It's not fair that Jon gets to play Breaking Madden all by himself. So this time, he invited thousands of you to push the buttons for him. This is going to be so stupid.

I regard "Twitch Plays Pokémon" as one of the greatest moments in video gaming history. It's still going on as we speak, actually.

The premise, for those unaware: there's a live video feed of a console playing Pokémon, and to the right, there's a chat room. Any chucklehead can swing by and enter a request for the machine to press a button. At the peak of its popularity, the screen was an incomprehensible waterfall of up, down, A, down, right, B, and so forth. The Internet populace worked together to play the game, although the input was so dissonant that it would often take the little dude an eternity to walk across the room. We, The Internet, eventually beat the game in spite of this. It's among our greatest triumphs.

This Breaking Madden is even dumber than that. It might be the single dumbest episode in Breaking Madden history, which is saying a great deal:

At least the folks playing Pokémon could see the dang screen. Y'all had no such luxury. And by "y'all," I mean everybody who filled out the form I published earlier this week. Here's the deal:

THE RULES.

1. I will play a game of Madden as the Seahawks, and I'll play against the Chiefs, their Week 11 opponents.
2. Every offensive play I call will be a run play that gives the ball to Marshawn Lynch.
3. I will never touch the left thumbstick on the controller. That is the one that, uh, makes your guy run.
4. I will only press randomly-selected buttons from the form you filled out.

Thank y'all so much for your button-mashing. In all, I received 3,063 submissions. Your options were as follows:

A (stiff arm). One of Beast Mode's signature maneuvers. Can send a fool to the mat, but only if it's timed correctly. You had no way of timing it, because you entered it into a spreadsheet days before the game was played.
B (spin). The most Madden of moves. For decades, this has been the bread and butter of everyone who barely knows how to play. Somewhat effective.
X (dive). I would imagine that at least half the time, this button is pressed in error. It's like if every laptop had a big honkin' "QUIT WITHOUT SAVING" key in the middle of the keyboard.
Y (hurdle). One of the funnier buttons, to be sure. For our purposes, it's also effective: since we can't use the left stick, we have to rely on any move that sends us upfield. Hurdling does. Very slowly, but it does.
LB (pitch ball). A lateral, in other words. Sometimes, Marshawn will hold the ball out but refuse to pitch it. Sometimes a teammate will catch it and run with it, and sometimes he'll fling it 20 yards in the wrong direction to absolutely no one.
RB (protect ball). Boring, but a lot of you picked this one because you value safety.
LT + X (precision dive). Depending on the situation, Beast Mode will vault into the air, ball up, and hit the ground like a meteor.
LT + Y (precision hurdle). I still haven't figured out how this is any different from a normal hurdle.
Right stick (up, down, left, right). With this stick, we're able to juke left, right, or backwards. I soon learned that if you're not touching the left stick, flicking the right stick up to truck a guy doesn't work. This move does absolutely nothing. Apologies to the 707 of you who pushed this button.

Without a left stick, Beast Mode pretty clearly needs some help. I didn't change any of his player ratings (except for Stamina, just to make sure he stayed on the field for every play), but I did reduce the Kansas City Chiefs defense to a gaggle of five-foot, 160-pound helpless babies. Longtime readers of Breaking Madden know the drill by now: I made them as slow, weak, unthinking, and oblivious as possible.

THE NEW CHIEFS DEFENSE.

I found them on Twitter, as I always do:

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

These really are some special folks. If you'd like to get to know them, click on over to this week's Breaking Madden Roster Cuts. Please enjoy the stories of:

- a drunk man who fed a potato to a garbage disposal because he thought it looked hungry
- a sound operator who accidentally blasted "Love Shack" during Juliet's death scene
- a woman who pressed a restaurant's panic button because she thought it was a doorbell

and many more. (Appropriately enough, I also pushed a button I really shouldn't have this week: after spending several hours creating this roster, I accidentally saved over the file and had to start over from scratch. Me: I'm just like you.)

THE GAME.

You're probably thinking, and understandably so, that we will get absolutely nowhere with Marshawn Lynch. Well, this ought to set the table:

No left stick is necessary; our friends on the Chiefs are doing the work for us. These little fellas never bring down Beast Mode on the first try, and when they touch him, they trigger an automatic "shed tackle" response, and Marshawn trots a few yards upfield. It's like riding a wave.

As such, this is a profoundly weird-ass game, right? The other team serves to help us, and is basically on our side. With our dissonant and often-destructive button-mashing, we're actually our own opponents. This is confusing. Do we even want to win this game? In retrospect, I wish I'd asked that question in the form.

Lordy, this is so stupid.

Anyway, I did ask you folks to explain why you pressed the button you pressed. So when a play completely went to shit, I at least had some closure:

Sometimes the precision dive was just a dive. Valued Internet subscriber Untilitkillsyou did not pull off the precision dive he wanted, but he did manage to sabotage our efforts.

People loved hitting the dive button. I don't know why. So many times, the makings of something good would be promptly destroyed because someone demanded I hit X.

I should note that there was no rule against multiple submissions. Valued Internet subscriber @emerszi took full advantage of this:

This individual, who submitted "time to dive" exactly 127 times, ruined a fair number of plays. This individual also perfectly demonstrates the spirit of Breaking Madden: "just do whatever because who cares." If anything ever means anything at all, it ought to be regarded as an accident.

Another popular option: the lateral.

This was arguably the funniest way to ruin a play. Marshawn did this well over a dozen times, but thankfully, he often just refused to pitch the ball.

I'm not sure of his rationale, but this is perfectly representative of the real-life Marshawn Lynch: he does what he wants to do, and he doesn't do what he doesn't want to do. He doesn't want to be tackled, no matter how many Saints are on him. He does want to eat Skittles. He doesn't want to talk to the media. He does want to drive a golf cart around on the field. He has done nice things, and he has done bad things, and he has literally precipitated an earthquake. Our own Matt Ufford wrote a longform on Beast Mode that remains one of my favorite sports pieces I've read all year. I can't recommend that highly enough.

Oh look, a person named "Dog Wizard" would like to play! All right, "Dog Wizard," let's see what you got.

Did you see that? Marshawn Lynch somehow just trucked a dude from behind with his ass. Anderson, number 35, executed some of the worst tackling form I've ever seen. He stretched out his arms, planted his face directly into the ball carrier's ass, and slowly crumpled into a lifeless heap. R.I.P., Anderson. He died of butt.

The "precision hurdle/dive" remains sort of a mystery to me, but occasionally, the result was something special:

@Stevenkeers' rationale is perhaps not the easiest to explain, but it's clear that this move came from a spiritually true place, and it inspired Beast Mode to take to the sky like a human rainbow. He completely vaulted over that little dude. He's only five feet tall, sure, but I think this is the first time I've ever seen that.

Sometimes, y'all just let him beast.

I hope this helps somehow, Anonymous. The true stiff arms were few and far between during this game, since Madden is kind of fickle in the stiff-arming department. Given this, and that we were deprived our truck stick, this was actually not a very Marshawn Lynch affair. Don't worry, I'll fix that before we wrap up here.

Meantime, the game went bonkers again.

It would be one thing if Justin Britt, number 68, simply got in the way and knocked Marshawn over. But look, he actively reaches out his arm and rips his own teammate to the ground. Hold on, let's take a second to examine the allegiances in play here:

1. The Chiefs are basically gut flora. Just like gut flora don't actively want to help you break down that hamburger, these Chiefs don't seem to want ... well, anything. I don't know if they're evolved enough to want anything. But by virtue of the way they are and the three and a half things they know how to do, they make it possible for Marshawn Lynch to move upfield. If the Seahawks were the only team on the field, they'd actually be playing worse.

2. The Seahawks are managed by all of us, and I'm firmly convinced that half of us are trying to ruin the Seahawks. Additionally, we just witnessed the Seahawks AI blatantly tackle its own man.

I no longer understand what is going on or who any of us are or what we want. Next slide.

Watch Ragan, number 28, while keeping your eye on Beast Mode, number 24. Ragan goes up next to him and just stands there. This is the portrait of an artificial intelligence in the process of un-learning its pathos.

I say this as a lifelong Chiefs fan: I took no small amount of delight in seeing how often the Chiefs hit the ground. At the end of any given play, at least half the team would be lying around like they got unplugged from the Matrix. Since I started Breaking Madden last year, I've always wanted to knock all 11 players on the ground at the same time. I've never done this, and don't know whether it's possible. In the meantime, this will do nicely.

This was my favorite moment of the week.

I think I pressed "stiff arm" here. Whatever I did, I scared the living Hell out of number 33. He ran up to Beast Mode only to scurry off in terror. He did this three times. I want to reiterate here that I had nothing to do with that little fella's idea. That was all Madden's doing. Look, y'all, this game is working through some very difficult issues, and we need to respect that.

THE RESULTS.

Final score:
Seahawks 76, Chiefs 32

Beast Mode's stats:
126 carries
998 yards
7.9 yards per carry
11 touchdowns
357 yards after first hit

Yep. No, I know. I know how profoundly stupid this is. We didn't even touch the stick that made the player move. You folks played this game from New York and Atlanta and Goodland, Kansas and Bremerton, Washington, and you couldn't even see the screen.

And y'all killed it. You did it with the help of our Twitter volunteers, sure. But you won. You beasted. I saw the entire damned thing, and I still can't believe it.

The one thing we really missed out on, regrettably, was Beast Mode being his true Beast Mode self. Trucking fools, stiff-arming jokers, watering the grass with all those chuckleheads. So for this week's final video, I decided to play as Marshawn Lynch myself and destroy some suckers. If that's your thing too, then here you go:

Click here for many more episodes of Breaking Madden.

Saturday, Wisconsin running back Melvin Gordon ran for nearly a quarter-mile and busted the record for most rushing yards in NCAA FBS history. It was bonkers. To the charts!

No. 20 Wisconsin's Melvin Gordon rushed for an NCAA FBS-record 408 yards in a 59-24 win against No. 16 Nebraska. And then he sat down for the entire fourth quarter. He didn't even need an entire game.

It was an all-or-nothing sort of deal for Mr. Gordon.

Once he busted through the Nebraska secondary, he was just gone. Consider that he had:

• one run between 10 and 19 yards
• one run between 20 and 29 yards
• one run between 30 and 39 yards
• five runs of 40 yards or longer

In hindsight, that kind of makes sense, because you can't really set the all-time rushing mark in three quarters without blowing the doors off the opposing defense every 20 minutes. But we've never seen a game like this from a running back at this level of football.

A running back's performance, of course, is completely inseparable from that of his opposing defense. How much of this was Gordon cranked up to 100, and how much of it was owed to Nebraska's defense having a spectacularly cruddy day? I'm not sure, but keep in mind: Nebraska has been pretty good against the run this season.

A game like this is not supposed to happen against the 19th-best total run defense in the nation. It's supposed to happen against, say, 1999 UTEP, a mediocre team with a poor defense, which previous record-holder LaDainian Tomlinson torched for 406 yards.

So, to sweep all this up again: Melvin Gordon rushed for more FBS yards in a day than any man who has ever lived, and he did it against a run defense that had been effective, and he did it in only three quarters.

In all, Wisconsin rushed for an incredible 581 yards (versus only 46 passing yards). Let's put 'em sideways, as first suggested on Twitter by our pal Ryan Nanni.

So close. Wisconsin rushed for 1,743 feet, just 33 shy of the height of One World Trade Center.

One more note: Gordon was on pace to rush for 544 yards, had he played in the fourth quarter and kept getting the same amount of touches. That is nearly a third of a mile.

Did you tell a story awkward enough to land yourself a roster spot in this week's Breaking Madden? Well goodness, I certainly hope not. Here are the 19 Twitter players who find themselves in Week 12 of this nightmare.

For the second straight week, this will be a crowdsourced Breaking Madden: y'all call the play and tell me which buttons to push and when. I still don't know how this is gonna turn out:

Music: "Go Deep" by Janet Jackson"

Among other things, I gave y'all the option to keep Matt Stafford standing in the pocket for as long as 10 seconds before throwing the ball. If he wants a chance at staying on his feet for that long, he's going to need some help, and that's where this week's Twitter players come in: six enormous, 400-pound Detroit blockers, and 11 five-foot-tall, completely helpless New England pass rushers.

This is how I found them.

if you would like to be in the next Breaking Madden, please tell me about the most awkward 30 seconds of your life

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) November 17, 2014

See, Madden's physics tend to have some trouble when it comes to making giant people interact with tiny people. It's gonna get awkward. I should have said "10 seconds," but at the outset, I really thought it might be possible to keep Stafford in the pocket for half a minute on a reliable basis. That isn't the case, so I set the max value to 10 seconds so as not to scuttle the whole dang thing before it gets going.

Please meet:

THE TWITTER PLAYERS OF BREAKING MADDEN: WEEK 12.

LIONS

Left tackle:

@jon_bois I called my teacher mom and I pooped my pants on the same field trip. in the eighth grade.

— ☆彡☆ミ　☆彡 (@LeonardCowalski) November 17, 2014

Though our friend Leonard doesn't mention it, it's implied via the prompt he's answering that this happened within a 30-second span. That's really funny, and if both happened simultaneously, it is the funniest event in the history of our planet.

I've written about this before, but I was homeschooled for a few years, so my mom was my teacher. My favorite moment of the entire experience: I went to a museum on a field trip with some other homeschooled kid. A few public school classes were there, too. It was a weekday morning, so it was natural for the public-school teachers to assume that I was part of their school's group.

So I'm just wandering around the museum and taking stuff in at my own pace, which, essentially, is what homeschooling was for me. A teacher (or chaperone, or whoever) is herding her students to another room. When I don't follow them, she turns and snaps her fingers at me. "Get moving!" she barks at me.

I'm indignant. In a moment that is wildly over-representative of exactly how cool I was at age 12, I stare at her for a moment, and I say, "no," and then I turn and walk away. Anyone who's ever been a kid ought to fully understand how incredible that felt.

Left guard:

@jon_bois i was in seat e when seat f came out to seat d

— bryan (._.) (@imhatchc2) November 17, 2014

Oh no. Forgot for a second that it was an intimate moment. Being seated in the middle of any conversation is the worst sociospatial arrangement I can imagine. A few months ago, I was on a flight from Atlanta to Las Vegas, seated in Seat E between two old guys who were friends. I offered to switch seats so they could sit together, but neither of them wanted to sit in a middle seat.

So that was nearly four hours of conversations about guns and aircraft design and all the wrong kinds of politics. Sometimes they'd try to loop me into the conversation without any real indicator that they were opening up the line. And then they started talking about Ferguson, saying the kinds of things that ought to get a dude smacked, but there was no way I was going to say a word about it, sandwiched between them and 20,000 feet over Mississippi.

w e l c o m e t o h e l l l l l l

Center:

@jon_bois when i first got my license i walked out to my car, opened the door and sat alone in the back seat, forgetting i was the driver.

— Nick (@GuardianNJL) November 17, 2014

Suggestion to everyone who owns a car: next time you walk out, take a moment and just sit in your own back seat. I know it's dumb. Listen, I know. But the fight you're putting up against this idea ought to indicate to you that there's an explorable issue here. For real, how long have you been driving this car? Two years? Five? And I can guarantee with virtual certainty that you've never sat in the back seat. Sex, maybe, but you've never just sat there. That seems like a shame. Just give it a try.

haha i'm just kiddin', that shit's stupid

Right guard:

@jon_bois My 4 year old son repeating over and over again in the store "I will not bring a gun to school"

— Southey Blanton (@southey) November 17, 2014

agree

Fullback:

@jon_bois I tried to take a clandestine picture of someone who looked like a white Russell Westbrook doppelgänger but forgot my flash was on

— Gregg Fox (@0utfoxed) November 17, 2014

This is in a different category entirely, but at a driving safety class, I once saw a guy try to take a creep shot of a woman. Well, I didn't actually see it happen, but it was pretty clear to me and to everyone else in the room. It made both the bright, shadow-casting flash and the unnecessarily loud shutter noise, both of which he evidently forgot to disable. He sputtered out a couple words of what was probably going to be something like, "heh! was just playin' around with m'phone," and maybe someone would believe him if he didn't go beet-red in the face, stand up, and leave. Humiliation is amazing when it's deserved.

Right guard:

@jon_bois I tried to explain to a friend of mine that doesn't use twitter who and/or what Jon Bois is

— JQ (@Quintetokounmpo) November 17, 2014

First, I am honored that you would even want to! Second, I don't really tell a lot of people who I am either. I really love my job and feel very luck to have it, and also, I don't really know how to talk about it with people who aren't plugged into Sports Internet to begin with. I mean, just to run through a few options of self-identification:

"I'm a writer." A hundred million people are writers.
"I'm a sportswriter." Now I'm expected to be an authority on sports, or at least a sport, which I'm so not. Not only that, I sometimes am so otherwise occupied that I might miss the one thing literally everyone in the sports world is talking about on a given day. Someone could easily, and understandably, walk away with the impression that I completely lied about what I do.
"I produce a mixed-media web series called Breaking Madden. Basically, I use th--" GOD SHUT UP.
"I'm a web designer." This is great, but completely untrue.
"I work on computers." Yep, this one.

PATRIOTS

Defensive end:

@jon_bois 14 y/o me got period during 2Q at Georgia Tech game, had to ask my mortified dad if Bobby Dodd Stadium sold tampons (they didn't)

— annie (@persicapit) November 17, 2014

Atlanta sporting complexes have very little in the way of amenities, as it turns out. Just earlier today, we learned that there is only one washer and one dryer in the entire Georgia Dome. Before they tore it down, in fact, The Omni was just a really big-ass grain silo. No doors in or out. Had to climb up to the top and jump in and just stay there forever. Go Hawks.

Defensive end:

@jon_bois thought I was going to get a promotion, ended up getting job eliminated. This morning.

— Miles Oliveira (@OliveiraMiles) November 17, 2014

Ah duuuuuuude. I am so really, genuinely sorry. You're in, just in case it matters a thousandth of a percent right now.

Defensive end:

@jon_bois I had one line as 'Boy 3' in our 2 hour Macbeth production. I forgot it and Macbeth was forced to slaughter me without any context

— Max Burford (@iammax17) November 17, 2014

I see nothing fit to add to this. It's the story of the week so far.

