After a very long absence, TAILGATE JUDGMENT returns. Leave a comment below describing what you had to eat and drink during game day last weekend. Jon will rate it between 1 and 10.

For well over a year, all of you have eaten gameday food without purpose, since I, Jon, did not judge it. In fact, it's possible that you have not eaten any food at all, because all food beyond the realm of my judgment may not, in fact, exist.

Today, I am gracious and magnanimous enough to issue rulings on your food and drink. Here is how it works:

1. You leave a comment below that describes the food and drink you enjoyed, or did not enjoy, during football activities last weekend. You may submit your entry for either last Saturday or last Sunday. Perhaps you were tailgating, perhaps you were at a party, or perhaps you were at home.

2. I review as many comments as time will allow, because I am a tremendously busy and important man. I will issue a rating between 1 and 10 for both your food and your drink, and I will do my best to explain my ruling.

3. This ruling may not please you. I am not out to hurt feelings, but in some cases, I might. In any case, you will accept my ruling as absolute and superseding of any other judicial rulings at the federal, state, and municipal level.

I have decided to hold court on a Friday, so that your successes and failures are fresh in our memories as we head into a weekend of football. Below, you will hear from champions. Learn from them. You will also bear witness to spectacles of grand failure. Learn from those, too.

GO.

Chiefs rookie De'Anthony Thomas is on track to make his NFL debut Sunday. Breaking Madden celebrates his arrival.

After recovering from a hamstring injury, God willing, Chiefs running back/return man De'Anthony Thomas will play in his first-ever regular-season game Sunday. That is the day he will officially become my favorite player in the NFL.

This, from the preseason, happened the first time he ever caught a punt in a Chiefs uniform:

I've written previously, and multiple times, on retired Chiefs return man Dante Hall, who remains my second-favorite football player of all time. I perceive this as a Highlander sort of arrangement: there are a number of super-exciting, unreasonably fast Chiefs special-teams returners scattered across history, and De'Anthony Thomas is now the one to carry the torch.

He is also my favorite athlete to follow on Twitter.

HAD A VERY SUCCESSFUL CAMPING TRIP

— DE'ANTHONY THOMAS (@CHECKDAT6) July 31, 2012

SEEN A DEER http://t.co/6J7N8imM

— DE'ANTHONY THOMAS (@CHECKDAT6) December 7, 2012

In this episode of Breaking Madden, we will be dumping irresponsibly high expectations upon the shoulders of a dude who has never played a regular-season NFL game and is barely old enough to legally drink:

Music: "Never Catch Me" by Flying Lotus feat. Kendrick Lamar

And here is how we're going to do that.

I. MAKE THE DOLPHINS SLOW AND BAD.

Kansas City's Week 3 opponent is Miami, a team that is now magically made up of frustratingly slow players. One quirk about Madden NFL 15, as well as previous editions, is that it's nearly impossible to set the special-teams lineups you want. If you drag down the stats of the special-teamers, the game will simply find higher-rated guys and place them on the special teams unit.

So just to be safe, I individually adjusted the ratings of every player on the team. Every dude is now a 0/99 at Speed, Acceleration, and Awareness. In addition, I lowered punter Brandon Field's leg power just a little bit, in the hope that more punts will stay in play.

II. SCUTTLE THE CHIEFS' OFFENSE WITH TWITTER PLAYERS.

I want De'Anthony Thomas, via kick and punt returns, to win this game all by himself, which is why everyone who touches the ball on the Kansas City offense is a useless tree-person. As usual, I found them on Twitter.

if you would like to be in the next Breaking Madden, please tell me the worst thing you have ever worn

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) September 15, 2014

I asked this question because it's rather central to being a Kansas City Chiefs fan. See, I think the Chiefs' colors look pretty sweet as applied to a uniform, especially their red-on-red home uniform. This color scheme does not work in any other wardrobe context. I would usually prefer not to police the fashion choices of others, but I must here: anyone who wears a giant Chiefs jersey in any context other than "playing in a football game" looks like Ronald McDonald at a baptism.

Y'all were more than happy to self-report your fashion infractions. Ten of y'all really stood out, and you now comprise the Kansas City Chiefs' offense. You are all seven feet tall, horribly slow, and terrible at everything.

QB: Ryan Gantz, Vox Media UX director (@sixfoot6)

Ryan wins the starting quarterback position, in part because his story is the best-worst, and in part because including him in this episode involves getting his height wrong even though it's explicitly stated in his Twitter handle.

Wearing a meat tenderizer on one's hammer loop is fundamentally iconoclastic, as it claims a spot reserved for something as useful as a hammer, and yet is itself completely useless. That animal took the trouble of building itself all that flesh, and you can't trouble yourself to tenderize it via a marinade, or by braising it, or by any other way than to whack it with a stupid-ass hammer? I see you standing in the aisle with the kitchen miscellanea and furnace filters and wrapping paper, staring at this artifact of thoughtless destruction, twist-tied to its cardboard scabbard. Go forth and ruin, Unitasker of Worlds, Thor of the Walgreens.

RB: Jacob Bacharach, author and blog-poet (@jakebackpack)

OH MY GOD.

WR: Rich Mattingly (@nickelcity)

Neither you nor your mom could be troubled to draw a few circles on it to illustrate cheese holes, which would have literally been the only thing required to represent the completist's image of cheese. The box would be pushed upward whenever you tried to sit at a desk, rendering you nothing but a child with a box over his head. God dangit.

See, this is how I know I'm not emotionally equipped to be a parent yet: I've never met this child who doesn't even exist anymore, and I'm wrought with worry about him being picked-on and sad. If I had a kid and I got wind that he or she got called a butthead, I'd blubber until sawdust came out.

TE: Jane Coaston, SB Nation and EDSBS contributor (@cjane87)

This is a dangerous game. I tried to do this ironically once and just didn't have the fortitude. I once received a shirt as a gag gift that read,

Jesus Is

"WHASSAAAAAP"

In My Life

and one day I resolved to wear it in public. I stepped out the door, walked half a block down the street, and then sailed back home to change upon a wave of self-conscious shame. This is not tenable in Kentucky. This ain't Brooklyn. They will ask you about the Jesus here.

QB: David Dpottzzz (@dpottzzz)

David went on to note that he had this hat custom-made at a hat-embroidering store at the mall. This is crucial.

I don't know how old David is, but when people my age were 10 years old, our culture was awash in a trend of in-your-face pith. BUTTON YOUR FLY. SHUT UP AND JAM. Shirts that said, YO! BY THE TIME YOU FINISH READING THIS SHIRT I WILL HAVE SCORED ON YOU!

When you're 10, this is the raddest thing in the world to you, but you aren't really developed enough to be able to reproduce it. And that is how we arrive at me, in my fourth-grade classroom, designing a coffee mug for my mother that read:

YO! I'M FULL OF COFFEE NOTTTTTTT FOOL!

My family saw this and dropped me off in the forest, where I died.

RB: Jon Riegel (@jonriegel)

"Huh? Oh, no, I've never read the books. Just a fan of tribulations, really."

FB: Mark LaBelle (@mrklbll)

New project: ask athletes to sign absurd things that don't make any sense. I was at my friend's house one time when his dad poked his head into the room. He had just found out that he was going to be at some kind of event that Michael Jordan would be attending. "I've got to head to the airport in two minutes," he said. "If you give me something to autograph, I'll see if he'll sign it for you." All I had on me was a pack of baseball cards I'd just bought. I gave him a Tim Wallach baseball card. It was not signed, and it is impossible to understand why not.

WR: Matt Watson, SB Nation editor (@mattwatson)

Y'all should be aware that in the SB Nation editorial chat room, if you type "/get fanny pack," it will automatically return this image.

WR: Henry Ermer (@ozmasis)

This is the saddest thing I have ever read.

WR: Sam Greszes (@SamGreszeseses)

POSSIBILITY A: you're rolling the dice on the astronomically low possibility of meeting someone at your party who's dressed as a wall jack. POSSIBILITY B: you coordinate with your partner, who is dressed as a wall jack, and broadcast the message that your sex life is horribly unsatisfying.

"are you in"
"yeah"
"stay completely still for several minutes"
"i am"
"charge that Nikon, baby"
"oh yeah"
"grill that turkey bacon, baby"
"yeeeeeahhh"

Also, where's the grounding plug? Safe sex, y'all.

III. MAKE EVERY PLAY THAT IS NOT A DE'ANTHONY THOMAS RETURN THOROUGHLY UNWATCHABLE.

Our quarterback, Ryan Gantz, is the only one who will really be doing much of anything. On every play, he will take the snap and just straight-up run away.

He will run directly backwards as fast as I can make him run. (He runs far slower in that GIF, which I sped up to 3x.) Why, yes, that will sometimes result in a safety! In fact, this ensures that virtually every Chiefs possession will end in a safety.

This is important, because it gives the Dolphins a chance to compete with DAT and his punt/kick returns. Remember, all the Dolphins are too slow and terrible to build much of an offensive drive. They might kick the occasional field goal, but apart from that, they'll need all these safeties to keep pace on the scoreboard.

In other words, this is a match between De'Anthony Thomas and his self-destructive disaster of an offense. The Chiefs' greatest enemies are so often themselves.

THE GAME.

We'll get to DAT, I promise. We just need to talk about this offense first. Here is Ryan Gantz running an impromptu 40-yard dash in real time.

His 40 time is just over 10 seconds, a full four seconds slower than the slowest recorded time in NFL Combine history. That he can run so far, so slowly, ought to clue you in to the sort of Dolphins team we're dealing with here. If either side were any good at literally anything, they would win 200-0. They're just stuck in this miserable, eternal gridlock.

When Kansas City has the ball, the offensive linemen are the only real-life Chiefs on the field. You might wonder whether they're equipped with code that would tell them what to do when their tree-man of a quarterback just up and runs away. The answer is that they do not give a shit about him.

This is one of my favorite things about Breaking Madden. Finding the responsive behaviors in scenarios that should not exist. Surely the game's AI programmers didn't sit down and explicitly program them to walk at a grocery-aisle pace and watch their match-ups streak past them en route to murdering their quarterback.

No, Madden just formed a decision with the crumbs of code it had sitting around. "I guess this will happen," it said. Just as we struggle to settle on who was the first human, the descendants of artificial intelligences will one look back upon a moment. "In this moment," they will say, "we became us." Maybe that moment is a moment like this. Maybe it was the time you kept the toaster lever pressed down after it started buzzing. This moment may well have come already, and I pray only that the reckoning arrives long after I am dead. Here is a punter kicking his blocker in the nards.

This is from a practice-mode session. I wanted to try to gauge how Brandon Fields' punts would land from different spots on the field. As it turns out, if I set the line of scrimmage all the way back to the goal line and told the Dolphins to punt, this happened every single time.

Anyway. Here's what our other Twitter players were up to: a whole lot of nothing. I just sent them on verts every time, because it didn't really matter. Every time, they were comfortable calling for the ball. Take, for instance, tight end Jane Coaston. It's a first-and-goal situation, and she's calling for it. That's perfectly reasonable! Let's see how the quarterback's doi--

yeah

So. On to De'Anthony Thomas himself, who was taking shit from absolutely no one.

I find it really tough to return punts and kicks in this year's Madden. As recently as a couple years ago, two or three times out of ten, I could pull this specific zig-zag route that would take my man right through a hole in the coverage and into the end zone. Under normal settings, I've never scored a return touchdown in this game.

Even with all the game's settings pushed in my favor, it was kind of difficult. Only 11 of Thomas' 24 punt returns went for touchdowns. That's ridiculous, of course, but the enterprise was far from automatic, and I don't think I scored any of those without reversing field at least once or twice.

This maneuver won us some success. The guy in the blue circle is De'Anthony.

I'd kind of bait the Dolphins into gravitating toward the right side of the field. Once they sold out for it, I'd make this broad sweep to the other side of the field and haul ass.

You know what, this was often a lot like playing Snake.

It's like DAT was the head of the snake. He and the Dolphins were a singular organism. We just had to be careful not to run him into his tail. This required us to buy a lot of time in far-flung regions of the field, just waiting in holding patterns until a hole opened up.

This one, though. This was our best run.

We didn't draw this constellation to be cute. It was a measure of necessity. In some way, it felt like smacking the side of a bottle until ketchup comes out. Just survive and keep moving the pieces around. And, man, we killed it. Even if none of DAT's teammates were worth two quarters of a shit.

He's like a backpack! Like a lil' bitty backpack!

THE RESULTS.

The ebb and flow of this game was probably the strangest I've seen in the history of Breaking Madden. I played almost the entire game with either no idea or the wrong idea of which team was going to come out on top.

The safeties piled up early, and I was down at the end of the first quarter, 18-16. Then I started to get better at returning, and before I knew it, I was up 78-52 in the second half. This was a rout.

In my pride and foolishness, I had failed to consider that while Miami safeties were a near-immovable constant, opportunities for punt returns were not. Down several scores in the fourth quarter, the Dolphins often went for it rather than punting. They started to aim their punts out of bounds. Unbelievably, they started placing their kickoffs out of bounds, which of course results in a penalty. The game was getting wise.

With that 78-52 lead, and on such a roll, I would have found it inconceivable that the Dolphins would score 28 unanswered points (two field goals and 11 safeties) to take the lead, but that is exactly what they did.

One minute left. With an 86-84 lead, the Dolphins elected to punt. It was, mercifully, inbounds. I was nervous. Please know that the rules I'd insisted on for this game made the game very time-consuming. Just playing the game itself took about seven hours. I had spent all day on this quest, and my success depended on one single punt return.

I ran out of room. I had to gun it. I just ... I ran out of room.

The first time I ever really invested myself in an entire football game, I was eight years old. Chiefs-Dolphins, wild-card playoffs, 1991. The Chiefs trailed, 17-16, when Nick Lowery made his paces and readied for a 52-yard field goal try. It was so close, I thought he'd made it, and I started to celebrate before I realized I was the only one in the house who was celebrating.

I had these NFL bed sheets with all the NFL teams' logos printed on them. That night, I found all the Dolphins logos and crossed them out with my little magic markers. It was now a school night in January. I cried and went to sleep.

First down, around midfield, with seconds left. A Chief and a Dolphin begin to dance. Ryan Gantz dutifully offers himself up for safety one final time.

And it is done. Dolphins 88, Chiefs 84.

The game said we lost, and also that we won. Madden has trouble adding the final score, just as it has for the better part of the last decade. This is fine. I do not need a picture of loss. I know the stench.

But on this day, De'Anthony Thomas has shattered every return record in the books. To the stats:

Music: "Steppin' Out" by Joe Jackson

For many more episodes of Breaking Madden, click here.

It's been yet another Worst Week Ever in the NFL. Jane Coaston joins Ryan Nanni and Jon Bois on this episode of Punt Brothers to speak on why this league is how it is, and whether it was this way all along (it was).

This episode of Punt Brothers is going to be rather different. It's a serious episode, with next to nothing in the way of fun and games, because the NFL has been a miserable thing lately and we don't want to ignore it.

Joining us is Jane Coaston, a contributor on SB Nation and Every Day Should Be Saturday. Earlier Friday, she published a piece titled, "Football has never been good." It doesn't flinch:

It's never been a paragon of virtue. It's never been a font of whatever it is you want your kids to be. It just hasn't.

The difference is that now we know. We know exactly what we're getting into with this thing called "football."

You can follow Jane on Twitter at @cjane87. Today we talk to her about the NFL, whether we can ever hope for it to be an ethically sound institution, whether change is happening, and how we feel about the League as lifelong fans.

(Punt Brothers' RSS feed is here, and here we are on iTunes.)

How much would you have to pay us to live in a bathroom for a week? How much to lick Papa John's teeth? These are your questions. This is The Proposition.

Hello and welcome to our latest effort to waste your Friday afternoon. This is how The Proposition works:

1. Spencer Hall and Jon Bois asked y'all to submit theoretical unsavory activities. Living in a bathroom for a week. Listening to the entire Eagles discography. That sort of thing.

2. Here, we will fix prices on these things, offering the lowest amount of money you'd need to pay us to do them.

3. Spencer and Jon will hang out in the comments for a while, happy to fix prices on more of your Propositions.

Let's get it. Here are our responses to these Propositions, which we settled on via Gchat.

@jon_bois@edsbs Licking Papa John's pearly white teeth.

— Greg Gookin (@GregGookin) September 18, 2014

Jon: just one lick? if he's consenting, but doesn't have feelings for me, and i'm not at risk of disease? $20
if he did have feelings for me it'd be a lot higher, because i wouldn't want to broadcast the wrong message

Spencer: I would do this for free if someone Vines it. Hell, I'll kiss his face with tongue and lick it I'm taking the fuzz off a peach.
This isn't gonna go well because I'll pretty much lick or eat anything.

@jon_bois@edsbs Discussing wearable tech with Richard Dawkins

— Aaron Munoz (@Munz0) September 18, 2014

Jon: $200 per hour

Spencer: I would require $1,000 and hour and whatever legal fees would be incurred when I put Richard Dawkins in the camel clutch theatrically on a Queens subway platform

@jon_bois@edsbs Live Tweet a handful of episodes of A Prairie Home Companion.

— jesse (@jcd1124) September 18, 2014

Spencer: just, no
No money. No amount will do

Jon: i would do that for $100 per episode and then realize the mistake i'd made 14 minutes into it

@jon_bois@edsbs run a 10k while wearing corduroys

— Tom Deary (@sturdyvant) September 18, 2014

Spencer: I'd charge about $175 for this

Jon: well, the benefit here is that after 100 feet of running, the corduroys will have completely disintegrated, because corduroys are pretty shit. but i really, really hate running. $300

@jon_bois@edsbs listen to a baseball game on the radio. no other distractions. You get milk, tortilla chips, no salsa.

— Jack Mags (@mags_nd) September 18, 2014

Jon: is it possible to hang yourself with milk? no? $200.

Spencer: I can slit a wrist with a tortilla chip, something I learned in the corporate school-prisons of Tennessee Sponsored By Chilis. $400 payable to my children and family.

