RaiderDamus’ Friday Foretelling: Raiders vs. Titans

Greetings, Raider Nation! It is I, your host with the most, your hero, your paragon of virtue, your Tower of Power too sweet to be sour, and the World’s Freshest Man, Raiderdamus the Great and Powerful! I am a man who truly needs no introduction, but I am a conceited son of a bitch so I give myself one anyway. You know who I am and you know why I’m here, so buckle up. There is no “Off” position on the Genius Switch.

It has been a long offseason, hasn’t it? The NFL offseason is dark and full of terrors, especially when your favorite team’s prized quarterback suffers a major injury at the end of the season. And nobody knows that better than the Raiders’ victim this week, the Tennessee Titans. But they’re used to having unfortunate events befall their quarterbacks.

So if you’re new or just stupid, here’s what I do around here. I, the Great Raiderdamus, can tell the future. For the last six years, I have done so by contacting the almighty Great Beyond, who hath shewn me what is to befall our beloved Raiders each week. I have not asked Senor Beyondo why he is so interested in the Raiders, and at this point I’m afraid to. I just report what he says and I take credit for it when he is right, which is always.

So without further ado, here is this week’s message from the Great Beyond. Prostrate yourselves and hearken unto his word.

“Well well well, look who’s back. You’re here again for more punishment I see. So who are the Raiders playing this week? The Titans? Are you sure that’s a real team? And what day are you publishing this? Friday? For a Titans article, this should really come out on a Thursday. And anyone reading it should be wearing a baby-shit colored shirt.

I have a lot to say about the Titans, but I’m afraid all my wit is going to be wasted on them, because there are thirty-seven Titans fans and they all have satellite internet in the Smoky Mountains so there’s no way any of them are going to be reading any of this. Still, I have a reputation to uphold, so away we go.

When I think of Titans football, I think of flashes of greatness broken up by vast swaths of mediocrity, I think of the fact that they won three playoff games in 1999 and have won two playoff games since then. I think of the time they began a season with a safety. Behold:

If that isn’t the Platonic ideal of Titan football, I don’t know what is.

I think of the final game in 1999, wherein the Titans were defeated by Kurt Warner and the Rams. Steve McNair may have had his ups and downs in his career, but in this game, he had his shot. When McNair was brutally murdered by his psycho side hoe on July 4, 2009, he was buried only three feet down, so he could be a yard short for all eternity.

I think of the Titans’ vicious hellscape of a mascot, T-Rac, who is supposed to be a raccoon, but looks like like a bobcat with Down Syndrome. T-Rac’s catchphrase is supposed to be “I didn’t do it!” which is a blatant ripoff of The Simpsons that only someone so uncreative that they work in marketing in Nashville could come up with. What T-Rac actually says is “I can count to potato!” before he urinates on himself.

Oh wait, it gets better. T-Rac legitimately got the entire Titans organization sued because he ran over the Saints’ backup quarterback with his stupid shitty golf cart.

DECEMBER 18--Quarterback Adrian McPherson, who was injured during a pre-season game when run over by a golf cart driven by the Tennessee Titans's raccoon mascot, has sued the NFL team for $20 million in damages. McPherson, 23, was warming up before the start of the second half of an August game between the Titans and the New Orleans Saints, who drafted McPherson in 2005 and signed him to a three-year contract. That's when T-Rac, the Titans mascot, recklessly ran over McPherson, according to a lawsuit filed Friday in Tennessee Circuit Court. The December 15 complaint, a copy of which you can find below, notes that McPherson was listed on the Saints roster as a quarterback and 'was going to play in other significant capacities for the Saints.' However, 'as a result of the wreck,' McPherson was forced to miss the entire pre-season as well as the NFL season, since he was placed on the team's injured reserve list. McPherson contends that the Titans are culpable for damages since the club allowed 'its mascot to operate motorized vehicles on the field while players are present.' The lawsuit, which seeks $5 million in compensatory damages and $15 million in punitive damages, does not specify McPherson's injuries. According to his page on the Titans web site, T-Rac (who was named after Tennessee's official state wild animal) lists drag racing in his motorized chariot as one of his hobbies. And his favorite saying is listed as, 'I didn't do it!'

I swear I am not making that up. McPherson never played again. T-Rac ended his career as a professional football player. McPherson was last seen turning tricks outside the Clarksville Shoney’s for crack money.