Defensive tackle: [DELETED]

Once again, as is y'alls' right, someone tweeted me a story, I put them in the game, and they deleted the tweet before I could share it. I loved it. In fact, Spencer found it on his own and gchatted it to me. That's how funny it was. And yet, a day later, I don't remember anything about it.

Linebacker:

@jon_bois Bashed my head on a guitar headstock on the last song of the night. Blood everywhere. White shirt. Didn't stop singing.

— Elisa Melendez (@ElisaRockDoc) November 17, 2014

This actually reads like a really badass story more than it does an awkward story, so lemme supplement it with what might be the most awkward show I've ever been to. It was an Alexi Murdoch show I got dragged to like five years ago. He did a really quiet solo acoustic set, which always seems like a bad idea for any opening act in a standing-room venue. Unsurprisingly, the room was full of people talking and noise from the bar and whatnot, and his Super Quiet Intimate Music was partially drowned out by it.

A couple times, he muttered something about needing everybody to be quiet. After four songs, he stopped and said something like, "listen, if you're not here for the music, I don't know what you're here for." (The main act. The answer is the main act.) A song or two later, he indignantly announces that he's playing one more song and he's out of there. Nobody cares about this or the song that follows, and then he leaves.

Part of me actually feels bad for him, and part of me thinks acoustic sets should be forbidden by law. I don't know why I would ever bother to go to any concert that isn't louder than hell.

Defensive tackle:

Reply to @jon_bois I was interning for the Yankees. I had to get something out of the locker room. Rickey Henderson was in there. Naked.

— Michele Catalano (@inthefade) November 17, 2014

This leads perfectly into my favorite unconfirmed Rickey Henderson anecdote, which is that he'd strip naked, look at himself in a mirror, and repeat, "Rickey's the best!" over and over. Rickey is a man of such faultless grace that it is never he who is awkward. The rest of the world must work itself into awkward contortions to exist around him.

Defensive tackle:

@jon_bois Said "gracias" to the ticket guy at the Eiffel Tower

— Ben Klein (@BKihaveitmyway) November 17, 2014

YEP.  This is the "saying 'you too' to the server" of international relations. I have been in a French-speaking grocery store and said "danke" upon receiving my bags. I have done this MULTIPLE TIMES, because I a blockhead. You can grow up and wear cardigans and read blogs about how to blanche a tomato and listen to all the dang Serials you want, but you are an American, and some of that America just won't ever wash off.

Linebacker:

@jon_bois I was interviewing a girl for a job with my company and she started crying because she remembered I saw her barf at a house party.

— shorts ill (@katewitko) November 17, 2014

I've been in charge of other people, but I've never been in a situation in which I directly hired or fired people. Maybe that day will come at some point, but until then, I have trouble understanding why I wouldn't hire basically anyone who wanted a job. They really want the job, for money, and it would be nice. Plus, everybody's basically the same and jobs aren't hard. Oh God, never put me in charge of hiring anybody.

Linebacker:

@jon_bois Stuck in a hotel elevator with Keith Richards after a fellow co-worker had hit the buttons for every floor.

— Travis (@bakesale77) November 17, 2014

hey

hey did uh

did you push between the buttons too

Linebacker:

@jon_bois a guy came into my office with a gift to thank me for finding him a job. The client had just called and asked me to fire him.

— Nick Selby (@NSelbs) November 17, 2014

Yeah, see, once again ... just as I should never be entrusted with hiring anyone, I should never be asked to fire anyone. I just wouldn't do it. Everyone in my entire office would be Milton, just sorta "fired" in technicality only, but still sitting in the office and taking a paycheck. Meanwhile, I'd just keep hiring more people, because again, it's important for folks to have jobs, for money. So the building would get more and more crowded with people I'd hired and people I wouldn't fire, until we'd all get stuck and the fire department would have to help us get out.

But then we'd have to just go back inside the building for work the next day. So basically, the fire department would have to help us in and out every day. You think I haven't thought this through, but I have.

Linebacker:

@jon_bois I got off a DC flight ahead of WWII vets because I paid $10 extra. There were balloons and reporters and banners. Not meant for me

— Jason Gennaro (@TheJasonOfMan) November 17, 2014

So a couple months ago, my state ID expired. Since I'm moving out of state shortly anyway, I figured I just wouldn't bother getting a new one, and use my U.S. passport card for all identification purposes in the short term.

This, turns out, is of considerable consequence whenever I'm ID'd at bars. I doubt anybody actually uses their passport card as their primary means of identification. I'm seeing this Venn diagram with a circle for "people with a passport" and a circle for "people who don't have their shit together enough to get a proper ID," and I see myself right in that little sliver. So the dude working the door at a bar probably never has a passport ID handed to him.

A couple times, I've showed up at a bar with a few friends. They show him their IDs -- "thanks ... thank you ... thanks ..." and then I show him mine, and he looks up at me, and he's like, "Hey, man. Thank you. Have a good time tonight."

I just put this together the other day: they think it's a military ID. They think I served. Until I get a proper state ID, I think I need to go around town with a sash that reads, "I HAVE DONE NOTHING FOR YOU."

Linebacker:

@jon_bois Yelled @ lady pushing out double door on wrong side that "in America, we walk on the right side," then saw it was Maya Angelou

— Cosmic Pennyloafer (@CopperShoes) November 17, 2014

YOU YELLED AT MAYA ANGELOU

ABOUT DOORS

This week in Breaking Madden, we're playing as the Detroit Lions offense. Well, you are, actually. Y'all told me which buttons to push, and when to push them. This is all your fault.

I let y'all play Madden this week. I pretty much handed you the controller. I asked you to fill out a form that asked you:

1. which passing play to call for Matt Stafford
2. which receiver to throw to
3. whether to throw a lob or a bullet
4. how long to hold the ball in the pocket before throwing

And then you went and made this happen.

Poor Matthew. I chose him as the subject of this week's Breaking Madden not to beat him up, but because I thought it would be nice. His Lions just suffered a 14-6 loss to the Cardinals in which he had trouble getting much of anything going on offense. At 7-3, Detroit finally has a healthy Calvin Johnson and a good shot of winning its first-ever NFC North title. They're a good team and Matt Stafford is a fun quarterback. I thought it would be fun.

It was, in its own erratic, unpredictable, and fundamentally stupid way. This is a stupid episode:

Music: "Go Deep" by Janet Jackson

THE SETUP.

As the Lions, we'll be playing their Week 12 opponents, the New England Patriots. Stafford will have Calvin Johnson, Golden Tate, and the rest of his receiving corps at full strength, but their ratings have not been altered in any way. I'm also leaving the Patriots' secondary untouched.

While playing, I'll be keeping a "player lock" on Stafford, meaning he's the only player we'll be controlling. So if, say, Calvin Johnson somehow manages to catch one of our random throws, he'll then be at liberty to go and do Calvin Johnson Things.

The thing is, I'm allowing y'all to keep Stafford standing still in the pocket for as long as 10 seconds. If he's to have any chance of staying on his feet, I needed to take a wrecking ball to the offensive and defensive lines, then rebuild them from scratch. So that's what I did.

Eleven horrible New England defensive linemen, and six monstrous blockers for Detroit. As always, I found them on Twitter. Since this figures to be a completely ungraceful exercise, I asked people to tell me about the most awkward moments of their lives. Among those who find themselves in Breaking Madden this week:

- The man who yelled at a woman about using the wrong door, then realized she was Maya Angelou
- The kid who got his first driver's license, went to his car, and sat alone in his back seat out of habit
- The guy who had one line as Boy 3 in a production of Macbeth, forgot it, and forced Macbeth to slaughter him without context

And many more. Dang, these were so good and bad. For more:

Breaking Madden: Roster Cuts

Heading into this game, I don't know what to expect. I think the roster editing was completely necessary if we want any shot at winning this thing, but I'm not giving us any more cheats. The difficulty is set on All-Pro, the second-toughest, and the one that I figure is just about closest to the real thing. The opposing quarterback is Tom Brady, so we ought to be prepared to blindly put up at least 30 points.

This isn't our first crowdsourced game, of course. Last week, I handed y'all the keys to Marshawn Lynch. To my outright shock and delight, we somehow won, 76-32.

Throwing the ball without seeing the screen, though, feels so much more dangerous. Madden will usually give a player a couple freebies at the outset, but throw enough bad balls and the game will punish us. Darrelle Revis is out there, and could probably destroy us all by himself.

Get ready. Well, get ready in the past, three days ago, when you filled out your form. But even then, I guess you couldn't be ready since you had no information about what was going on in the game. So uh, stay unready but keep going anyway.

THE GAME.

One more thing: I also required y'all to provide a statement justifying your decision, in as many words as seconds you gave Stafford. For example, if you demanded that Stafford stay in the pocket for seven seconds, you had to justify yourself in seven words.

Second play of the game. You requested that Matt hang back for nine seconds and bomb a Hail Mary:

I've been praying a lot of Hail Marys lately.

Well, all right.

HOLY SHIT. Right away, we have a 68-yard touchdown.

★ ★ ★

Play: Slants (pistol formation)
Hold ball for: 10 seconds.
Pass to: Y.

He is not open yet. Nope. Not yet. Okay now.

This ended up being an incompletion, but Matt certainly had all the time in the world. It helps that No. 4 shakes his mime-blocker only to run the wrong way.

When you yank a pass rusher's Awareness and Pursuit ratings to zero, these are the sorts of things you see. They'll turn around eventually, but they make these giant circuitous loops on their way to the quarterback, as though they're little tugboats trying to reverse course.

★ ★ ★

Play: Hail Mary.
Hold ball for: 6 seconds.
Pass to: RB.

Gotta go deep gotta go deep

That's our fullback! Our Twitter fullback, Mr. Fox! He wasn't supposed to do anything but post up near the line of scrimmage, but apparently he got bored, streaked downfield, and called for the ball. Since you randomly chose the RB button on this play, it was his lucky day.

★ ★ ★

Play: Hail Mary.
Hold ball for: 7 seconds.
Pass to: X.

Matt Stafford loves to throw deep. buttz

Y'all look out. You run up on Reggie Bush, he'll sit on you like a mother hen. And, uh, play an invisible Casio.

The Patriots' pass rushers had pretty low odds of breaking through the line in a timely manner, but once in a while, they'd find a way through and bring Stafford down within four or five seconds. Speaking of which: next slide.

★ ★ ★

Play: Verts drag (singleback).
Hold ball for: 10 seconds.
Pass to: X.

You gotta take time to let the play develop, mang.

Charles Babbage was a 19th-century English inventor whose body of work completely fascinates me. He tried to build a machine that could perform algebra in the year 1822. It was called the "difference engine," and just looking at it gives me a headache: there's such an enormous array of moving parts that it could only come from a superhuman grade of genius.

Back then, of course, the idea of a computer was completely foreign to people. Babbage said that on multiple occasions, people asked him, "if you accidentally put the wrong numbers into the machine, will the right numbers still come out?" You and I, living in the age that we do, know that this is a completely ridiculous question, but I think it's easy to take for granted that computer logic is not naturally intuitive to human beings. It's a learned concept, and until we're familiar with it, it's just magic.

I was reminded of this when I shouted at No. 4, "WHAT ARE YOU DOING? YOU ASSHOLE!" Madden is a machine of rules and instructions, but in moments like this one, I can forget that my Xbox isn't a box full of little gnomes banging their mallets and working the pulleys. It's not a human, it's just dumb like one.

★ ★ ★

Play: Mesh (strong).
Hold ball for: 3 seconds.
Pass to: X.

fun sports play

Half the time, I just wanted to play as Calvin Johnson. Sending Megatron out there against a team like this one -- especially if the defensive tackles hang back to play zone -- is like ripping a dirt bike through a go-kart track. The Patriots should not have played zone here. I don't know what they should have played. Not zone, though.

★ ★ ★

Play: Lions comebacks (singleback).
Hold ball for: 1 second.
Pass to: RB.

well,

This is one of the dumbest plays I've ever seen. The button you pressed was RB, which stands for both "running back" and "Reggie Bush." That coincidence, in and of itself, is dumb.

Due to the nature of this play, throwing to RB wasn't an available option right away. I still wanted to do my best to fulfill your request, so I just mashed RB over and over until something happened. After a couple seconds, the game decided to process it as a lateral.

A lateral to which player? Who knows? Surely not the offensive lineman right next to him, since he isn't an eligible receiver. What we've got here is Matt Stafford spiking the ball off a New England player's ass like he's priming a bazooka rocket. And then, magically, it caroms upfield into the hands of Reggie Bush, who I was trying to throw it to all along.

Lordy, that was stupid. Let's see how the rest of the play turned out.

A TOUCHDOWN? Matt Stafford threw a touchdown pass by throwing the ball at his opponent's ass?

This was when I started to realize that this game was winnable. It was just stupid enough to be winnable.

THE RESULTS.

Good job, y'all. Win or lose, this was your game. You did all of this:

Music: "Five Seconds" by Twin Shadow

Click here for many more adventures in Breaking Madden.

This may very well be RadioShack's final holiday season. Jon, a former employee, looks back on a strange, craven, five thousand-fingered strip-mall monster from a forgotten age.

RadioShack won't be the only store to open on Thanksgiving Day, but it might be the only one of its particular makeup to do so. This isn't Walmart or a call center, in which volunteers who want overtime pay can be chosen first. Most RadioShack stores have just a handful of employees, most or all of whom will work Thanksgiving whether they want to or not. Retail employees have very, very little in the way of perks, of things that are understood to be sacred. Having Thanksgiving Day to themselves was one of them.

After some pushback from its employees, RadioShack gave in just a little: after originally planning to open from 8 a.m. to midnight on Thanksgiving, its stores will now close for a few hours in the middle of the day so that its folks can have a little bit of family time.

RadioShack is a company of massive real estate, and is peddling a business model that is completely unviable in 2014. It's very likely to go extinct soon, and I doubt there's anything its operators can do about it. In scenarios like this one, there aren't happy stories or easy answers, and if this were any other company, I'd concede that, perhaps, opening on Thanksgiving is a regrettable but necessary stab at saving the company, employees and all.

But as this company has spent the last decade-plus trying to save itself, the happiness of the employees has always been the first to go overboard. Its store managers are worked so hard that they become unhappy, half-awake shadows of themselves. Labor laws have been brazenly ignored. Untold hours of labor haven't been paid for (when I quit, on good terms and with two weeks' notice, they withheld my final paychecks for months and wouldn't tell me why). Lawyers have been sent to shut down websites that have bad things to say about RadioShack. Employees who make a few dimes over minimum wage are pressured, shamed, and yelled at as though they're brokering million-dollar deals.

RadioShack is a rotten place to work, generally not a very good place to shop, and an untenable business to run. Everyone involved loses.

These are stories from my three and a half years as a RadioShack employee.

I.

I really hope Black Fridays aren't like they were a decade ago, but I doubt much has changed.

During the 2004 holiday season, I worked in a RadioShack situated in a dying mall with virtually no foot traffic. It was hard enough making much in the way of commissions when the sales were split between our usual staff of three or four employees. RadioShack is a corporation dedicated to the prolonged destruction of the individual, so it tripled our staff right before Black Friday, ensuring that no one would make any money.

And during this season, RadioShack also decided to abandon newspaper inserts, which had always been the lifeblood of its advertising. There was no explanation given for this, but it ensured that we would make a fraction of zero money.

4:30 a.m. We show up an hour and a half before the store opens, as demanded by the district office.  We stand around and do nothing.
6:00 a.m. We all line up in expectation of hordes of customers. Six on one side of the store, six on the other side, pallbearers of an invisible casket. The manager opens the doors. No one is waiting on the other end.
7:00 a.m. Nobody has walked into the store. Nobody has been seen even walking past the store. This infuriates the manager, who at this juncture elects to fire one employee, right there on the spot, because her sweater is a shade of red that is inconsistent with the dress code.
8:00 a.m. Someone almost walks in. She kind of turns toward the store, sees 11 of us just standing and staring at her, and turns a 180. Don't blame you, ma'am.
9:00 a.m. First customer! Someone just walked in and bought a cordless phone battery. One of us would have made approximately 23 cents on the sale (18 cents after taxes), except you don't start making any sales commission until you surpass a monthly sales figure that is usually unreachable and arbitrarily set. (I worked at RadioShack for 43 months, and barely hit this mark once.)
12:00 p.m. We've sold maybe $90 worth of stuff. Two more employees walk out and don't come back.
2:00 p.m. A couple comes in to return a pair of cell phones I sold them a couple weeks back. I received about $40 for the sale on my last paycheck, and now they will take $40 out of my next paycheck. Voiding a cell phone contract is a process that takes an hour or so of waiting on the phone and talking to three or four different gatekeepers. This time, it's even longer, because someone errantly slapped them with a $200 cancellation fee. My manager gets wind of this and starts screaming at me: "JON, WHAT DID YOU DO? WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU DO?" She then tries to initiate a shouting match with my customers, who don't bite.
3:00 p.m. Two more employees quit, one because the manager has refused to give her a lunch break over a 10.5-hour shift.
9:00 p.m. Mercifully, and with sales numbers that are beyond abysmal, the district office tells us to close the store and not to remain open until midnight, as planned. Someone else came in to return a phone, so my sales are now about $60 in the hole. I make $5.45 an hour, and have worked a 16.5-hour shift, so that's about $90. Minus the $60 I've lost, that's $30. So today, I have made about $1.80 per hour, for a shift of nearly 17 hours. Before taxes.
9:45 p.m. Ha ha ha ha I am still at the store, counting the money and helping clean up and such, but not getting paid for it. This is RadioShack's thing: if you're working while the store's closed, they might decide to pay you and they might not. I worked countless hours they never paid me for; this is one. We finally close up. On the way to the parking lot, I ask my manager whether I can take Christmas Eve off; this would allow me barely enough time to make the seven-hour drive home to Kentucky to see my family, then head back. She doesn't say no. She yells no, and tells me I'm not special.

II.

That story paints that store manager as the worst woman on Earth, which I swear is not true. She was at heart a good person, and had major stress/anxiety issues, and "RadioShack manager" is just about the worst position for a person with those issues (or any person). Being a manager made her miserable and unhealthy, as it tends to do to people.