Jon: all that salt, man. it'd be like slipping into a warm bath.

@jon_bois@edsbs listen to every Mitch albom book on tape in one sitting. Narrated by albom of course

— Brian Connor (@postmodernpizza) September 18, 2014

Spencer: You know that Russian probe full of geckos
lost in space, off track, just having sex forever until they died
I'd rather be consumed slowly in that satellite by a bunch of boning geckos than listen to all of Mitch Albom's books on tape.

Jon: dude's got ... six books? more? at some point i'm paying time, a thing they can't print more of. no deal.

Spencer: His wife's the only person who has to listen to him, right? I'm not his wife. Oh god I hope I'm not Mitch Albom's wife. That would complicate things for me in so many ways right now.
that'd be REAL bad for me

Jon: oh, it wouldn't be all bad. he has a nice haircut

Spencer: I'm taller! That means I never get to wear heels!

@jon_bois@edsbs live in a van for 30 days

— Andrew (@ebojla) September 18, 2014

Spencer: I would do this for less than you think because I think I've always been destined to say "It was a bad night in the van last night."

Jon: i spent a couple years living in an apartment that wasn't very much bigger than a full-size van. not bad. would be fun to reckon how to be resourceful. $1000.

Spencer: I'd do it for like $700
I have young kids, so it'd be sleeping through the night excepting break-ins and raccoon infestations.

Jon: if the seats can be taken out, this is really not that bad
plus maybe at the end of the month you will be Jewel

@jon_bois@edsbs listen to 'metal machine music'

— moisés (@moisesafbc) September 18, 2014

[Editor's note: That is here. Don't click unless someone pays you money.]

Jon: the whole thing? have you ever done that?

Spencer: Never. I once listened to Kentucky police scanners for like two hours following a basketball win, so it's probably not much different. $40

Jon: my "sit in a room and do nothing" baseline is $100 an hour, i think. pipe this into the room and i get to at least imagine lou reed laughing his ass off. $80.

THESE ARE THE PRICES OF OUR DIGNITY.

Any more Propositions for us? Please share below.

Let's hear it for the state of Florida, our nation's chief importer of losses and exporter of points.

So far this season, the Jacksonville Jaguars, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and Miami Dolphins hold a combined 1-8 record, thereby continuing a pattern they've followed for the last half-decade.

Remove all traces of the Florida football teams from the NFL's win-loss columns, and the league's cumulative winning percentage would be .514 over this five-year stretch.  That may not sound like a huge difference, but it takes a whole lot of losing to move that needle at all.

Between 2009 and this weekend's action, these three teams have a combined 92-157 record. It would be bad enough for one team to play .370 football over a 15-year stretch, but that is certainly conceivable. Terrible ownership, lack of direction, bad drafting, a toxic atmosphere, and any other number of things are certainly capable of poisoning the well and leaving an NFL franchise in a perpetual lurch.

This is special, because we're looking at three different test tubes here. Three different franchises, sets of personnel, hierarchies of ownership, fan bases, rivals, everything. There's no reason all three of them should be failing so dramatically. And yet!

Again: one team misses the playoffs for many, many years in a row? Well, that's explained by "it's the Browns" or "it's the Raiders." That three completely different teams can combine in this effort is staggering.

If it weren't for the state of Florida, the rest of us would be hurting for two commodities: oranges and points.

Throughout all of those seasons reflected above, only two of them finished with a positive point differential: the 2010 Buccaneers (+23) 2011 Dolphins (+16). Those are almost negligible as stacked against the worst seasons: -156, -189, -202, -207.

I have decided that I am not going to play for any of Florida's NFL teams.

Teddy Bridgewater didn't run much in college, and when he did, he was one of the least graceful ball carriers in football. Now he plays before a nation of dumb NFL fans who want him to run. In this Breaking Madden, their terrible wish is granted.

Teddy Bridgewater is now a starting quarterback in the NFL, and Guy At The Bar will expect him to run with the ball. It is impossible to even begin to guess why he would have this expectation, but surely the decision-makers of the NFL know better than to awwwww hell

[...] there will be subtle changes made with a new quarterback under center. Perhaps a little read-option, which we saw at least once on Sunday in New Orleans. With Bridgewater’s mobility, Norv Turner may be more likely to use bootlegs. We’ve already seen one designed quarterback draw called, too.

Bridgewater is mobile in the sense that he's good at escaping pocket pressure and buying himself a few extra moments, which he nearly always does for the sake of eventually throwing the ball. Like most quarterbacks, he'll run past the line of scrimmage to gain a few extra yards if they're handed to him on a silver platter, but that's just about where it ends. The majority of quarterbacks selected in this year's draft -- Blake Bortles, Johnny Manziel, Derek Carr, Logan Thomas, Aaron Murray, Keith Wenning, Tajh Boyd, Garrett Gilbert -- have better college yards-per-carry numbers than Teddy.

He may, at least, be the goofiest ball carrier in the NFL. Consider this moment from his senior season at Louisville:

Designed runs and read-options should absolutely not be a fixture of the Teddy Bridgewater offense, no matter how much Guy At The Bar would like them to be. But in this episode of Breaking Madden, Guy At The Bar will get his way.

We're running a little light on game tweaks this week, because the theme of this episode of Breaking Madden is: "you want Teddy to run? Here's what you get." Teddy Bridgewater is going to run the ball on every single offensive snap.

I've turned off injuries, because Breaking Madden ought not to be a breaker of men, and because I love Teddy and could not bear to see him hurt. I've also turned off fatigue: run a guy 50-plus times under normal settings, and you'll stop seeing anything fun.

To offset these advantages for Teddy, I've replaced the defensive line of the Atlanta Falcons (the Vikings' Week 4 opponent) with the seven-foot, 400-pound monsters who longtime Breaking Madden readers are well familiar with. They aren't perfect 99s in every category, but I did max them out in Strength, Block Shedding, Hit Power, and a few other things. They are a mediocre 65/99 in the Speed department, so Teddy at least stands a chance in Hell of outrunning them.

As usual, I found them on Twitter.

if you would like to be in the next Breaking Madden, tell me about a time you ruined something beautiful

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) September 22, 2014

Please meet your Atlanta Breaking Madden Falcons.

LE - Rembert Browne, writer at Grantland (@rembert)

For the second time in three weeks, Breaking Madden finds itself in Paula Cole territory. I'm guessing Rembert went with "I Don't Want To Wait" and "Where Have All The Cowboys Gone?" Maybe I'm selling him short and he went for a deep cut like "Hitler's Brothers." Anyway, I need to let y'all know that I found a Paula Cole album on Spotify that's just 10 different versions of "Where Have All The Cowboys Gone?"

And that's it. Every track has the exact same title. There's a really terrible dance mix, a smooth jazz version, a track that sounds almost like a lounge cover, and one that sounds like it was just shoved through a Casio keyboard.

There are some really weird corners of Spotify. There are thousands of ringtones, even though they could not possibly be of any use on a service like Spotify. There are 500-track albums of a guy singing "Happy Birthday" to people with different names. But this Paula Cole album might be the damnedest thing I've seen.

DT - @dooscent

I'm having some trouble with this one, y'all. Granted, my bathroom is pretty basic: sink, a bathtub/shower, a toilet, a washer and a dryer. I'm trying to think of how long I could go without running out of things to clean. Like, get the room so clean that scientists could make science what-not in there. I'm topping out at like 45 minutes.

Four hours! No diss, but if I spent four hours working on my bathroom and it didn't, like, have new tiling or plumbing, I'd feel very strange about myself.

DT - Herbert Husker (@HardyWallbanger)

This is just one of over a dozen entries I received that had to do with ketchup. We're carrying too much ketchup guilt, friends.

DT - Jazbeck (@_jazbeck_)

I'm laughing, but I am also guilty of Frame Crime. During my senior year of high school, I received a small scholarship. It was the only one I got, so we framed the letter. I dropped out of college after one semester and never returned. A year later I didn't clean up my kitchen after a party, and my roommate printed me a diploma that read, "Certificate of Upgrade to Complete Asshole." I liked it, and I wanted it framed, but the only frame I had in that size was being used for that scholarship letter.

So I just slipped my Asshole Diploma on top of it. It's still here. Like, right here on my office wall. Lookin' at it right now. Only diploma I got. Think I out-shamed you on this one, dude, but it wasn't easy.

LOLB - @SarahKezele

It's amazing, really. I can think back to several times in my teen years in which a girl clearly, obviously was into me, but I was too shit-scared and pessimistic to even conceive of the possibility that any girl would actually--

Wait, pancakes? How do you send a pancake message? This is the waffle's 266,882nd advantage over the pancake: you can use it to transmit binary code. Squares are 0, squares with syrup are 1.

RE - Jake Schumer (@Sevarro)

I don't think you actually do, but I don't care, because you've kicked a soapbox my way.

I've played maybe four hours of Destiny, which appears to be about as deep as Wolfenstein 3D. This is every mission:

Ghost: WE MUST GO TO THE SURFACE TO GET THE SWORD OF WHATEVER
[you kill a bunch of aliens]
Ghost: HOLD ON I'M HACKING INTO THE WHATEVER COMPUTER
[you wait around]
Ghost: HOLD ON IT'S TAKING A WHILE
[you kill a bunch of aliens while waiting around]
Ghost: OK DONE WITH THE WHATEVER SWORD COMPUTER WHATEVER. THEY WON'T BELIEVE THIS!
[you go back to base, nobody cares or ever says more than three or four words]
GHOST: WE MUST GO TO THE MOON TO STOP THE WHATEVER THING

I think I'm realizing that as I get older, I continue to like the heck out of video games, but I need to be able to make meaningful decisions that I actually have to think about. Destiny, despite its record budget, is maybe the worst, most uneven attempt at storytelling I've seen from any kind of thing in years.

And even that doesn't matter much to me, as long as you let me build my own story. Maybe it's calling the right plays in Madden, assembling a starting five that hums well together in NBA 2K, building an economic empire in Civilization, or even figuring out how to get the goddang legs to move in QWOP. Destiny is gorgeous, but the gameplay feels about as thoughtful as pointing and clicking your way through the world's worst operating system. I play it and feel like I'm killing time, and that's an awful feeling.

ROLB - Stef (@LaStefa)

That's why you frame stuff. Could've eaten spaghetti on 'em. Should've! Spaghetti is great!

LE - Drew (@Six4ThreeDP)

Okay, well hey man, you

The point was, I asked you to tell a story about

sigh

Oh hell, you're in. Sincere apologies to all the rest of y'all, because many of you told amazing, hilarious stories we just don't have room for. But this is one of the funniest answers in Breaking Madden history, and I ain't made of stone.

THE GAME.

Two more things before we get going. As far as ball carriers go, Teddy Bridgewater may well be the least graceful finisher in the NFL. To reflect this, I will be playing as Teddy the entire game, and whenever possible, I'm going to have him straight-up jump into every would-be tackler. As you saw in the video above, this often sends Teddy hurtling upside-down into the sky, which is more or less appropriate.

And finally, I am imposing a reward/punishment system.

The Minneapolis-St. Paul area is a difficult place for me to understand. Who is the most eccentric, electric, norm-smashing living artistic genius you can think of? Prince. Which stage performer is the exact fuckin' opposite of Prince? That's Garrison Keillor. That both of these men came from the same place suggests to me that Minneapolis is some sort of wormhole to another world that is constantly spewing anything and everything into our existence.

In keeping with this: if the Vikings somehow win this game, I will set the game recap video to a Prince song. If they lose, we're listening to A Prairie Home Companion.

I have never wanted to win so badly in my life. Let's get it, Teddy.

I didn't even push any extra buttons there. I just ran into a tackler, and Teddy took it upon itself to pull a full 900 across two different axes. The real delight here is that he was hit by two dudes, rolled on top of two other dudes, and almost kept going.

Strange things tend to happen in Madden when you introduce the big seven-foot people. Things, in fact, that often have absolutely nothing to do with the player's size. The computer seems to kind of throw the baby out with the bathwater: it doesn't make sense that all these people are seven feet tall, therefore nothing about them will make sense.

Note: everything you see in this GIF happened after the play was whistled dead.

Our friend Drew is probably just running wild with an animation that should have stopped five seconds ago, but I'm more satisfied by the explanation that these people are over-dramatic vampires in a community theater production.

I mean, come on now, fella.

It's the late-afternoon autumn sun in Minnesota. It may as well be the Moon, dude.

Teddy's real-life teammates engaged in some dramatics of their own. Keep your eye on No. 42.

That is fullback Jerome Felton. Again, nearly every frame of this GIF is happening after the play is over. It's gonna be real weird when you get back to the locker room and the only dirty part of your uniform is your ass.

Madden's physics are highly mock-able, but honestly, it's only because the game aims so high. It's hard enough to make a single model move like a human would move. It's exponentially more difficult to have that model run into another model, at unpredictable speeds and angles and with their limbs in any number of positions, and make it look anything like two humans interacting. Now try that with 22 people. And in the case of, say, a quarterback sneak, make nearly all of those 22 players run into each other.

That is how we arrive at this: a human submarine, with poor Teddy's legs bobbing port and starboard like a forgotten periscope.

This game was a really interesting strategic exercise. Every first down, I'd call a passing play and send Teddy on an improvised run. Sometimes disaster would strike and we'd lose 10 yards, but I'd always try to at least pick up five if I could. If I did, I could run two or three consecutive quarterback sneaks to pick up the first. It was often the surest way to do so.

It was a pretty fun time for all involved. Except for Teddy. What you're about to see is a thing I really had nothing to do with. Teddy took the snap, and then did the most Teddy thing possible by immediately tripping over his center and hitting the ground.

He was so hoping the play was over. This is where I started to feel bad.

The more I zoomed in on him, the worse I felt. For good reason, he looked terrified the entire game. Terrified.

Listen, man. I know you thought you'd live a happy life. You thought you'd be printed on a disc, mailed to some rando's house and shoved into an Xbox. Maybe your disc would belong to a Vikings fan! Maybe he or she would play as you! Maybe you'd be the star of a franchise mode that led you to five Super Bowl rings! Then the disc you call home would be traded in, and you'd enjoy a pleasant retirement on the shelf of a GameStop somewhere, and that would be that.

It's true that you really got the shit end of the stick here, pal, but the real Teddy wouldn't be scared. You've got to pull it together.

THERE WE GO. This is actually the first time I've ever seen this in Madden. Right as Rembert Browne moved in for the tackle, I hit the jump button. In every other instance, this resulted in Teddy being vaulted into oblivion. This time, though, Teddy sends a 400-pound man flying with a knee to the gut and neatly spins away.

Teddy Bridgewater's performance on this day was one of the most inspiring efforts in the history of Breaking Madden. He is no Clarence BEEFTANK. He's not even remotely close. He's just a man with the ratings he had out of the box, out there trying to slay dragons all by himself.

A parting note to the Minnesota Vikings: you got a steal in this year's draft. An absolute steal. I had the honor of watching Teddy Bridgewater play at Louisville for three years. He is a very effective, very exciting quarterback who is a terrific leader and excels in high-pressure situations. If you drafted him only to send him running, I swear to God, I will come and find you.

And now the time comes to learn our fate.

please not prairie home companion please not prairie home companion please not prairie home companion

Click here for many more episodes of Breaking Madden.

Friday, Jon posted a tweet about web tools that sparked controversy and confusion. Here is his statement on today's developments.

Earlier today, I was using a web tool, and I found it fit to issue a comment.

a web tool i’m using is autotweeting on my account. that is a good example of a web tool

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) September 26, 2014

Of course, today is not Web Tools Wednesday, which we celebrate each Wednesday. Immediately, my tweet was met with complaints from many of my readers.

@jon_bois please save this info for Wednesdays. Thanks.

— Ryan Irwin (@rirwin01) September 26, 2014

@jon_bois it is not Wednesday

— Tom (@ThomasCollaro) September 26, 2014

@jon_bois It's not Wednesday Jon.

— Kris (@5kl) September 26, 2014

@jon_bois Jon it's not Wednesday please delete this

— Matthew Ruder (@billikenhawk) September 26, 2014

@jon_bois but it's not web tools Wednesday

— dcur batiy huduof (@sl2c) September 26, 2014

Following this negative response, I took a short break from tweeting as I worked to collect my thoughts and prepare some sort of response. This afternoon, I am ready to offer that response.

I have long said that although Web Tools Wednesday may be a Wednesday-only observation, I effort to celebrate web tools every day and in every way. From simple web tools such as online calculators and calendars, to more advanced web tools such as photo editors and analytics software, web tools ABSOLUTELY have a place in our everyday lives.

I have also remained consistent in my advocacy for making Web Tools Wednesday personal. I will never attempt to police how you choose to celebrate -- or not celebrate -- Web Tools Wednesday, and in kind, I request that you not call into question how I choose to experience, observe, and comment on the web tools I happen to use each day. I find many web tools to be wonderful resources. That is a principle I will NEVER back down from.

However, I understand that tweeting on web tools outside of Web Tools Wednesday may have caused some confusion among readers and fellow celebrants. I regret this misunderstanding, and I can't wait to celebrate the next Web Tools Wednesday with each and every one of you.

Let's make this coming Wednesday the best Web Tools Wednesday yet.

- Jon

Gordon Ramsay's "Kitchen Nightmares" recently ended its run in the United States. Before it left, it gave us a two-hour odyssey of vanity, failures, and humiliations that must never be forgotten.

This is a story of two men, Gordon Ramsay and Joe Nagy. Gordon has been cooking professionally for about three decades, owns one of the top restaurants in the world, and is one of the most accomplished chefs who has ever lived. Joe is a guy in Ohio. This is Joe, on Gordon:

This is from an episode of Kitchen Nightmares, a show that is no longer being made. It is being told on a sports website on absolutely no particular occasion nor anniversary: this story is itself the occasion. "Mill Street Bistro" is a two-part episode that transcends both Kitchen Nightmares and the vast majority of modern television. There is, of course, yelling and screaming and lying and freezer-burned seafood and crying.

