Football is over and Peyton Manning is the story: Does Eli pass the Matt Ryan test →

The idea that the NFL is a passing league isn’t a new one, but the inequity between the two conferences has never been clearer. The three best passers in the NFL are all playing in the NFC, and the relative dearth of talent at the position in the AFC is the reason that Vegas has the conference as a 3-point underdog in next year’s Super Bowl already.

Here’s a way to determine whether a team has a decent quarterback in place or not — let’s call it The Matt Ryan Test. Matt Ryan, the Atlanta Falcons quarterback, is an above-average player whose best years are still ahead of him, but he’s unlikely to ever be confused with Joe Montana or Johnny Unitas — the very definition of “decent.” The Matt Ryan Test is this: If you’d trade your team’s quarterback for Matt Ryan in an even exchange, then your team doesn’t have a decent quarterback in place.

In the AFC, only a handful of team’s pass the Ryan Test — the Patriots, the Chargers, the Steelers, and the Texans are the only teams with a starter in place who’s at least as good as Matt Ryan. There’d be serious conversations in Oakland and Cincinnati about it, and regardless of what Broncos fans think, John Elway would have Tim Tebow stuffed in a suitcase before the Falcons hung up the phone.

As football season comes to a close, so too does my Culturemap football column, Down And Distance enter its offseason. Thanks to everybody who read it and wrote in, except for those who threatened me for pointing out that Ben Roethlisberger has been credibly accused of rape more than once (fuck y’all!) and give this last column a read!

We introduce the concept of The Matt Ryan Test, speculate about what the speculation surrounding Peyton Manning will be like (boners swordfights around the ESPN offices!), and lament the fact that during the rest of the primary season, there will be no easy football metaphors to reach for, leaving us woefully restricted to comparing the candidates to baseball and basketball players until things heat up as the 2012 NFL season kicks off…

Seriously, though, getting to write a weekly column where I wrote about football as a social, political, and cultural force through which we view ourselves as Americans has been a dream project of mine for a very long time, and I had so much fun doing it that I am apparently right now typing a weird acceptance speech on Tumblr. But thanks, sincerely, to the people who read it and wanted to talk about it with me, and especially to Culturemap for saying yes to a kind of weird idea (when they were just launching, no less) that they knew would take half a year to complete. This was so much fun for me, seriously.

Rating the storytelling potential of the four possible Super Bowl matchups →

The New Orleans Saints are done, and Drew Brees’ absurd year of disrespect from the sports establishment — dude had the best year of any quarterback probably ever and was an afterthought in MVP discussions — will likely last for another season. The Green Bay Packers — the NFL’s most dominant force — were clobbered by the New York Giants so convincingly, and with their offense sputtering so badly, that you could practically hear Brett Favre furiously masturbating throughout the fourth quarter all the way in Texas…

…and even Tim friggin’ Tebow, the blue-and-orange messiah, was utterly exposed by a merciless Tom Brady with hate in his heart, determined to make the kid go from looking like Moses to looking like Job.

Yeah, those are the stories we are done with. Oh, you’ll hear Tebow’s name plenty, and up in Wisconsin the “what the hell just happened” posts will be penned by bloggers with their foam cheeseheads still jauntily askew from the tailgate party for the next two weeks. But if there is one thing that the NFL has in common with the political world and the broader American culture, it is that it forgets quickly what it cared about deeply only weeks earlier.

Tim Tebow is a punchline for the next few months, at least, and the Discount Double-Check commercials will make grown men from Fon Du Lac tear up until the start of free agency — and all that matters now is what becomes of the teams who are still in this thing.

I’ve tried this year through the Down And Distance column at Culturemap to offer a type of sportswriting that’s a bit more thoughtful, conscious, engaged-in-the-larger-world, and culturally aware than most. Except this week, where it’s all immature jokes, masturbation gags, Ron Paul slights, and mean-spirited personal attacks on Boston sports fans.

Sometimes, you just have to say fuck it.

The playoffs versus the primaries: At least the NFL requires you to be good before you can win →

[W]hile parity rules in the NFL, random arbitrariness isn’t usually the way things work: losers, typically, are exposed as losers in the playoffs. The football-watching establishment may be nearly as bored with the long-presumed favorites in Green Bay as the Republican base is with Mitt Romney, but that boredom doesn’t mean that they’ll randomly select the St. Louis Rams — the football equivalent to Rick Santorum — to advance in the playoffs just because it’d be kinda neat.