I had well over a dozen different managers across my RadioShack career. One of them, who was also a friend of mine, dealt with it by getting loaded. I'd often give him rides to and from work, and on the way home, he'd ask me to swing by the gas station so he could pick up a 24-pack of Bud Light. Since I wasn't 21, this was a pretty sweet deal. I'd drink one or two beers with him in the parking lot, and then he'd go inside and kill the rest in a single night. I should have maybe said something, or done something, but I was 20 and there were things that didn't occur to me then.

III.

Another manager of mine staggered through life in a state of perpetual exhaustion. Our entire store had exactly three employees; my co-worker and I worked 40 or 50 hours per week, and he worked a minimum of 70 if he was lucky. We often had just one employee at the store at any given time, and sometimes, when there weren't any customers in the store, he'd take a nap in the back room. More than once, while he was back there, someone would walk in and shoplift hundreds of dollars' worth of stuff off the shelves and walk out in plain sight.

He just didn't give a shit. Sometimes, due to various obligations, he was working 80, 90 hours a week. He was pretty low on his hierarchy of needs: he didn't care about selling things, or making commission, or running a good store, or climbing any kind of career ladder. He was just trying to survive. He was trying to keep being an alive person for another hour. He made $23,000 a year.

IV.

He and I sometimes saw our work week increase by five to a dozen hours because of inventories. Most folks who have worked in retail are probably familiar with this. Once every couple months, we'd have to stay after hours and count inventory. The store computer would print out a novel of every single item we were supposed to have in stock, from TVs to transistors to batteries, and then we'd have to root through the entire store and make sure we had all of it.

This could mean staying until midnight on a good inventory, or staying until five in the morning, depending on how obsessive my manager happened to be. RadioShack could very easily have scheduled these regularly and in advance, as a courtesy to its employees, but RadioShack is a craven and unfeeling entity that issued what I can only describe as open contempt of those they employed. The higher-ups preferred to spring them on us with maybe a day's notice.

That is a major violation of labor laws, but they didn't care. Sometimes they'd call an hour before the store closed to let us know we were staying there until two in the morning. We could comply or be fired.

V.

I recently bought a new phone from a Sprint employee who used to manage a RadioShack. He told me about a time he ran his store for an entire day, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., all by himself without a lunch break. After closing, he was told to immediately head to another store and help with their inventory. He stayed up all night doing so, then headed right back to his store for another 12-hour shift. Thirty-six hours.

VI.

I am not letting up on RadioShack, a machine that sometimes operates in a way that could be confused with malevolence, hammering away at good people until they are a heap of dust and a plastic name tag.

I am not doing this because for a time, at least, RadioShack tried to silence employees who shared their stories online. The company was the target of a class-action suit alleging (correctly) that it failed to pay massive amounts of overtime. A forum frequented by employees, RadioShackSucks, was instrumental in rounding up those who opted in to the suit.

At this point in history, it's inconceivable that a company would shut down an Internet forum for "defaming" them. That's what RadioShack tried to do, and kind of did. I am not worried about this today, because that isn't how it works and because RadioShack is now too half-dead to do anything about it anyway, and thank God.

VII.

And when I say "thank God," I'm also thinking of the people working there today who will probably be jobless soon. My heart breaks for them, and I hope they -- like me, the guy at the Sprint store, and my friends from those days -- go on to find a place that isn't so damned miserable. Many are great, massively over-qualified people who RadioShack never deserved for a second.

Some were, uh, not. For a few months, I worked with this guy I'll call Craig. He was a guy in his fifties who had been making lots of money growing pot out in the country until the feds busted him and took it all, and he mostly preferred to stand around and crack jokes about TV shows I'd never seen. Every day, halfway through his shift, he'd happily announce that he was going to go "take [his] medicine," and then sit in his car and get extraordinarily stoned and become Stoned Craig.

Stoned Craig would turn the volume all the way up on the Casio keyboards and just bang away at the keys. He didn't play music, it was just a bunch of BLONK BLONK BLONK BLONK, but he was having the sort of good time you and I might not be able to understand.

VIII.

Stoned Craig was considerably more skilled with the talking picture frames we'd always have on display: you pushed a button on the picture frame, and it'd play a pre-recorded message. Craig loved recording them; there was a new message every day.

So that sets the table for this: a nice old lady is browsing around the store and comes across one of the picture frames. There's a stock image in the frame, a little girl in a tire swing with an ear-to-ear grin.

From across the store I see her, praying that today's affirmation is at least G-rated. She presses the button. The voice of Stoned Craig, which sounds just like Tom Waits, blares forth.

QUIT FINGERIN' THE GODDAMN MERCHANDISE AND MAKE A FUCKIN' PURCHASE!

The old lady busted out laughing, and I think she might have ended up buying the picture frame. If she did, that might have been the only sale Craig ever had a hand in making.

IX.

Once, I was activating a cell phone for a customer when Stoned Craig staggered over to me. Then he just stood there. After a minute, he said, "I'm hungry, Paw." If he was quoting something, I still have no idea what it was. He just kept repeating it.

Stoned Craig. I'm hungry, Paw.
Me: ... so this is a $39.99 plan, and if you sign a two-year deal, you'll also get 500 text messages--
Stoned Craig. I'm hungry, Paw.
Customer: Is he all right?
Me: Hey, Craig. You wanna maybe chill out in the back room for a minute?
Stoned Craig.[walking away] I'm hungry, Paw.

Hope that you're doing well, Craig, and that you found a dinner out there somewhere.

X.

There is a part of me who isn't comfortable with talking this way about an employer who provided my income for three and a half years, but I, along with most people I worked with, put in far more than we got back.

A friend of mine worked at a RadioShack in a decrepit mall that has since been torn down. There was a restaurant upstairs, and in the middle of the night, its floor collapsed, along with its plumbing. He opened the store the next morning to find it covered in sewage and human waste; to hear him tell it, there were fifty pounds of it all over the place.

Any reasonable business, of course, would immediately pick up the phone and hire a hazmat team. Our district office ordered my friend to clean it up himself. When he refused, he almost lost his job.

XI.

RadioShack would claim to its new hires that its sales associates commonly made $20 per hour, which is inarguably complete bullshit; the majority of ground-level employees I knew averaged less than half that figure. As a result, the workforce was a revolving door of people who realized they'd been suckered, realized it wasn't going to get better, and quit. The long-term employees were often like me -- we would have moved on if we could have found anything better.

We all fantasized about quitting in dramatic fashion, dropping our name tag on our manager's desk, and stomping out. I never did, and came closest to it when my manager accused me of stealing a CD-ROM drive out of one of the desktop computers. There was an empty space in the tower where a CD-ROM drive would go, but there had never been one there.

My manager, who had spent Lord knows how long in an overworked, screamed-at, sleep-deprived haze, suddenly decided that there had, in fact, been a CD-ROM drive in that computer. Further, she decided that I, the only one who had stuck with her over the last year and the one who had been there for her so many times, was the one who stole it. When I denied this, I was screamed at, and she threatened to call the loss prevention department and/or the police.

In a huff, she picked up the phone to call another manager and prove the computers were supposed to have those drives. Nope. She called another: no. She finally relented when the third manager told her no. I told her I thought I deserved an apology. She flatly told me that, no, I would not get an apology, and that by the way, the store's schedule had changed and I wouldn't be able to take my planned vacation.

XII.

At that point in my career, I would have at least had an honest-to-god name tag to indignantly throw on the ground. I spent my first year wearing this one, with my name handwritten on a scrap of paper I taped to it. They just wouldn't order me one.

Once, during a store visit, my district manager scolded me for not wearing the name tag I didn't have, and insisted I wear a proper one, any one we had lying around. I had the option of being Chad or Elizabeth. I decided to be Elizabeth, and then he said that no, I could not be Elizabeth.

XIII.

The fun thing about those name tags: they were magnetic. For fun, we used to walk by each other and slap them off each other's shirts.

I did this to my assistant manager all the time. I'd found a spare "ASSISTANT MANAGER" name tag of his, which I'd altered with black electrical tape and hid in my pocket. I smacked his name tag off his chest, bent down to pick it up, and gave him the other one through sleight-of-hand. And that is how he ended up wearing a name tag for an entire day that read "ASS MAN."

XIV.

The majority of my RadioShack experience felt like guard duty. Depending on the store and the time of year, I could go four or five hours without seeing a single person walk in the door.

We kind of had to amuse ourselves. For some damn reason, the company had ordered a ludicrous number of remote-controlled PT Cruisers. We literally had a hundred of them in our little store alone. Nobody bought them, of course, because PT Cruisers are boring and stupid.

So a friend of mine would take a couple of them out to the middle of the mall and hold impromptu demolition derbies, just smashing them into each other until one of them stopped working. They would draw little crowds, and employees of nearby stores would stand in their doorways and watch. We even put money on them one time.

Look, y'all. RadioShack may have been a crummy company, but I'm not blameless here, either.

XV.

The same merchandise procurers who ordered all those PT Cruisers ordered all kinds of other unsellable crap, like remote-controlled Brum cars. It's okay that you don't know what Brum is. It's a British children's cartoon that nobody in America has ever heard of.

And yet, we were required to display a stack of 20 or so Brum cars right in the middle of an already-cramped store, because we were so desperate to get rid of them. People would walk around them and bump into them and say, "uh, what is Brum?" Zero of them were sold.

After months of this, a family I presume to be from England walked into the store one day. They saw the display and their eyes lit up in unison. And I swear to God: they made a circle around the Brum toys and held hands and started dancing around it, singing the Brum song. Either it's a two-minute-long song, or they sung it a bunch of times in a row.

It remains one of the most surreal moments of my entire life. They didn't buy one, either.

XVI.

RadioShack also tried to sell a thing called a CueCat, although by the time I started working there, they were trying without much success to give them away for free. A CueCat was an infrared scanner that read barcodes from magazine ads.

This was the idea: you, the consumer, were supposed to sit next to your computer and read a magazine. When you saw an ad you liked, you were supposed to scan it with the CueCat and hook it up to your computer, and it would direct your browser to the advertiser's web site.

This technology was developed by a man who legally changed his name to J. Hutton Pulitzer. Here is a long, barely-intelligible interview of him that you shouldn't read; half the time, I can't understand what the Hell he's talking about. RadioShack gave tens of millions of dollars to this dude because they thought consumers' idea of a good time was to sit there, do all the work, and advertise to themselves. If there is such a thing as dada investing, this was it.

This might have been the dumbest of many, many dumb ideas to come from RadioShack over the last 15 years. I think it's perfectly understandable, to be honest.

This is a consumer technology business that is built to work perfectly in the year 1975. The Internet comes around, and this, being a technology company, is expected to move on it aggressively and know what it's doing, except basically nobody really understood the Internet for a very long time. So they whiffed big a few times. Then the iPhone came around and rendered half the stuff RadioShack sold completely redundant. This company needed to become something radically different a decade ago. I just don't think it knows how to be anything else.

It's like retracing the steps and doings of a drunk person: okay, here's where he keyed the cop car. Wait, why'd he do that? I don't know, but his pants are lying here, so this is before he stripped naked and tried to rob the library.

XVII.

Working at RadioShack was sort of the worst of two worlds: there was the poverty-level income of a blue-collar retail job, coupled with the expectations, political nonsense, and corporate soullessness of the white-collar environment.

At least once a month, often on our days off, we were expected to show up, in dress code, to the district office for a two-hour meeting. Sometimes we'd be individually picked out and shamed as people whose sales numbers weren't good enough for them. I still remember a woman crying in front of everyone and leaving in embarrassment.

We were also shown videos from the corporate office in Fort Worth. One skit stands out in particular. Four of RadioShack's regional executives were sitting at a poker table, "betting" on which of their regions would perform best in Q3.

Midwest executive: I'm betting that my region leads sales this quarter.
Northeast executive: You know what? My sales associates know they need to offer DirecTV and Sprint to every customer who walks in the door. I will call you ... and raise you. [shoves stack of chips to middle of table]

(Note: that is a string bet, you dingdong.)

Southwest executive: Well, my sales associates know they must sell H.O.T. the A.A.A. way! I raise!
Northwest executive: When it comes to my sales associates ... [pushes enormous stack of chips] ... I'm allllll in.

We were supposed to watch this and take pride in our thousand-store region and be motivated to, I don't know, earn bonuses for these executives? We, the people taking home a thousand bucks a month, who go to work with holes in our last pairs of khakis, who walk an hour to work every day because we can't afford car repairs, who managed a store for 80 hours last week and received a figure below minimum wage for the trouble. We, who are scuttling our only day off so we can sit here and hear about the money they want to make and how useless we are.

It's fair to ask me why I worked there for so long. I just couldn't find a job I thought was better, and tried to convince myself in the moment that it wasn't so bad.

XVIII.

I said that a lot of working at RadioShack felt like guard duty. One week, it was actual guard duty: a RadioShack in a stone-dead mall was scheduled to close in a week, and all its employees had already bailed, so they sent me there to manage it for a few days.

The first day, I opened the store for 12 hours, and not a single person walked in. The second day, a guy bought a watch battery, and the store revenue for the week upped to $2.99. It didn't take me long to pull out the desk chair from the back room, have a seat in the middle of the store, rewire the display TVs, and watch MacGyver on satellite.

And it's true that I was making pennies above minimum wage, but it's also true that my job was to go to a building, turn on the lights, sit there, be the boss of myself, watch a shitload of MacGyver, and go home. MacGyver is an awesome show and I will never have a better week of work than that one.

On the second-to-last day there, I left the store empty for 30 seconds so I could use the bathroom, and within those 30 seconds, someone sprinted in and straight-up stole the cash drawer and the $300 inside of it. In a panic, I called the district office to let them know.

Their response, more or less, was, "eh, whatever." Damn it, I could have just taken it myself. I could have given myself a $300 raise for watching the dang MacGyver.

If that thief counts as a customer, I had two customers that week.

XIX.

Me. Thanks for calling RadioShack, this is Jon. How may I help you?
Old man. Jon, is it?
Me. Yep.
Old man. Well, I got a joke for you, would you like to hear it?
Me. Sure.
Old man. Well, they call it the World Wide Web, is that right?
Me. They do.
Old man. Now, would that make Bill Gates the spider?
Me. I guess it would!
Old man. Well, that's all. I just thought of that joke, and I thought, "who might get a kick out of that?" And I figured y'all at the RadioShack would get a kick out of it.
Me. I loved it.
Old man. Take care now.

That wonderful old man, to this day, is one of my chief comedic inspirations. God bless him.

* * *

On Thanksgiving, the people of RadioShack will be working for a company that has, perhaps, finally run out of new ways to make them sad. They are people who RadioShack never deserved. People who, God willing, will go on to find a job better than this one.

I bet RadioShack was great once. I can't look through their decades-old catalogs and come away with any other impression. They sold giant walnut-wood speakers I'd kill to have today. They sold computers back when people were trying to understand what they were. When I was a little kid, going to RadioShack was better than going to the toy store. It was the toy store for tall people.

By the time I got tall and worked there, RadioShack had already begun to die, I think. It failed exotically, with great flourishes, on canvases large and small, and in ways previously unimagined, taking pause only to kick around the souls who kept it alive. It doesn't have me to kick around anymore, and soon, it won't have anyone.

Damn. I mean, Thanksgiving. Y'all just had to get one last shot in, didn't you?

Images found via RadioShackCatalogs.com, which is one hell of a site to look through in the year 2014.

after spending more than six months at the drawing board, we at jon's sandwich shop are pleased to introduce our newest venture, sand:WICH.

please have a look at our menu. we are now open for business! edit: we are now closed

Did you make it into this week's episode of Breaking Madden? Goodness, I hope not. This week, we're going to destroy the NFC South, and we have enlisted the help of a dozen Southern-inclined individuals to help us do it.

After a brief scare Monday night, the Falcons fell to the Packers as everyone expected them to. Despite this loss, which drops them to 5-8 on the season, they lead the 2014 NFC South, the worst division in the history of the NFL.

Combined, the Falcons, Saints, Panthers and Bucs are 8-36 -- that's a winning percentage of .182 -- against the rest of the NFL this season. The 2010 NFC West, which sent a 7-9 team to the playoffs for the first time ever, achieved great infamy that these chuckleheads will probably eclipse. There is a very real possibility of a 6-10 team going to the postseason. And since playoffs are dumb, this team will probably go to the Super Bowl.

This is not all right. In this week's Breaking Madden, our mission is to cast the NFC South into the fiery depths of Hell:

This experiment, in summary:

1. We create two God-awful quarterbacks -- a starter and backup -- for all four teams in the South.
2. We also create a God-awful kicker for each team.
3. We make the incumbent quarterbacks and kickers -- Drew Brees, Matt Ryan, Gordon Gano, et al -- play running back.
4. We release all the original running backs into free agency.

And then we'll run simulations and try to engineer the worst playoff team imaginable. Can we get a team into the playoffs at 6-10? 5-11? 4-12? Any just and righteous governing sports body would revoke the NFC South's playoff berth in such a case, but this is the NFL.

To find those 12 athletes, as usual, I asked Twitter for help.

if you would like to be in the next Breaking Madden, please tell me about the most The South moment of your life

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) December 8, 2014

The South is a wonderful place that, like the NFC South, is often dumb and funny. These 12, I feel, truly understand the experience. Please welcome your new Falcons, Saints, Panthers and Bucs:

Falcons quarterback: Dan Morris

@jon_bois While hiking the Florida Trail I happened upon a house with three shootin’ cars outside. Their sole purpose was to be shot at.

— Dan Morris (@djsensei) December 8, 2014

Oh sure. In high school, a friend of mine had a shootin' car out in the country. Once in a while, we'd drive out there with a bunch of guns and empty clips into it. Usually we shot pistols and hunting rifles, although one time, I got to shoot an automatic rifle.

As a hobby, I find guns to be tremendously boring. The first few minutes are really great: it's loud as hell and stuff gets damaged, and guns themselves are pretty neat from aesthetic and technical perspectives. After five minutes, once all that wears off, I tend to wonder what I'm doing. I could, with practice, improve my marksmanship and whatnot, but I could also sit down with a pencil and get better at drawing a straight line.

There's nothing in the way of real strategy. I'm not challenged to make any real decisions. I'm just standing there and pointing and pushing a button. It's why I'm even less sympathetic toward the NRA than I would otherwise be: y'all are cool with all these accidental homicides so you can preserve your hobby? And it's a shitty hobby? Y'all tried Angry Birds?