But "Mill Street Bistro" is a deeply strange and frustrating tragedy. Our damsel-in-distress resists salvation and is revealed instead as the antagonist, an Idiot-Tyrant. Our presumed protagonist, Gordon Ramsay, is consumed with frustration and angst, ultimately accomplishing nothing and saving nobody. The protagonist's cape hangs on the rack, unworn, and by the end of this darkness, every character in the cast remains as perfectly still and unchanged as a weed in the light of dawn.

It is a story that ought to be told in four parts:

I. JOE NAGY, who was SELF-TAUGHT by OTHER PEOPLE, outlines his RESTAURANT PRETENSIONS and EMOTIONAL NEEDINESS;

II. the EXPOSURE of JOE NAGY's FRAUDULENCE and the CRUMBLING of his FAÇADE;

III. the TERRIBLE WRATH of GORDON RAMSAY rains upon the head of a SMALL MAN and his FAKE BISTRO;

IV. JOE NAGY is ROUNDLY DEFEATED and continues to FAIL, but QUIETLY and awash in his own HUMILIATIONS.

This episode is free to watch on Hulu. Part 1 is here, and Part 2 is here. What you're about to read here is not a recap or a review so much as an examination of a uniquely tragic figure and the man who won't stop screaming at him.

PROLOGUE: A 60-WORD INTRODUCTION TO KITCHEN NIGHTMARES.

Kitchen Nightmares is a show in which Gordon Ramsay visits a failing restaurant, identifies its problems, frowns and yells and curses a lot, and eventually provides solutions to get the establishment on the right track. His ideas work. Half the time, the restaurant promptly undoes all of Ramsay's changes after he leaves, and the business is run into the ground.

ACT I.

JOE NAGY, who was SELF-TAUGHT by OTHER PEOPLE, outlines his RESTAURANT PRETENSIONS and demonstrates his EMOTIONAL NEEDINESS.

Arriving on his two-wheeled steed is Joe Nagy, owner of the Mill Street Bistro and the sort of man who, while smugly talking down to you about the shitty carrots in his restaurant, will refer to Four Seasons hotels as "the Five Seasons."

You may wonder why Joe would think anything would be called the Five Seasons, or whether anyone has even considered a fifth season of climate. I reckon it's the Season of Joe Nagy, darker and colder than Winter, when the trees grow leaves that are already dead.

I cannot spend another word on Joe without first strongly recommending that you regard Joe Nagy as a fictional character. While it's true that Kitchen Nightmares is classified as a reality show, the end product is considerably twisted and warped, even by the standards of reality television. This episode is clearly edited, re-arranged, overdubbed, and manicured to make him look worse than any human could possibly be.

The real-life Joe Nagy is surely far closer to a reasonable human being than the Joe of this episode. So please note that when I say that Joe Nagy is an eminently mean, artless bumblefuck whose only redemption is his eventual learned ability to fail without making noise, I'm talking about the near-entirely fictitious character we see before us.

Joe's driving passion is to put on airs and impress you. This quote nicely sets the table (restaurant term):

I want Chef Ramsay to critique my restaurant and say, "you've got something, Joe."

He perceives his restaurant as a fine-dining establishment, and seems to believe that the locals of Norwalk, Ohio, don't deserve him. (Though he will later deny this, he was accused by a former employee of calling them all "hillbillies.") One remarkable triumph of Kitchen Nightmares is that over the course of its six-year run on primetime network television, its producers managed to keep finding restaurant owners who didn't understand the show or how it worked. Gordon will not visit your restaurant, shower you with compliments, shake your hand, and leave. That is never, ever how this show has worked.

But this time, just like most times, the owner willfully ignores the name of the show he's appearing in and refuses to consider why they wanted him on the show. Joe is blinded by his need to be congratulated. While showing off his farm to Gordon, he nonchalantly explains that he, I don't know, spent a decade in the forest with restaurant-monks, fencing with meat cleavers and balancing himself on bread boxes and holding buckets of broth over his head or some shit like that?

Note Gordon's response. "Yeah. Yeah." He's been shooting this show for five years. He knows he's being bullshitted, and is happy to play along with this man's stories for a while before destroying him.

Anyway, did you catch that?

I am self-taught by old-school Europeans.

self-taught
old-school Europeans.

That is Joe: with each boast comes a reinvention of elementary logic. He will invent a word like "functuality" and then tell you he's got it in spades.

Many, many Kitchen Nightmares have featured owners who don't come off as particularly intelligent people. When these people are nice, or at least decent people, I take no pleasure in their mockery. Neither does Gordon, who tends to soften considerably and focus on restoring their confidence.

But Joe Nagy -- again, fictional Joe Nagy -- hits the trifecta. Dumb, egotistical, and mean. He rips his employees and makes them feel like garbage, sometimes driving them to tears. He sees his restaurant as among the best in the world, persistently meddling in the kitchen and undermining his own chef.

His emotional neediness is evident nearly every time he's on screen. Joe, the next hour and a half are going to be very bad for you.

ACT II.

The EXPOSURE of JOE NAGY's FRAUDULENCE and the CRUMBLING of his FAÇADE.

BAD IDEA: Joe keeps a fake fireplace running in his restaurant on 95-degree days. BAD IDEA: He makes his servers wear name tags, but rather than ordering them name tags with their names on them, he shoots them on with a label maker. BAD IDEA: He calls his specials "features," a thing no restaurant ever does. BAD IDEA: His idea of fine dining is "elk quesadilla."

Wherever he walks, terrible ideas clank and rattle behind him like tin cans strung to his belt.

BAD IDEA: Gordon says his fish is not "fresh," as advertised. Joe argues that it isn't advertised as fresh, and then Joe counters by pointing to a thing that proves that Joe is totally wrong.

BAD IDEA: Joe tries to play a game of gotcha about a very basic culinary principle with one of the most highly-esteemed chefs who has ever walked the Earth.

It's a thing so easy for Gordon to explain that I can fit the entire thing in a Coub and still have time left over to include the most impotent follow-up argument imaginable. Joe seems to think there's no game hunting in Scotland. In fact, throughout this episode Joe mutters a lot of "pffft, he's from Scotland, what does he know." Joe, a man in Ohio, appears to have nothing but contempt for Scotland because it is a different place.

Those who are only casually familiar with Gordon Ramsay might wonder why he doesn't just lay into him here. Oh, that's coming. He's just saving it up for now. But my God, is it ever coming.

For now, Gordon's happy with openly mocking this man. BAD IDEA: Joe has posted a big "QUIET" sign in the kitchen and discourages his cooks from talking to one another, which is a very important thing for cooks to be able to do.

Joe's standing right there. Gordon is happy to openly mock him in front of his employees. A man like Joe is not the sort of man who would be a good sport about this, and Gordon knows this is a jackhammer to Joe's ego. He just doesn't give a shit, that's all.

And this is the moment Joe is officially established, not as a flawed protagonist or party in distress, but as the villain. Gordon likes the restaurant's staff, and wants to make life better for them, but he sees nothing in Joe worth liking. In fact, nobody in this story does, not even for the most fleeting of moments.

This story was once about a man's mission to save another. It is now a fight, and the only weapons at Joe's disposal are very poorly-conceived lies.

This is what Joe would be learning right now if he ever learned things: you've got to be smart to pull off a lie. Or, at least, you can't be stone-stupid.

I swear to God, the only thing Joe cares about is being validated. We know Joe doesn't value notions such as art or integrity or treating others well, and now we have to genuinely wonder whether he cares about money, or saving his business, or anything but receiving compliments and validation. We know that he's desperate for those things, so desperate that he is appearing on "YOU ARE DOING THINGS WRONG: THE TELEVISION SHOW" and expecting to be told he is great.

This comforts me, actually, because it further reassures me that this is not representative of the real-life Joe Nagy. He's a victim of Gordon and the producers stacking the deck against him. Nobody could possibly be this much of a dillweed.

The reckoning is at hand.

ACT III.

The TERRIBLE WRATH of GORDON RAMSAY rains upon the head of a SMALL MAN and his FAKE BISTRO.

Again, many of those who are only casually familiar with Gordon Ramsay's oeuvre tend to pin him as the yelly, screamy, and completely unreasonable character he plays on Hell's Kitchen. If that is 100 percent Gordon Rage, then his Kitchen Nightmares self rarely pops above 40 percent Gordon Rage.

It takes a very special sort of small, stubborn, unliking, unlikable, conceited dimwit to elevate him to such rage. Gordon Ramsay is never more eloquent than he is when he reduces a man to a buttoned-down bag of shame.

The sky cracked in two and Hell fell out of it, all above us all along.

Do not worry. Joe is more than capable of engaging Gordon in debate. He has this great idea. His idea is to take what Gordon says, replace all the "you's" with "me's" and throw a "not" in there, then say it back to him.

"You want me to blow smoke up your phony ass."

"I don't want you to blow smoke up my phony ass!"

"Why are you fucking around like this?"

"I'm not fucking around like that!"

Listen for this the next time a four-year-old argues with you, because they do this exact same thing: they'll parrot back the negative of what you just said, and they don't quite get that they could edit it down if they want to.

You may recognize this particular model of dumb and stubborn. I sure do. We all know folks who will never change, too yoked to what they have decided is true to, their ability to learn atrophied by disuse. Joe's trajectory is straight as a meteor's. It is evident to every person in this episode of Kitchen Nightmares, a show about effecting change: this man will never change.

There is nowhere for Joe to go but nowhere. He has achieved perfect stasis. Gordon is an agent of movement, of excellence, of passion. The two cannot rule together. And so Gordon serves him the ultimate indignity: he casts him out of the kingdom.

Joe will deny this. He is the king! This is his kingdom!

Joe was kicked out of his own kitchen.

It is the ultimate indignity. It is brought about because Joe will not stop making elk quesadillas, a dish Gordon told him time and again, with no room for confusion, is a terrible dish that should be taken off the menu. At the outset, Joe was supposed to be the helpless man tied to the railroad tracks, waiting for Gordon to save him. Instead, he is the train itself. He is fixed upon the track, knowing no other option but to make the same crummy food for miles and miles.

On television, people are conquered by guns or fists or legal proceedings or Machiavellian dealings. The defeat of Joe Nagy was far more exotic, and much more difficult to accomplish: he was defeated by shame.

ACT IV.

JOE is ROUNDLY DEFEATED and continues to FAIL, but QUIETLY and awash in his own HUMILIATIONS.

Joe has been blown off his tracks: a pretend chef without a kitchen, a king without a kingdom. The only further humiliation he could possibly suffer would be by his own hand. This is Joe, and so this is exactly what happens. He staggers into the dining room, and does the least dignified thing a restaurant owner could possibly do: he wanders from table to table, telling his tale of woe to any of his customers who might listen.

Joe, don't do this. No, no, no, no, no. Please no. I can't take this.

I can barely watch. Joe, here is your lonely triumph: you have led me to pity you.

He continues to grouse outside the brick and mortar of the walls of the kingdom, having engaged in conversation with this poor woman who looks like she desperately wants to leave.

Joe is reaping the harvest he sowed simply by being Joe: heartless, mean, stubborn, and vain. Gordon hates him. His employees openly delight in seeing him fail. His customers want nothing to do with him.

Joe, on Gordon:

I said, "I'd love to see you, you know, fucking do what I do."

Not only does Gordon Ramsay do what you do, he has done it for decades. Not only that, but he has done so on international television, where you could easily see him do what you do, for longer than a decade. Not only that, but HE WENT TO YOUR TOWN AND INSIDE OF YOUR RESTAURANT AND DID EXACTLY WHAT YOU DO RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU. He is literally doing that right now while you are out here begging the customers you once resented for some crumb of empathy or companionship.

A wind has swept in from Scotland, across the sea and into northern Ohio, where it has blown the ego of Joe Nagy into another county. A boy will find it in the woods and wonder who it once belonged to, and why "functuality" is scribbled all over it.

At the end of this episode, Gordon hosts an American Cancer Society walk in town. Joe is not there, and it has nothing to do with food, but it is welcome, because it is the only way Kitchen Nightmares can end this episode with any modicum of joy or meaning.

Joe is failing now, but he is finally doing so in relative silence as a food runner. With a new chef installed and Gordon overseeing a dinner service, everything hums, save for all the times Joe brings food to the wrong tables. On one occasion, Joe brings a table the wrong dish, realizes it minutes later, takes it from the table, and tries to take it to another table, apparently unaware that this is a very basic no-no that anyone who has ever worked in the food service industry knows you are not supposed to do.

Men do not change. Men do not change. Gordon leaves the Mill Street Bistro with one immutable law, above all else: Joe must not do any more of the cooking.

He must not be anywhere near the kitchen. When he cooks, things happen like elk quesadillas and french onion soup with raw onion sitting in it.

Men do not change. Men do not change.

Men do not change.

More from Vox Media

• Can Gordon Ramsay save Atlantic City?
• How Gordon Ramsay plans to conquer Asia
• Watch Jon Bois break Madden

In this episode of Breaking Madden, we are disabling the offsides penalty. Ice up, Cam.

Something terrible is happening to Cam Newton.

He is being haunted. No one will believe him.

The last time we visited Cam Newton in Breaking Madden, he and the Panthers managed to slog their way to an agonizing 23-9 win. This in spite of the fact that I disabled the offsides penalty and lined up an opposing tackle behind the line of scrimmage at the snap.

The next month, Cam Newton joined the modest list of NFL players who have actually seen Breaking Madden. American hero and Sporting News writer Jesse Spector took the opportunity to show him a couple of episodes. Cam saw the one in which Bo Jackson is an unstoppable man-God, and then the one in which he's tackled 0.1 seconds into every play. And then he looked up and said:

Y'all would do that to Bo Jackson, and then y'all would do that to me.

Mr. Newton, we at Breaking Madden are not in the business of charity, nor celebrity appeasement. We recognize, however, your desire to hold some sort of agency over what happens to you in a video game.

How about this? Let's do this:

Steve Smith plays the wideout position aggressively, to the point at which he's almost his own enforcer. He's also one of the NFL's premier trash-talkers. Last season, while still with the Panthers, he and the Patriots' Aqib Talib spent a whole game stepping in each other's cereal. After the Panthers came away with the win, Smith was asked what happened between him and Talib:

I don't know. You're gonna have to ask him, because he didn't finish the game. Ice up, son. Ice up.

It should also be noted that in that exchange, Smith called Newton a "young great quarterback." A year later, that sentiment seems to have completely vanished. Smith, now with the Ravens, commented last week that Newton doesn't think fast enough. And before he even signed with Baltimore, he talked the most memorable shit of the calendar year to date:

I want to make sure that whatever team I go to, they're going to get the best, in-shape 35-year-old guy they can get. If that happens to run through [the Panthers'] Bank of America Stadium, put your goggles on, 'cause there's going to be blood and guts everywhere.

Steve Smith is apparently a man so used to blood and guts that when the thought comes to mind, his next thought is, "you don't want that stuff in your eyes, believe me," with the same measured caution you hear from your dad when he tells you you'd better get your oil changed.

So. Let's set the table.

I. STEVE SMITH, SR. NOW PLAYS DEFENSIVE END FOR THE BEARS.

Central to this narrative is not that Steve Smith plays for the Ravens, but rather that he really, extremely does not play for the Carolina Panthers. The Bears are their Week 5 opponents, so naturally, that is where Smith goes. He will follow Cam and the Panthers everywhere.

Steve now plays on the opposite side of the ball. I didn't touch any of his ratings when I switched him over, because Madden does that automatically. His rating immediately dropped to the 40s or 50s. In other words, a good wide receiver just became the worst defensive end in the NFL.

II. STEVE SMITH, SR. IS UNBOUND BY THE LINE OF SCRIMMAGE OR NATURAL LAW.

I disabled the offsides penalty. Every time the Bears are on the field, I'll move Smith behind the line of scrimmage, as close to Cam Newton as I can get him without drawing an encroachment penalty. He moves as a ghost, and is sworn to haunt Newton throughout the entire game.

III. CAM NEWTON IS GIVEN THE GREATEST OFFENSIVE LINE POSSIBLE.

This is the situation for Cam: if he can somehow shed Steve Smith for even a second or two, he'll benefit from the best offensive line any quarterback has ever had. Should he ever manage to hand the ball off, his running backs ought to be able to take huge chunks of yardage.

Of course, these linemen will not even notice Smith, who is standing behind them. They will not believe Cam when he tells them he's being haunted by a ghost. Surviving Steve Smith is up to him, and him alone.

All five of these linemen are seven feet tall and weigh 400 pounds. As always, I found them on Twitter.

if you would like to be in the next Breaking Madden, please share the worst lie anyone ever tried to tell you

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) September 29, 2014

Please welcome your brand-new Carolina Panthers.

Left tackle: Tyler Bleszinski, founder of Vox Media (@papiblez)

Ahhhh dangit. The gig's up, y'all, and so is the jig. I joined Vox Media a little over five years ago, before it was even called Vox Media. It was called SB Nation, and all its employees could fit into a living room. I had duties and responsibilities, and if I didn't get things done, people would notice.

Since then, the company has grown exponentially, which has presented me with the opportunity to disappear. Everyone else in this company is selling ads, writing stories out in the field, designing websites, maintaining servers and doing all manner of other things. It is remarkably easy to create the illusion of doing work when nestled within a collage of people doing meaningful things. I have spent quite a lot of time dickin' around with a video game on the company's dollar.

Someone has finally noticed. Tyler's always been super-cool, but I doubt he's gonna let me slide on this. It's curtains on this nonsense. I'd write a tell-all book about SB Nation, but the only juicy secrets I have are that Chris Mottram brews his own beer, which may be illegal, and Spencer Hall once used his laptop in our hotel bathtub.

Left guard: NOBODY

Longtime readers of Breaking Madden know that this happens from time to time. I pick out the tweets I like the best, make the players, and play through the game, and by the time I'm finally ready to swing back around and write the dang thing, one of our players has deleted his or her tweet. Now I get to wander upon one fewer unnecessary tangent, and it breaks my heart.

