then pleads ignorance after the fact? And the late Denny Green may very well have been the most mayor head coach to ever operate within the NFL. I was there when Denny tossed out empty motivational slogans (“Plan your work and work your plan”), got accused of sexual harassment, and kept a stooge named Richard Solomon with him at all times despite the fact that no one in the organization knew who Solomon was or what the fuck his job was. And Denny Green was a popular coach at his peak! People loved the guy even though he never won dick! THAT’S a mayor. Can you see it now? Can you see how your coach fits into the equation here? Are you looking at a photo of Mike McCarthy as you read this and whispering “My god” to yourself? I think you are. Now that you understand what a mayor is, you won’t be able to unsee all of the NFL mayors driving their teams into the ground. Matt Eberflus: mayor. Deion Sanders: mayor. 2024 Doug Pederson: oh my god such a mayor. Look close enough and you’ll be left unable to discern your Sean McDermotts from your Eric Garcettis, nor your Brian Dabolls from your Muriel Bowsers. Even if your head coach isn’t a mayor now, there’s nothing stopping them from becoming one somewhere down the line. Mayorism can happen to anyone … even you. If you don’t find that prospect (Halloween voice) SPOOOOOOKY, then you may already be one. An envelope of kickback money is under your welcome mat as I write this. The Games All games in the Jamboroo are evaluated for sheer watchability on a scale of 1 to 5 Throwgasms. Five Throwgasms Lions at Packers: I swear to God that Jordan Love could be decapitated on the field, on camera, and it would still turn out to be a neck strain on the MRI a day later. The man is Wolverine with a limp. Meanwhile, Jared Goff has thrown a grand total of 13 incompletions over his last four games. He is officially a dangerous quarterback now, and the Lions have somehow gotten better since losing their best pass rusher. I feel like I fell into a wormhole. Four Throwgasms Broncos at Ravens: Bo Nix could win multiple Super Bowls (he won’t) and I promise you I still won’t call him good. Get that dink-and-dunkmeister out of my fucking face. Three Throwgasms Colts at Vikings: For this exercise, let’s all agree for the moment that letting a rookie QB sit and learn for a year-plus (like Jordan Love and Patrick Mahomes) is the optimal way to develop them. Let’s also agree that rushing a QB into the starting lineup too quickly can do permanent damage to their long-term prospects, especially if you handle his early struggles as poorly as the Colts are currently handling Anthony Richardson’s regression. Bench your franchise QB once, and they almost never recover. The problem then is that the rookie wage scale has so utterly perverted the economics of roster-building that nearly every team is incentivized to start any first-round QB right out of the gate, in order to take full advantage of their rookie deal. The longer your starter plays at a bargain salary, the more years you have to field a loaded team around them. But that approach only works if the guy you draft is good, and good instantly. Most quarterbacks aren’t good right away, because NFL QB is one of the hardest jobs on the planet. No matter. The second you draft an AR or a Bryce Young, the whole world (myself included) will demand he start instantly, and then deem him a bust if he sucks after 10 minutes. In my football knowing opinion, this is suboptimal. I was around before the rookie wage scale, so I know that a lot of teams rushed young passers into the fold before it came to be. But it was better when teams had some measure of choice in the matter, even if they still fucked it up. This is why every rookie QB from now on must be remanded to some sort of special academy for a full year before officially joining the roster. It’d be like Hogwarts, only with a better sport. Dolphins at Bills: I didn’t have a chance to highlight this last week, before Tua Tagovailoa returned to the field after becoming a ninth-degree black belt in the fencing position, but this killed me. Never mind that the efficacy of Guardian Caps is dubious at best, I’m just aggravated that “It’s a personal choice” is now the default justification for anyone who wants to avoid getting vaccinated, not wear extra padding, never use a seat belt, never wear a rubber, or own 500 semi-automatic rifles. Tell any of these people you’d like abortion to be legal and they’ll call the DA on you. Cowboys at Falcons: If you’re as confused as I am as to why certain calls need to be challenged by coaches and others automatically get an instant replay assist without any red flags needed, you’re not alone. Here now is how the NFL rulebook says Replay Assist should be deployed: Replay officials located in NFL stadium replay booths and designated members of the NFL officiating department in Art McNally GameDay Central at the league office in New York may provide on-field officials with objective information regarding on-field rulings and the correct application of playing rules. Before, replay officials were only permitted to provide input on limited administrative issues and during replay reviews. Now, they can proactively assist in situations where clear and obvious video evidence is quickly available to assist the on-field officials on objective rulings. The new assistance rule applies to plays where there is clear and obvious video evidence to proactively address specific objective rulings. THEN WHY DO WE NEED A FUCKING CHALLENGE SYSTEM? This isn’t a situation where the refs get to commandeer the entire replay process within the final two minutes of any half. I’ve seen replay assist correct multiple fuckups, on the spot, across every timeframe of every game. It’s fast, efficient, and correct. No ad breaks or announcements needed. It’s the ideal way to use replay, and therefore should be the only one. We don’t need a whole secondary replay process that involves coaches wasting timeouts on plays that need to be slowed down to .001x speed and zoomed in on to atomic levels to be parsed. Just get the tip from upstairs, change the call, and get on with it. The inconsistency appalls me. Bucs at Chiefs: I know they’re fresh on the eyes compared to their current getups, but every time I see the Bucs in their Creamsicle unis, I remember why people in the '90s made fun of them. Not every retro design is worth bringing back. Rams at Seahawks