My means of keeping myself entertained with guns are very, very slight, and opening up on a beat-ass car is one of them. The sight and sound of shooting a car -- specifically, a car -- is strangely beautiful, like clawing at a handful of garden soil or ripping the plastic off a new TV screen. I think most of us who have ever shot at a car understand this.

Bucs quarterback: CBSSports.com's Jerry Hinnen

@jon_bois My public HS held a mandatory 1-hr assembly in which a guest speaker told us evolution was BS and humans lived alongside dinosaurs

— Jerry Hinnen (@JerryHinnen) December 8, 2014

I don't think we can really fault young-earth creationists for clawing at all the territory they can get. They're loud, they argue, they fight battles, they develop systems of parlor-trick apologetics that can easily trip up the unprepared smarty-pants layman, and they intrude upon barriers defined by the Constitution and common sense.

They do this because this is not just about an origin story, it's about our souls, and whether they live forever in Heaven or roast forever in Hell. Those ranks certainly include their share of obnoxious, vain, unfeeling non-thinkers, but there are also a lot of them who have you in mind as they claw and scratch to be heard. You! They are doing this for you. They love you, and they want to save your soul.

If you held what they held to be true, I sure hope you would be stomping on the Constitution for my sake, as well. It's a shitty crumbled-ass piece of paper that belongs to a bunch of dead government nerds, and salvation is forever.

Bucs quarterback: Donald

@jon_bois my dad yelling "he's got designs on us, boys!"when he, my cousin& I were attacked by a horny goat while trespassing on an emu farm

— Donald (@theHell_YouSay) December 8, 2014

lol

Bucs kicker: Danny Roes

@jon_bois I flew into Alabama and in the airport there was a giant ad featuring, I swear to god, a fighter jet blowing up a dang hospital.

— Danny Roes (@dannyroes) December 8, 2014

Southerners participate in the sort of recreation that springs forth from our DNA. They don't need to visit the hobby shop or sporting goods store. All they need is in the woods and in their bones and in the tent store selling firecrackers outside the Chevron.

They want to blow shit up, and they want to burn shit. It was illegal to sell fireworks in Georgia when I lived there, so every summer, families would make hours-long pilgrimages to Tennessee and come back with enough of a haul to blow the treads off a tank. A church leader of mine was planning on hosting a firecracker party, and when the firecrackers fell through, he announced the party would be called "burn stuff night." Everyone was welcome to bring literally anything they wanted to burn. Old furniture, secular CDs, random pieces of chipboard, whatever. Unopened glass bottles of Sprite were really fun. Don't go to the South.

Falcons kicker: brungl

@jon_bois watched truett cathy tell a room of kids "when you're married you can have sex 24 hrs a day!" then spank a kid with "god's ruler"

— brungl (@bezzl_brungm) December 8, 2014

This is easily the most South story of the week:

1. Old Southern guy named Truett
2. Old Southern guy's last name is Cathy, a common name that you've never, ever seen as a last name
3. Old Southern guy named Truett Cathy is actually Samuel Truett Cathy, but his much more common first name is abbreviated
4. S. Truett Cathy owns a wildly successful fast-food establishment that refuses to open Sundays and enforces fundamentalist beliefs as a matter of policy
5. S. Truett Cathy tells children that marriage is great because it's nonstop bonin'
6. After speaking, S. Truett Cathy finds it prudent to discipline a kid he presumably doesn't know
7. S. Truett Cathy brandishes a "God's Ruler." Google has no idea what a "God's Ruler" is, which suggests it's a thing that S. Truett Cathy made up right there on the spot

Falcons quarterback: Polygon's Justin McElroy

@jon_bois Christian comedian and Gaither Vocal Band member Mark Lowry once stole my Atlanta Falcons hat during a concert

— Justin McElroy (@JustinMcElroy) December 8, 2014

This one is a close second, though. This is at least Justin's second time in Breaking Madden -- actually, it might be his third -- but his stories are just too on-the-money to turn down. He was born to be here.

Here's Mark Lowry, everyone. ENJOY

Panthers quarterback: [DELETED]

GUH. For like the 20th time, someone deleted a tweet before I could get around to it. It was something about grandmas crashing a wrestling match and hitting the wrestlers with wheelchairs, which immediately made me think of this:

This is a short film shot and produced in Hartford, Kentucky, by my friend Daniel. All of it's great, but the lady. Do not sleep on this old lady. If you have to, skip to 4:30, right at the brother's despicable heel turn. This lady's more furious than you've ever been in your life.

FUCK YOU

IN YOUR

REAR END

I HATE YOU YOU SORRY SONOFABUCK

Panthers kicker: some asshole

@jon_bois reenacted Stonewall Jackson's death using ketchup as blood. Homeschool civil-war themed theatre troupe, Georgia, third grade.

— Kevin Bois (@whoucallinturky) December 8, 2014

We each did a Civil War-themed monologue in front of everyone's parents. This one was received favorably, but the loudest applause was reserved for our friend, who wore blackface and performed this outrageously racist and offensive impression of a slave. Here is a lot more about that, if you're interested.

Panthers quarterback: namestolen

@jon_bois Went to school in rural VA. Once I got assigned a partner to build a display for an Egypt project. He brought in a cat skull.

— Campbell Bird (@namestolen) December 8, 2014

My Cub Scout pack went to South Carolina one time to provide the least productive non-assistance that a disaster area has ever seen. A tornado had recently blown through the area, and we were ostensibly there to help clean up the debris, and then our pack leader announced, "whoever finds the coolest thing in the wreckage wins free Braves tickets!"

This was an area in which peoples' livelihoods had been completely destroyed -- people may have even lost their lives, I don't remember -- and all of a sudden it was a funhouse for a couple dozen craven 11-year-olds to run around and have a scavenger hunt. My dad turned to my brother and I, and said, "No, we're not doing that, we're here to help clean up."

I was mad at him for the rest of the day, and I really resented him when the pack leader's son won the contest. He found a dog's skull. That was a living thing, a dog that had probably belonged to a family, and he held it over his head, immensely proud. He got to go to a Braves game, and all children should be jailed.

Saints quarterback: Sagrus

@jon_bois tended to my dad's broken leg after he got shitfaced and did donuts on an ATV until he rolled it

— The Sagrus (@Ambisagrus) December 8, 2014

A fun thing to do when you're 16 and before you have your full driver's license is to go out to the country, borrow a friend's beat up old ATV with barely-functioning brakes, and throttle it as quickly as you can. I did this for about 15 minutes without consequence and was pretty much having the time of my life, and then I was surprised by a sharp right turn that sloped off on the left side.

I sort of froze up, which is a good thing, because if I'd jerked right, I probably would have rolled it. I tried the brakes, which didn't really do anything, and then I decided to just keep forward, jump off the four-wheeler, and ghost-ride it into a tree. I was fine aside from a few scrapes, but my friend told me he was never letting me drive one of his vehicles again.

A couple months later, he let me ride his dirt bike. I had never rode a dirt bike before. I climbed on, revved it, lost control of it, jumped off, and ghost-rode it into a tree.

Saints kicker: Nowell

@JustinMcElroy@jon_bois broke a church pew for jumping up and down at a Toby Mac concert

— Chris Nowell (@zerosktr151) December 8, 2014

Uh, it's tobyMac. He is a 50-year-old Christian rapper who would prefer you to stylize it tobyMac.

Saints quarterback: Jonathan Myer

@jon_bois I saw a couple at speed street (nascar block party in Charlotte) leave their baby with shirtless, cape clad man. He was wasted.

— Jonathan Myer (@jonmyerspeaks) December 8, 2014

NEVER FEAR NASCAR MAN IS HERE

[NASCAR Man bends over to spit tobacco juice, vomits profusely instead]

THANK YOU NASCAR MAN

[NASCAR Man raises child into a riding lawnmower he drives to work]

THANKS NASCAR MAN

The lower-fi the motorsports in the South, the better. The only ones I ever attended religiously were the figure-eight school bus races at Kentucky Speedway. If you're unfamiliar with such a thing, you might initially take a stab at what it is, then give up because you think, no, it couldn't be that.

No, no, you were right. A dozen or so old school buses race around a too-small track that is shaped like a figure eight. When they reach the intersection in the middle, they can make the reasonable choice to stop and give way to the buses that are barreling through the intersection.

Or, preferably, they stomp on the gas and play chicken with County Bus 4889. School buses are huge, so near-misses were rare. They'd just T-bone the Hell out of each other, and for the rest of the race, the other drivers would swerve around the sideways bus like it was a dead cow. Buses would keep driving with their engines on fire, and mufflers and other random parts  would knock loose and eventually fall off the back. It was gorgeous.

I lived in various parts of the South -- Georgia, Kentucky and Virginia -- from the age of 9 until about a week ago, when I moved to Brooklyn. I love it here, and and it's full of magical things I certainly missed by not growing up here instead. But a school bus plowed into the broad side of another school bus while pushed 45, and shit flew everywhere and caught on fire. My heart aches for those who have never seen it.

Check back Thursday for the full episode of Breaking Madden. And for more many more episodes of Breaking Madden, click here.

The NFC South is horrible. It could be worse, and it will be worse. Let's blow it to Hell.

This season, there's a very good chance that we'll see a team wander into the playoffs with a losing record. It's only happened once before over the course of a full 16-game season, in part because the NFL's scheduling tendencies present a sort of safeguard against it. Each team plays six games against its division rivals, which automatically inflates the division's cumulative winning percentage by 12 wins.

To produce a division champ with a losing record, all four teams in the division must work very hard to be very bad against the rest of the league. This is what the NFC South has done in 2014.

Combined, these teams have a .229 winning percentage against the rest of the NFL. For comparison's sake, Washington's winning percentage as of this writing is almost exactly that (.231).

Consider how difficult it must be to assemble such a Bad Football Megazord. These are four different football solutions, sitting in four different test tubes hundreds of miles apart, with different players, coaches, game plans, philosophies and cultures, and -- presumably -- sitting at different places on the rebuilding/contending spectrum. Maybe they downshift a little to be only as good as they have to be, or maybe all the badness aligned at the right moment.

Let's help them out. The mission of this week's episode of Breaking Madden is to engineer the worst playoff team in the history of American football:

Music: "Free Bird," Lynyrd Skynyrd

I. THE SETUP.

We'll start the season over with versions of the Falcons, Buccaneers, Panthers and Saints that are even worse than their real-life counterparts. This will be a four-step operation.

1. We scuttle the offenses by creating eight of the most terrible quarterbacks the sport has ever seen: short, slow, weak-armed, oblivious, and brittle. That's one starting quarterback for each team, plus the requisite backup.

2. We lay waste to the kicking game by giving each team a horrible placekicker. They are just as bad as the quarterbacks, and their legs are barely strong enough to kick an extra point.

3. We edit all the real-life quarterbacks and kickers to make them running backs instead. The likes of Drew Brees, Matt Ryan and Mike Glennon will be our stud backs. (I feared that Cam Newton would actually be a good running back, so I made him a center instead.) Aside from their positions, I changed absolutely nothing about them.

4. Now that we have all the running backs we need, we release all real-life running backs into free agency. The NFC South isn't really known for its elite running backs, but still, we don't need them clogging up the depth chart.

As for those miserable quarterbacks and kickers, I recruited them, as usual, via Twitter.

if you would like to be in the next Breaking Madden, please tell me about the most The South moment of your life

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) December 8, 2014

These are the 12 brave suckers we have ended up with.

Tell y'all what, they had some amazing stories. One person told me about their dad, who got crap-hammered and did donuts on a four-wheeler until he broke his leg. Another broke a church pew while moshing at a Christian rap show. One man witnessed a couple at a NASCAR block party leave their child in the custody of a random drunk man wearing a cape and no shirt. If stories such as these interest you, by all means:

BREAKING MADDEN ROSTER CUTS: WEEK 15

All right. Let's crack open this shitty little division we've made. Sorry about the "we." I've just decided that you're complicit in this, is all.

II. THE REGULAR SEASON.

What we have here is a five-foot-tall Panthers quarterback running a play action with Derek Anderson, our new 6'6, 31-year-old running back. Or maybe it's an actual handoff that failed? Hell, I don't know.

His running back is well past the line of scrimmage, and he's still trying to sell the handoff. Literally. He is trying to sell the ball, for sale, because his center bequeathed it to him and he has no idea of what to do with it. Can you buy the football in the middle of a play? I'm sure they would have written a rule against it if you weren't supposed to.

There's plenty more in the way of horrid quarterbacking to show you, and we'll get to that. First, though, I want to talk about Madden's artificial intelligence, and what it's making of all this nonsense. I want to make clear that in this episode, I never controlled any of the players, and I didn't really call any plays during the season, either. I just signed off on whichever play the game recommended.

So it was Madden's idea, and not mine, to punt inside the red zone.

This is a game that knows what shit smells like. It knew its field goal kicker was so untenably bad that it wouldn't trust him to kick a 35-yarder. And rightly so, because there was no way in Hell that was happening. Here, let me show you. To the practice field!

The Buccaneers' kicker, Danny Roes, is just like every other kicker of the NFC South, in that his field goals would be more accurate if he strapped a stick of dynamite to the ball, lit the fuse and ran away. This is actually a pretty impressive distance for these little guys. It stayed in the air for like 20 yards! In the wrong direction.

But back to that red zone punt. Is there really a line of code in this game that says, "punt at the opponent's 15 if X is true"? I doubt it. I think this is a case of Madden thinking independently, which it really shouldn't do, because this is dumb. It only presents any benefit at all if the punter can manage a coffin-corner, which he almost certainly can't and which I never saw a punter do, because punters have no practice coffin-cornering from 15 yards away, because NO ONE EVER DOES THIS. Instead, the dude just booted it out of the back of the end zone for a touchback, which just spotted the other team an extra five yards.

It's okay, Madden. You are full of awful ideas, but I can see the effort, and I appreciate it, and I want you to know that.

In order to end up with the worst division winner possible, it was important to ensure that these teams lost every game to teams outside the NFC South, but it was also crucial to the mission for these teams to be more or less equally bad. I didn't need one team running the table and picking up six gimme wins from its division rivals. I simulated about 10 seasons, pausing between each one to try to balance the scales. I'd do so by releasing Jimmy Graham, Julio Jones, and other star players, slowly but surely, until each team achieved a resting point of "horrible as Hell."

After enough tweaking, we hit the jackpot.

Ideally, of course, we'd have all four teams finish with an 0-10-6 record. To play through all those interdivisional games would probably make for a weeks-long project, and besides, a 4-12 division champion is plenty bad, even for my tastes. (We even had a tie! I did not watch that Saints-Panthers game, and I am glad I didn't.)

We did succeed in losing every game to every other team in the NFL. None of them were one-score losses, and only one of them was a two-score loss.

They just got clobbered, y'all. As you can see, the vast majority of their games were lost by four-score margins. About half of them were 40-point losses. That is what you ought to expect from teams that are quarterbacked by these poor people:

(A brief aside: The first names of my created players are usually "YOUR." The default name is always "YOUR NAME;" I only edit the last name because that's the one that shows up on the jersey. It's a rare time-saver within the Breaking Madden production process, and also it reads like the players are being introduced to me by a Vaudeville man.)

I really hope you're enjoying those stats. The game made them just for you. Please note in particular the statistics of one Justin McElroy, starting quarterback for the Atlanta Falcons: one touchdown, 29 interceptions. His team won the division.

Seven of these quarterbacks saw significant action. These are the footprints of a desperate, panicked artificial intelligence, I'll tell y'all what. Sure, switch to the other guy. He's the same guy. Oh, you're switching back to the first guy? Sure, do that. You are out of moves. Video game, play thyself.

The rushing numbers are even funnier.

HOW THE HELL DID THE FALCONS WIN THIS DIVISION? Their quarterback was impossibly bad, and they rushed for negative-three yards over the course of the entire season. Noted running back Matt Ryan rushed for 43 yards on 90 attempts, good for about 0.5 yards per carry.

But hey, let's see how the rest of the quarterbacks did! Drew Brees had 42 yards on 29 carries ... oh, hey, Luke McCown had 355 yards on 1.6 per carry! Not too bad! I mean, it is too bad, but he's who passes for good around here. Oh, you know who probably did pretty well? Mike Glennon. At 6'7, he's one big ol' drink o' water. Bet he could move those chains. Let's take a look at hisOH MY GOD

Mike Glennon, how the shit did you do that? How did you take the ball 100 times for five yards? Come with me, Mike. We're not doing anything else until we take you to the practice field.

All right.

Okay, okay, yeah. I get it. We're good, Mike.

III. THE PLAYOFFS.

Our Atlanta Falcons are going to the playoffs with a 4-12 record. A more reasonable system of governance would leverage executive authority to take the NFC South's playoff berth away from them and relegate them to college football, but this is the NFL, and this is Madden.

Late in the season, starting quarterback Justin McElroy was lost for the year to injury, leaving the equally brittle Dan Morris to lead the team into their wild card matchup with the 12-4 Dallas Cowboys.

Well, we made this big ol' pot of stew, and now the time has come to dump it on the floor. Godspeed you, NFC South. Set sail to a foreign realm, one that will love you. We all hate you here.

Music: "Saturday=Celebration" by Big K.R.I.T. feat. Jamie N Commons

Click here for many more episodes of Breaking Madden.

Did you make it into this week's Breaking Madden? Goodness, I certainly hope not. Let's meet the 19 newest members of the Cleveland Browns and Carolina Panthers.

Johnny Manziel's first-ever start in the NFL was kind of a disaster. In this week's Breaking Madden, we're going to try to return him to his roots. He needs to get out there and extend the play.

Like, forever. We need a 15-minute play.

Music: "Johnny Strikes Up The Band" by Warren Zevon

We need superhuman giants to block for Johnny, and we need to whittle the Panthers' defense down to worthless five-foot nubs. As always, I recruited new players via Twitter.

if you would like to be in the next Breaking Madden, please tell me about the biggest waste of time you have ever experienced

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) December 12, 2014

Six 7'0, 400-pound, great-at-everything offensive linemen for Cleveland. Thirteen 5'0, 16-pound terrible-at-everything babies for Carolina. Please say hello to our new Twitter players:

Panthers linebacker:

@jon_bois pre-ordered Madden 12 through a local 7-11. Made me keep coming back every hour from midnight to 4, then they got it at 10 AM.

