Sports Meme Power Rankings: Trollin’ To Super Bowl XLV

U Mad, Patriots? The trollingest NFL team ever could not have made a better foil for the bloodless, patrician Patriots.

Boston columnist: “How, with their uncouth manner, their cromagnon brand of football, their lack of a gridiron Fauntleroy-Achilles like our own Tom Brady, their crass Falstaff of a coach and his pedal-philia, how, I say, how could such savages tear down the crystal intellectual palace of pure icy football built by the great architect himself, William Belichick?”

Rex Ryan: STERN RULES!

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[/beats hide off Patriots]

Bart Scott can’t wait for the next round, Rex Ryan still hasn’t sold out his fellow foot-fetishists publicly, and despite doing everything in their power to give Roger Goodell an extremely unsportsmanlike stroke, the Jets continue to fly into the playoffs with the wobbly confidence of a hopeless Mark Sanchez pass that Braylon Edwards somehow brings in for a crucial first down.

The nightmare truly does live in 360 degrees in all directions for the NFL here, and for fans of flaming disaster in all its forms (points to self) it could not get better. The Jets play a brutal and not particularly TV-friendly brand of football and are led by toe-bandito Ryan. The Steelers feature Ben Roethlisberger, who has had nothing interesting or controversial happen to him recently. The Packers bring with them the crucial Fond-Du-Lac television market. The Bears have Jay Cutler, who brings the epic sulks even when the Bears win. (Don’t blame him: his face came like that.)

In a four-way race for least marketable NFL teams, the profane, bellicose, and unruly Jets are the most marketable for the league. There is no more ironic a punishment to wish on the No Fun League than that which life has already invented for us. Alleluia.

(Troll Fireman Ed via.)

Mikhail would no longer like to speak to you, Myelo. This conversation no longer serves either of us. I offer you fine things. I offer you cheese made from milk of condor. I offer you jetski. I offer you copper mine in Russia for you to fill with strange liquid of choice. I do this frequently with expensive cognac, and then light on fire for large cognac pool fire party. Many models attend. It is this luxury I want to share.

(Do not stage cognac pool fire party near industrial solvent storage tanks. This is lesson I learned painfully.)

Mikhail gives and still you want more. Go to do other things now. We will crush you when next we see you on court. In meantime Prokhorov has no bad feeling toward you. It is life. Live it richly. This afternoon I take 13 models on yacht and sail to larger yacht. All afternoon we eat meat of rare whale. Play on jetski. Admire huge Prokhorov hands when I hold them in sunlight. One American model say “You have hands of Gheorge Muresan!”

Ha! This is impossible. I have not paid to have them cut off and brought to Prokhorov. This is Putin thing to do, not Prokhorov.

The collective bargaining agreement expires on March 3rd, and unless the two sides can come to an agreement a lockout is a real possibility for America’s biggest and brawniest sports league. Sourcing stories like this is difficult. We at SB Nation lean towards more reliable indicators of NFL labor trouble, and now I’ll explain what I mean. The NFL’s current CBA was negotiated in 1993.

This is a picture of Merril Hoge from the 1990s, a time of labor peace and cooperation in the NFL. Please note tie size.

We’re guessing that’s from around 1999, when everyone was wearing the washed-out single color scheme for menswear popularized by Regis Philbin on “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.” Merril unwisely opted for “Poop Spectrum Brown.”

Flash forward to around 2006 when the NFL and the NFLPA opted out of the CBA. Again, note tie size.

Tie size: swollen.

Now, to the troubled present.

That is not so much a tie as it is an ascot with a prolapsed rectum, and a clear indicator that Merril Hoge’s tie is as good way to determine the NFL’s labor relations status as anything else. If you want to know if there is going to be a lockout, go no further than Hoge’s tie. If you see him on ESPN wearing what appears to be a cloth goiter, we are going to have a lockout, and you will have to start watching rugby to get your fix of sporting violence.

Al Davis had a press conference this week, and OHHHHHHH GOD--

The bizarro world Grand Slam has been uneventful in early going, but tennis commentator Todd Woolridge and Kim Clijsters did help illustrate why Australia is the last and best hope for humanity. Clijsters called out Woolridge for a text he sent to a friend asking if Clijsters was pregnant because “she looked grumpy and her boobs looked bigger.”

At Wimbledon this would have been met with gasps; in Flushing, dead silence followed by a gentleman asking to see said boobs; and at the French, a few titters and then no fewer than seven serious essays by serious intellectuals about feminism in sport in major newspapers?

The reaction in Australia?

APPLAUSE ALL AROUND. I’m looking into emigrating immediately.

I’m just glad like so many others that the federal government isn’t interested in what was coursing through my bloodstream in the 1990s, because they tend to get very, very particular about the details, and after a 12 pack of Miller High Life and a few hours of watching Dolemite it was hard to remember my name, much less what else went into my system that night.*

Lance Armstrong may have taken drugs for an entirely different reason, of course, and thus the interest from the FDA and the Feds. Lance Armstrong refused to answer any questions regarding SI’s follow-up on previous allegations, refused again, then denied Lance Armstrong was ever involved in such things, and then just denied being Lance Armstrong, or even there in the first place, and then asked “Why are you talking to yourself?” Minds blown, the journalists left questioning what was real, and retired to the hotel for the night with a 12 pack of Miller High Life to ponder the universe.

*This paragraph brought to you by Miller High Life, The Champagne of Beers and Balm For Completely Blown Minds.

A record number of underclassmen will enter the draft this year, presumably to get their hands on cash before a rookie signing bonus comes in as part of the new CBA, or because they all just got lemming fever and decided to go at once. Regardless of their eventual financial disappointment or glee, it is worth noting that some leave greater legacies than others.

I don’t care if it’s obscure. The Dakar Rally in pictures alone is worth viewing. You have to be somewhat touched to want to drive 6,000 miles over the length of Argentina and Chile, but doing it on an ATV with a broken hand is triply insane, and is of course what Alejandro Patronelli did to win the ATV division this year. I’m all but certain they’ll let you run this thing in anything if you have enough cash, which is why as a mad future billionaire I’m going to be the first to do it in a Segway with really puffy tires.

A meme so dead people are now using LeBron James’ narcissism to make fun of your narcissism in some kind of infinite loop of douchebaggedness.

NASCAR returns next month, and now we get to talk about how to fix NASCAR for a month prior to shutting up, opening a beer in a can or plastic bottle (no glass bottles, snob), and then just watching Daytona blow up for a few hours. We all have our own ways of preparing: for instance, Tony Stewart gears up by fighting Australians, who he may not now are all naturally venomous fanged. We choose to focus on lobbying for our favorite modification to NASCAR: the introduction of dinosaur drivers (and we don’t mean Mark Martin HEY-OOOOO. No seriously, we want dinosaurs to race in NASCAR.)

It’s the only solution now that you’ve seen it, right?