Center: @PhilCatelinet

I used to do over-the-phone tech support for an ISP. Half my time was spent telling people that their router was the problem, and another 25 percent was telling people that, no, really, their router was the problem. The rest of the time was spent apologizing for field technicians who didn't show up.

Most field techs did their job, but the few who didn't gained such infamy that we learned about them in orientation. They were called "ninja techs," and they were masters of their craft. They would sneak up to a customer's front door, quietly leave a "sorry we missed you" tag on the door, and bail. Multiple customers told me that they watched them literally sprint back to their truck, which they'd parked down the street so as not to be spotted.

That's a phenomenal hustle, and a remarkably sustainable one. Some of my company's service areas were managed by lawless independent contractors who were pretty much accountable to nobody. In these places, techs could screw off in apparent perpetuity. Hey, you didn't ask to be born into this cursed world. You see a way out, you take that shit by the horns. From one professional bullshitter to another: respect.

Right guard: Jonathan Webster (@jweb460)

Oh, so you attended school in the Deep South too, huh?

WORST THINGS I WAS ACTUALLY REALLY TOLD BY AUTHORITY FIGURES AS A KID IN THE SOUTH POWER RANKINGS

10. Pop music is dangerous. The rhythm of pop music resonates with human cells at a fatal frequency and causes cancer
9. Do not watch the movie The Craft. I put it in my VCR just to test it for y'all. It melted the circuits in the VCR because it's of the Devil
8. Your leg isn't broken. Try to stand on it. C'mon, stand up. Try to stand on it. C'mon. Stand on it
7. That snake ain't gonna hurt you. Red to black, friend of Jack. Red to, uh ... that snake ain't gonna hurt you
6. No, Boardwalk isn't the best space. The best space is the Lord God
5. The Devil put dinosaur bones in the ground to trick us
4. Y'all don't need to be shootin' toward the house, y'all just prop up that rock over there and shoot at it
3. Y'all know why the gas can didn't blow up, right? It's a plastic can. You gotta shoot a metal gas can, that way it makes a spark
2. The Civil War wasn't about slavery, it was about freedom
1. [Literally anything that referenced Ephesians 6:5]

Right tackle: Chris DiNardo (@chrisdinardo1)

MOVING ON.

We aren't finished here. This monstrous offensive line will be going up against:

THE LIARS.

These are the defensive linemen the Bears will send out there to be destroyed. When asked to share the worst lie they have ever been told, they each responded with some variant of:

@jon_bois "If you reply to one of @jon_bois's tweets, he might put you in Breaking Madden!"

— Big Texty (@mightynute) September 29, 2014

Now all y'all are in the game, which means I have made liars of you all. POW.

THE GAME.

One more rule: After I line up Steve Smith in enemy territory, I put the controller down. Everything that happens afterward is his doing.

Immediately, a lesson is learned:

Cam Newton should not take any snaps out of the shotgun. Granted, if a tackler lines up nine inches from him on every snap, I'm not really sure of what he should be doing. Just not that, though.

If I were calling plays for the Panthers, I'd probably run a few direct snaps to one of my running backs, just to see whether it would throw Smith off the scent. The Panthers are calling their own plays, though, and they keep throwing the occasional shotgun into the mix.

True to the narrative, Cam really seems to be the only member of the Panthers to recognize what's up. Once I line Smith right next to him, Cam starts looking left and right, tapping his thigh, frantically calling some audible or another. It doesn't seem to matter much.

The poor fellas can't even manage a handoff most of the time. Steve barrels in from behind and bowls over the entire backfield at once.

Cam is losing the trust of his teammates, and it's kind of heartbreaking. What you're seeing here is not a play-action, but an honest-to-God handoff.

Cam hands the ball to DeAngelo Williams, who seems to just kind of hand it back to him. "Ehhh ... you can have it, pal. This one's all you. Knock 'em dead."

This is a disaster, but this story becomes pure tragedy once we realize just how great this offensive line is. This happened just about every time they were on the field.

A few episodes back, I described Tony Romo as the Henry Bemis of football. I want to retract that and repurpose it for Cam Newton. He's stranded in The Twilight Zone, the last quarterback on Earth, gifted with everything he's ever wanted. If only his spectacles weren't broken. There was time now.

We should remember that Steve Smith is not a very good tackler, but even when he whiffs on a tackle, he creates chaos. Cam's linemen are so dang big that real estate is kind of at a premium. Blockers are constantly running into each other. Here is [UNKNOWN PLAYER] tackling his own quarterback, who is ruled down because No. 1 on the Bears was lucky enough to barely graze him.

Cam persevered, though. To be honest with y'all, I expected the Panthers to be obliterated. I predicted that they'd score, at most, one or two field goals by virtue of lucking into great field position. But Lordy, he really hung in there.

Late in the third quarter, the Bears led, 31-17. I took it as a miracle that the Panthers could let an opponent hang out in their backfield all game and still score 17 points.

The true miracle, the one that was to follow, was the one I could not have imagined.

I want to reiterate that I didn't play as Steve Smith for a single second after the snap. I set him up in Panthers territory, then I just let him do whatever Steve Smith wanted to do. For the sake of consistency, I had the Bears call the exact same play every time -- Mike Will Blitz -- but in spite of this, Steve would occasionally decide that he needed to be in zone coverage.

There is nobody out there, Steve. The ball carrier was right there, and you ran away to man a post light-years away from any other player. What are you doing, Steve?

This happened more often as the game went on. It created the illusion of a shred of artificial intelligence that was trying to understand itself, to think for itself. This Steve Smith, it decided, is not a mere replicant of the real-life Steve Smith. It is its own soul, working its way through its nascence, trying to understand what it is.

And I swear to God, I think this Steve Smith looked within himself and recognized himself as a wideout. Not only was he running away from Cam at a greater frequency, he was starting to run routes.

Tell me that's not a receiver route he's running. He's definitely not playing man coverage, nor is he digging into zone coverage. He's even looking back at the quarterback as he runs, just as a wide receiver would.

This Steve Smith has found himself. He has refused to play our little game. He is in open rebellion.

Cam Newton, longer haunted by his spectre, instantly begins to unload on the now-pitiful Bears defense. He has battled back.

Panthers 34, Bears 34, overtime. Carolina has the ball inside Chicago's 30. Cam hands off to DeAngelo, and the Steve of a couple quarters ago would have laid waste to him both. But look. Steve runs off. Maybe he decides he's in the wrong place. Maybe it's a slant route. I don't know.

BALLGAME.

Final score: Panthers 40, Bears 34 (OT).

Cam Newton: 134.8 passer rating, 31 completions, 39 attempts, 478 passing yards, two touchdowns, three fumbles.

Steve Smith: 24 sacks, two fumble recoveries.

This is the most improbable win in the history of Breaking Madden. That Cam even survived long enough to give himself a chance is remarkable, but Steve's gradual erosion into what he became is difficult for me to explain. I called the same play each time. Nothing should have changed. And yet, he did.

I didn't expect Cam Newton's Panthers to score seven points. They scored 40 in complete defiance. I felt as though Cam deserved to be rewarded somehow. I restarted the game, took Steve Smith off the field, and let Cam do all the nothing he wanted.

Time enough at last:

Click here for more episodes of Breaking Madden.

You should buy every advertised product.

This is a new comic strip I'm testing out called Every Commercial Is Good. We're all used to our televised sporting events being interrupted by commercials, and these commercials are often a real hoot.

Recently, though, I've had an epiphany: you know what TV commercials are really trying to do? You think they're just trying to have fun and broadcast things that folks would enjoy, but they're actually trying to convince you to buy their products. That's how they get you.

Every Commercial Is Good is an attempt to use these beautifully-shot commercials to tell different stories that are nice. Our first subject:

"NFL Mobile" (Verizon, 2014)

Five feet tall. 400 pounds. Age 76. Fast as the Dickens, and perhaps even faster. At long last, the hero of Breaking Madden has returned.

Let's make some time for an old friend. I missed you, you big little fella.

Clarence BEEFTANK. Star of the first-ever episode of Breaking Madden. Was last seen mocking the law of gravity in an episode of NBA Y2K. Proud beneficiary of his very own official Sports-Reference page. Stands five feet tall, weighs 400 pounds. Born in 1937. Origins unknown. Quarterback. Always runs. Never, ever, ever throws.

BEEFTANK has previously suited up for the Jacksonville Jaguars, San Francisco 49ers and Memphis Grizzlies. No city or team can claim him, really; he belongs to the woods and the winds and the unseen gullies and the great expanse. He prefers simply to drift to where he is needed, and it's quite possible that no team has needed him more than the New York Jets. And so that is where he goes:

The Jets are stumbling aimlessly into Week 6 after suffering a 31-0 clobbering in San Diego. The play at quarterback has been bad, and I honestly don't know how much of it is Geno Smith's fault, and how much is the Jets' fault for drafting a guy and immediately making him Starting Quarterback In New York, which is one of the most visible and scrutinized positions in American sports. I asked my friend Pete, a Jets fan, what he thought: "Did the floor break the egg, Jon, or the fall?"

Whether it's Smith or Michael Vick at quarterback, there's no way the rest of the season is going to be any fun for the Jets. BEEFTANK cannot fix all their problems, but he can at least give the Jets a one-week vacation. If you think hope is hard work, wait till you try abandoning it. These poor people need rest.

Jets fans, here is your quarterback:

bough’t a slide wistle; for to play in my barn. beeooooooop :^)))

— BEEFTANK (@BEEFT4NK) September 24, 2014

Clarence BEEFTANK is a friend to all. If ever you see a daffodil standing all by its lonesome, know that he was the one who planted it, and if you pull up a chair and wait until the dead of night, you will see him quietly visit it with a water pail, wherever this daffodil may be.

His center of gravity is such that for a time, astronomers regarded him as a second moon, although they later reasoned that moons are not jolly. As you might imagine, it takes a specific diet to maintain 400 pounds on a five-foot frame while remaining nimble as a mouse and hitting harder than a sack of bowling balls. It's a diet that, to folks like you and me, ranges from odd to disgusting.

soap pudding, .

— BEEFTANK (@BEEFT4NK) June 3, 2014

☂ can't to wait for noon! it's is pudding vapour tuesday. ☂

— BEEFTANK (@BEEFT4NK) November 5, 2013

broth sludge. broth you must to eat with a fork! <3 thank you to mart brand flour. <3

— BEEFTANK (@BEEFT4NK) October 27, 2013

6.7 of clock. it’s is time for a soup of logs. y.u.m. :-)

— BEEFTANK (@BEEFT4NK) February 4, 2014

time to carve some supper shapes

— BEEFTANK (@BEEFT4NK) December 9, 2013

In keeping with this, BEEFTANK's Week 6 opponents -- the Denver Broncos -- will be made up of folks who are responsible for making the worst food in the entire world. I found them, of course, on Twitter.

if you would like to be in the next Breaking Madden, please tell me about the worst meal you have ever cooked

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) October 6, 2014

I received more than 1,000 replies, because the story of contemporary America is one of shame and ignorance of the Maillard reaction. Thank y'all so much for all of them! I received so many extraordinarily sad stories that I doubled the number of Twitter players. Please welcome:

YOUR 2014 DENVER BRONCOS DEFENSE.

While BEEFTANK, of course, holds perfect 99/99 Madden ratings in every category relevant to running the ball, these players are the exact opposite: seven feet tall, 160 pounds and 0/99 in just about everything. They're just going to get stepped on, mostly. Think of them as rugs. Big, extension-cord orange, hideous rugs.

Bringing up the rear is our friend Spilly, undisputed maker of the Internet's most horrible food, who received automatic entry to the roster. His SB Nation post archive is here. Before you click that, know that this is a journey you can't un-walk. The man put toothpaste in his sushi.

The rest of our hopeless Twitter Chef Broncos are divided into four subcategories.

1. THE PIZZAS.

Three hours! Yeah, man, that's how you gotta cook pizza. Low and slow. I usually cook mine at 65 degrees for eight weeks.

2. THE HIGH-FALOOTIN' CATASTROPHES.

It should be noted that Jane was nine years old when she tried to make that blueberry yogurt, which checks out, because kids will think any dangOH MY GOD THAT VODKA SPAGHETTI

3. THE SADDEST MEALS.

I really could have used that pancake batter idea back when, if for no other reason than to add some variety to my exclusive "rice and maybe hot sauce" diet. I don't know if my story is sadder, really, but I do know that I once walked inside a Taco Bell, grabbed a ton of sauce packets, and walked out without buying anything so that I could go home and put it on my rice, because I had nothing to put on my rice, not even salt.

Is that theft? I think it's theft, although I believe I'm safely past the statute of limitations. Maybe some lawyers will show up in the comments.

4. THE NONSPECIFICALLY, BUT VERY, BAD.

Mr. Plante, like me, is a product of Kansas City. "Jiffy Pop with beans, weenies and barbecue sauce" is just a longer way of saying "Kansas City salsa."

And finally we end with PFT Commenter, who is one of two Twitter players who cooked a meal with their own body heat. This story presumably ended with squashed Hot Pocket all over his butt, which is how all Hot Pocket stories end. Whatever happens, the Hot Pocket isn't digested. It's like a plumber's auger, but for people!

THE GAME.

This week, I played as Clarence BEEFTANK throughout the entire game. Every other player was controlled by Madden's AI 100 percent of the time.

There are certain rules you must observe whenever you play as this man:

1. No passing, ever. No exceptions.
2. You can hold the "sprint" button and use the truck stick. You can also jump or dive, as long as it's directly into an opponent. Spinning, stutter-stepping, and juking are strictly prohibited.
3. If, while running upfield, you need to make a slight detour to clobber another player, do that.
4. Follow your dreams.
5. Who is the quarterback well it's you.
6. No passing.

Unlike most episodes of Breaking Madden, there aren't any valuable lessons to learn, and neither is there any real drama to speak of. We know the Jets are going to win, and we haven't established any statistical targets for BEEFTANK to hit. This week is purely a spectacle of a big little happy man.

In the spirit of this, and since Clarence's jersey number is 98, we will appreciate the game as a series of 98-word short stories.

I.

Fifty percent of BEEFTANK is a bowling ball without holes, heaved with both hands over the head and into the pins. Fifty percent is a cursor bound to a three-button mouse, which is itself tumbling about inside a tractor-trailer which has itself jackknifed and is skidding into a ravine. Fifty percent is a fretful toddler, and his tacklers are the Sunday clothes his mother struggles to dress him into. Fifty percent is an agent of love, which in this fallen world counts only as chaos.

That is two hundred percent. He is a very heavy man, you see.

II.

Do Not Touch The BEEFTANK. It's clearly posted, pal, right on that sign over there.

The choice you make will tell us whether you're a human or an animal. A human knows it'll die. It's got the existential dread and whatnot. An animal thinks death is just a smell. It lives its whole happy life fearless of death, because how can you fear death if you don't reckon what it is? Seems like a happy life. Seems like you'd ignore the do's and don'ts of our world.

You're an animal, God bless you. Do Not Touch The BEEFTANK.

III.

BEEFTANK knows when he's being mocked, just as you know you have a sock on your foot: It's information that comes in the mail and goes right in the trash. He doesn't even open the envelope. He's got elsewhere to be and elsewhat to do. Go ahead and offer an eleven-foot high five to a five-foot-tall man. Please do. You're a bronco in the sky and he's a jet on the ground. Down there, he has made six points, and up here, you are struggling to make your first. You cannot beat him this way, or any way.

IV.

NICK FOLK. Ha ha ha ha ha.
COACH. I don't see what's so funny.
FOLK. HAAAAAAA.
COACH. Look, I'm not wearing khaki shorts in the snow. I'm not. I just, our laundry got mixed up and I got BEEFTANK's pants.
ERIC DECKER. Hey, what's up, y'all?
FOLK. He's wearing BEEFTANK's pants. What do y'all think of that?
DECKER. I don't know. I am a rogue assembly of code from an artificial intelligence that has lost its goddang cookies.
FOLK. Two words: Fashion. Fail.
DECKER. I am a virtual, blubbered teardrop rolling down the face of a half-woken soul.

V.

If there were really an unstoppable, immortal, never-passing quarterback in our universe, I'm sure he would attract enormous crowds week after week, but in the absence of real competition, this could not possibly sustain itself. People would abandon the game slowly at first. But when the Jets win 58 consecutive Super Bowls, what's a 59th? It's Old Faithful: You should go see it, once.

There had to be a first to leave . Willie Colon's services were no longer needed. Over his shoulder, he took one last look at BEEFTANK, and he peaced the hell out.

Wrong sideline, Willie.

VI.

It's August. There's a room in Vancouver somewhere. Outside, there's a big sign that says "EA SPORTS." Here in this room, there's a developer, and she's talking to a physics engine. The poor little fella is all buttoned up, backpack on, shoes all shiny, lip trembling, sniffling a little. It's his first day.

"What if they don't like me, Mama?"
"They will, baby."
"What if I gotta render a 10-man dogpile, Mama?"
"Then that's what you're gonna do, baby boy. Remember what I taught you."
"What if I gotta animate a five-foot flying man's arms?"
"Give up immediately."

VII.

How many tacklers does it take to bring down BEEFTANK on the first hit? Well, if you've seen what I've seen, you know that zero is too few. One won't do it. Two is too few. A hundred would surely do it, but that's just wasteful. With that in mind, so is 10^80, which astronomer types believe to be the number of particles that exist in the entire universe. A pile of folks higher than the stratosphere? Folks floatin' off the top of the pile and into space all willy-nilly? No thank you!

But three is not enough.

VIII.

BEEFTANK is inherently distrustful of islands -- "fool's oceans," he calls 'em -- but he agreed to join the Jets upon learning that they actually play in New Jersey. He wasn't so hot on the name, though, because to Clarence BEEFTANK, nothing's sadder than a jet. They rumble and roar and shoot out flames and do all sorts of carryin' on, and Clarence figures they wouldn't have to do that if they ever got to stomp. It's his favorite thing to do. Stomp, stomp, stomp. He wants for nothing.

But then he tried flying. It's like running, except you're flying.