Which is the point: America, especially in the conservative worldview, likes to see itself as a pure meritocracy. “Jim Abbott,” they like to say, indicating that hard work and determination are enough to make anyone a success. But the Republican primaries, whoever ultimately wins them, indicate something else. You don’t necessarily need to be good in order to win. In the end, it looks like a tight three-way that resulted in Santorum — but that doesn’t make him a winner. It only makes him the person who did less badly than everybody else, because someone — statistically speaking — had to.

So, I filed this week’s Down And Distance last night before Romney pulled off his decisive eight (8) vote victory after every precinct reported. Still, the point seems to be more or less intact (though I’ll lose the super mature Santorum pun) — this is as arbitrary a primary season as has happened in my lifetime, to say the least. While it’d have been hugely unexpected for something as competitive and fascinating as ‘08 to occur a second time, especially with an incumbent as one of the guys in the race — but geez. This makes the loser class of ‘04, which at least had a clear narrative (outsider obviously torpedoed by establishment in favor of their favored Massachusetts empty suit), seem positively high-concept.

You have to assume that, if the primary season had lasted just another 2-3 weeks, and the Santorum surge had been pushed against by some negative ads, the 75.4% who’ll never vote for Romney would have ended up giving Huntsman some love. This isn’t really even anybody but Romney, it’s anybody but everybody, and that’s not how America is designed. Or, at least, not how America sees itself working.

The playoffs are how we wish America worked. The primaries are how it is at its most depressing. That’s never been more clear than this year.

So, I got a lot of hate mail yesterday. →

It’s weird — I don’t usually get hate mail. Negative comments? Those I get like crazy. I’ve had pseudonymous people on the Internet publicly declare that I am stupid/retarded/fat/gay/black?/racist/etc in response to things that I’ve written loads of times, but this is the first time that a bunch of people independently took it upon themselves to email me to let me know how much of those above things I am.

In any case: This was a response to this week’s Down And Distance column for CultureMap, which talked about Ben Roethlisberger. The emails, naturally, were from Steelers fans who felt like I was picking on their guy unfairly, since it’s been over a year since the last time he was accused of raping anybody.

I will admit that it’s not the freshest of topics, but that’s why I wanted to re-visit it. Because while I am certainly aware that 20 months are an eternity in football-time, I bet it doesn’t seem like several lifetimes ago to the young woman in Milledgeville, Georgia who offered horrifying details to the police (who, hah, posed for pictures with the QB when they got there) about what Roethlisberger did after he had her cornered. That’s part of the point.

The other part of it is that the dude gets to just go and play football now, 20 months later, after a Super Bowl appearance and a few stressful weeks with a publicist have rehabilitated his image. And we will watch, and when we do, we should remember who we’re watching, and what role our enthusiasm for watching played in the fact that he avoided prosecution.

But the article isn’t some you shouldn’t root for the Steelers guilt trip. And that’s why I’m so surprised by the angry emails. Because I know how it is. You were a Steelers fan long before Ben Roethlisberger joined the team. There is an emotional connection to the black and yellow colors and the uniform that is very real and very significant, and I don’t think that people should feel like they have to give that up in order to be a good person — that is not productive. It doesn’t work that way. And ultimately, it’s got nothing really to do with the Steelers. They’re just the team that drafted Roethlisberger. Whatever team he ended up on, they’d be the bad guys. It’s a thing that all of us who care about football share responsibility for.

So I also didn’t propose that we should stop caring about football, because the problem isn’t football, either. Ben Roethlisberger could have played baseball, and people would have argued that the women were lying; the police would still have posed for pictures and called the one in Georgia a drunk fucking bitch; the investigation still would have been dropped because she still wouldn’t have wanted her name in the news. That’d be true if he played baseball, or played in a killer band, or starred in movies, or ran for office. The culture that values Famous, Important Dudes more than the women that they may have raped, is bigger than football.

