Raiderdamus’ Friday Foretelling: Raiders vs. Cardinals

We are required to inform you that these Foretellings are works of satire and are not for the faint of heart. Due to their content they should not be read by anyone. Please enjoy at your own risk. -The Editor

Greetings, Raider Nation! It is I, the yeast to your dough, the hops to your beer, and the funk in your dysfunction, Raiderdamus the Great and Powerful. I come to you today hot off another correct prediction of a Raiders loss, because what else is new? Predicting the Raiders to lose is like predicting the sun will rise, the French will be tactless surrender monkeys and Comcast will have abhorrent customer service.

But it is another week, and as such it’s time to once again consult the Great Beyond, and listen to his great wisdom. Silence your cell phones and assume a posture of meditation:

“You’re back! Isn’t this getting old? You tell me a team, I tell you how much they’ll beat the Raiders by, so on and so forth ad nauseum. You and all your friends must be true masochists to keep coming to me like this. But who do you got this week? The Cardinals?

Oh, man, there are few teams I hate more than the Cardinals! Mark McGwire was more juiced up than the Kool-Aid Man, Tony Larussa had the charisma of a smoked ham and Bob Gibson was only good because he pitched on a mound taller than he was. Ozzie Smith was all glove, no stick and is only famous because he can do a backflip, which isn’t even a thing you do in baseball. And the best prospect they’ve had in years got drunk and drove himself and his girlfriend off a cliff rather than have to play for the Cardinals. Furthermore, they employed Enos Slaughter, best known for being the colossal racist dick who spiked Jackie Robinson. The Cardinals are a waste of time and space and energy and they should be yeeted into the Sun immediately. If the Cardinals were footwear, they’d be open-toed sandals and socks. The Cardinals are to baseball what St. Louis is to pizza. The next time I see fucking Matt Carpenter hit a three-run... wait, what?

The football team? There’s a Cardinals football team?

Oh, THOSE Cardinals. You’ll have to forgive me for forgetting them. It’s pretty damn hard to exist for 120 years and have no history to speak of. When the Cardinals were founded, as the Morgan Athletic Club in Chicago in 1898, the United States flag had 45 stars. Utah had just recently been admitted to the Union, a move which has proven to be one of the more embarrassing mistakes in American history. The Spanish-American War was in full effect. And since that time, the Cardinals have accomplished exactly dick.

The first game the Cardinals had upon becoming a charter member of the NFL in 1920 was a 0-0 tie against the Chicago Tigers. It has been all downhill from there. The last time the Cardinals won a title was 1947. The entire Baby Boomer generation has been born since then. The Vietnam War began and ended since then, as did the Cold War. Rock and roll did not exist the last time the Cardinals won anything. The events depicted in Back to the Future had not happened yet. Man had yet to walk on the Moon.

That’s not to say that the Cardinals haven’t had some good players. Larry Wilson, Jackie Smith, and Ottis Anderson all came to fame as Cardinals players. But people don’t know who the fuck Larry Wilson is anymore, and they know Smith as the Cowboy who dropped a pass in the Super Bowl and Anderson as a New York Giant.

There’s your legacy, Cardinals. A player who nobody remembers played for you, fucking up on a national stage, as if he wouldn’t do the same thing in a Cardinals uniform.

The Cardinals have an all-time great playing for them RIGHT NOW and nobody gives a shit. Larry Fitzgerald is still in football purgatory, playing in a stadium that used to be named for the same shitty fake college he got a degree from. Here’s a Super Bowl statistic for you:

Lombardi Trophies

Santonio Holmes: 1

Michael Floyd: 1

Larry Fitzgerald: 0

Now, the current Cardinals head coach is someone named Steven Wilks. I am not certain Steve Wilks is a real person, but that’s what it says here. That means the last fat loudmouth bastard the Cardinals employed is gone now. Unfortunately for me, unlike the Allies in 1945, I am too late to roast Arians. But hopefully I can be as offensive and inappropriate toward the Cardinals as Bruce was on Hard Knocks. Let me check my Rude Joke Encyclopedia:

The most successful season by record the Cardinals have had recently ended like this:

The Cardinals are currently wasting the career of David Johnson, and would have wasted the career of Calais Campbell as well had he not had to run to LITERALLY JACKSONVILLE to find some success. The Cardinals are the worst team in the history of professional sports, and they ruin the lives of pro athletes. Much like actual cardinals, these Cardinals ruin the lives of their young fans as well.

There is not a single offensive skill player in the NFL Hall of Fame best known for their efforts with the Cardinals. Fitzgerald will likely be the first, and the narrative surrounding his induction will be “What if he had played for a real team?” The Cardinal team is where careers go to die. In the mid-90s, Cardinals fans were all excited about “BuddyBall”, a slogan for new head coach Buddy Ryan’s tenure, as if the 1990 Eagles did not exist.

When a football fan says their favorite team is the Cardinals, other fans look at them as if they’d said their favorite soda was Shasta. Nobody hates the Cardinals enough to circle that game on their calendar. They just say, “Oh, we play the Cardinals,” and make reservations to the Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse on Scottsdale Boulevard. Nobody feels any emotion for the Cardinals more intense than wan apathy.

And because the fans don’t care, ownership doesn’t either. This is the team which literally signed Sam Bradford this year to be their starting quarterback, as if Sam Bradford’s tenure with the Rams, Vikings, and Eagles had never happened. Surely they knew what was going to come next. In fact, the only reason they drafted Josh Rosen is so they could graft cartilage from his nose onto Bradford’s ACLs.

Photo by Hannah Foslien/Getty Images

The Cardinals have a long history filled with nothing but abject failure, and they will do to Rosen what they did to Jake Plummer, and that’s let him show his promise before trading him to the Broncos. The Cardinals would have been better off sticking with this man, Drew Stanton, who provided the Cardinals with the greatest moment in the history of their franchise:

Even without the greatness of Stanton, though, even with a quarterback who is in danger of falling over forward at any time, and even with a head coach who may be an elaborate hoax, the Cardinals are more than good enough to handle the Raiders, who are tanking harder than the Wehrmacht’s 1st Panzer Division in 1941.

Cardinals win, 23-9.”