CLARENCE BEEFTANK'S FINAL STATS.

Honestly, all we want to do is see Clarence truck some fools. So here is a whole bunch of that.

Click here to enjoy many more episodes of Breaking Madden.

Did you make it into Breaking Madden? Well, goodness, I hope not. Here are the 21 people who have disgraced their way into Week 7's episode.

Introducing a brand new weekly feature, Breaking Madden Roster Cuts.

Those familiar with Breaking Madden know that I commonly seek volunteers from Twitter to program into each episode. This week, I tweeted:

if you would like to be in the next Breaking Madden, please share the worst thing you have ever done more than once

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) October 13, 2014

It's a question crucial to the Week 7 episode of Breaking Madden. Because these volunteers will be doing something terrible. Over. And over. And over. And over.

And over:

Within two hours, I had received more than 800 responses. Whittling them down was not easy, because as it turns out, y'all make a habit of doing terrible dumb things on the regular.

These are the 21 individuals I've settled upon (10 Patriots and 11 Jets):

PATRIOTS

Tight end: Jeff

@jon_bois I've been to three SMU games this season

— Jeff, Hauntin' (@jmesquire) October 13, 2014

Let's catch everyone up, because 2014 Southern Methodist football is really something to behold. Last week's Shutdown Fullcast podcast estimated that this year's SMU team might be the worst team ever in the history of FBS college football. Ever.

The state of things is such that last week's 45-24 walloping at the hands of East Carolina is unquestionably the high point of the Mustangs' season. These are their other four efforts:

Lost to Baylor, 45-0
Lost to North Texas, 43-0
Lost to Texas A&M, 58-6
Lost to TCU, 56-0

I imagine that bearing witness to this is like watching the final moments of the universe. It's a tremendous spectacle, and you are there to see it. But who will you tell?

Left tackle: Tom Ziller

@jon_bois broke up with a girl via AIM

— Tom Ziller (@teamziller) October 13, 2014

My theory is that AOL Instant Messenger was used widely, and exclusively, by people who were under, say, 23 years old between 1998 and 2005. Almost nobody above that age ever used it. This means that if a database of all AIM dealings exists somewhere, it's weapons-grade crappy immaturity, all of it conducted in the era of the proto-Internet in which everyone was still kind of trying to figure out what being online was, and what the Hell it was for, and what we were doing.

If that database exists, and in case it ever leaks, I may as well take ownership of my greatest shame. When I was 15 I chose the screen name "SkaterHater." I didn't hate skaters, or really have any feelings about them at all. But it rhymed and it was available, and I thought it was so dang special of a name that I tried to craft an entire ideology around why I hated skaters. I think that screen name lasted a day and a half. Ever since that day in 1998, I've gone by my real name on the Internet, because I don't deserve to be able to hide.

Left guard: Gabby Dearth

@jon_bois walked in on my boss taking a dump

— Gabby Dearth (@the_real_gabby) October 13, 2014

"Did you hear about Dennis? Took a dump the other day. One of his employees saw him."
"Ah, man. What happened to that guy? He used to be one of the best pissers in this whole department."
"I told him, man. I told him, 'Dennis, man, you work at the pissin' factory. You can't be foulin' up like this."
"Nope. Nope ... you see it sometimes, though. People lose passion for this line of work, and before you know it, they keep messin' up and makin' shits instead."
"He's gotta get it together. If this keeps up, we're gonna have to can his ass."
"No, no, we can't do that. That's the problem, see."

Center: Tommy Cook

@jon_bois cut a bunch of habaneros, decided to take contacts out. after 5 minutes of pain after taking 1st out, decided to take 2nd out too

— Tom Cooks Ppl Alive (@TommyECook) October 13, 2014

If you go a while without being reminded how stupid you are, pick up some hot peppers the next time you're at the store. Jalapeno, habanero, whatever. Make some salsa or chili or something. By all means, while dicing them up, feel free to repeat "I'm gonna wash my hands" over and over. There's a 50-50 shot you won't do it, and the next half-hour will be Hell for you. Fortunately, there is a home remedy for this, which is to burn your house down and cry.

Right guard: Aidan

@jon_bois drunkenly stole string cheese from the 7-11 cause the clerk had thrown out the hot dogs early.

— Canadian Aidan (@Pulp_Comics) October 13, 2014

Multiple times! Multiple times? Did you not know when you were supposed to show up for the hot dogs? The dang name of the place is dang 7-11!

Right tackle: Jason Harris

@jon_bois I used to piss in the dehumidifier as a kid because I didn't want to go upstairs to the bathroom.

— Jason Harris (@_TracerBullet_) October 13, 2014

"Now, Jason. He was the best damn employee this factory ever had."
"What's he up to these days?"
"Went freelance. Doin' some real art-house kinda pissin' these days. Peein' in dehumidifiers and whatnot."
"Oh, that's poetry."
"That scene's really blowin' up. There's one guy, he gets married and then pisses in his mother-in-law's sink. Divorces, remarries another lady, does it again."

Tight end: Joe Reynolds

@jon_bois I tried to convince my roommates I was hiding a pet cat from them. Long con. Had to buy cat food for my nonexistent cat many times

— Joe Reynolds (@jreynzy12) October 13, 2014

The motive for this completely eludes me, but it's totally doable, because a solid slice of the housecat population goes weeks without being seen.

Also, I really like it when things that could not possibly be gainful propositions, in any way, are described as "cons."

Tight end: Brian Powers

@jon_bois pee'd in the sink of 2 different mothers in law

— Brian Powers (@gringoinbrazil) October 13, 2014

"Wait, that guy's real?"
"I told you."
"You gotta be shittin' me."
"NO. HOW MANY TIMES DO WE HAVE TO GO OVER THIS?"

Fullback: Carl Engle-Laird

@jon_bois Rented Superman 64 from the Blockbusters. Had to go through them rings.

— Carl Engle-Laird (@EngleLaird) October 13, 2014

Superman 64is widely regarded as one of the worst video games in the history of Earth. It was released in 1999, the most appropriate time in which such a crapshit product could be produced.

This is not the first time I've repeated sentiment from FreeDarko's first book, which argues that American pop culture bottomed out in 1998. I'd expand it to a five-year stretch between ... I don't know, 1998 and 2002. Comedy films that were actually funny nearly went extinct. Overly-ambitions CGI often looked like butt. The Internet was growing just visually sophisticated enough to look hideous. Almost all pop music and television was terrible. Creed, for a time, was permitted to peacefully assemble.

I doubt it's an accident that video games, during this period, actually looked worse than they did five years prior. We had 3D games, but developers often seemed to sacrifice all aesthetic appeal, accessibility, and actual working mechanics for the sake of having three dimensions. I'll go out on a limb and argue that, by and large and with exceptions, games made in 1993 were more fun to play than games made in 1999.

And I just remembered this week's theme and it's finally occurring to me that you rented Superman 64 multiple times. I am so sorry.

Halfback: David Conway

@jon_bois Gone to the Times Square Applebee's (over the course of one vacation)

— David Conway (@davidvconway) October 13, 2014

While working in SB Nation's New York offices, I have suggested -- several times and completely sincerely -- that we go to lunch or have a meeting at this very Times Square Applebee's. I can tell that every time I'm saying it, they think I'm joking. I'm not joking. I WANT TO GO TO THE FUCKIN' TIMES SQUARE APPLEBEE'S!

FOOD
FOLKS
&
FUN

JETS.

Linebacker: Matt Johnson

@jon_bois Purchased a Nintendo console on launch. Games? Are you there?

— Matt Johnson (@bigdamnzero) October 13, 2014

Over and over, for a solid 15 years at least, the folks who make the consoles have sent the following message: don't buy a console at launch. The games just aren't there. This was as true as ever with the Xbox One. I'm a giant NBA 2K stan who was ready to excuse away any shortcomings of NBA 2K14, the series' first next-gen title. It turned out to be such an incomplete game that I dug my Xbox 360 back out, played that version of the game, and found it to be 10 times more fun.

Defensive end: Jeremy Dewar

@jon_bois more than once I have tried to get into Breaking Madden only to lose a spot to a Vox employee

— Jeremy Dewar (@Jeremy_Dewar) October 13, 2014

yeah you know what time it is

Defensive tackle: Wes Bulgarella

@jon_bois running as a hobby

— Wes Bulgarella (@THEREAL_boogs) October 13, 2014

Running is awesome if you don't have access to a bicycle. Or maybe you do, but you want to see less of the world and have a bad time.

Defensive tackle: Bryan Brown

@jon_bois Tried to make fried bologna with a lamp.

— Bryan Brown (@brownbearSLC) October 13, 2014

No further questions. This might be the second-worst tweet I received.

Defensive end: PhilKenSaban

@jon_bois gone to jail

— Violence (@PhilKenSaban) October 13, 2014

Twice, huh? Me too! The first time, I was pulled over, and the cop found that I had a bench warrant I had no idea I had that stemmed from an old speeding ticket, so I spent that night in jail. I later had the fine taken care of through my lawyer, who failed to tell me that I needed to take a driving safety class to avoid another bench warrant. A couple years later, I'm pulled over on a routine stop, same thing, off to jail. The next morning, the judge was like, "huh, why are you even here" and immediately released me without any fines or conditions.

The thing I really hated about jail is that nobody tells you anything. Most people -- at least, most of the dudes I was there with -- are in and out of there so often that they know how the whole thing works. If you don't, you're constantly flagging down various guards and clerical people: wait, what happens next? Am I spending the night? Has someone signed me out yet? Can they do that? And you have to stay hyper-vigilant on the door in the group cell. If they call your name to let you out and you're asleep, too bad. You're waiting around for another couple hours at least. There is no clock on the wall and nothing to do, so a couple hours is approximately six years.

Also bad: when a dude is assigned the bunk next to yours approximately two years after learning that there are new charges on him, and that his two-week stay in the system will probably be closer to eight years. I don't know what the charges were, and maybe he's a horrible person. But god dang, just being near him is the most awful feeling in the world.

The sandwiches are terrible.

Defensive end: Jonah Keri

@jon_bois When I was 7, stayed on school bus past my stop, all the way 'til end of route. FREAKED everyone out. Very next day, did it again.

— Jonah Keri (@jonahkeri) October 13, 2014

I bet most kids do this once. I did one time, purely out of curiosity. But Jonah, man:

@jon_bois 2nd day I still wanted door-to-door service, but at least was aware enough to realize I'd get in trouble. So I hid under the seat.

— Jonah Keri (@jonahkeri) October 13, 2014

"Jonah. Listen, young man. If you do this one more time, the Expos will go away forever!"
"Oh no!"
[Jonah never does it again]
[The Expos go away forever still]

Linebacker: Sean

@jon_bois Splint a broken finger to a video game controller. A dreamcast controller for Ikaruga and a PS2 controller for Super Robot Wars.

— Sean (@wildvulture) October 13, 2014

Dude, I think this qualified you, in purely technical but very real terms, as a cyborg.

Strong safety: Dan Schwartz

@jon_bois fall asleep in a Panera Bread.

— Dan Schwartz (@gohoos224) October 13, 2014

I hope this was a Panera Bread on some college campus somewhere. I mean, I wouldn't fall asleep in a Panera Bread, but if this was so, I could at least understand it. I spent much of my one semester of college napping in the fourth floor of the University of Louisville's Eckstrom Library. I bet I'm still the only person to even go up on that floor since 1970. I've been lots of places, and I've never found a better spot on Earth to nap.

Linebacker: Colonel Sweeto

@jon_bois talked at length about beer

— 2014 Toyota Corolla (@ColonelSweeto) October 13, 2014

When you first discover craft beer, it's exciting, and you want to talk about it. After a while, God willing, you'll realize the immutable truth: "most beers are pretty good." No, really. Every beer on Beer Advocate is like a four out of five. Almost all beer is beer is pretty good. Even Coors Light is pretty good. It's all pretty good. Granted, you could probably fill two or three minutes of conversation with "pretty good."

Free safety: The TRP

@jon_bois Drank a bottle of coke that was actually dip spit.

— The TRP (@TRP_QCFL) October 13, 2014

We're almost done, right? We've gotta be almost done here.

Cornerback: Matt Spiegel

@jon_bois College:used to trap & freeze giant cockroaches,take them to restaurants, drop them in the soup, complain & get a free meal. Awful

— Matt Spiegel (@MattSpiegel670) October 13, 2014

OH GOD.

We're stopping here. I quit.

A quarterback sneak from inside your own 1-yard line is a terrible idea. Let's do this hundreds of times.

The "money play," as far as I can figure, is dead.

We all have our favorite money play -- the play that guarantees a big gain every time, or at least most of the time. In Madden '93 we could call "HB Toss Left" with the Bills, and Thurman Thomas would more than likely take it to the house. NFL Sports Talk Football '93's "Fake Punt," one of the most cynical exploitations in the history of video gaming, resulted in a touchdown every single time if performed correctly. My personal favorite is a Kansas City verts play in NFL 2K3: give Tony Gonzalez the lone slant route, have Trent Green chuck it to him, and gain 30 yards against any defense that isn't Prevent.

Madden is now the world's only NFL video game, and year after year, it's pressed into the service of searching itself for non-real things and stamping them out. Even a couple years ago, it was possible for a Devin Hester or Jamaal Charles to field a kickoff, run a sequence of well-timed zig-zags, and score a touchdown every odd chance he got. No longer.

If the money play is extinct, let's turn instead to the most hopeless of offensive plays. If this isn't the very most hopeless scenario in Madden NFL 15, it has to be very, very close:

1. We give the Patriots offense the ball on their own 1-yard line.
2. The defense calls this.

3. The offense calls this.

The quarterback in this scenario, of course, is Tom Brady. We call him Touchdown Tom around these parts, and so it follows that he ought to score a 99-yard quarterback-sneak touchdown on this play. If he does not, we will place the ball back at the 1 and try again.

And again.

And again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again,

and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again.

And again.

Months ago, I came up with this idea with Spencer Hall as we stood around in a Las Vegas casino, a place in which failure is a concept so constant and inextricable that it ought to be awarded its own tape-measure dimension somewhere in space-time.

We were discussing Edge of Tomorrow, this year's criminally under-seen Tom Cruise sci-fi thriller, which they desperately re-titled Live Die Repeat because you wouldn't watch it. It's near-flawless for the film it is: in the future, Tom is a PR man in Earth's military as it battles an alien race that's laying siege to the cities of the world. After talking bunk to the wrong general, Tom is dumped on the front lines of battle despite having zero combat experience. He doesn't know how to use his gun or get his robo-suit-thingy to work, and he dies nearly instantly. It's just a mess.

But then Tom wakes up again in the previous day. He can't die. Every time he's brutally killed in battle, he just goes back in time and wakes up again. His mission is to live the battle over and over and over again, becoming a barely-better soldier each time, until he can fight the perfect battle and save the human race.

The title of this week's Breaking Madden, appropriately, is "Edge of Tom-orrow." Tom Brady will relive the same Hellish scenario over and over. I will re-live it with him. I do not know whether we will get better.

THE PLAYERS.

I needed 21 players -- 10 Patriots and 11 Jets, their Week 7 opponent -- to help conduct this nonsense. I found them on Twitter.

if you would like to be in the next Breaking Madden, please share the worst thing you have ever done more than once

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) October 13, 2014

Click that image to check out this week's Breaking Madden Roster Cuts, in which I reviewed, and was thoroughly disgusted by, the tweets of the 21 individuals who made it into this week's game. Just to give you an idea of what you're in for, this

@jon_bois Tried to make fried bologna with a lamp.

— Bryan Brown (@brownbearSLC) October 13, 2014

was probably only the third- or fourth-worst tweet. You're warned now.

Anyway, all 21 of these folks weigh 400 pounds and are as wide as possible, so as to give Tom as little room as possible to squeeze through. For cruelty's sake, they're only five feet tall, which gives Tom -- by far the tallest player on the field -- an excellent view of the territory he may never reach.

There is one gesture of charity: they're all as slow as possible. This means that if Tom ever, ever can penetrate this defense, he has nothing but daylight.

STAGE I: HITTING THE WALL.

Well, I doubt anyone has ever asked Madden NFL 15 to render hundreds of consecutive dogpiles of squat little folks. It's doing its best, even if "its best" means starting a b-boy at defensive tackle.

This experiment was held within Madden's "Practice" mode, which made it far easier to reboot a game situation over and over. I played as Tom Brady, and only Tom Brady, for hours, and I should note that this was the Tom Brady that came out of the box. I didn't change any of his skill ratings in any way. This is as Tom as Tom can get.

Tom and I abided by one sacred rule: no running backwards and trying to flush out to the side of the field. This must be a true quarterback sneak, one in which Tom plunges through the middle of the line, just as the Devil intended.

And man, we tried everything I could think of. Trucking, juking, diving, spinning, breaking left and right. I even sent Tom to straight-up leapfrog his center, since he was mostly just getting in the way.

Trucking over dudes dong-first was perhaps slightly more effective than one might imagine, but of course, knocking over one guy wasn't nearly enough. Bowling over a guy slowed him down so much and took him so much time that by the time he did, half the Jets defense was all over him.

And while these Jets were slow as Hell, they were also mean as Hell. Well after the whistle blew, Jonah Keri went scrappin' with Tom Ziller, and threw all 400 pounds of him square on Brady's knees.

STAGE II: ANGER.

Tom and I had run dozens of quarterback sneaks, and never even came close to snapping one off. Worst of all, we weren't really even learning anything. No maneuver seemed to work better or worse than any other. My fear was being realized: unlike Mr. Cruise, we weren't improving. A Groundhog Day in which nothing ever, ever changes. That is Hell.

I was fearful. Tom was fucking pissed.

Not only would he not stop fighting, he was throwin' knees into gullets when I told him to jump.

Brady was going down, but some Biblical shit was going down with him. He wore this force field of hate that would sometimes just send fools flying.

I mean, look at this. Throughout the history of Breaking Madden, I've almost never seen a super-powered man-God do things like this. And yet, Tom Brady -- kinda-old, unmodified Tom Brady -- was out here using a free hand to chuck a poor 400-pound fellow out of the frame, head over heels.

