RaiderDamus' Friday Foretelling: Raiders vs. Chiefs

Greetings, Raider fans! It is I, Raiderdamus, the most dangerous mad scientist in the Tri-State Area. I come to you today pleased with the Raiders' victory over the miserable Titans, although I am displeased that the Great Beyond was again incorrect in his prediction. It matters very little though, as my articles are perennially masterpieces of comedic prose and the correctness of the prediction is of late quite secondary to how funny the writing is.

But, I still hate to be wrong. I also hate when the Raiders lose. The worst thing in the world to me is to watch the Raiders lose a game I predicted they should win. That's been happening with some frequency lately and it is irksome. Slightly less distressing is them winning a game I said they would lose, which is what happened last week and what I hope happens with more regularity in the future.

In any case, I again went to consult the Great Beyond for his wisdom on the matter of the upcoming Chiefs game, and here is the message I received:

"Well hey there! Good to see the Raiders bounce back strong last week. It's always tough to win a game on the road in bad weather, but that's what they did and they are still in the playoff hunt. Good to see them in the mix this late in the year. They haven't been this good since you starting asking me for visions of the future.

So who you got this week? The Chiefs? Great googly moogly!

The Chiefs are the Jar Jar Binks of football. They are completely insignificant on their surface and do nothing but screw around and annoy everyone. Late in the season you wonder how they are still around and why they have not been utterly destroyed yet, but there they are. Everyone hates them and they do nothing of importance until they ruin the entire season with the sheer volume of their incompetence. They are so bad at what they do, they will often blind-luck into doing something well beyond their abilities. If they ever faced a team with actual ability, they would easily be killed.

Of course, there is the theory that Jar Jar Binks is actually a very powerful Sith Lord and has been controlling everything all along. Binks has agility only seen in Force users. He can influence others with a wave of his hand. He mouths the words said by other characters, as if he were influencing their speech. He pretends to be clumsy, but only when observed. What if the Chiefs are similarly hiding in plain sight?

The Chiefs have negatively impacted the fortunes of several teams. First, they traded for Joe Montana from the 49ers. This is the last time the Chiefs won a playoff game. This led the Niners to give Steve Young his big shot, but Young could not beat the Cowboys. Thus, we all had the early-nineties Cowboys shoved in our faces and now we all have to deal with the "AIKMAN TOUCHDOWN UNBELIEVABLE!" commercial. It is as vomit-inducing to me as it is to all of you. Thanks, Chiefs.

The Chiefs also traded for Marcus Allen from our Raiders, forcing him to end his career in that dreadful shade of red, and leaving Oakland without a star running back after the demise of Bo Jackson's career. It was horrifying for Bay Area football fans to see Kansas City to have any level of success with Montana and Allen.

More recently, the Chiefs have enjoyed some success with Andy Reid as their coach. However, they have already reached Reid's ceiling and have nowhere to go but down. 11-5 and a playoff loss is about the best Andy Reid can do. There are two things Andy Reid hates- running the football and passing deep. Thus, his entire offense consists of dumpoffs to running backs and tight ends. Jamaal Charles used to play the role of Brian Westbrook, but with his injury that job now falls to Charmander West.

Now, Charmeleon West isn't a bad player (although I have never personally heard of him), but he's not Jamaal Charles. If Andy Reid was ever going to call twenty running plays in a game, it would have been for Charles. Now, I'll be surprised if there are eight, and I suspect Spencer "Tupper" Ware will share those carries evenly with Charizard West.

One reason why Reid has had so much success with the Chiefs is that he has the perfect quarterback for his system- the risk-averse Alex Smith. Smith thinks it's too risky to mix red wine and fish. He reports parents who let their children walk to school to the police. He is the reason why terrible shows like Two Broke Girls on CBS get ratings- he falls asleep in front of the TV with CBS on. He is more boring than a Coldplay Super Bowl halftime show. But Reid keeps using him and he keeps smashing expectations. Reid is good at smashing things.

Andy Reid will never, ever win a Super Bowl. He had his chance about ten years ago, and his quarterback threw up on the field on the final drive of the game. If that doesn't sum up Reid's career, I don't know what does. Success, success, success, oh no I threw up on myself. He's like a teenage boy who's finally about to get laid and then has an asthma attack in the back seat of his car with a partially-clothed girl suddenly realizing she has somewhere else to be.

The Chiefs are so boring and dull, I can't imagine being a blogger for their team. However, as there is a high-profile SBN blog known as Arrowhead Pride, I know these people exist. I dug up a picture of the very first Chiefs blogger, way back in the Usenet days!

He has a cigarette, so you know he's cool. He also has a super hot girlfriend who lives in Canada and you have never met her. It's getting pretty serious.

But seriously, what do you write about? "Today the Chiefs bored everyone through another game where the defense played well and Alex Smith went 25-27 for sixteen yards. The Chiefs have again been eliminated from the playoffs in the first round." You might as well copy and paste this onto every Chiefs game recap from now until the end of time.

It's hard to imagine that the Chiefs are even in the same league as the Raiders, let alone the same division. Here is a picture of a Chiefs fan, whom I imagine aspired to be Marty Schottenheimer when he grew up and whose name I can only surmise is Poindexter Q. Smedley:

and this is a Raider fan:

Raider fans, as you can plainly see, have a wide variety of interests, including whistles. Woo woo!

Raider fans dream of looting and pillaging faraway lands. Chiefs fans dream of getting married at Wal-Mart. Raider fans dress up as wild beasts, demons, pirates and Sith lords. Chiefs fans dress up as Ned Flanders. The Chiefs lull you into a false sense of security, and lead you to believe that they're terrible, but then you discover that you have been mistaken about a great many things and we will find the shield generator will be quite operational before your friends arrive. You write the Chiefs off early in the season, but then you look up near the end and they have nine wins or something and you don't know how in the hell they did that. Didn't they suck? Weren't they all injured? Didn't they draft a crappy offensive tackle with the first overall pick like three years ago?

Why yes, they did, but Charcandlestick West has been very good this year and the early-nineties Buffalo Bills dink and dunk offense has been working very well for them the last month or so.

This is to say nothing of Chiefs defensive stars Tamba "Buddy" Hali, Eric "Boysen" Berry, Dontari "Edgar Allan" Poe or the currently-injured Justin "Sam" Houston. They all have been playing very well lately. The Chiefs did the Lions so dirty in London that the Lions fired everybody and are now apparently the best team in the NFL.

I see this game going similarly to the Vikings game. Neither the Chiefs nor Vikings will wow you with personnel, but they will both slowly choke the life out of you if you are not prepared or if you screw up repeatedly. While CharKendrick "Lamar" West is nowhere near the talent of Adrian Peterson, he is certainly someone who needs to be accounted for. If Neiron Ball can return and spare us all the agony of watching Curtis Lofton play, that will be a big help.

While the Raiders fell apart at the end of the Vikings game, I don't think they will fall apart at the end of this one. The team played very well last week and Rodney Hudson should be good to go at center, I don't believe the Chiefs have anyone capable of shutting down Amari Cooper so the Raiders won't get blown out. I do think, however, that they will probably die of sheer boredom.

This is TOTALLY NOT REVERSE PSYCHOLOGY HERE Chiefs win 27-24."