— Jay Douces (@Doctor_Midnight) December 12, 2014

You could pre-order Madden at a 7-11? Damn. OK, it's thought experiment time. In this thought experiment, you are furnished with the barest necessities: you have a home, clean water and all the clothes you are wearing right now at this very instant. You have a limitless supply of food, but it's all just plain rice, and you don't have any salt or other seasonings for it.

You are not allowed to receive any gifts or barter for anything. Which of the following do you choose?

1. For one year, everything you buy must be bought at the 7-11, whether that's clothes, or food, or household items or anything else. The catch: you have an unlimited amount of 7-11 gift cards, and can buy as much as you would ever want to.

2. For one year, everything you buy must be bought at Target. You have only $200 to last you the entire year.

There are a lot of elements in play here. We can talk about this in the comments if y'all want.

Browns tight end:

@jon_bois red carpet at the 2008 video music awards: i had only a digital recorder, and was ignored by everyone who wanted to be on tv

— jingle jangle maura (@maura) December 12, 2014

Gonna take a completely wild stab at this. I'm guessing that if you were able to talk to literally anyone, that person was Dustin Diamond, a.k.a. Saved by the Bell's Screech. That man has a superhuman ability to remain seen and heard. He will produce his own sex tape and leak it himself. He will sell shirts that read "SAVE SCREEECH'S HOUSE" to avoid foreclosure on his home, spelling his character's name with three Es to skirt copyright law. He will be on anything and talk to anyone.

Normally, I would respect that hustle, but his recent tell-all Saved by the Bell book is largely an impotent, misogynist vehicle for him to slut-shame his co-stars and accuse random child celebrities of being jerks when they were children. He's kind of the worst, and there's probably a 12 percent chance he will respond to this article. Here are some highlights from an instructional chess video he made.

Browns left tackle:

@jon_bois I played through an entire game of Civ in one sitting. Eight hours completely gone.

— Roehl Sybing (@roehlteacher) December 12, 2014

Hold on, I'll be right back. I gotta look something up.

oh my god

Browns left guard:

@jon_bois I once went to hear John Ankerberg preach on how Y2K was predicted in the Bible and how to prepare.

— Mark Ennis (@MarkEnnis) December 12, 2014

When I was 16, shortly before the year 2000, I gave a presentation on Y2K for English class. While researching it, I ran into a lot of wet-blanket shit: actually, the vast majority of computer systems will continue to operate with almost zero consequence. Actually, the power plants will be fine.

That was no fun, so I zeroed in on the most radical, neo-survivalist bullcrap I could find. In my presentation, I presented as fact that the power grid would immediately fail, which would shut down heating and water, and people would drink rainwater and die of diseases because they wouldn't know to boil it, and people would be burned alive inside of their own houses because they didn't know how to properly start an indoor fire. Pretty sure I also cited a 700 Club report stating that China was planning to capitalize on the opportunity by conquering the United States.

It was one of those rare high school presentations in which kids not only paid attention, but looked genuinely horrified. I do not describe myself as a journalist and there are reasons for that.

Browns center:

@jon_bois the government put me on a Navy ship home from Kuwait instead of a plane. Two months on a boat instead of 13-hour flight.

— Matt Ufford (@mattufford) December 12, 2014

I just talked to Matt about this. Over these two months, he and his fellow Marines had literally nothing they were supposed to be doing. No training or classes or anything. They could work out, or they could rent DVDs from the ship's whatever store thing, and that was just about it.

This would have been 2003, right? Let's see which movies were out in 2003.

• Kangaroo Jack
• Boat Trip
• Big Momma's House
• Love Actually
• Gigli

Thank you for your service, Matt.

Browns right guard:

@jon_bois I re-watched every episode of Lost for the purposes of writing and article. I never wrote the article.

— Takao Yamada (@TakMacYamada) December 12, 2014

I see you, man. I actually watched the majority of Lost, and kept on watching only to keep my hatred of it as well-informed as I could. I have also spent an enormous amount of time writing things I've never finished.

I'll show you. Here, I tried to reinterpret Sebastian Janikowski's 76-yard field goal attempt with army men.

Here is an excerpt from a story in which Bobby Petrino falls into a wormhole in 2007 and reappears seven years later in Louisville, having lived those years in an alternate dimension:

Both of these projects were like 25 percent finished before I axed them, either due to time constraints or because they just weren't cohesive enough. I've got an embarrassing amount of far worse crap where this came from. The stuff I shovel at y'all is dumb enough. Know that it could be much, much dumber.

Panthers defensive end:

@jon_bois I watched the movie "Puma Man"

— Zach Eberhardt (@ZachEberhardt1) December 12, 2014

The Mystery Science Theater 3000 version is on YouTube and makes the movie a bearable experience. The original was made in 1980, but it looks like it was shot in 1960, and yet -- due to everyone's recent discovery of synthesizers -- sounds like the music was produced a in coked-out 68,000 A.D. It is a really weird slice of cognitive dissonance and an overwhelmingly shitty movie.

(Most underappreciated moment from that MST3K version, by the way, is at 57:40. "He's refenestrating! See?"

Panthers defensive end:

@jon_bois I drove 7 hours to Omaha to visit my girlfriend at school. She broke up with me and I drove home.

— Erik Johnson (@WangChangBackup) December 12, 2014

And then you have to spend the next seven hours driving through ... Hell, spin the wheel. Omaha's right in the middle of Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, and Kansas. Whoooole lot of nothing to look at. Whole lot of time to kick yourself for buying her Norton AntiVirus for Valentine's Day. She is free of web junk, unwanted spam, and at long last, you.

Panthers defensive end:

@jon_bois I took pencil boxes filled w/ soil to every TV station in L.A. to promote event none of them came to. Most even refused delivery.

— Jesse Cazakoff (@jessecaz) December 12, 2014

Oh God, I'm so sorry. Mostly because I'm trying to map out how the Hell I would preserve any shred of dignity, and I'm failing. I'm sure this is "soil taken from the whatever field" or "soil preserved from historic wherever park" or what have you, but I guarantee you that what they heard is what I'm hearing, which is

WOULD YOU LIKE BOX O' SOME FUCKIN DIRT

I'd have the most trouble conducting the little exit interview I would doubtlessly hold with myself every time I walked out. "Welp! Guess they didn't like my dirt! Heh!" And then my lip would quiver for just a moment, and then I would explode into a blubbering fit of self-pity, the kind where you're drooling and snot falls out your nose and stuff, and then it's on to the next one.

Panthers defensive end:

@jon_bois Navigating phone menus. Just give me the damn operator already.

— Roger Rice (@msuroo) December 12, 2014

A lot of automated phone systems out there allow for a cheat that lets you bypass the menus. Just say "supervisor" or "representative" a few times. Some systems will actually recognize what these words mean, and more can simply be brute-forced into giving up if you yell at them enough.

When I did over-the-phone tech support at an ISP, our automated system recognized this command.

Woman from Slidell, Louisiana. SUPERVAHSOR. SUPERVAHSOR. SUPERVAHSOR.SUPERVAHSOR.

Me. Thank you for calling Charter tech support. This--

Woman. SUPERVAHSOR.SUPERVAHSOR.SUPERVAHSOR.SUPERVAHSOR.SUPERVAHSOR.

Me. -- is Jon. How may I help you?

Woman. SUPERVAHSOR.SUPERVAHSOR.SUPERVAHSOR.SUPERVAHSOR.SUPERVAHSOR. SUPERVAHSOR. SUPERVAHSOR. SUPERVAHSOR.

Me. Ma'am, you've reached me. I'm a real person. What can I--

Woman. SUPERVAHSOR.SUPERVAHSOR.SUPERVAHSOR.SUPERVAHSOR.SUPERVAHSOR. SUPERVAHSOR. SUPERVAHSOR. SUPERVAHSOR. SUPERVAHSOR. SUPERVAHSOR. SUPERVAHSOR. SUPERVAHSOR. SUPERVAHSOR. SUPERVAHSOR. SUPERVAHSOR.

A minimum of two minutes passed before she heard anything I said.

Panthers defensive tackle:

@jon_bois college

— P.J. Zipser (@zip_zapdos17) December 12, 2014

A high schooler recently emailed me some interview questions for a class project, and asked me what I majored in while in college that helped me get the job I have today. I answered: "I didn't go to college because it's really expensive and school is boring."

Before sending it, I added in a disclaimer that I was only speaking from my personal experience, and that depending on what one wants to do, college could be a necessary path and a worthwhile experience. But I've known so many people who earned college degrees they could do absolutely nothing with, and I've known lots of people who made good livings and lived happy lives without ever stepping foot in a university. The only actual blanket advice I'm comfortable giving is, "don't trust anyone who tells you you have to go to college."

Panthers defensive tackle:

@jon_bois spenta month going over a mile of fiberoptic looking for cracks to discover no one put battery in original test. Line was perfect.

— supercam (@supercam) December 12, 2014

This is vicariously stressing me the Hell out.

Panthers defensive tackle:

@jon_bois XMen videogame. RECENTLY found out 2 pass Mojo level I had 2 physically hit (but not too hard) the actual reset button on my Sega

— Andrew Del Toro (@stonecutter7) December 12, 2014

X-Men for the Sega Genesis was so difficult that I never even halfway finished it. I was equally surprised, pissed off, and delighted to look this up and verify that this was true. At one point, you run across a computer screen that reads, "RESET THE COMPUTER." So naturally, most players probably ran all up and down the level, mashing buttons everywhere, trying to get something to happen.

And then you learn that "RESET THE COMPUTER" means you're actually supposed to get up out of the couch you are actually sitting in real life and walk over and press the reset button on your Genesis. It is a puzzle specifically engineered to make you feel like a complete idiot. I was a pretty mild-mannered kid, but that shit would have gone flying out the window.

Panthers linebacker:

@jon_bois drove 6 hours to a house I wanted to buy. When I got there, the fire department was leaving. It had burned to the ground.

— Joshua Hall (@JHallSports) December 12, 2014

DO NOT BUY THAT HOUSE!!!!!!!

Panthers linebacker:

@jon_bois waited till midnight to get a wii with 3 friends then went home with a rejected credit card cause of earlier charge 2 same Walmart

— CRYST-MAS BOY (@gilgamix) December 12, 2014

This happened to me in 2005, the night the Xbox 360 launched. They put out a couple rows of chairs at Walmart at 5 p.m.; if you grabbed a chair, that was your spot in line, and you couldn't get up unless you wanted to risk losing your place. My friend and I waited in these chairs for six or seven hours, only for my bank to decide that my purchase was suspect and decline the sale. Which, I mean, serves me right for buying literally anything at launch.

The highlight came earlier in the evening, though. One guy, who was trying to grab an Xbox for his kid, had spent the last two hours in one of the chairs. "I really need to go to the bathroom, y'all. Would you mind watching this chair for me?" Of course not. So he gets up, and as soon as he rounds the corner of the aisle, a guy who had been skulking about immediately sprinted to the empty chair and sat down before we could do anything about it.

He spends the next hour indignantly crossing his arms and defending himself. "Look, it's cold. I know it. That's cold. It's cold as Hell. I ain't gonna say sorry for it. Gotta do what I gotta do." Everyone was shooting daggers at him, and a few people were just relentlessly mocking him, and he just had to sit in that little chair and take it. He eventually had enough, and gave the seat back to the other guy.

This means that a man drove to Walmart, sat in a chair, was roundly shamed and humiliated to the point of defeat, and drove home. For nothing.

Panthers linebacker:

@jon_bois 3 days of Law School "orientation". At least 50% was people telling we wouldn't succeed.

— Dan Lorentzen (@danzeedotes) December 12, 2014

Upwards of 25 people answered, "law school." I just walked over and talked to noted law school graduate Ryan Nanni to ask him whether he'd like to weigh in. "The thing to remember," he says, "is that everyone who chose law school had absolutely no other option in mind. They weren't going to go to art school or something. They were going to accomplish nothing, they just chose the very most expensive way to do that."

Panthers linebacker:

@jon_bois Atlanta traffic

— Sam Mercer (@smercedog) December 12, 2014

I've been in my new apartment for two weeks now. I am almost certain that I have spent less time in it than I did sitting as a child in a hot car on Bells Ferry Road. I'm pretty sure you can mail stuff to people in Atlanta while they're driving.

Panthers linebacker:

@jon_bois I once attended a pyramid scheme seminar that didn't provide food or drink.

— Eric Shuff (@ericshuff) December 12, 2014

Withholding refreshments seems like a scam in and of itself. Because then you get to keep them all to yourself. Think about it.

Browns right tackle:

@jon_bois took adderall to write a term paper, spent 22 straight hours arguing with facebook neocons instead

— Minecraft Holmes (@momspubis) December 12, 2014

OH GOD THIS IS HELL GET ME OUT OF HERE

/pulls cord, parachutes out of article

We've got every single episode of Breaking Madden right here, if that's your deal.

We have seen Johnny Manziel extend plays for several seconds. In this episode of Breaking Madden, we ask him to do so for an eternity.

I spent most of this episode trying to decide what the hell I was going to do with Johnny Manziel. My original premise wasn't as captivating as I'd hoped, and, appropriately enough, I scrambled. Week 16 of Breaking Madden was a lot like Manziel's debut as starter of the Cleveland Browns: rife with missed opportunities, ideas that didn't pan out, and eventual defeat. In the end, I threw the artificial notions of "goals" and "success" out the window, and let Johnny Football do what he probably wanted to do all along.

In the end, I am perfectly fine with that. This episode of Breaking Madden is about Johnny Manziel extending the play, as he is famous for doing. He can stretch out a single play for an entire minute. An entire quarter. Forever, in fact:

Music: "Johnny Strikes Up The Band" by Warren Zevon

What's the longest play in the history of American football? Even the plays that feel like an eternity, the very longest, most tortured Hail Marys, the zig-zaggiest interception returns through dense thickets of inept tackling, never last longer than 20 or 30 seconds.

I want Johnny Manziel to extend a play for so long that time no longer matters. The field will be his, to do with as any man with a plot of land might do. Till the soil and grow corn. Build a cabin. Hang a portrait of ducks flying over a pond. Choose bath towels that match the tiles. Pour a mug of coffee and hobble with morning legs to the porch; sit and enjoy the sun as it floats over the tree line. Build a future, Johnny.

I am here to help, and so are 19 of my friends. Please welcome the newest members of the Browns, and their Week 16 opponents, the Carolina Panthers.

As usual, I found them on Twitter. I asked y'all:

if you would like to be in the next Breaking Madden, please tell me about the biggest waste of time you have ever experienced

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) December 12, 2014

As per usual, the responses were a riot. There are stories of Y2K doomsday predictions, two-month-long trips home from Kuwait, seven-hour drives that ended in a breakup, and, simply, "law school." You can read them all here.

BREAKING MADDEN ROSTER CUTS: WEEK 16.

In order to help give Johnny all the time he would ever want, our six newest Browns make up the offensive line. They are as large as I could make them, and rate a perfect 99/99 in every rating category. As you've probably already guessed, the new Panthers are the polar opposite: five feet tall, 160 pounds, and 0/99 in every conceivable skill.

That explains this, I guess.

In Madden, the most lethal ratings cocktail usually involves an Awareness level of 0/99. Johnson, number 4, is actually just being completely oblivious, but I see a guy bailing from a shitty party.

This behavior might seem strange to a lot of people, but know that within our society, there is a subset of us who have no issue with throwing on a coat, heading to a bar or a party or something, putting two feet in the door, and peacing out after two minutes. Maybe you spot your ex or something. Personally, if I bail immediately, it's almost certainly because it's an absurdly loud, crowded bar. It's hell. Eking out barely enough room to stand, holding a drink with a T-rex arm, shouting every line of conversation, and hearing maybe 70 percent of what the other person says: this is my Kryptonite. I love a chill bar, and I like a moderately busy bar. But put me in some generic Irish bar at 11 p.m. on a Saturday night and I turn into Sean Connery from Finding Forrester when the kid tries to take him to a Knicks game. I'm perpetually bug-eyed and sneering and all I want to do is go home and ghostwrite your term paper.

My original idea was to keep Johnny scrambling in the pocket for as long as it took for the game clock to hit zero. And with a little practice, I could do this reliably. Trust me, it's not really worth your time to watch that in its entirety. But as we've seen previously in Breaking Madden, if a play lasts long enough, the game's AI totally runs out of stuff to do.

After a few minutes, Johnny's offensive line stopped blocking for him. In fact, they stopped playing football entirely. Look at 'em! Even as Johnny scrambles for dear life right in front of them, they go into "video game bad guy guard" mode. For them, the play is over, and I get it. Props to the artificial intelligence for even finding two minutes' worth of stuff to do, because that's about minute and 50 seconds of content that virtually nobody would ever see.

Check out the daps between the Browns' No. 75 and the Panthers' No. 6. Pretty good.

Unfortunately, from a big-picture perspective, this scenario didn't turn out to be very inspiring. Johnny held the ball for 10 or 15 minutes, the Panthers' offense did their thing, and the Browns lost 21-0. Shrug.

So I put both teams in the Super Bowl. I was hoping to take control of both teams, prevent either team from ever scoring, and poke a little at the game's overtime construct. In the postseason, of course, teams play as many overtime periods as they need to break the tie. Maybe if I necessitate enough overtimes, I'll expose some kind of glitch! Maybe the game will be over, and without a winner, the Super Bowl trophy will float around, held up by an invisible person! Something?

No, nothing. Madden executed the overtime system without incident. This episode of Breaking Madden still lacked meaning, although a couple funny things had happened along the way.

I finally appreciated the power of audibles in this game. The game allows us to change a guy's individual assignment; among other things, it lets us assign a guy to man coverage. All 11 men on the field can be put on man, and all can be put on the same man. This is something I plan on exploring/exploiting in greater depth in the future, because that shit is a riot.

Players who are seven feet tall and 400 pounds, of course, hit very hard. They're elements of nature. If it's decided that they're going somewhere, they are going to that place, no matter what is in the way. Even if that thing is their quarterback. With limited protocol to work from, these linemen would sometimes just kind of bunch up in a cluster around Johnny, representing a terrifying amount of potential energy. At random, that could transform into kinetic energy, and there was nothing to be done about that.