It's 200th and 99, and Tom ain't happy about it. DON'T PISS OFF 200TH-AND-99 TOM JUST YET.

STAGE III: MANIA.

A few times -- I'm talking maybe three times out of 250 -- I felt like we were getting close, but I think my idea of "close" was severely warped by our unbending vector of failure. Tom just got past four guys! Oh yeah, there are seven more guys. Tom trucked a guy! Oh yeah, well now he's standing flat-footed in no-man's land.

Tom began to hallucinate. The ball, it was ... moving. Slowly, but ever forward ...

And now you are running, Tom! Run, Tom! Run! You are free!

RUN!

And he runs, but from who? Where are the Jets? Where did they go? It doesn't matter. He is finally running.

And then, in this fever dream, the ball begins to creep backwards, back to the one-yard line, back to his little Hell.

No. Nooo. It was real. It was ... real ...

And all of a sudden, there he was, at the one, his opponents snapping back into view. He had, in fact, not run anywhere at all.

Do not follow your dreams, Tom. They will only break your heart. If you abandon your hopes, they will never hang above your head. And if a Hell has nothing above it, it is no Hell at all. It is mere living.

STAGE IV: AN END.

There must be an end.

[UPDATE: If you watch the video below, you'll know what The 344th is. We've got the story on that here, as well as an extra GIF.]

Click here for many more episodes of Breaking Madden.

It wasn't supposed to happen. This episode of Breaking Madden was supposed to be a story of defeat. But sometimes I am not in charge.

Firstly: this entire post is one giant spoiler. If you haven't yet seen this week's episode of Breaking Madden, you can do so here.

This week, I also debuted a new feature called Breaking Madden: Roster Cuts, which is all about the people who made it into the game and the horrible, horrible things they've done. That is right here.

Week 7 of Breaking Madden was supposed to be an honest-to-God story of failure. I certainly could have tweaked Madden's settings in any number of ways, but I chose to use the version of Tom Brady that came on the disc. The idea of trying the impossible, failing, trying again, and failing again was really compelling to me. In the original post I explained my love of the movie Edge of Tomorrow, but you know what movie I'd be even more interested in? A movie in which Tom Cruise's character never learned. Never improved. Just died forever. Maybe he'd have spiritual awakenings and come to better understand his existence and whatnot, but he'd never escape his fate.

The completely unexpected happy ending arrived on my 344th try. I made sure to take an extra shot of it:

As I mentioned, I tried everything I could think of to get Tom Brady to score a 99-yard touchdown up the middle on a quarterback sneak. I jumped, I dove, I trucked, I juked, I protected the ball, and I spun.

Here's the thing: when I hit the B button, Tom would always spin to his right. This would allow him to shed one tackle, which wasn't really that useful, because that tackler would slow him down so much that four other dudes could jump on him. So I started messing with the right stick, and remembered I could spin him the other way. Whether this is an effective strategy in the broad sense, I can't really say, but it does seem clear that a left spin is the only thing that could have possibly worked in that play.

This was a total fluke that has nothing to do with how good or not-good I am at Madden. I don't think I could repeat it if you gave me a thousand more tries. This time, it just wasn't up to me.

In total, 12 of you will be featured in this week's Breaking Madden. If you're one of them, I'm sorry. Let's talk about the worst days at work we've ever had.

This week's Breaking Madden is gonna be one big ol' bear of a time.

Sunday night, Peyton Manning broke Brett Favre's career record for passing touchdowns. He now has 510. In this episode, Brett Favre's mission is to surpass that number, and he only has one game in which to do it.

Five hundred and eleven (511) touchdowns, in one 60-minute game, with all NFL rules in place. No cheats or glitch exploitations or funny stuff like that. In other words, this will be a realistic simulation of a game that could be reproduced in real life. After performing a couple short trial runs and working out the math, I sincerely believe this to be possible, at least mathematically.

I'll explain the dark science behind this on Thursday, when Breaking Madden drops. But as you can probably imagine, this game will take millions of billions of thousands of years. When you score a touchdown, you have to drag your extra-point unit on the field, kick it through, kick off to the other team, change possession ... that takes some time. In a normal NFL game, you might expect to do that, what, eight times?

The idea of going through that over 500 times, frankly, is filling me with real dread. Ahead of me is a journey of agonizingly rote repetition that might take 12 consecutive hours of playing. Maybe 15. Shit, 18? I really do not know. But I will do it, because it is my job. I haven't worked a 16-hour shift in years. This might be the single worst shift of employment I have ever had.

If I must go down this road, I will do so in the company of those who might understand me.

if you would like to be in the next Breaking Madden, please tell me about the worst shift you ever worked at any job

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) October 20, 2014

As always, thanks to everyone for all the responses. My own mentions have turned into one of the most fascinating reads I experience on a week-over-week basis. It's something. Cutting the field down to a dozen wasn't easy.

Four giant Green Bay receivers. Eight tiny, helpless Denver defenders (four cornerbacks and four safeties). Here they are.

@jon_bois double shift at the olive garden on my 21st birthday two weeks after i moved to a new city, then went home and the power was off.

— CHILLS FANGSTOCK (@sundownmotel) October 20, 2014

This is intensely sad in so many dang ways. When you're turning 21, you're probably still used to a life in which every one of your birthdays is special, and on these days, you are special. And on this birthday, or some other birthday in your twenties, it really sinks in that when you're a grown-up, you are no longer special by simple virtue of existing.

If Bill had just moved, he may not have yet had any friends in this new city. That means that maybe, when he worked a double on his birthday, nobody even tried to talk him out of it.

But what's really killing me about this is Bill coming home to a dark apartment (my guess is that there was some kind of foul-up with the change in occupant). Like a 21-year-old dude is gonna be like, "welp, time to dig out my emergency candles!" You just lie your sorry ass down and look at the dead of night and either sleep or do nothing. Of all the non-serious gut punches your morale could take, this is right down there.

This happened to me multiple times in my twenties because I either couldn't or didn't pay the power company. The folks they send to shut off the box are masters of their craft. Like, they probably all belong to an ancient guild and meet at an inn every fortnight to share secrets of their discipline and drink mead and wear animal hats and shit.

When they come for you, they're in an unmarked vehicle, and they will seriously sit there for minutes while they case the joint and make sure you won't be around to confront them. I've seen them do it. And if you do happen to get home from work at the right time and catch them at random, they'll slyly move to a neighboring building and fake like they're poopin' in someone else's soup, not yours. You nod, they nod, you walk upstairs, and sucker, you're in the year 1700. Churn you some butter, son.

@jon_bois Bartending 4pm-1am Thanksgiving day. $2 shots of Wild Turkey. Everybody cried.

— Sara Kate W (@SaraKateW) October 20, 2014

Now this is one of those times when individual notes of our world's minutiae are played together to strum a chord of sorrow. It's festive and well-meant cheer in bed with existential sadness. It's the crying clown, it's the grape stomp lady on the ground as the local news continues to play the canned bouncy carnival music, it's the wailing little boy with the skinned-up knee and the "Mr. Tough Guy" sweater, it's the person who got dumped at a Halloween party, crying into the ShamWow that was crucial to the ShamWow Guy costume. NEXT SLIDE.

@jon_bois man came in and asked to use the employee only bathroom. We said ok. He smeared poop all over the walls and ceiling. No janitor.

— Chemmy (@felixpotvin) October 20, 2014

At last count, there were 23 instances of "poop" in my mentions. You will bear the cross for them all.

@jon_bois I had to work at the dump one summer day and the supervisor wouldn't let us in to get water b/c he was pooping in a Big Gulp cup

— ryan van bibber (@justRVB) October 20, 2014

Actually, you know what, you get in there, too. In fairness to your boss, there isn't a much more appropriate place to take a dump than the dump, but I'm wondering how you collected these facts, and how that conversation went, exactly.

"Hey, let me in."
"NOT RIGHT NOW I AM POOPING"
"Okay, whatev--"
"I AM POOPING IN A CUP"
" ... "
"IT'S A BIG GULP CUP"
"I really don't need to kn--"
"IT'S A PROMOTIONAL 'THE CONSTANT GARDENER' BIG GULP CUP. IT IS THE CUP OF THE FILM"
"..."
"IT'S FOR A LIMITED TIME"

@jon_bois Was a gravedigger for a summer - every shift was the worst. Finished a shift once and realized I left my soda cup in a grave.

— Patrick Pearson (@Ppearson281) October 20, 2014

This is accidental genius. You could have skated by on sympathy for such a long time. "Cut me a break, okay? I BURIED MY POP LAST WEEKEND."

@jon_bois I worked in a Delta bagroom at Hartsfield-Jackson one summer. Any shift that involved the flight to Accra or Lagos was murder.

— John Davis (@johnmdav) October 20, 2014

I try to steadfastly adhere to my "all the folks at the airlines do a great job" belief system, because in my experience this is nearly always true. One regrettable exception is the way Delta books connecting flights that go through Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson Airport. I've lost checked baggage three times over the last couple of years, and only got my person to the second plane via riding a train and sprinting through concourses.

Seriously, nothing but respect to the people whose job it is to actually get bags from Concourse A to Concourse F within 25 minutes. By virtue of Hartsfield's enormous sprawl, and also by virtue of riding the underground train that deprives one of visual spatial reasoning, I would submit that the size of the airport is impossible for anyone to truly quantify. Concourse F might be in Arkansas.

@jon_bois I worked at a video store. A teacher at my school came in and rented porn, then returned the tape 45 minutes later.

— Down Goes Brown (@DownGoesBrown) October 20, 2014

Some men, merely by their wordless doings, write epics in the souls of those they encounter.

@jon_bois I was a canvasser 4 charity and I stupidly told a man I liked his eyepatch and then he screamed "THERE'S NO EYE UNDER THERE" at me

— Emma Jo (@diegosafety) October 20, 2014

oh god

@jon_bois In Egypt, my first real training exercise. Smashed the roof of a Humvee with my tank's gun tube. Almost got fired FROM A GOVT JOB.

— Matt Ufford (@mattufford) October 20, 2014

Oh damn, dude. When I think of what it must take to get fired from a government job, I just look to one of my favorite historical Onion articles of all time. From "Russians Continuing To Kill Rasputin":

In later years, Rasputin was set on fire, dissolved in acid, boiled alive, flensed, fed molten lead, ground beneath the wheels of a freight train, thrown from the top of St Basil's Cathedral, impaled on sharpened stakes, buried under 10 tons of hot gravel, struck at high speeds by an automobile, strapped to the mouth of a great cannon which was then fired several times, bolted to the keel of an icebreaking ship which was repeatedly run aground, drawn and quartered, crucified, run through with a cavalry spear from bowel to gullet, vivisected, and eviscerated. Furthermore, throughout the process, he was continually re-poisoned, re-stabbed and re-shot.

@jon_bois I was made Nicholas Sparks's personal gofer at his signing at my bookstore. He gave me unsolicited writing tips the entire time.

— Andrew Ferguson (@epiktistes) October 20, 2014

GUUUUHHHHHHHH

I'll be honest: I don't have any sort of well-formed opinion on Noted Author Nicholas Sparks. Or at least, I didn't until this tweet.

I've got a Thing when it comes to writers giving unsolicited writing advice. It's one thing, of course, if someone is actually asking you for advice, or if you are that person's editor or professional colleague or some kind of deal like that. But writing, especially creative writing, is a hopelessly individualized experience, and the tools you've got will ultimately inform your process, and nobody knows your toolbox like you do. The one who tries to marm the way you go about it is the ding-dong at the bar who yells "SHOOT IT!" every three minutes at the hockey game.

And actually, I know I'm becoming the monster I despise here and whatnot, but I'd be cool with it if writers never talked about writing ever again, at least not in public. Plumbers aren't out there building plumbing about what it's like to be plumbing.

@jon_bois Black Friday at Radio Shack. Had to get in at like 5:30am for 10 people buying RC cars. No one else came in for four more hours.

— Scott Wells (@BZatBON) October 20, 2014

Well, naturally, you made the cut. We gotta look out for each other.

During Black Friday 2004, I worked at a Radio Shack in a near-dead mall. Business had been so slow, it's almost like the company had refused to close it as a point of pride. We normally had only three or four employees, since that's really all it took to operate the store, but in preparation for Black Friday, the company tripled our staff. So it's five in the morning, and 12 of us are standing there when we open the doors.

Thing is, this is the year Radio Shack decides, "nahhhh, we're not gonna run a newspaper insert," despite the fact that this is the most crucial driver of business for any big retailer in 2004. I have no idea what their logic was behind this.

So we open the doors. Nobody walks in. An hour passes. One old man has walked in to buy some batteries. I think we saw our second customer at the three-hour mark. Nobody made any commission at all. The only way Radio Shack could get a dozen people into that store is to hire them to stand around in it. An unanticipated logistical downside of hiring such a large staff to such a small store: the manager had trouble finding a spot to be alone to cry.

Actually, that shift is worse than this one. Forget what I said.

Peyton Manning is now the all-time leader in touchdown passes with 510. Brett Favre's mission: to surpass that in a single game. We realize how impossible this sounds.

I would like to throw 511 touchdown passes in a single game of Madden NFL 15. I will not disable any rules or exploit any glitches. These will be legal, honest-to-God touchdowns in a standard 60-minute football game. If I score 511 of them and make every extra point, the final score will be 3,577 to 0.

Y'all, I'm serious. Stick with me here.

The significance of the number 511, of course, is that last week, Peyton Manning threw his 510th career touchdown pass and surpassed Brett Favre as the all-time record holder.

I have stated many times on record that, in my estimation, it sure would be something to see Brett lace 'em up and give it one more go and show all these young kids a thing or two. Further, I have posited that the ol' Gunslinger still has some magic left in that arm of his. Finally, and this is crucial, I hold it to be true that it just hasn't been the same without the Gunslinger out there runnin' and gunnin' and finding a way to win any which way he knows how and goin' out there and choppin' it up and just havin' some fun out there.

The game plan for this particular episode was inspired by valued Internet subscriber and www.twitter.com visitor Keith Mullett:

@jon_bois I told you, breaking madden week 17: the gunslinger takes back his records from peyton

— Keith Mullett (@KeithMullett) October 19, 2014

I laughed it off at first, but my heart began to fill with dread as I realized that throwing 511 touchdown passes in a game might actually be possible, at least on paper. I began to wish I'd never even considered it, because once I knew it was within the realm of possibility, I couldn't not try it. Trying it would probably mean a single game that lasted 14, 16, maybe 18 hours.

My first step was to find companions who would understand my struggle.

if you would like to be in the next Breaking Madden, please tell me about the worst shift you ever worked at any job

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) October 20, 2014

Turns out, lots and lots of people have really terrible work-shift stories! Narrowing the field down to 12 was a challenge. Click here to hear their stories. One individual had a boss who took a dump in a 7-11 cup. Another accidentally destroyed a Humvee with a tank. Still another worked a double at the Olive Garden on his 21st birthday after moving to a new city with no friends. Remarkable, all of them.

Brett Favre and I will not break any NFL rules along our journey, but we will definitely tip the scales in our favor in every way that is legal. Nowhere in the rule books does it forbid the Broncos from fielding 5'0 cornerbacks and safeties who are bad at everything. Nor does it disallow the Packers from suiting up four unstoppable 7'0 wide receivers.

Nor, unfortunately, is there an NFL rule that prevents some doofus from wasting hours and hours of his life in pursuit of something he won't even be able to prove he did. See, as longtime readers of Breaking Madden know, the game stops counting once you reach 255 points. After that, you can keep scoring as many touchdowns as you want, but they won't show up on the game's scoreboard. There is no screenshot I could possibly take that would prove to you that I really did do this.

But I will know. This isn't about you.

THE STRATEGY.

This number is everything:

7.045

In order to score 511 touchdowns in a 60-minute game, I will have to score one touchdown per 7.045 seconds of game clock. After running a few experiments, I think this strategy is the most effective and reliable.

1.

I should mention here that I'm controlling both the Broncos and Packers in this experiment. The Broncos will be completely aiding and abetting Brett Favre's quest. This is legal! If you've been watching the NFL for very long at all, you know it's perfectly legal for a team to defeat itself.

On the kickoff, I'll move the Broncos' return man out of the way to ensure he doesn't field the kick. The ball will drop out of the back of the end zone for a touchback, and no time runs off the clock. This is the easy part.

2.

Oh, there's another thing I forgot to mention! Peyton Manning is now the Broncos' field goal kicker. He is terrible at it, which is important. I need him to make the worst, shortest attempts possible so as to conserve game clock.

The duration of this play varies, but it usually runs about three seconds off the clock. The Packers take possession.

Here, the Broncos call a field goal block, which means they have no secondary. The Packers call a Hail Mary, Favre throws a bullet as soon as he possibly can, and we've got our touchdown. Boot the extra point, which takes no time off the clock, and we're back to Step 1.

If every step is properly executed, scoring a touchdown takes between six and seven seconds -- just barely under our limit of 7.045 seconds. If y'all can think of a more efficient means of doing this, I'd love to hear about it in the comments, but this strategy was the most efficient I came across.

And dang it, I think that means something. It would appear as though 511, or a number very close to it, is the logical limit of touchdowns that can possibly be scored in one game. Why wouldn't the career touchdown pass mark arbitrarily be 350, or 617, or 820? Why would it sit right there at the precipice?

It all joins together. It's like watching glass shatter in reverse. The numbers have been patiently waiting for me. I have to do this.

THE GAME.

Madden is going apeshit in a hurry this week.

This year, the franchise introduced a new feature to the kicking game. It displays an array of paths that estimate your kick's trajectory and helps you to aim a little better. It's pretty neat! Except for when your kicker is Peyton Manning.

I'm not even touching the controller there. The game is just totally flipping its shit. This display is implying that Peyton might somehow kick the ball 30 yards backwards. Lord knows I tried, but I never managed to pull that off.