Only a team as bland and faceless and forgettable as the Titans could represent a city as bland and full of monstrous disappointment as Nashville. If Toby Keith were a city, it would be Nashville. Only in Nashville can a man sing a song about a plastic cup and make a bajillion dollars. Hey look at that cup! say Toby Keith fans. I drank out of one just like it one time!

Nashville is a monument to jingoism. It is where people with a Southern accent who don’t have enough talent to make it in Los Angeles or New York go so they can wait tables for peanuts and live in an overpriced apartment with five roommates while waiting for a big break that never comes because their parents don’t know any record executives.

Nashville is infested with mosquitoes, who are there because everyone has diabetes. It’s like drinking candy. They simply can’t resist. Nashville has a thriving food scene, which they stole equally from Memphis and North Carolina. The one original idea they had was Hot Chicken. “Let’s take chicken,” someone said. “And put some spices on it.” That’s some Nobel Prize-winning thinking right there. And then they added pickle slices, which takes the meal to a whole new level.

One would think that Nashville, being a reasonably large city, would have some interesting and original architecture. One would be wrong. Here is what Nashville does have:

That’s right folks, it’s the fucking Parthenon. Nashville had a vast open field in the middle of downtown where they could have put literally anything. They could have put a big Gothic church there. They could have put in a Piggly-Wiggly. Hell, they could have erected a giant statue of a dong. Instead, they decided to put up a replica of a building that was first built in Athens, Greece in 447 B.C. As usual, the people of Nashville are 2,500 years behind the times.

One might also expect an impressive Nashville skyline. Wrong again! Nashville’s most famous building is this one. It’s the AT&T Building, which is well-known because it looks like Batman.

Batman, Schmatman. Show me a building that looks like Darkwing Duck and I’ll be impressed.

Nashville is also primarily known for country music. It is the country music capital of the world, and in any place where there are a lot of people trying to do one thing, there are good examples and bad examples. For every “Devil Went Down To Georgia” you have five versions of “Redneck Woman”. Many of the biggest country hits are actually about the Titans.

Dropkick Me Jesus Through The Goalposts of Life: The Rob Bironas Story

Hank, Why Do You Drink? Because of the Titans

It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere, So the Titans Already Lost

Before Taylor Lewan Cheats

Stand By Your Man, Because He Broke His Leg

Live Like You Were Losing To The Colts

The Titans’ inexhaustible dedication to irrelevance was punctuated this summer when the Nashville Predators went to the Stanley Cup Finals, and proceeded to get their shit kicked in by the Penguins. But the city was abuzz. For a brief moment, hockey was bigger than football. Folks, Nashville is in the South. Hockey should never, ever be bigger than football. The fact that this was true shows just how much an ethereal shade of a football team the Titans are.

The Titans play in Nissan Stadium, which is perfect for them, because they are the Nissan Sentra of football teams.

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Look at that piece of shit. Do you see anything interesting about it? Anything that sets it apart from the fifty other crappy Japanese mid-size sedans that infest American markets? No? That’s exactly what the Titans are. They’re a boring mid-size sedan of a football team. You get off from work, take your kids to soccer practice, go home and watch some TV and fall asleep on the couch. That’s what it’s like to be a Titans fan.

Tennessee’s head coach is Mike Mularkey, which is not a football name. It’s the name of a fatass police officer from a terrible CBS sitcom. Take a guess what his football philosophy is. Go on, guess.

Time’s up. Mike Mularkey wants to- get this- “run the football and play good defense.” Truly, this man is an innovator on the level of Tesla and Gatling. How Vince Lombardi and Don Shula ever succeeded without Mike Mularkey on their staffs I’ll never know.

The sardonic smiles on the faces of the fans in Nissan Stadium in the face of crippling despair is par for the course in a city with no soul. It’s a place where raging against the machine is against city ordinance. It’s a city where people believe pro wrestling is real.

Wrestling may still be real to them, dammit. But by the end of Sunday’s game, their passing interest in the Titans will be very much over with. Marcus Mariota, avatar of all the best of humanity though he may be, has looked like hot buttered ass in his preseason outings. The Raiders’ first-team offense, conversely, look like a death machine.

You’re up against a machine too strong. Titans, you’ve got no chance, no chance in Hell. The Raiders’ experience in Nashville on Sunday will look a lot like this:

Raiders win, 36-20.”