junelice

If Sam McDarnold can win a Super Bowl, there is absolutely no reason to believe that the Most Valuable Player award should automatically go to the Quarterback position each year. How is it possible to have a 300 pound linemen in front of you with well enough time and space to get off a throw, and you don't think to pump fake him when it seems that you tail only Bo "Thro Pix" "Blo Dix" Nix in batted balls this season? I know Sam Darnold isn't good: I watched him open up McDarnold's against the Rams in a grand banquet, rolling out the red carpet to 9 sacks (with an average of 9 yards per sack! read into this enough and there's certainly some kind of twisted foreshadowing pertaining to JJ McCarthy here [he even averaged an 18% sack rate]). As a Vikings fan I got pretty used to these flameouts after a wonderful regular season, but the true bitterness set in the next year. Having barely paid attention to football between my blossoming collegiate social life and the JJ McCarthy experience, I was shocked to learn not only that my childhood team and present AFC loyalty had made the Super Bowl, but that they were to face off against the Seahawks. While I tend to mask it with irony by openly admitting that they cheated or reciting Touchdown Tom jokes, the Patriots will always have a grasp on my heart, kept in check only by shame and a love for the Purple. This time I was especially rooting for them because it was Seattle. Not the Seahawks, as I do possess fond memories of Beastmode and the LoB (particularly when we beat them), but Seattle. After my fat gay furry best friend from Washington State had betrayed me and turned out to be a horrible person, I needed Drake to pull out an underdog victory like Tom before him. Instead I have a vague memory of Maye throwing a touchdown, seemingly gaining momentum before throwing a horrible pick in the next drive, at which point I got up to go eat dinner, bent over and put my socks on. It was here that something snapped in my back. To this day I don't know exactly what it was, only that for 2 weeks I could not bend over more than say, 10 degrees. For another 2 I still had constant pain. All thanks to Sam Darnold. It's not enough that my team got rid of him for NINE and then watched him masquerade as a real QB with no picks in the playoffs, on route to thrashing my other team. Because this year Sam Darnold has decided not to extract more pain from my teams, but me personally. All I needed was for McDarnold to throw one more touchdown to the very best receiver in the league, and I would have won fantasy last week. Instead he decides to throw a pick after his defense blesses him with a fumble. A flag erases it, and he still can't score a TD. His very presence disgusts his kicker so much that he shanks it. All this against a team that will either miss the playoffs or flame out in the Divisional. Sam Darnold tortures me but worst of all is that he takes a concrete form in doing so. From the precise, ball-secure SB winning quarterback larp to this new form of suffering: sheer incompetence that I can't even celebrate because I need him to throw to his OPoY. He now gives a horrendously annoying division rival fanbase another week of pretending to be a big deal. Sam Darnold has no idea I exist and will never read this, yet I'm convinced his purpose in life is to torture me.

Knowledge is best described as a facilitator, a vital engine on the media literacy offense, facilitating the flashy scoring of Understanding. Knowledge on its own has little value: anyone who's gone through the school system can tell you that the worst courses are the ones where the terminal bouts don't test comprehension of the material, but your ability to regurgitate knowledge. Knowledge cannot be mastered--it can't even be improved upon--it can only be accumulated. Just like a good pass-first player: knowledge may be best conceptualized as a key, but only understanding makes up wondrous room on the other side, with its bounties of complex analyses, rich interpretations and observations in the labyrinthine, ever-shifting realm of perception. If you're a borderline narcissist like me, there is no worse feeling than being knowledge checked by someone, who then feels they've gotten a fastpass ticket to believing they are smarter than you. It's like losing RPS to someone in a Fighting Game because you don't know how to throw the figurative paper (perhaps because I'm a tad preoccupied getting literal paper), but without knowledge we would never touch the feeling of toxic euphoria in learning that check and leaving them in the dust forever. Of course you should be happy to find a challenge and learn new things from your friends, rather than tipping into neurosis at the sight of someone with a higher power level than you. For the media connoisseur, knowledge exposes us as Gokus and Vegetas. If you're a Goku, little is more exciting than the great unknown. If you're a Vegeta, nothing can make you hate yourself more. For those highs and lows, knowledge earns a seven, but not the video essayist's half-dozen, rather the mark of a truly polarizing, divisive concept.