Kicking was far and away the toughest part of this whole thing. I had to keep it away from any Packers who might catch it and run it back to the house. I also ran the risk of hitting one of my dudes in the butt.

That was bad news. It seems that if your field goal attempt hits a teammate and then falls on the ground, Madden counts it as a fumble. Precious seconds go off the clock, especially if I didn't realize what happened and I'm not quick to call a timeout. And remember, this is such a tight operation. Assuming I did everything exactly right 511 times (which is probably not humanly possible), I'd only have around 200 seconds of game clock to spare. Losing 10 seconds on some random play could scuttle the whole deal.

So, Peyton. Peyton ain't too good at all this kickin'.

Peyton would much rather be throwing the ball, as evidenced by this play, which I ... guess is legal?

He kicks the ball to his offensive lineman, who takes it and rumbles forward for a few yards. It's the opposite of an armpunt. It's a legpass!

I mean, it's certainly illegal to throw the ball to an offensive lineman, since he doesn't line up as an eligible receiver. But hell, ain't mean you can't kick it, I guess! By exploiting a loophole, Peyton Manning just blew our understanding of legal offensive football wide open.

If Madden was correct in allowing that play, that is. We might not wanna trust Madden.

This is the game's play-by-play report from a test run I did. Those of you who are sports experts may find this to be unusual!

Peyton Manning attempted a field goal from his own 20, but rather than turn over possession to the Packers, the game let the Broncos keep the ball. Not only that, the game decided to re-spot the ball all the way across the field to the Packers' 13. Madden was trying to hide the ball from me, or maybe it just no longer understood what the hell was going on.

With 14:01 remaining in the first quarter, I was feeling an ounce of optimism and a bucket of dread. The good news: I scored my ninth touchdown in the 59th second of the game, which meant I was keeping a pace of one touchdown per 6.55 seconds. I was a half-second-per-touchdown ahead of schedule. If sustaining this pace for a minute was doable, it meant to me that whether or not I succeeded was entirely in my hands.

The bad news: I looked up and realized the first minute of game clock had taken up 30 minutes of real-world time. By that pace, the game would take me 28 hours. Now, that first minute was so slow in part because I kept pausing and recording replays, but bare minimum, each game minute was bound to cost 15 real minutes. That meant 15 hours of gameplay, unless I took breaks, which I would have to do ...

... for the time being, I decided to stay the course. Things got messy. On one occasion, I accidentally called a Denver pass, and completed a pass despite trying to throw the ball away. That cost me about 10 seconds. Another time, a field goal was caught and returned for a Packers TD, which of course was of no use since it wasn't a passing touchdown. More seconds wasted.

I just couldn't slack off at all. I had to be careful to do everything the same way every single time. Example: never, ever call trips right on a Hail Mary.

My receivers took up so much mass that they essentially played defense against one another. It didn't matter which button I'd pressed, they all decided the ball was for them.

We've seen this time and again in Breaking Madden: when some stuff gets weird, even the stuff that shouldn't be weird gets weird. This, for example.

wheeeeeeeeeee

An outlandish game score should have absolutely nothing to do with a game's physics engine, right? No matter how ridiculous it is? Why would a 217-0 score make the physics mess up? And yet, the game throws a tantrum and yanks Ryan Van Bibber 30 yards downfield for no reason. This is the first time I've ever seen that happen.

It's like the various elements of the game -- the textures, rendering, physics, scorekeeping, artificial intelligence, all that -- is part of one big game of telephone. Except, instead of a coherent message being gradually deteriorated, everyone's just screaming. It's just a room of people screaming, "AAAAAAAAAHHHH."

Here's a man whose hand has been replaced with a football.

This poor fellow's ball-arm probably isn't all that difficult to explain. There was just an error in the collision detection or something. The engine was trying to make the ball be in his hand, and it messed up terribly. What I can't explain: he's holding his arm in the sky, which I never see a ball carrier do, and which no ball carrier would ever do. Just holding it aloft in horror as the townspeople prepare either to hoist him around as some sort of demigod, or devour him alive.

THE RESULTS.

I'm not gonna try to hold y'all hostage. Look, I failed. I do believe I successfully proved that it was at least possible, and that in a real-world football game, with both teams working toward the same goal, 511 passing touchdowns could happen. But it didn't happen.

Here is why it didn't happen.

Click here for many more episodes of Breaking Madden.

This weekend, we witnessed one of the greatest performances in football history, and one of its grandest catastrophes. Both of them happened on the same field. If we can't truly understand what happened at Heinz, let's at least talk about it.

I will tell this story backwards, because the first act of this story, condensed into a single image, is a rocket ship full of manhole covers at 25,000 feet and falling, its engines burning and whipping it into a tailspin and toward the ocean of a cursed, deserted Earth.

We will start with what happened Sunday at Heinz Field.

I. HEINZ FIELD, SUNDAY, OCT. 26, 2014: THE REBIRTH OF OFFENSIVE FOOTBALL, WHICH WAS NECESSITATED, BECAUSE IT HAD DIED THE DAY PRIOR.

Ben Roethlisberger, statistically speaking, gave the greatest passing performance in the history of the NFL. That statement is completely arguable, of course, but I place it at the top. Here are his numbers:

• 522 passing yards (tied for third-most in NFL history, 5 yards shy of the record)
• Six touchdowns and no interceptions (which had previously been done only 10 times in NFL history)
• Completed 40 of 49 passes (81.63 completion percentage)

The completion percentage is key. Take a look at this thing, if you would.

Those dots represent the 275 most prolific performances in the history of NFL quarterbacking. In terms of quantity -- passing yards -- Roethlisberger is third-best. And in terms of quality -- completion percentage -- he's also third-best!

The quality of the Colts' secondary could be debated, certainly, but by definition, any defense that allows 500 yards on 49 throws is going to look sorry. This entire Sunday afternoon was a celebration of offensive football, and Roethlisberger wasn't the only one celebrating.

Andrew Luck countered with exactly 400 passing yards of his own. This was only the 12th game in the history of the league to see at least 400 yards of passing from both quarterbacks.

The story of the NFL is one of sea changes, and this is a big one. As you can see, there was a scattering of 800-yard shootouts throughout the 1980s and '90s. And then, between 1995 and 2010, it never happened once. And now, within a five-year window, it's happened eight times.

It was a stunning display. And yet, in its wake, Heinz Field is by no means a cathedral of offensive football. Sunday's game was merely an attempt to settle a debt that, in fact, still may not be paid in full.

II. HEINZ FIELD, SATURDAY, OCT. 25, 2014: THE DEATH OF OFFENSIVE FOOTBALL.

The day before, on that same field, Pitt hosted Georgia Tech. At large, there was plenty of offense in this game: Georgia Tech won 56-28, and both teams finished with more than 500 offensive yards.

But the way this game started for Pitt ... I had never seen this in my entire life. It wasn't frigid. It wasn't raining. I would never expect such a thing to ever happen in this level of competitive football.

PITT'S FIRST POSSESSION (SECOND OFFENSIVE PLAY).

This fumble is a story of defensive ability. On the opening possession, Pitt quarterback Chad Voytik runs right on a keeper, and Tech safety Isaiah Johnson masterfully rips away the ball.

PITT'S SECOND POSSESSION (THIRD OFFENSIVE PLAY).

This fumble is a story of stupid, unfair rules. It looks as though Pitt is turning things right back around. On the first play of their next possession, running back James Conner busts loose for a 74-yard run. Tech's D.J. White catches up to him right at the end, and Conner loses his grip on the ball about a foot away from the goal line. The ball bounces out of bounds in the end zone.

Now, if the ruling here reflected any level of intuition, maybe the officials would give Pitt the ball at the 1. Maybe they'd call it a touchdown. Something like that. Instead, the officials were bound to ruling consistently with one of the dumbest rules ever devised in the hearts of humans: if you fumble the ball out of your opponent's end zone, they get the ball at the 20.

Pitt's first two possessions: fumble, and fumble.

PITT'S THIRD POSSESSION (FIFTH OFFENSIVE PLAY).

This fumble is a story of collapsed fortifications. Pitt's offensive line can do absolutely nothing to stop or slow down linebacker Paul Davis, who sprints right into the backfield and causes yet another fumble. And look at Tech's No. 36 up there. Georgia Tech have marshaled so many men into Pitt's backfield that he's hardly even needed. He looks like he's playing contain on the dang running back.

Pitt's first three possessions: fumble, fumble, fumble.

PITT'S FOURTH POSSESSION (SIXTH OFFENSIVE PLAY).

This fumble is a story of what happens when you don't lie down. Wide receiver Tyler Boyd takes a screen pass a couple yards downfield, is rolled up, manages to roll over his tackler without touching the ground, and keeps his legs moving. Once again, it seemed that for Pitt, things went right only as long as they needed to in order to then go wrong.

I switched over to watch this game seconds before this play, because everyone on Twitter was hollering about Pitt and their three fumbles in five plays. There was no way this had happened again. It was surreal.

Pitt's first four possessions: fumble, fumble, fumble, fumble.

PITT'S FIFTH POSSESSION (13th OFFENSIVE PLAY).

This fumble is a story of fate. Up to this point, the fumbles had followed all sorts of different themes. There was the strip fumble, the unfair rule fumble, the collapsed-line fumble, the "you did it to yourself" fumble. And now, at last, we had an economy-grade invisible dogpile fumble.

On this fifth possession, Pitt managed to string several plays together without fumbling. I knew it would happen again, and that's not because I'm any manner of football expert. I just listen when the fates are screaming, and so, probably, did many of you who were watching. As this play unfolded, the ball was completely obscured, and there was no way we could have known for sure that it was a lost fumble. Neither could Tech's No. 6, Chris Milton, who certainly didn't see a damn thing. But he signaled that Tech had it, and I had no trouble believing him.

Pitt's first five possessions: fumble, fumble, fumble, fumble, fumble. This was a mathematical catastrophe.

Again, there is a lot of foolin' around to be done with those numbers. Due to confidence issues of the ball carrier, or an opportunistic defense emboldened by its last fumble recovery, or any other thing, I'd believe that one fumble makes a second fumble more likely. Regardless, I doubt it moves the needle far enough to make this anything but a miraculous event.

If either of these events -- the Steelers game or the Pitt fumbles -- had happened independently of one another, they would still have been so remarkable that I would have written about them. But they happened on the same field, on the same weekend. It is a gift-wrapped story of a series of high crimes against the ideas and dreams of offensive football, a sunset, a sunrise, and an attempt to atone for it and restore honor to that cursed ground.

Ben Roethlisberger threw for 522 yards. I don't think that was enough. Five fumbles in five possessions. For this we require a priest or a bulldozer.

People have been eating lunches ever since the 19th century. Perhaps you even ate one or are eating one today! Tell me about it in the comments, and I'll rate it between 1 and 10.

Lunches have been eaten in America, Greenland, and many other countries for well over a hundred years. Now that you're all caught up, let's take some time this afternoon to dwell upon our lunches. Well, your lunches. I have not eaten lunch. I will subsist upon the satisfaction that I know everything about food and am in lesser company.

If you're new to LUNCH JUDGMENT, this is what we do:

1. You leave a comment describing the lunch you ate or are eating today.

2. Time permitting, I will issue a 1-through-10 rating for your lunch, and do my best to explain my ruling. I certainly won't have time to get to every lunch, but I will rate as many as I can.

3. You will accept this ruling, however favorable or harsh it may be, as absolute, unimpeachable, and superseding of all legal judgments at the federal, state, or municipal levels.

So let's hear it, friend:

What is/was your lunch today?

Mark Sanchez has once again found himself a starting quarterback in the NFL. Can a team get to a Super Bowl with The Sanchize? This is our mission. No matter the team. No matter the cost.

This episode of Breaking Madden will have no GIFs. I haven't created any Twitter players. I haven't changed a single one of Madden's settings or player ratings. This week, the game will be a near-exact replica of what it was like before I ripped it out of the box. Those were simpler times, for the game and for me.

This is the mission:

A team will get to the Super Bowl with Mark Sanchez as its quarterback.

No matter how long it takes. No matter which team it takes. No hacks. Mark Sanchez getting to a Super Bowl is the hack.

Welcome to this Breaking Madden Special Event:

Music: "Star In The Ghetto" from Prince Phillip Mitchell's 1978 album, "Make It Good"

ESTABLISHMENT OF MOTIVE.

I hope the best, of course, for Eagles quarterback Nick Foles, who broke his collarbone last Sunday and figures to be out for about six weeks. But Mark Sanchez now has the keys to the Philadelphia offense for at least a month, and if I had to choose any quarterback in football to take his place, Mark Sanchez would be that quarterback.

It's clear that Mark Sanchez doesn't have abilities that are commensurate with the fifth overall pick the New York Jets spent on him in 2009. His four-year tenure as Jets starter, in fact, was by some measures the worst tenure in the history of NFL quarterbacks. This chart comes from a post I wrote on Sanchez a year ago:

That is a very long list of quarterbacks, and Mark Sanchez the Jet is at the very, very bottom. He instantly achieved celebrity status in New York, and reached the AFC Championship in his first two seasons. The Jets regressed after that, and so did Mark, who finished with an abysmal 66.9 passer rating in his fourth and final season in the Meadowlands.

Last season, Sanchez was ditched in favor of Geno Smith, another rookie who was thrown straight into the fire, and who has played just about as badly. The same even goes for Michael Vick, who hasn't been able to get much of anything going in his limited time under center. So this is my question: How much of Mark Sanchez's failure belongs to him, and how much belongs to the Jets?

Well, let's have Mark play a whole season with each NFL team and see what's what.

THE RULES.

1. I'll install Sanchez as the starting quarterback of each NFL team, one at a time, and using Madden's in-menu simulator, I'll sim an entire season of every team's Mark Sanchez Experience.

2. If Sanchez still can't take a team to the Super Bowl after 32 tries, I'll look over our body of research, identify the teams with whom he reached his greatest potential, and start him on those teams until he reaches the Super Bowl. I will do this for as long as it takes, because this is important. As @sorryeveryone, my friend and favorite Jets fan, told me, "Everyone deserves life after the Jets."

3. Whenever we do reach the Super Bowl, I'll actually watch the game itself, but I won't actually play. I'll simply call whichever play Madden suggests, put the controller down, and let Mark do his thing, whatever that may be.

4. This experiment ends once Mark plays in the Super Bowl, win or lose. He will have one shot at a ring, and one only.

5. No matter how long this takes, I will absolutely not, under any circumstances, employ any cheats or shortcuts. I will never edit Mark's player ratings to make him better. If I did that, he would not be Mark Sanchez at all.

6. There is only one break from reality: I've turned injuries off. This is only to ensure that Mark plays an entire season. I think this is entirely fair, since all his opponents will, too.

At this point, some of y'all might not see what the big deal is. "Just put him on one of the best teams, like the Broncos," you say. "Sim it like five or 10 times. Surely you can at least make it to the Super Bowl after a few tries with an awesome team."

Ha. Ha ha ha ha ha. I remember when I was like you.

PHASE I: FOR EVERY TEAM, A SANCHIZE.

I was fully prepared for the possibility that Mark wouldn't reach the Super Bowl with any of the NFL's 32 teams on the first go-around, and good thing I was, because he didn't.

This is how each team finished.

Only five teams were able to post winning records with Mark taking all the snaps. As it happens, all five made the playoffs, which made me hopeful. But as Mark tends to do, he lost both conference championships he played in: With the Steelers, he lost the AFC Championship to the Patriots, 29-16, and with the Cowboys, he suffered a 55-3 blowout in the NFC Championship at the hands of the 49ers.

At this point, I began to worry about time constraints. Like, real-world time constraints. I came up with the idea for this experiment Monday morning, mere hours after the Second Mark Sanchez Era had begun in earnest. The process of trading Mark to a team, simulating an entire season with that team, and recording all the data took about 20 minutes. So, including breaks, simulating Mark through the entire league took around 14 hours. Breaking Madden must go up by Thursday.

What if this just doesn't happen? What if I literally don't have enough time to get Mark to a Super Bowl? I tried not to think about it. I would spare no cost to give Mark Sanchez enough opportunities to succeed.

PHASE II: FINDING THE TEAM THAT IS RIGHT FOR MARK.

Within the first round of 32 simulations, the success/failure spectrum was considerably large. This was good news, because it offered me clear-cut information on which teams were bad for Mark Sanchez, and which were good for him.

I was curious, so I looked up the real-life passer rating posted by each NFL team in the 2014 season to date. Then I compared that to Mark's simulated passer rating with that team.

Mark's numbers were almost always worse. Half the time, they were way, way worse.

Mark outplayed only four real-life teams in terms of passer rating, and even then, the edge was only marginal. The Jets, though. The god-dang Jets were the team Mark outplayed the best. That is suspiciously perfect.

One thing I regret about this experiment is that I can't really give you definitive proof that I didn't tweak any numbers, cook the books or just make this junk up entirely. But long ago, I decided that Breaking Madden would be ethical journalism. I am a beat reporter. I may be interviewing only a half-broken fortune teller machine, but I will not misquote it, and I will hold this mic to the mouth of Zoltar until my arm goes numb.

Well. Let's decide on a team.

We're just trying to push Mark into the Super Bowl, so team wins should be the only thing that really matters. I've found, however, that it's become important to me that Mark plays within a system that fits him, so I've taken his personal passer rating into consideration as well.

The two best bets appear to be Pittsburgh (13-3 record, 80.3 passer rating) and Denver (10-5-1 record, 93 passer rating). I have to go with the Steelers. A passer rating that scratches at the 80s is probably just about as much as we could ever expect from the real-life Mark. If the Steelers can regularly post around 12 or 13 wins a season, they have a great shot at a first-round bye, which gives Mark one fewer opportunity to fail.

We're headin' to Pittsburgh, y'all.

PHASE III: THE STEELERS ERA.

sigh

Those 13 wins during the first journey through Pittsburgh were a cruel aberration. Over the course of two decades' worth of seasons, Mark's Steelers never managed more than 11 wins. We made the playoffs only three times, and we never even reached the AFC Championship.