So what I proposed in the article that got me a couple dozen hate emails was really just a gesture, inspired by the #10ForTebow thing a couple weeks ago: put your money where your mouth is, and prove that you care about the women who may have been raped by the people that our participation in this culture has helped empower. If you want to watch Ben Roethlisberger play football — whether he’s throwing touchdowns and you’re thrilled, or interceptions and you’re rooting against him for whatever reasons — then every time he scores, or tosses a pick, donate $10 to RAINN. Pay for your interest in what he’s doing on the field by offering support to the women who nobody’s cheering for. It doesn’t solve the problem, but at least it says that they’re not forgotten.

And apparently that sentiment is still so upsetting to dudes — not a single letter or comment from a lady! — that they felt the need to fill my inbox with shit about how much I suck for suggesting it.

You can't be an underdog if all you do is win: How Tim Tebow undercuts Rick Perry's Culture War nonsense →

Here’s a variation on the old theological question about whether God could make rocks so heavy that he couldn’t lift them: Could you have an overwhelmingly privileged segment of the population so utterly unrestrained by anyone else in the country, and so capable of doing anything that it wants, that it can even declare itself an oppressed minority?

This is the question that first occurred to me after watching Rick Perry strut around in Heath Ledger’s Brokeback Mountain jacket to complain about how icky gay people have more rights in America than good, old-fashioned Christian schoolchildren whose interlocked prayer hands are being pried apart by secular humanist teachers. You’ve seen the ad by now, and probably the parodies that followed. “There’s something wrong in this country,” Perry smirks, yanking the “oppressed minority” badge off of the 30-40% of gay and lesbian students in America who’ve attempted suicide,  and placing it firmly on the 76% of them who identify as Christian. After all, they have to hear school officials acknowledge the existence of people who celebrate other holidays that occur this time of year.

It’s a neat trick, and one that he — and his fellow culture warriors — are able to pull off by virtue of having their voices amplified and opinions taken seriously precisely because they’re not members of an oppressed minority.

But that’s the thing about the Great American Culture War: Everybody likes to feel like a victim, and there’s no way to actually keep score. Except, with Tebow, there is.

In this week’s Down And Distance column, it’s time to talk about how Rick Perry and Tim Tebow are actually at odds in the Great American Culture War.

Hold Steady frontman Craig Finn keeps it intimate and personal, debuting new FNL-inspired album at Frank →

This was a pretty under-the-radar show, for the first-ever performance of solo material by the guy from a still-popular indie rock band. (Also: Lot of hyphens in that sentence, huh?) Craig Finn did a warm-up set in advance of his solo tour behind his upcoming Clear Hearts Full Eyes at my favorite hot dog restaurant in Austin, because of course he did.

The show was pretty great, honestly — it’s usually both exciting and kinda weird to hear a set of all-new material for the first time, especially when it’s by someone whose other work you’re very familiar with, and my plaid shirt and thinning hair should confirm that I am very much in the Hold Steady’s demographic. Finn’s lyrics are usually more like short fiction, but the new stuff is largely personal essay, and it’s cool to hear how he adapts. Read the full review at CultureMap for early impressions on his new solo material.

Did Childish Gambino deserve today's brutal Pitchfork review? →

So, minutes after I posted the thing about Childish Gambino here, it was decided that it’d be worth expounding on more fully on CultureMap. Give it a read, unless you’re really and truly sick of the guy 100% (which is understandable).

He defended his work’s misogyny with comparisons to other artists and half-hearted deflections (“It sometimes can be crazy and misogynistic and unfair, but so is life,” he insisted, and his publicist pulled him away to take care of a quick stage task as I started asking a follow-up). He generally seemed uncomfortable with the line of questioning. On Camp, he’s opposes it more overtly: “You better shut your mouth before I fuck it,” he raps to a critic who claims that she “wrote about rape culture” in the song “Backpackers.”

It’s weird. A guy whose stand-up material is thoughtful about a culture that can be tough on women is not someone that I’d expect to threaten to mouth-rape people who are critical of the misogyny in his music that he personally acknowledged when I asked him about it.

Cautionary Tales from Ndamakung Suh and the 2011 Detroit Lions →

The alacrity with which the Detroit Lions went from the year’s feel-good story to one of the most unappealing teams in sports ought to provide a lesson worth learning for anyone for whom public opinion matters. In this week’s Down and Distance column, I explore what things there are to learn from the Lions.