DENVER BRONCOS – I feel like the Denver Broncos are a good team because if you blindfolded me, spun me around, and then ordered me to list as many NFL teams as I could, they would probably be one of the ones I wouldn't forget. If you then held a gun to my head and asked which of the teams I'd just remembered had been to the Super Bowl, I would say Broncos probably third after the Saints and the Red Sox. Also, they play at Mile-High Stadium, which is pretty cool. If you think about a bunch of actual broncos running around on a mountain a mile up in the air, you get a very cool, Macchu Picchu sort of image in your brain, but that being said, the horse on their logo looks like it's suffering from altitude sickness.
KANSAS CITY CHIEFS – According to nfl.com the Kansas City Chiefs were formed in 1960, but everything I know about Kansas I learned from In Cold Blood and The Wizard of Oz, and everything I know about 1960 I learned from Mad Men, so the Chiefs don't register in my brain. I also feel like every team that has some sort of Native American reference is getting in a lot of trouble for racism lately. This might not be the team to latch on to.
OAKLAND RAIDERS – A lot of people here in LA are still Raiders fans, but I'm not sure whether that's out of nostalgia, or if nobody got the memo that the Raiders don't play here anymore. I mean, I'm sure that letters were sent out, but I know I won't offend any Raiders fans by saying in text form that very few of them consider literacy to be a priority. To give credit where credit is due, they do manage to have at least one of the top three most amazing logos in the NFL; putting Dick Tracy in an eyepatch and a football helmet combines three unrelated types of badassery in a way that shoots WAY off the charts without even really trying. On the other hand, nfl.com says they don't win much, and I'm almost positive that they won't even sell Raiders tickets to anyone who doesn't have a neck tattoo.
SAN DIEGO CHARGERS – I can't figure out what this team is supposed to be. Their symbol seems to be a lightning bolt and in general I think of a “charger” as a device relating to a cellphone or possibly just a battery, so I guess that the Chargers are supposed to be low-powered electricity storing devices? I just don't think something like that could beat a wild horse in a fight.
ARIZONA CARDINALS – In David Foster Wallace's epic novel Infinite Jest, he portrays the fictional kicker for the Cardinals as a former tennis prodigy whose house is infested with cockroaches. He cannot bring himself to crush or poison these bugs, so his only means of killing them is to trap them under heavy glass jars which they fog up as they suffocate to death, and then his horror of the insects is too strong for him to even remove their dead carcasses, so his bathroom is filled with upside-down juice glasses. He eventually dies, in a fantasy sequence in which he is trapped under a giant version of one of his own juice glasses, in an ironic, Kafka-esque twist. He is also afraid of heights. That is everything I know about the Arizona Cardinals.
SAN FRANCISCO 49ERS – Despite their disappointingly unmockable logo, I am sort of drawn to the 49ers. The nerd in me appreciates the historical allusions of the mascot (referring, as it does, to the California Gold Rush of 1849), and since everyone in my family except me went to BYU, I actually know not only that Steve Young was an NFL quarterback, but also that he played for the 49ers--connecting a player to an actual team is not something I am able to do very often. On the other hand, I have been told that San Francisco is full of hippies and turds. So that's a strike against.
SEATTLE SEAHAWKS – The people that I know who are from Seattle are wonderful. The people I have known that moved away to Seattle were all eco-jerks. Their logo is awesome; it looks like one of those optical illusions where if you look at it one way, you see a bird, but if you look at it a different way, you see a bullet train. A bullet train full of recycling and coffee.
ST LOUIS RAMS – The Rams are the other team that used to play in Los Angeles, and I know a handful of Angelenos who still root for them, I think mostly out of sadness and fear of Raiders fans. I appreciate how they've made the Rams' horns look like a football helmet, and I like that he looks mean. The Raiders guy looks like an ad executive who has a meeting to get to as soon as he's allowed to take the eyepatch off. The main problem I have with the Rams is that their stadium is named after a guy named Edward Jones, and it was built in 1937. Really, St Louis? You take a football team all the way from Los Angeles, you have all kinds of time to plan, you make all these guys leave their homes and move to a place where winter happens, and you don't even take the time to build them a new stadium with a bad ass name? It's not like you didn't know they were coming. That's pretty weak.THE WINNER
The other thing about the Cardinals in Infinite Jest's odd, dystopian near-future world is that they enter all of their home games by skydiving into the stadium with fake cardinal wings on their backs, and when you take that into account, none of the other teams in the Western Division can compete. Of course I realize that Wallace's book is fiction, but that's still so mind-blowingly cool that I have to pick the Cardinals in hopes that someday I'll get to see one of the players fall to a spectacular death in front of a stadium full of screaming fans before the game even starts. I'd buy season tickets to anything if I had a chance of seeing that.
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