In terms of real-world time, this phase didn't take quite as long as the last one, since I didn't have to pop out of the simulator and trade Mark Sanchez each time. It still took quite a while. Many of you probably would have bailed on the Steelers far sooner than I did, and you would have been right to do so. I was just trying to Trust The Process, y'all.

I finished Season 52 at around noon on Wednesday. The week was disappearing on me. After 20 disappointing seasons with the Steelers, Mark and I switched horses.

PHASE IV: THE BRONCOS ERA.

In our first season with the Broncos, we finished with a 10-6 record. In our second, we lost the AFC Championship by four points (to, naturally, the Steelers).

Once again, I found myself hopeful. Mark Sanchez will never be confused for Peyton Manning, but in Denver, he has a fantastic receiving corps and as much protection as he could ever ask for. In Pittsburgh, he was commonly sacked 30 times a year; here, he was once sacked only seven times in a single season.

Still nothing.

You know what's a lot of fun? You know what's a real sack o' yams? Going to the playoffs for the first time in an hour, taking a deep breath, hitting the "Advance Week" button, losing 27-24, and realizing it might be another hour before you even get that far again.

The shame of it is that Mark Sanchez played well with the Broncos. Really well! Over these 20 seasons, he averaged a 92.7 passer rating. One season, his passer rating was 102.6, and he threw for 5,291 yards -- only a couple hundred shy of the all-time NFL record. I just could not understand how a quarterback with those numbers could ride with the 2014 Broncos for 20 years and never once reach the Super Bowl.

By Year 72, it was about 6 p.m. Wednesday evening. I panicked. I switched teams again.

PHASE V: THE DARK ERA.

At this point, I reduced my level of Trusting The Process to mere Stalin-esque levels. I decided I would implement Five-Year Plans. If Mark couldn't get a team to the Super Bowl within five seasons, I'd cut bait and move on.

The Dallas Cowboys era is too sad to chart. Mark threw the ball fairly well -- his passer rating averaged about 85 -- but the Cowboys managed only one winning record, and never made the playoffs.

We moved on to Chicago, where Mark had played well during Phase I. When the they staggered to a 3-13 finish in their first season, I cut my losses immediately.

Can we stop for a second and talk about how ridiculous this is? Mark Sanchez has not been able to reach a Super Bowl despite PLAYING FOR SUPER BOWL-CALIBER TEAMS FOR 78 YEARS. There is no way Mark is this awful. Madden is shitting me. It has to be.

Or maybe the game's just shrugging at me. "Mark Sanchez, Super Bowl Quarterback? I ... I'm sorry. I don't know how to do that. I don't know how to show that to you.

"I don't know what that looks like."

PHASE VI: THE RAVENS ERA.

Under pressure, I decided to go with my gut. That is exactly what Mark himself would do, of course, which was hardly encouraging, but the Ravens just seemed like a good fit. In Phase I, he'd finished 10-6 in Baltimore.

And the real-life Ravens, well ... they're recent Super Bowl champions, and perennial playoff contenders, and they have accomplished these things with Joe Flacco as their quarterback. Flacco is so up-and-down as to be unknowable. If Flacco had been drafted by the Jets, and Sanchez by the Ravens, would they have lived opposite careers? I don't know. But it feels right.

In the first video for this episode, which I released Tuesday, I promised that I would get Mark Sanchez to a Super Bowl, no matter how long it took. But it was Wednesday night at this point. I was running out of hours, much less waking hours. I realized that after simulating for 100 years, I would have to stop, and the next day I would trudge unshowered to y'all and dump a heap of losses at your feet, and nothing more.

What started so well in Baltimore turned sour in a hurry: lost AFC Championship, lost AFC Championship, no playoffs, no playoffs, no playoffs, no playoffs, no playoffs, no playoffs, no playoffs.

I let out some bitter laughter at one point. At the start of this experiment, I had originally intended to play until Mark Sanchez had won a Super Bowl. Then I scaled it back. "Well, I'll just stop once he reaches the Super Bowl, and end the experiment there, win or lose. That will keep things reasonable." If I had resolved to keep going until he actually won a Super Bowl, we might be playing into the 38th century.

It's gotta end, Mark. No matter what happens, you didn't deserve all this losing. You deserved so much better. Godspeed, Mark.

Music: "Come On Up To The House" from Tom Waits' 1999 album, "Mule Variations"

Click here for many more episodes of Breaking Madden.

This week's Breaking Madden requires the services of 21 individuals who are terrible at pushing buttons. These are their stories.

This week in Breaking Madden, I will be playing as Marshawn Lynch, and so will all of you. You don't get to see the game until Thursday, but in the meantime, you can tell me which buttons to press by filling out this quick form.

Let's dance:

Mashing a sequence of buttons wouldn't get Beast Mode very far upfield, so to help him out, I'm replacing the entire Chiefs defense with players I found on Twitter. There are 21 of them. They are all five feet tall, weigh 160 pounds, and are as slow, weak, and unthinking as I could make them.

Since this week is all about indiscriminate button-pressing, these were the sorts of folks I was looking for.

if you would like to be in the next Breaking Madden, please tell me about a time you pushed a button you really shouldn’t have

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) November 10, 2014

Sincere thanks, as always, to all y'all who responded.

INTRODUCING THE NEW KANSAS CITY CHIEFS DEFENSE.

Defensive end: Walter Baumann

@jon_bois fire alarm lever my first day of kindergarten. I had just watched a cartoon where someone did that and then got ice cream.

— Walter Baumann (@ThatOneWalter) November 10, 2014

Maybe you're mis-remembering, or there was some splinter group of the Weathermen who infiltrated the Cable in the Classroom industry and started cranking out petty eduterrorism. And I mean, I couldn't blame you, because kids have little option but to work with the information they're given. When I was seven, an adult told me that due to a water shortage, people in California had to pee in the toilet and pull a cord and the urine would feed up to the shower head and they had to shower in their own urine. I held this information to be true for years.

Defensive end: @LisaFurioso

@jon_bois I called the nintendo help line as a 5 year old to figure out how to plug in a SNES and cried once I heard someone pick up

— meryl streep of E3 (@LisaFurioso) November 10, 2014

I have no doubt that the person on the other end of the Nintendo help line delivered excellent customer service. In the pre-Internet era, people on the other end of a long-distance communication actually held up their end of the bargain. At some point around 1995, I was looking through an old SimCity box and found a postage-paid postcard that read, "mail this in to join the SimCity fan club." The game was more than five years old at this point, but stuck it in the mailbox anyway out of pure curiosity.

A couple weeks later, I get this typed letter, personally addressed to me, that explains that the fan club promotion had concluded years ago and apologizing for the inconvenience. If this were the Internet Era we were talking about, someone would have made a "pffffft" noise and thrown it in the garbage. They wouldn't even wad it up first. They'd just hold it flush against their palm, crudely swing their arm forward like a catapult, and watch that flat slip of card-stock waft slowly to the floor like a dead leaf.

Long-distance stranger accountability has just eroded. People at the cable company will lie that they've scheduled a repair truck just to get you off the phone. A third of my email isn't answered in a timely fashion because the tab says "Inbox (4)" and I crumple within myself and compress into a single 190-pound molecule of despair.

A thing about period pieces that genuinely amazes me: a Roman general can send a message from Gaul to Caesar and it actually gets there. Hell with all the swords and flaming arrows and whatnot, the logistics are the real fireworks.

Defensive end: Griffin McElroy

@jon_bois the time i reformatted my PS1 memory card w/o understand what that meant, erasing my brother's 70-hour Final Fantasy 7 save

— Griffin McElroy (@griffinmcelroy) November 10, 2014

Everyone has a story like this, right? Like, specifically this one? You hit "reformat" because you didn't understand what "reformat" meant? Let's conservatively estimate that 100,000 Americans have done this, and that each one lost, I don't know, 20 hours' worth of work. That is 83,000 days, or 228 years, of American labor that was completely destroyed because some chucklehead decided, "let's use the word 'reformat' instead of 'erase' and not explain what it does."

Defensive end: Journo Horse

@jon_bois@edsbs i pushed the emergency stop button at a Sunoco station because all the pumps were taken.

— Journo Horse (@AmericanMatt5) November 10, 2014

For the uninitiated: this is what it looks like when you do that.

Defensive tackle: Chris White

@jon_bois playing ding dong ditch as a kid, i didn't ditch quick enough, my neighbor caught me then talked to me about jesus for an hour

— Chris White (@CarryTheFight) November 10, 2014

The Worst Ding-Dong Ditch Players Ever: A People's History

5. The kid who forgot the "ditch" part and just stood there
4. The kid who forgot the "ding-dong" part, stood on the porch for a minute, and then just kind of wandered away
3. The kid was grounded so he would just ding-dong ditch his own front door from the inside of his own house
2. The kid who would just hang out in a literal ditch and set bags of dog shit on fire
1. MURDERERS AND CRIMINALS!

Defensive tackle: Zachary Pligge

@jon_bois I pushed the stop button in a elevator as a child because I didn't want to get off until the song was done.

— Zachary Pligge (@PliggeTheFallen) November 10, 2014

When i was four I honestly just assumed they really quickly re-arranged the same floor of the dang Dillard's to put different stuff on the shelves. I always wanted to stand right outside the elevator so I could watch them do it. Actually, you know what, scratch what I said earlier, kids are just plumb stupid.

Linebacker: Pete Segall

@jon_bois drunk in a london phone booth dialing 999 repeatedly, forgetting that that's the number for the police there

— Pete Segall (@petesegall) November 10, 2014

Theory: this is the entire Dr. Who universe. He thinks he's this mega-powerful Time Lord who has hundreds of episodes' worth of adventures, but he's actually just a shithammered dude in a phone booth in Britain somewhere.

Linebacker: Taylor Gabbard

@jon_bois I pressed play on Dexter on Netflix. All the way through the end.

— Taylor Gabbard (@Tgabbard87) November 10, 2014

Behold this poor man, who probably started watching because someone told him it was good. Y'all people who recommended this show to others carry the same weight as those who recommended Scrubs or Lost. Innocent people wasted their time on televised vanilla, and that's on you.

Linebacker: Ragan

@jon_bois one time i turned on the garbage disposal after shoving a whole, raw potato down the drain. I was drunk and it looked hungry.

— Ragan (@ImDupes) November 10, 2014

well i think that that was very nice

Linebacker: D Guar

@jon_bois It was 1978...TRASH COMPACTOR

— The Real D Guar (@Real_DGuar) November 10, 2014

If any element of this tweet was missing, this person wouldn't have even contended for a spot. If the year is 1996, or if TRASH COMPACTOR isn't capitalized, or if literally any of this were elaborated upon, it's not even considered. You are great at social media and you probably killed a guy.

Cornerback: Caitlin Kelly

@jon_boispic.twitter.com/XHLnCCnPC3

— Caitlin Kelly (@atotalmonet) November 10, 2014

yeah

fart

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) November 3, 2012

fart

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) September 15, 2012

fart

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) July 4, 2012

fart

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) February 10, 2012

poop & boogers

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) January 27, 2013

boogers

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) May 20, 2012

scheduled tweet: boogers boogers boogers boogers boogers boogers boogers boogers boogers boogers boogers boogers boogers boogers boogers

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) October 1, 2012

poop

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) June 29, 2012

Linebacker: Matthew Anderson

@jon_bois When I was 17 and worked at a grocery store produce dept. I tried to run a coconut thru a garbage disposal

— Matthew Anderson (@thew1242) November 10, 2014

When I was 18, my friend and I decided to buy a coconut at the grocery store, and for some reason we were hellbent on opening it before we left the parking lot. After a half-hour of throwing it at stuff, I finally ran it over with my Oldsmobile. It worked. I still do not know how to properly open a coconut.

Cornerback: Gregory Martin

@jon_bois Every button in Space Quest or any other 90s Sierra game that was an instant 'you lose.' Every time. All of them. So many deaths.

— Gregory Martin (@yaleosubmarine) November 10, 2014

Oh, this makes my heart hurt. I'd like to tell y'all about my personal worst video gaming moment of all time.

When I was eight I played King's Quest V religiously. It's a pretty difficult game for an eight-year-old in the first place, and on top of this, my family's computer had a very small hard drive, so I just had to use a single save file over and over. This means that if I saved my game after making a crucial mistake, there was no going back, and all was lost.

That dead guy down there is King Graham. See, in order to scale this cliff, you have to tie a rope to something and climb your way up. There are two objects you can tie your rope to: the super-conspicuous branch, and this overhanging rock that blends in with the scenery so well that you don't even realize it's a thing you can interact with.

If you choose the overhanging rock, you're safe. If you choose the branch, the branch snaps and you fall to your death. I tied my rope to the branch and then saved the game. The game doesn't allow you to untie your rope from the branch, nor are you able to go back and find another rope somewhere. It's a million times worse than a "game over." The game was over, but it didn't let me know, so my little eight-year-old ass spent hours scouring this entire screen for some pixel I could click that would let me undo what I'd done. Over those hours, it slowly dawned on me that this game, a game I had spent a month playing, was over because I clicked the wrong thing.

Still sore about it. If I still haven't gotten over it two decades later, I probably never will.

Cornerback: Maureen Williams

@jon_bois Might have emergency stopped a log flume ride at a certain Orlando theme park with my boobs. On accident. More than once.

— Maureen Williams (@cflmo) November 10, 2014

misandry

Cornerback: Mack

@jon_bois pressing the button to sign up for Google plus

— Mack |-/ (@MackTouchton) November 10, 2014

The worst thing about Google+ is that it effectively killed Google Reader, which might be my favorite service in the history of the Internet. It was imperfect and amazing. It's how I made a lot of friends, and it's also how I found out SB Nation was hiring over five years ago. Reader had sort of a cult following, and by no means did Google -- a company who's always tooling around with floating Internet balloons and self-driving cars and whatnot -- lack the relatively tiny resources to spare to keep it going.

But they killed it, maybe because they wanted us to migrate to the not-nearly-as good Google+, or maybe out of indifference. At any rate, Google is Eddie Murphy, and this is when they started to Daddy Day Care everything.

Free safety: Adam Hansen

@jon_bois at the Mendenhall Glacier in Juneau, AK. The question mark was so inviting. And then nothing happened pic.twitter.com/MqKpEnjMgB

— Adam_Hansen (@adam_hansen) November 10, 2014

Well, now you can tell everyone you've played Myst. "You push a button that does nothing" is 95 percent of the game. The other five percent is opening magical books with little TVs in them that show strange men who scream at you.

Free safety: rewenzo

@jon_bois I borrowed about $250,000 for law school in New York with a push of the "submit loan application" button.

— rewenzo (@rewenzo) November 10, 2014

This process should be verified via a bow-tied gentleman in NORAD with lock-and-key-authentication. He cackles, preferably.

Linebacker: Sir Deli Meat

@jon_bois I was running sound for a play. I pressed the "go" button with the wrong CD loaded. Which was why Juliet died to "Love Shack"

— Bill Murray (@SirDeliMeat) November 10, 2014

This is funny, but what pushed you over the top was the promise that I'd be able to put DELI MEAT on the back of a football jersey.

Strong safety: Emily

@jon_bois pushed the panic button when I worked at a hibachi restaurant. Thought it was a doorbell that was hidden for some reason.

— MLTurkeyLeg (@mlerowley) November 10, 2014

My mentions were full of restaurant employees who pushed panic buttons out of curiosity, but Emily is the only one who thought it was a doorbell. If it's a doorbell, how does that work? Do you use it to get inside the building you are already inside of? (P.S. I would push that button 110 times out of 100.)

Strong safety: Alex Nichols

@jon_bois in middle school i created a macro on MS Word in the computer lab that replaced the word "the" with "HELP I'M TRAPPED IN COMPUTER"

— Alex Nichols (@alexnichols11) November 10, 2014

The Internet is a billion times better than it was a decade ago -- not just technologically and aesthetically, but in terms of the quality of the content and the amazing things people are doing. Message boards, however, are a thing I miss.

They're still all over the place, of course, but I miss moderating my own forum. Our boards at Progressive Boink were sort of a miniature proto-Twitter, and y'all better believe we used word censors all the time. If someone tried to include a sexist or homophobic or ableist slur in a post, for example, the system would automatically replace it with

there's that word again

or

I have a lot of thinking to do, please excuse me

or something of that sort. We weren't the PC Police, we were a paramilitary PC junta. I miss the petty tyranny.

Defensive tackle: Nate Fisher

@jon_bois changed my ATM setting to Korean

— Nate Fisher (@fishingwithnate) November 10, 2014

Been there. I mean, it was my own dang fault for selecting a language I didn't speak out of pure curiosity, but its refusal to give me some sort of lifeline to find my way out of it makes that ATM the second-worst ATM I've ever used.

The worst ATM I have ever used is the Fifth Third Bank ATM in Louisville International Airport. It's still right there on the second floor, just inside the doors, and its continued existence is an affront to us all.

1. It's one of those "you don't get your card back until the very end" ATMs. Banks seem to have wised up to the fact that this is not the way to go about it, and newer machines usually just let you slide your card, or stick it in and out, but
2. This ATM is pretty new. High-definition color touchscreen and all that. But it still holds your card prisoner until you're done, as though it needs to admit it for a goddang MRI.
3. The problem, of course, is that folks are totally liable to forget to take their card when they're done. The more hassled and/or in a rush they are, the more likely they are to do this. This ATM is in an airport.
4. This ATM is literally three steps from the airport's Fifth Third Bank location. If the card is found by someone and returned to them, and the card isn't a Fifth Third card, they immediately destroy it.

I've only lost two cards in my life, and both happened at this machine. The last time, I left my card in the machine and returned literally 90 seconds later to the sound of my card being shredded to Hell. With zero cash on me and my flight minutes from taking off to a city with none of my banks in it, I had to cancel my trip. When I did, the folks at the airline kiosk offered knowing grimaces. "The Fifth Third machine, right? Mhmm. This happens a lot."

Seriously: can y'all think of any reason why ATMs should hold your card hostage the whole time? Any at all? Let me know, please.