I wasn't even touching the controller here. Johnny just got caught up in the wave and shoved nine yards upfield.

By this point, I'd spent an irresponsible amount of time in search of some sort of purpose to this experiment. Maybe there wasn't. Maybe there was nothing to say, maybe this episode really was simply, "grown man plays a video game like he's 10 years old and strange things happen."

I took the Browns and Panthers to the practice field, a place unbound by clocks or downs or any such thing. I could spot the ball wherever I wanted, and instantly repeat any play I wanted. Remember what I said about audibles? Those can also be used to drop literally any player into zone coverage, even the linemen. So I did that, and I found something like an atomic clock: a thing that would degrade, but very, very slowly, across an immeasurably large plot of time.

Sometimes, after five or 10 minutes, one of the players would seemingly grow fed up with his stupid assignment. Defying my instructions and the game's instructions, he would drop out of coverage and make a beeline toward Johnny.

And Roman Harper took the hard road, too. For reasons I can't explain, my offensive line would sometimes line up in single file right in front of me. Rather than run around them, Roman just barreled through and took them head-on. He was pissed off. That is my explanation.

Ten minutes passed. Twenty. Thirty. The system began to slow down, one component at a time. Madden was becoming an old grandfather clock, and we had lost its winder key. It struck noon at 1:06, and by tea time, it was bedtime.

Some, like Mr. Harper there, fell into an alternative plane of time. Others went out like a lamp.

They're still observing, craning their necks, looking around, but they are otherwise frozen. The longer a play ran on, the more this tended to happen.

And even now, like Johnny Manziel eluding a half-dozen Alabama linemen, I was desperate to reach some kind of conclusion. To add to this, my heart was filled with regret: at one point, Johnny was standing still at his opponent's 20. Think the Matt Stafford Incident, but twice as amazing: he was sandwiched by a couple of his own giant blockers, got squeezed a little, and then, POWWWW. Johnny flew into the air like he'd stepped on a land mine, and was catapulted 30 yards in the air. He hit the cone at the corner of the end zone, so it even counted as a touchdown. The first-ever 20-yard flying-man touchdown.

I went to the replay. The play had run on too long. Madden had stopped collecting replay data. I missed it. It was one of the funniest Madden moments I had ever seen, and I missed it. You would have laughed your ass off, I promise you, and it feels criminal not to be able to share it. I am so sorry to have let y'all down.

And shortly after that, it occurred to me that no point needed to be made, no goal attained. Perhaps, just as Johnny sometimes appears to extend a play for the sake of doing so, it's fine to simply wind a clock, sit quietly, and watch it die.

I decided that Johnny would spend an afternoon in Scrambling Quarterback Heaven. For as long, at least, as something so beautiful could last:

Music: "Prince Johnny" by St. Vincent

Click here for many more adventures in Breaking Madden.

Sunday, the 6-8 Saints and 5-8 Falcons will play in a game that may well determine who wins the NFC South. Neither team deserves this. So Ryan Nanni and Jon Bois fired up Madden, coached these teams, and tried to run them into the ground.

We're playing Madden NFL 15. Ryan Nanni is coaching the New Orleans Saints. Jon Bois is coaching the Atlanta Falcons. Both of us are trying to lose, although we're employing different losing strategies:

• Ryan has actually printed out a script of 70 offensive plays to blindly run in consecutive order. He literally printed out the list of plays on actual sheets of paper with a real printer, because he lives in the year 1996.
• Jon is calling plays from his gut, and is utilizing audibles to their worst-most potential. Among other things, he will drop all 11 players, including the defensive line, into man coverage. They will all cover the same man.

We've edited the results down to 13 of the worst minutes. As we play, we stumble upon a number of epiphanies, such as:

• Falcons coach Mike Smith refrigerates his table salt!
• Falcons coach Mike Smith saves the crust from his pizza and wears it as a belt!
• GL Man is either a goal-line formation play or a reclusive author everyone pretends to have read!
• Sean Hannity is a Tolkien villain!

You don't have to pay anything now. If you view this video, a $500 charge will be added to your next Internet bill. Enjoy!

For more Madden nonsense, you might want to check out Jon's feature, Breaking Madden.

If President Obama fills out a college football playoff bracket, he will usher us into a paradise. Paradise is its own Hell.

Henry watches television from the only occupied stool of a dim, dusty bar. It's an old heavy cathode-ray TV. A digital converter box hangs from audio/video cables, from the back of the TV to a hole punched through a ceiling tile, draping like a holiday ornament.

Henry. Any games on?
Bartender. It's only seven. Could check and see.

The bartender leans and holds the remote around the corner with an outstretched arm; after a few labored presses, the "last" button flips the receiver box to ESPN.

Henry.Oh, what's this? This the, uh ...
Bartender. Yeah it's uh, Obama's fillin' out his tournament bracket.
Henry. See ..

Henry leans back just a little. The winter sun peels out of the clouds, just as it's set to dip into the trees.

Henry. And look, I don't wanna be politically incorrect or whatever. And no offense.
Bartender. Yeah, yeah, no, yeah.
Henry. But it's like. Doesn't Obama have anything better to do than fill out a college bracket? I mean, he's the President.
Bartender. Hey, I hear you.
Henry. Last I checked, he had a country to run. Last I heard, there were real problems that needed fixing. Like the um. You know, Middle East is goin' to Hell in a handbasket.
Bartender. I heard about that.
Henry. Yeah, and the money problems. All of the money debt.
Bartender. Oh yeah. Ohhh yeah. My brother-in-law? He works for the government. The things he says about the money problems and all of the money debt ... he told me on Thanksgiving, he said, "you better be ready. There are gonna be money problems with the debt."
Henry. But I guess that's gonna have to wait, huh? The President has to fill out his bracket.

The President. Well. I've had the opportunity to watch Marcus Mariota a few games this season, and you know, I'm going to go with my gut here. Let's put the Ducks over Florida State. And who have we got next?
Host. Over here, we've got Alabama versus Ohio State.
The President.[chuckles] Well, they've really put me in a spot! But you know ... Ohio's a battleground state.
Host. Ahhh! A little political gamesmanship here, Mr. President?
The President. Hey ... you know-- and, and hey, I'm a politician at heart.
Host. Now here's the big question. Oregon or Ohio State?
The President. I just don't think the Buckeyes can match the pace of that Oregon team. Let's put the Ducks in the next round. Who's up next?
Host. That's it, Mr. President.
The President. Hm?
Henry. Hm?
Host. This is only a four-team bracket, since it's football.
The President. Huh.

The President turns to the camera.

Henry squints back at him.

Henry. Huh.

The President. Well, I set aside an hour for this. I thought there were going to be 68 teams.
Host. No, sir. We're all done.
The President. Charlie, what time is it?
Aide. It's, ah ... It's 7:02. This was supposed to run until eight.
The President. Well. Hey. I've almost an hour free. Anything that needs doing?
Aide. Not really.
The President. Oh! I could get started on Game of Thrones. Is that show any good?
Aide. No.
The President. Hmm.
Henry. You guys gonna be open for Christmas?
Bartender. Oh, I imagine. Short day, though, maybe eight to midnight.
The President. Can someone get me some paper? Might as well get some work out of the way.
Aide. Need a pen?
The President. Got one.
Henry. Might stop by. Home stuff is a little ... you know.
Bartender. Mhmm.

Credits

Music:
"New Grass" from Talk Talk's 1991 album, "Laughing Stock"
Source videos for time-lapse animations:
Balmedie Beach - time lapse video
Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over
District Nights

More than 100 articles are published to the Internet each and every year! Jon Bois wrote a lot of those. Here are the 10 he is happiest with.

10. Jon's Basketball Game.

Using a sandbox physics engine, I tried to produce my own basketball video game. As it turns out, video games are very difficult to make! By the time I was done, my players were crushed to death by a bus that fell out of the sky and/or set on fire. I truly believe in my heart that I did my best.

9. NFL Daft.

I analyzed a few NFL Drafts and learned that almost nobody in the NFL knows what they are doing. I like the comments more than the piece itself, because we played a game of "Try to Out-Draft Matt Millen." I simulated a draft and let commenters make draft picks completely blindly and randomly. We drafted better than Matt Millen.

8. Hey y'all got y'alls' asses whooped.

I'm happy that I got to write an article with that headline. I'm very happy that I got to write it the day after the Super Bowl, and about the team that was thoroughly stomped on. The comments section is Mordor.

7. A eulogy for RadioShack.

This might be RadioShack's final holiday season before it goes under, so I shared a bunch of stories from my three and a half years as an employee.

6. Breaking Madden: The Mark Sanchez Century.

I was determined to get to a Super Bowl in Madden with Mark Sanchez as my quarterback, no matter the team, and no matter how many tries it took. Eighty-nine years. Eighty-nine years is how long it takes.

5. "Are you that stupid?"

I love Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, and there is one episode I love most of all. This, captured through GIFs and videos, is an examination of a phenomenally mean, not-smart man and the British celebrity chef who won't stop screaming at him.

4. Tony Gwynn, baseball scientist, has died.

Like everyone else, I was pretty heartbroken when Tony Gwynn passed away at the age of 54. He was baseball's jolliest supervillain dork. We say "there wasn't anyone else like him" about a lot of people. This time, we meant it.

3. Breaking Madden: The Machine Is Bleeding To Death.

We managed to raise thousands of dollars in charity as I built two nightmarish rosters in Madden: the Seahawks were all enormous and perfect at everything, while the Broncos were tiny and horrible at everything. I wanted to score a thousand points in a single Super Bowl. Instead, the game totally lost its cookies, glitched up, and created a misshapen alien fetus-monster in the middle of the field. I provided photographic evidence, but I couldn't explain it. I still can't.

2. The Tim Tebow CFL Chronicles.

A note of warning before you click that: in terms of both word count and animation size, it might well be the longest, heaviest article you have ever seen on the Internet. It's a 44,000-word illustrated online novel about Tim Tebow, who signs with a CFL team and soon learns that an offensive drive in the CFL does not end in the end zone. The stadium walls open up, and they continue to play through the streets. What follows is a decade-long offensive drive that stretches millions of yards through the Canadian wilderness.

The whole thing is crudely-animated, and as a written thing, it has flaws. It's just a thing I really, really wanted to do, so I did it.

1. NBA Y2K: The death of basketball.

Using NBA 2K15, I built an NBA draft class that was nothing but tiny, stupid, completely talentless players, and then I made NBA teams draft them. Then I fed them the same draft class the next year. And the next year. And the next year. I did this until all the real-life NBA players retired, and the sport of basketball was essentially murdered. By the end, we witnessed a 12-overtime thriller in which a team won 3-0.

This one takes the top spot for me because it's one of those few things I can look back on and say, "holy shit, all of it actually works."

0. well guess what it's you the fans

Y'all also be sure to check out Spencer Hall's 10 best pieces of 2014.

Jon thought it would be nice to create a Twitter account that gave a voice to all sports fans. So he made one, and then he tweeted out the password to everybody who wanted to use it. Everything fell into ruin.

I have identified what sports fans will crave in 2015: an opportunity to share their thoughts and opinions, connect brands with audiences, and find up-to-the-minute sources for sports scores, stats, news, opinions, & more. So in order to usher in the new year, I decided it would be nice to create such a thing:

hi everyone i made you a twitter account, @jonsfriends. password is prettygood. let’s all maintain a fun sports account for folks to enjoy

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) December 30, 2014

It's a Twitter account for sports fans, and who's in charge? Well guess what, it is you. Anyone on the Internet was invited to log in and use the account to tweet whatever they wanted.

As it turns out, it was rather difficult to maintain a consistent voice and properly serve our audience. This is the story of @jonsfriends.

11:09:00 A.M.

I took this screenshot the instant before I tweeted the account password to the world. Twitter suggested a couple of sample tweets to introduce ourselves to everyone, neither of which we elected to use.

Nicéphore Niépce took the world's oldest surviving photograph. It's barely a photograph by our standards, and by any technical measure it's a rather miserable attempt. It's a simple view from a window ledge, full of shadows that are only buildings because they're too straight to be anything else.

I doubt this bothered Niépce, because I don't think this is really a photograph of those buildings. It's a meta-photograph, a portrait of itself, a self-evident declaration: "This has been borne into existence." The first-ever photograph turned the lens upon itself; and now it was upon our first-ever tweet to do the same.

11:09:40 A.M.

Our first tweet. It was a non-sports tweet, and it was a harbinger of what was to come.

11:10:55 A.M.

Nearly two minutes into our Twitter career, we had managed to remain true to the mission in large part. Our follower count had nearly quadrupled to 86 sports fans, due in large part to a smorgasbord of sports predictions, discussions, and more.

The most intrepid among us had already explored the account settings by this point, and already, we had our first true profile pic. It would not be our last.

11:11:35 A.M.

Someone posted an emoji of a nice lady! I thought that that was nice.

11:12:40 A.M.

Three minutes and forty seconds in, an interlocutor took it upon himself, herself, or themself to forward a different agenda. Grøtris is a rather difficult thing to Google, but it appears to be some manner of Lithuanian rice dish.

I was of two hearts on this. On one hand, I envisioned this account to be a non-stop source of sports stats, news, rumors, scores & more, and this tweet did not serve these ends. On the other, I was delighted that folks were eager to participate at all. Perhaps what I wanted was not what was most important; perhaps this was not about me at all.

11:14:03 A.M.

After approximately five minutes and three seconds, it appeared as though one of our social media volunteers elected to take the account private. Shortly thereafter, our Twitter handle was a dead link. I feared the worst. While I acknowledge that Twitter's spam protocols may find it fishy to see a brand-new account tweet a hundred times in five minutes from all around the world, I wish they would install safeguards that would enable it to recognize either a) a collective of well-intentioned and passionate sports voices from around the web, or b) a single, very fast person.

11:18:45 A.M.

Nine minutes and forty-five seconds into our experiment, we bore witness to a miracle: somehow, @jonsfriends had risen from the dead. It had seemingly battled the balrog of Twitter security protocols and returned to us, clothed in a fun photo of a dog wearing a people sweater and a painting of Santa Claus brandishing a pistol.

11:20:15 A.M.

Nothing stood in our way, and so we stood in our own way. We found it difficult to remain on-message and execute a cohesive social media strategy, as the above tweets indicate. Some were determined to right the ship; others cried out in despair.

11:21:26 A.M.

This was an era of mixed fortune. I found our new name to be rather inappropriate, as I believe the ideal sports account is appropriate for all ages and ought to engage its audience in a professional manner. And yet, we had finally achieved a sports-themed profile photo.

It was neat that San Francisco Giants outfielder Hunter Pence was the new ambassador of our brand. But he seemed to stare in the direction of our tweets, and I suppose the expression on his face was one of something other than delight.

11:26:30 A.M.

We wanted out. We wanted out. Our social media focus had drifted further into despair, and as it did, it seemed to drift further from an up-to-the-minute source for sports news, scores & more.

11:28:45 A.M.

If a name is an account's flag, ours was flown upside-down and at half-mast. "We have fallen," it said, "and we ought not be saved."

At this stage, an unwelcome interlocutor attempted to replace the account's profile art with a photo of an individual's butthole. Valiant efforts from a more noble political sect, who I will call the "dog people," flooded our photo feed with a stream of adorable dog photos and attempted to countermand the doings of the butthole sect at every turn.

And the true victim was the sports fan. A house divided against itself is incapable of offering sports scores & more.

11:29:40 A.M.

At this stage I had emerged, at least to some, as some manner of deity. Needless to say, I was both uncomfortable with, and unready for, this development. I had exercised no control over this account, having given it all away to my fellow social media managers.

The clouds had frozen and struck the earth like fallen battleships. The sky had turned to space. It was Dog Time.

11:31:00 A.M.

A third political sect emerged: those who wanted to return our Twitter account to what it was always meant to be. Perhaps a retweet about badge prices at the Masters and an arbitrarily-selected Darren Rovell tweet were not the sort of content that would satisfy passionate sports fans from around the web, but establishing our own voice would have to come later.

We were, for the briefest of moments, a source for sports news; a portal that connected sports fans with the news they desired.

11:35:10 A.M.

I thought the Grøtris Movement was long-dead, as we had heard nothing about the dish in more than 20 minutes. It had returned, complete with a visual aid. Was this a collective of several grøtris enthusiasts, or a single individual?

In either case, my frustration grew. Suppose you are a sports fan on Twitter who's on the hunt for the things you're passionate about. This wasn't sports engagement. It wasn't engagement at all, and if that person we're after stumbled upon our feed expecting sports and receiving grøtris content ... well, if that person were me, I'd be gone in a second, never to come back.

At this point, my dream of creating a fun sports account had more or less died. That isn't even a can of beer.

11:38:30 A.M.

This was a civil war, but it was not the binary struggle we Americans are so fond of. It more closely resembled feudal Japan, comprised of dozens of fiefs, each determined to unify the land. There were the Dog People, the Grøtris Movement, the Butthole Cabal, the unaffiliated vandals who tweeted things like "poop," and a mysterious sect that, for reasons unknown, worked feverishly to change all our account photos to those of canned peaches.

I did not understand the motive. Fear the beasts of the forests and fields all you like. At least, it can be said, we know what it is they want.

11:41:50 A.M.

We were muttering to ourselves. We were soliciting gastrointestinal medical advice, and we were receiving it. We were calling folks "dill weed" and other things I felt were unprofessional and absolutely inconsistent with the social media voice I had hoped to develop. And worst, the Butthole Cabal continued to pollute the entire experience. Nobody wants to see a photo of a person's butthole when they're on the hunt for up-to-the-minute sports scores, news, gossip, rumors, stats, analysis, and opinion from some of the most trusted sources from around the web.

I had no choice but to pull the plug.

11:44:20 A.M.

Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

- Robert Frost

Did you make it into this week's episode of Breaking Madden? Goodness, I certainly hope not. Let's meet the 13 newest members of the Dallas Cowboys, and hear their stories of shame.

Last weekend, under direction from Jerry Jones, Roger Goodell, President Barack Obama, the Knights Templar, the descendants of Adam Weishaupt, Nicolae Carpathia, the political engine resourced by the estate of T. Boone Pickens, an eight-hooved centaur-squad who lives in the Earth's core and exhales volcanoes, the dude in the bathrobe at the front of the train in Snowpiercer, a levitating Bible that once belonged to Thomas Aquinas and shrieks when opened, Rupert Murdoch, and Jim Bankoff, the officials working the Cowboys-Lions game reversed a pass interference call moments after calling it against Dallas. It was a unique instance, in that the penalty was actually announced over the PA system before being picked up. This moment was the sole determining factor of the game; had the penalty stood, the Lions would have won the game by a minimum of seven touchdowns.

Instead, the Cowboys have moved into the divisional round of the playoffs, where they meet the Packers. All conspiracy theories are true and the Illuminati is real; it is only the destruction of the Illuminati that is confined to make-believe. And that is what this week's episode of Breaking Madden is for:

Music: "Kaputt" by Destroyer

I don't actually hate the Dallas Cowboys, but I acknowledge that they are very fun to hate and that a lot of folks hate them, and I'm delighted to placate y'all. Returning to destroy the Cowboys is Clarence BEEFTANK, the 400-pound, always-running, never-throwing quarterback who has been with us since the very beginning of Breaking Madden. He has doubled his intake of milk, which he refers to in plural as "milks," and as such, the former five-foot-nothing signal-ignorer now stands seven feet tall.

As you may have noticed in the video, the Cowboys' defense has been completely overhauled. The secondary is now made up entirely of quarterbacks from Dallas' present and recent past: Tony Romo, Troy Aikman, Jon Kitna, Quincy Carter, Ryan Leaf, Drew Bledsoe, et al.

The rest of the defense is made up of the tiniest, worst players Madden would allow me to create. I recruited them, as usual, via Twitter.

if you would like to be in the next Breaking Madden, please tell me about something you weren't supposed to do but totally got away with

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) January 5, 2015

Let's meet our newest Dallas Cowboys.

Defensive end: Brian

@jon_bois paying regular fruit price for organic fruit at the self checkout

— Brian (@ohheybrian) January 5, 2015

Just about every Child of The U-Scan Era has a story like this, I reckon. I've got one. But first, if y'all don't mind, I'd like to establish the setting.

I used to live near Mid-City Mall in Louisville, Kentucky. It's one of the most wonderful places in America, and is without question its greatest shopping mall. It features:

1. A bar, The Back Door, that will charge you $2.25 for a pour of well bourbon that is easily six ounces.
2. A basement that houses what is now a cavernous thrift store, and used to be an underground roller rink.
3. A large wall of vacant mall space featuring a giant mural of the parking lot that is right outside. Actually, it's a painting of what the artist apparently wished it looked like, because the artist added a bunch of bronze sculptures and fountains and pillars and basically made it look like Valhalla.
4. The Mid-City Art Gallery! It is not an actual art gallery. It's the most meta thing you could imagine. Instead of opening an actual art gallery, they painted on the wall what it would look like if there were an art gallery there. No, for real, look at this shit.

Its design is beautifully seamless. Look! They even painted fake legs to hold up the real sign!

To recap this one: inside of a building is a painting of a building that has paintings in it, and in one of the paintings inside the building in the painting, there are buildings. META-BLIGHT.

So now we arrive at ValuMarket, a grocery store, and one of the anchor stores of Mid-City Mall. I used to shop here all the time. It's the sort of place where you're liable to see a sign like this in the meat department, completely out of context, without explanation, striking the perfect balance between "ominous" and "gregarious."

And finally, back to the matter of produce U-Scanning. For the longest time, produce wouldn't ring up correctly. You'd buy four pounds of tomatoes, for example, and no matter what you did, the system would only ring you up for one tomato. You could almost hear the money leaking out of this establishment.

ValuMarket isn't a 300-store grocery giant, and this store really is an integral part of the neighborhood, so like a lot of people, I'd try to get someone's attention and have my produce rung up correctly. And man, they were sick of my Boy Scout do-gooder ass. They'd let out exasperated sighs and roll their eyes when I bothered them. So what I had here was the guilt of quasi-theft versus the guilt of bothering people. Eventually, I went one way as often as I went the other.

That magic is gone, as the store recently bought new U-Scan systems. But the murals are still there. So is the bar, the comedy club, the library, the everything else. If you're in Louisville, please stop by and tell it I miss it.

Linebacker: Zack Kaplan

@jon_bois invested in @jon_bois

— Zack Kaplan (@ZJKaplan) January 5, 2015

Zack is an investor in Vox Media, which started as SB Nation, but is now much, much larger than SB Nation. Perhaps you've seen and enjoyed our other websites, such as The Verge and Eater. I strongly urge you to check them out, because I worked very hard on them. I write every article that all of these websites has ever published. I also produce all the videos and design all the sites. I am the president and CEO, and also I am Zack.

Defensive end: Henry Baumgart

@jon_bois found Waldo but didn't notify him of my findings Let him burn in children's book hell

— Henry Baumgart (@Baum__Diggity) January 5, 2015

In Find Waldo Now, which I consider to be the magnum opus of the series, there was an illustration full of nothing but five hundred or so near-identical Waldos. I was charged with the task of finding the one with the slightly different poof on his hat. I never found him. At least he did not die alone.

Defensive end: Sorry Everyone

@jon_bois refuse to sleep

— Sorry Everyone (@sorryeveryone) January 5, 2015

This, if any of y'all missed it, really is the first great Internet triumph of 2015. There are 128 episodes of Dawson's Creek. My friend Pete, who had never seen the show and had no real opinion of it at all, resolved to watch every single one of them in a row. Exhausted, he collapsed into sleep a couple times, but he made it all the way through:

I'll have some kinda recap up this week but if'n you were curious, final pattern was 41 hours awake, 6 asleep, 22 up, 2 down, 34 up. 95/103

— Sorry Everyone (@sorryeveryone) January 6, 2015

Yep. Across a span of 103 hours, he slept only eight, and watched the entire run of the show. Before you call shenanigans, be sure to check his Twitter feed, where he live-tweeted the entire dang thing. Pete did this for charity, and raised more than $6000 along the way.

We have a lot of 2015 ahead of us, but I don't know whether this achievement will be bested.

Linebacker: Stephen Ford

@jon_bois Worked at Albertsons. Instead of disposing of spoiled dairy products, poured them into floor waxing machine. Store smelled awful.

— Stephen Ford (@Hightower8585) January 5, 2015

WHY

Linebacker: Sammy G

@jon_bois I used to go in the supermarket through the doors that said exit only

— Sämmy G (@OMGSameer) January 5, 2015

As usual, I'm totally betraying my fondness for grocery stores and what they are like and the things that happen inside of them. A lot of small-ish big-city grocery stores are arranged in such a way that you can't just walk in and out as you choose.

I once walked into such a grocery store in Montreal to buy one item, which, it turned out, they did not have. The entrance was fixed with a one-way turnstile that made sure that you couldn't walk out the way you walked in, and the only way out was through the checkout lanes. So despite having nothing to purchase, I had to stand in line at a checkout lane to earn my freedom.

This, I should note, was in a very Francophone neighborhood of Montreal. Despite the language wars the city is known for, most Montrealers were perfectly helpful and respectful toward me. Even so, as a dumb American who didn't speak French, making others placate me kind of made me feel dumb. Even more so when I had to walk up to the cashier, say SORRY I'M NOT BUYING ANYTHING HA HA, and walk away. Like I was purchasing nothing but a fleeting moment of unflattering attention. HI I AM HERE TO PURCHASE I AM AN IDIOT.

Linebacker: Bill.i.Am

@jon_bois 1 time in college I was at a McDonald's with a 2nd floor eating area that was closed/blocked off, I moved the sign & ate in peace

— Bill.i.Am (@Roobstickles) January 5, 2015

Mhmm, I get you though. I'm most comfortable in high places. I love flying, and can fall asleep 0.5 seconds after hitting 10,000 feet. Most of my apartments have been at the very top floors of their buildings, and at any sort of bar or venue, I immediately gravitate as upstairs as I can get. Also, I've never been in an earthquake and don't know what you're supposed to do, and also, I habitually rip the batteries out of all my smoke alarms because I'm tired of them going off while I'm cooking. This is how I'm dying. Book that shit.

Linebacker: Max Bielfeldt's Calves

@jon_bois the whizzinator.

— MaxBielfeldt'sCalves (@BigWhiteCalves) January 5, 2015

The Whizzinator, if you're unfamiliar, is a fake penis attached to a reservoir. You fill the reservoir with clean urine and strap it on before you head in for a drug test. It's a remarkably sophisticated device, complete with a heating mechanism that ensures the urine stays at body temperature and doesn't shoot up any red flags.

A few years ago, a friend of mine needed a sample without THC in it, and I was happy to oblige. I handed it to him in a container I honestly thought was completely sealed, and that is how my piss got all over the inside of his car. He passed.

Linebacker: Perpetual Dumb Machine

@jon_bois 2nd grd, in line: bully being mean. I reach past & shove the bigger kid in front of him. Kid in front spins around & slugs bully.

— PerpetualDumbMachine (@blakewrites) January 5, 2015

My story isn't as brilliant as this one, but I still got away with it. In second grade, a shrill-voiced, mean-ass bully arbitrarily picked me out as a target during recess. This went on for weeks, and for weeks, I just shrugged it off. One day, we're playing football and I throw an interception, and he just lets me have it. Just screaming at me, using words adults shouldn't say, the whole thing. I walk away, he follows me and shoves me in the back.

So then I turn around and punch him right in the gut, as hard as I can. His eyes bug up and he hits the ground, gasping for air and crying. I'm a pretty well-behaved kid who doesn't do stuff like this, so naturally, I instantly worry that I'm in tons of trouble. Then I look up at a couple of teachers who are standing not far off. They're not doing or saying anything. I think one of them's even smirking a little, and now I know I just got to do that for free, and that nobody will save that little crapsack.

Defensive end: Andrew Hiscock

@jon_bois flooded the @jonsfriends Twitter account with pictures of Grøtris pic.twitter.com/8lHBIOOYVi

— Andrew Hiscock (@andrewhiscock) January 5, 2015

Oh man, that was a good time. Last week, I created a Twitter account and then tweeted out the login info to everybody. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of people logged in to tweet from the account, and there were so many different agendas at work. Some people wanted to tweet sports news and maintain an honest-to-got sports Twitter account. Others did nothing but spam the account with photos of puppies. Still others just tweeted complete nonsense.

And among this sea of noise, this man, who we now know to be Andrew Hiscock, was determined to use the account as a means to talk about Grøtris, a Norwegian rice dish. Given enough time, I feel this Twitter account could have been all things for all people. It is dead now, and it is Grøtris, and it is for you.

Defensive tackle: Kunks

@jon_bois manually retweeted someone's hilarious image macro and got a ton of RTs and Faves and a hot girlfriend and a new sprots car

— Kunks Even (@Kunk7) January 5, 2015

It's killing me that I can't completely remember this anecdote, but this much I know: Prince was hanging out with some other black pop musicians, who were lamenting the fact that time and again, other (white) musicians were essentially thieving their style. "What do we do?" they said. "How can we stop them from doing this?" And Prince just shrugged and said, "you can't. Just go do something new."

Or! Continue to benefit from the content of people, but do it out in the open. Take, for example, this entire post.

lol suckers

Defensive tackle: Dan Rosart

@jon_bois accidentally pulled a fire alarm while doing a relief rubbing of it.

— Dan Rosart (@_Torgen) January 5, 2015

oh come on now

Defensive tackle: Adam Nightmare

@jon_bois got pulled over in CT with a suspended NY driver’s license. Police didn’t run my ID, let off with a warning.

— AdamBarnello (@AdamNightmare) January 5, 2015

And finally, we arrive at a "thing you shouldn't have gotten away with" story that I think I can outdo.

Previous editions of Breaking Madden: Roster Cuts have sufficiently and fairly painted Young Twentysomething Me as a generally well-meaning but completely irresponsible human being. Ten years ago, at age 22, I was driving down I-81 in Virginia one morning:

a) with no insurance
b) with expired registration
c) with an expired driver's license
d) about 15 miles per hour above the speed limit
e) bangin' some Ice Cube

I was headed back to Kentucky in part to fix some of those things, since I had to be there in person to do so. I zoom past a state trooper's car, hidden behind some bushes, and I see his brake lights turn on, and I know I'm dead. The police lights soon follow, and as I pull over, I contemplate the logistics of sitting in a remote Virginia jail hours away from any human being i know.

A few minutes later, I'm sitting in the passenger's seat of the trooper's car.

Trooper. So ... you have nothing? No identification at all?
Me. I, uh, I've got a business card.
Trooper. RadioShack, huh? You in college?
Me. No.
Trooper. So you moved out to Virginia to work at RadioShack?
Me. Not really. I moved in with a couple of friends to write on the Internet with.
Trooper. So ... you moved somewhere to write on the Internet?
Me. Yeah ...

A long pause. He looks through some things.

Trooper. Listen. What I'm supposed to do here is take you before the magistrate. That puts you in jail for a night, probably more. So what I want you do is go back into your car, and drive exactly the speed limit, to go exactly where you were going to go.
Me. Now?
Trooper. Yes.
Me. Thank you ... God, thank you.
Trooper. Don't thank me. Neither of us were ever here. Go.

And the lesson, as usual, is that you should just always do whatever you want because consequences are imaginary.

Click here to check out the full Breaking Madden archive.

The Dallas Cowboys must be destroyed, and Emmitt Smith's all-time rushing record must be broken. Clarence BEEFTANK, the hero of Breaking Madden, has 60 minutes to break it.

The Dallas Cowboys play under a roof, and must make their own storms. In the natural world there is thunder and lightning; within the indoor, fluorescent world, there is miscommunication and stupid bullshit. Late in Sunday's playoff win over the Lions, the officials couldn't find the same page. After calling a pass interference penalty against Dallas, and even announcing it over the PA system, they quietly picked up the flag as though the last thirty seconds hadn't happened.

The Cowboys won their second playoff game since 1996. Such a thing is so rare and disruptive that it can't even happen without perhaps throwing a presidential election into chaos. The win sent New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who was watching from the owner's box, into a toddlery huggy happy fit. Now he has his Dukakis Tank Moment, and our next president will be Gary Bauer.

All that from one Cowboys playoff win. If there's another, we'll probably crash into the Moon. That is why this episode of Breaking Madden is committed to their absolute destruction:

Music: "Kaputt" by Destroyer

This is a three-phase operation.

I. SUMMON CLARENCE BEEFTANK, THE HERO OF BREAKING MADDEN.

Clarence BEEFTANK has been with us since the very beginning of Breaking Madden. I try to use him sparingly and only when he is desperately needed -- this is the 30th episode of Breaking Madden, and only his fifth appearance. He is a 5-foot, 400-pound, faster-than-the-Dickens quarterback who always runs and never, ever throws.

Well, he was 5 feet tall, anyway. This week, I'm pulling out every single stop I can find in the service of destroying the Dallas Cowboys, and that means increasing BEEFTANK's height to 7 feet.

Sometimes, in between the initial conception of a Breaking Madden and the finished product, the purpose of the whole thing changes dramatically. For BEEFTANK and I, this week changed everything.

II. REDUCE THE COWBOYS' DEFENSE TO HELPLESS BABIES.

This part of the drill is familiar to regular readers of this series. The Cowboys' defensive line is now comprised entirely of 5-foot-tall, 160-pound people who are terrible at football in every way, and as per usual, I recruited them from Twitter.

if you would like to be in the next Breaking Madden, please tell me about something you weren't supposed to do but totally got away with

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) January 5, 2015

Here are the 13 folks Dallas has ended up with:

These people had remarkable stories to share. One enterprising gentlemen, for example, disposed of spoiled dairy products by covertly dumping them into a floor waxer. If stories of bad ideas and shame are your deal, you can read them here:

BREAKING MADDEN ROSTER CUTS: COWBOYS VS. PACKERS.

Despite overhauling the roster, I wanted to keep the Cowboys the Cowboys while still ensuring they were as terrible as possible.

III. BRING COWBOYS QUARTERBACKS OUT OF RETIREMENT TO PLAY SECONDARY.

Tony Romo has been re-assigned as a free safety. He joins Quincy Carter, Vinny Testaverde, Ryan Leaf, Drew Henson, Drew Bledsoe, Troy Aikman, and Jon Kitna to form Dallas' new secondary. I gave them their real-life heights and weights, but all their skill ratings have been yanked down to 0/99.

THE GAME.

Originally, I had no specific intent other than to indiscriminately whoop on fools for an entire game. But after BEEFTANK effortlessly galloped 80 yards for a touchdown on his first play of the game, I had a terrible idea.

Emmitt Smith holds the career rushing yards record. How many is that?

[looks]

18,355

Maybe I can beat that in a single game.

At first blush, that sounds completely impossible. Over the next half-hour, I did math and experimented and did some more math, and the terrifying truth slowly emerged: on paper, this is possible. One man can run for 18,356 yards in a single 60-minute football game.

No, for real. Just stick with me here.

STEP I

I have to take control of both the Cowboys and Packers in order to do this. First, I call an onside kick for the Packers, but a standard return formation for the Cowboys.

This ensures that most of the time, the Packers touch the ball before it's traveled 10 yards. This results in a penalty, which gives the Cowboys the ball right around the Packers' 35-yard line.

And that is good. That is what we want. (Well, me, anyway. I don't mean to drag you into this.) My logic is that I want to give Clarence BEEFTANK the longest field I can possibly give him every time he touches the ball, and that means going deep into Green Bay territory.

Time elapsed: zero seconds, if everything goes right.

STEP II

As the Cowboys, I punt on first down.

Since I'm only about 35 yards from the end zone, a coffin-corner punt is pretty easy to manage. Over the course of this episode, I was getting better and better at it, and by the end of it, I could pin the Packers inside their 5-yard line almost every time.

Time elapsed: four or five seconds.

STEP III

And now we give the ball to BEEFTANK.

This is unfamiliar territory for the big fella. In the past, he's always actively sought fools to run over; this time, I need him to sprint down the field as quickly as possible, because every single second matters.

Time elapsed: About 13 seconds, on average, depending on where the ball is spotted.

After this, I kick the PAT or go for two, which takes no time off the clock. Then it's back to Step I. If I can average 90 yards every time, I will need to go through this process about 200 times.

The next question, of course, is whether 60 minutes is enough time for that. In order to reach 18,356 rushing yards, we need to average 5.099 yards for every second that ticks off the clock. In the example you just watched, the whole process took 17 seconds, and I gained 94 yards. That's 5.529 yards per second. That's a tiny cushion, and I'm going to need all of it to account for various mishaps. Maybe, God forbid, BEEFTANK will get tackled. Maybe I'll screw up a punt and boot it out of the end zone for a touchback, limiting BEEFTANK to an 80-yard run instead of his usual 90 or 95.

This is going to take forever, but the numbers are right there, proving that the wildly impossible is entirely possible. We have to try this, and we can't possibly not try.

The repetition of it was a fairly awful experience. It required me to employ skill on every single play, so I couldn't just check out and watch TV while half-playing. The first quarter alone took me two and a half hours. I left myself one little slice of happiness: the two-point conversion.

Since the two-point try didn't take any time off the clock, I was free to punch it in with BEEFTANK any way I wanted. Usually I had him vault over the line and crush dudes like little accordions, because that was the most fun. It was gruesome. At one point, upon stumbling upon the wreckage, Computer Quincy Carter took one look and backpedaled in horror.

And it was horror. These Cowboys unmistakably and desperately wanted out of this Hell. Sometimes they ran away, and sometimes they preferred to fall through the Earth and into oblivion.

This is such an unsettling insinuation. Why, Baumgart, are you digging your way into Hell? "Because," he says, "there are no demons left in Hell. They are all in Lambeau Field."

The Packers, as you'd expect from this breakneck pace of football, suffered plenty as well. Two hundred onside kicks in a single game will really do a number on you. Look upon this man, whose back conveniently snaps into the letter C.

He was fine. So, remarkably, was HaHa Clinton-Dix, who at one point was reduced to an armless, legless statue.

The longer you ask Madden to process a nightmare, the more it becomes the nightmare. It starts forgetting to draw limbs. It fractures backs. It makes players fall through the Earth. BEEFTANK and I pressed forward.

And as we did, I began to consider whether, after this game, Clarence BEEFTANK would have anything more to accomplish in Breaking Madden. He's stomped over more linemen than I can count, and if he rushes for as many yards as humanly possible, what's left? What is left to break? Who remains to destroy?

Midway through, I decided that this episode would be BEEFTANK's swan song. And suddenly, a Breaking Madden quest had never been more important.

There were certainly some mishaps, as I'd expected, including some screwups on my part. Occasionally BEEFTANK would get tackled or I'd accidentally call a normal kick instead of an onside kick, and I'd have to burn a timeout. It became increasingly clear that this game would last 10 to 12 real-time hours, and the margin for error was brutally narrow. What if the game ends at midnight, and I've finished 100 yards short, and it was all because I screwed up one run at 4 p.m.? This was the thought that kept me perpetually stressed out.

After one quarter, the Packers led by a score of 367 to 2. (Disaster struck on one occasion when Troy Aikman busted through the line, and in a remarkable fluke, managed to sack BEEFTANK in the end zone.) The game's score counter always gets stuck once it reaches 255 points, and since I had no way of knowing when it would stop calling yardage, I made sure to record the stats independently.

Before I started the second quarter, I let myself take a break to look at my progress.

As you can see, BEEFTANK and I got a little bit more efficient as time went on. There were fewer mishaps, and we were slowly but surely getting back the time we'd lost. During our first 15 minutes, we had averaged 5.024 yards per second, just slightly under our target of 5.098.

At this pace, we would finish with 18,088 yards, just a few hundred shy of Emmitt Smith's record of 18,356. I remained confident, since we were only getting better and faster. We could do this. I could think of no better or more dramatic way to say goodbye to Clarence BEEFTANK, and I began to think on what inspired him in the first place.

December, 1998. I am a sophomore at Waggener High School in Louisville. Our football team, to everyone's surprise, has advanced through the playoffs to face Highlands High School in the 3A state championship. Their quarterback is Jared Lorenzen, who will later become the largest quarterback in the SEC, and then the largest quarterback in the NFL. In my memory, he's just as gigantic in this game. He's 6'4, and accounts of his weight vary between 275 pounds (not likely) and 320 pounds (more likely).

This is in the old Cardinal Stadium, the dumpiest stadium I've ever seen. It's out by the airport and sits in the middle of a hideous asphalt desert. An entire section of seating is too rusted-out and dangerous to sit in; rather than replace it or simply tear it down, they've just cordoned it off with yellow tape. You get the feeling that if Jared Lorenzen stomps just one more time, this whole damn place will fall down.

Lorenzen passes occasionally, but he never has to. He just takes the ball and rumbles downfield in chunks of 30, 50, 75 yards at a time. From the stands I'm watching my friends, some of whom are no bigger than I am, heroically try to bring him down and bounce away like hailstones off a Buick. Sometimes they cling to him, two or three at a time, and he drags them toward the end zone. He's wearing them like they're clothes, like he's a toddler playing dress-up.

He is unstoppable. He is a thinking, feeling element of the Earth, as certain and world-forming as the winds and the tides. We scored a pity touchdown in the final seconds and lost, 56-7.

That is where BEEFTANK comes from, and he is special to me, and today we will bring the impossible to being. And then--

Click here to read many more episodes of Breaking Madden.

Did you make it into this week's episode of Breaking Madden? Goodness, I hope not. Here are the 20 intrepid people who are suiting up for the Colts. They have terrible, terrible stories to tell.

This, sadly (?), is the final Breaking Madden: Roster Cuts of the season. We still have the Super Bowl episode of Breaking Madden ahead of us, but participants will be selected differently (more on that in the coming days).

And man, y'all, it's a special ride. I don't think any story will be worse than that of the gentlemen who collected cockroaches, froze them in ice cube trays, brought the ice cubes to a restaurant, put them in his drink, showed them to the server, and got a free meal out of it. But you know what? We're gonna try:

if you would like to be in the next Breaking Madden, please tell me about a time you really, really fucked up

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) January 12, 2015

No roundabout question here. We need to hear about your fuck-ups. I read about a thousand of them, most of which were truly remarkable in one way or another.

I asked this question because in this week's episode of Breaking Madden, we need a physically gifted, yet completely incompetent, gaggle of screw-ups:

Music: "Breakdown Dead Ahead" by Boz Scaggs

They are Tom Brady's opposites. See, Touchdown Tom's Awareness rating in Madden is a perfect 99/99. These folks, despite standing seven feet tall and weighing 400 pounds, hold an Awareness rating of 0/99. They're also terrible at every football skill, while remaining terrifyingly fast and strong.

I'm not sure how this will turn out for our hero. This is a noble experiment. Here are our volunteers:

@jon_bois Paid off a man for hitting his car, told my mom I lost my wallet, accidentally got him arrested for theft when he cashed my check

— Janie Campbell (@itsjaniec) January 12, 2015

No use in slowly building up to the best/worst stories, right? Let's just jump right into vehicular check fraud.

For the record, I can easily see myself making the same mistake in my younger years, because the idea of a check is kind of confounding to my generation. It's such an antiquated system of payment. Here, show any 20-year-old the Wikipedia entry for check kiting and watch their eyes bug: "wait, you can do that?"

Like maxing out a credit card you have no means of paying off, you'll almost certainly face consequences in due time, but the difference there is that the creditor kind of expects you to screw up. With check fraud, you're basically reducing the international financial system to an easily duped toddler.

Checks are the "Captain Crunch whistle for free long distance" of contemporary banking, and perhaps the only financial means of artistic expression we have left. There are probably all sorts of hacks. For real, have your friend write you a check for negative-five dollars and see whether they take five bucks out of your account when you deposit it. How do you know it won't work? Who knows? You don't know! (Dear Vox: never let me hold the money.)

@jon_bois I tried to get a girl who'd dumped me for laughing at Beavis and Butthead to keep dating me by telling her I loved her

— Brandon Stroud (@MrBrandonStroud) January 12, 2015

I think I was 19 when I received the worst reply to "do you love me?" that anyone can possibly get.

ME: I love you.
LADY I WAS IN A THING WITH: Aww!
ME: Do ... you love me?
LADY: Of course I do. I love everybody.

After that, I promptly realized what the relationship actually was and adjusted my expectations accordingly. Nah, just joking.

@jon_bois one time i pooped on my best friend's porch (i was 6) and blamed it on the dog. but my friend's mom saw me through the window.

— eden rohatensky (@edenthecat) January 12, 2015

I hope that this really happened, and isn't some kind of conflation of different, distant memories: once, at age five, I found The Giving Tree at a friend's house. For the first time in my life, I had read something that made me cry. I was embarrassed over crying, so I hid underneath a table with a book for a while. A poop was coming on, but I remained too ashamed to come out of hiding. So I shat my pants.

@jon_bois i once handed a small slip of paper that said "$20" to a Border’s cashier instead of the gift card it had just been attached to

— Trevor J. Mitchell (@TJM613) January 12, 2015

"Is ... is this a robbery? This is Borders. We blew through our last $20 in 1998."

@jon_bois 16 year old me drank most of a $10,000 bottle of scotch that was my friend's dad's retirement gift. She didn't speak to me again

— James Dator (@James_Dator) January 12, 2015

JAMES.

I actually don't have much of a problem with this. The difference between a $15 bottle of booze and a $90 bottle is enormous, and someone like me can easily appreciate that difference. For us laypersons, the actual ability to appreciate the taste drops off dramatically once you wander north of that price point: you might think that $300 bottle is the best you've ever had, but it's mostly because you told yourself that it had to be.

To actually be able to suss out the qualities of a $10,000 bottle pegs you as an even bigger asshole, because you're necessarily the sort of person who has spent the unfathomable amount of money it would require to develop an informed taste for such a thing. The good guy in the equation is indeed the guy who, albeit purely through perception and the novelty of it, would surely appreciate that bottle more than anyone.

Still. UNDERAGE DRINKING IS A DANGEROUS DEADLY GAME, JAMES.

@jon_bois i drank a third of a handle of Bacardi Gold + then convinced myself my dorm floor was an ocean I could totally throw up on.

— Jane Coaston (@cjane87) January 12, 2015

College dorms are buildings full of little rooms where folks have vomited all over the place. On the floor, on the rug, in the garbage can. On the wall, when some poor sucker was running to the toilet and couldn't make it. Barf is everywhere. Unlike other institutions in which barfing happens even half as often, such as a hospital, there is no dedicated cleaning staff, and the duty of cleaning up the vomit is tasked by default to 19-year-olds with minimal life skills or senses of responsibility. Many of these dorms have stood for 50 or 100 years or even longer. Decades upon decades of barf dust rest upon one another like bed sheets in this ancient barfatorium, full of barf particles from people who died of senescence in 1986. People pay $100 per semester to live here, and in some cases, even more!

@jon_bois enlarging a pond with a machine. I got sleepy. took a nap in the machine. The cold water woke me up. pic.twitter.com/cc4x9foDm8

— Lee Hall (@MRHOOTS) January 12, 2015

I'm glad you made it out safely, and if you had drowned, you would have secured the greatest obituary ever. LOST AT A SEA OF HIS OWN DESIGN.

@jon_bois ordered a special burger in France, "à la viande chevaline," thinking it was a fancy kind of cheese. Nope, it was horse.

— Vicky Johnson (@hurricanevicky) January 12, 2015

In Quebec, at least, horse meat is so commonplace that you're likely to see it plastic-wrapped in your average grocery store next to the beef and chicken. I cooked some. It cooked pretty quickly, and tasted kind of like venison. It was good! Then I went home to Kentucky and mentioned it to some people, and they reacted as though I'd eaten a toddler. I probably should have just bred some horses until their legs were popsicle sticks and raced them and shot them in the head.

@jon_bois my dad bet me I couldn't longboard down a 5 story parking garage while drunk. Couldn't, blew out shoulder, no health insurance

— robbedy (@robbedy) January 12, 2015

Years ago, I participated in an alley cat race, and alley cat races are really cool. You ride your bike all over town, hitting a series of checkpoints in any order you choose. This was just before smartphones were commonplace, which made things really interesting: it was just as much about your familiarity with the city as it was about your ability to ride a bike.

My bicycle's brakes had given out a couple weeks prior, and since I didn't really have any money to take it to the shop, I had just been resorting to foot-jamming -- in other words, stopping by jamming your shoe between the frame and the tire. With a little practice, it worked pretty well.

So I'm about halfway through the race, and I'm stomping on my pedals to climb the ramps in a parking garage. I get to the roof, and the ledge totally sneaks up on me. Because of how I'm balanced, I foot-jam the front wheel as hard as I can, which is fun, because it makes me fly over the handlebars. I fall on the happy side of the railing; two feet more and I would have fallen a hundred feet.

HERE LIES JON WOULDN'T INVEST IN PROPER BRAKES LOST AT A SEA OF HIS OWN DESIGN

@jon_bois used my Motorola Razer as a modem in 2006. Raked up a $2600 bill for the month. I was 17 and worked at Zaxbys.

— Brent Mccue (@AnywhereBut210) January 12, 2015

At RadioShack, there was a special category of items that we'd try to talk people out of buying, and only sell if they absolutely insisted. This included the entire line of Monster cables, whose marketers and executives should probably be rounded up and made to wander the desert in sackcloth and shit. It also included cell phone-to-USB cables, which were pretty much always bought for the purpose of using a phone as a modem.

These people would end up being charged extra hundreds or thousands of dollars. To make matters worse, this is circa-2003 Internet we're talking about. You know what the Internet was like then?

@jon_bois Turned 30, decided it was time to start trimming my eyebrows. Forgot to put guard on razor.

— Andrew Del Toro (@stonecutter7) January 12, 2015

This will happen to me one day. Related question: at what age, on average, do dudes decide they need to start doing a minimal amount of eyebrow work? It didn't happen to me until a couple years ago, when I rubbed my face and realized that hidden in my eyebrow was a single hair that was like 11 feet long. Like, if I squinted wrong one time, it might pop out like a busted bass string and knock someone's eye out or something.

@jon_bois 12yo - poured gas into paper cup, lit on fire & kicked it, yelling "FIELD GOAL!" 3rd degree burns on leg, bedridden for summer. :(

— Ian (@TheDDB) January 12, 2015

WELP, now you got me laughing uncontrollably at the grave misfortune of a child.

@jon_boispic.twitter.com/WCETZ7GotY

— jk (@jkrizel) January 12, 2015

I looked it up and verified that this gentlemen is indeed the Jeopardy! fellow. This a far, far better look than all the people who just write "What is" and leave it at that. No, this right here is what we call "found poetry."

@jon_bois Responded to judge in court, who asked me if I believed what I was saying, "Yeah, right now, but not that often."

— The Venal Times (@thevenaltimes) January 12, 2015

This is Modest Mouse, one of my favorite bands of all time. They make music that you would be completely justified in hating, and that's fine. I kind of split the difference between loving them unconditionally and knowing they're the furthest thing from perfect by making up fake Modest Mouse lyrics. Look, it's easy:

I HAVEN'T NO HELL YOU ON THE WRONG SIDE OF A NICKEL
AND IF I TOLD YOU WELL DIG YO' GRAAAAVE
WAAYYYYYYLL
THIS SHIP IS SINKIN AND RATS ON A SHIP
AND A DOGS AND CRICKETS YOU THINK YOU
LOOKIN RIGHT WELL YOU JUST LOOKIN
WAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYL
CAR BROKE DOWN ON THE SIDE OF A ROAD
WAY HAYLLLLL

@jon_bois I only had my learner's permit and hit a fire hydrant, speed limit sign, a fence and some cars with both of my parents in the car.

— Jeanna (@jeannathomas) January 12, 2015

The miracle is that this doesn't happen far more often than it does. How many new drivers do we put on the road in America each year? Two or three million, maybe? They're all sitting in a chair with this big-ass dial sitting right in front of them, encouraged only to manipulate it very slowly and expertly. And virtually never, over the course of those two or three million times, does one of them say HMMM WHAT WILL HAPPEN and jerk the wheel to the left at 40 miles per hour?

I mean that. I read about human beings being monsters to each other all the time, all over the world. It's gotten so bad that sometimes I can look at the drivers on the interstate not arbitrarily trying to manslaughter each other at all times, and I think, "aww, that's nice."

@jon_bois dropped my phone and it cracked then I vomited on the phone.

— fixins (@matweet222) January 12, 2015

Two-factor annihilation. Smart!

@jon_bois in an email to my best friend, described in DETAIL how my first blow job went. Sent to the guy instead.

— j e s s (@eye_like_sharx) January 12, 2015

This is a Pitchfork review of a sexual encounter that is (presumably) early in a person's sex life and that is the most horrifying thing I can possibly imagine.

@jon_bois Waiting tables, woman ordered daiquiri, I didn't hear "virgin," she gave it to her 5-year-old, I didn't notice until it was gone.

— Daniel Kelley (@danieltkelley) January 12, 2015

oh no you got a small child drunk

this is bad

@jon_bois in a bar the night of the ferguson decision. i tried to play "what's going on" on a jukebox but played "sexual healing by accident

— Timothy (@TimLiving) January 12, 2015

ok this is real bad, we're stopping

@jon_bois i shot my dog on accident

— Not Danny Ford (@1981tigers1981) January 12, 2015

STOP

WE'RE DONE

STOP

Check back Thursday for the full episode of Breaking Madden. And for many more episodes of Breaking Madden, click here.

The Patriots' offense: 11 identical clones of Tom Brady. The Colts' defense: 11 enormous superhumans who have never seen a football game. In this episode of Breaking Madden, Touchdown Tom is in for the fight of his life.

We all built the "never count out Touchdown Tom" meme, and it is a monument to the normal. Anyone can play! All you do is shake your head, let out a chuckle, and paraphrase something to the effect of, "you just can't ever count out Touchdown Tom."

Here it is, deconstructed:

1. The NFL is the most popular sports league, and actually, it might be the most mainstream element of American culture.
2. Tom Brady plays the most visible position of this profoundly American sport in a uniform that looks like the American flag. He is perhaps the most popular football player in America. He is the football player you might see barely sketched into a little television in an illustration of a messy bedroom in a children's book. He is Captain Generic.
3. Tom throws a lot of touchdown passes, but so do a lot of quarterbacks. Because of that, and because it's alliterative, I gave him the nickname "Touchdown Tom." It's a title so generic that even American pop culture wouldn't give him that nickname, because it's too obnoxious and stupid.
4. Tom has developed a knack for coming from behind to win football games, and this is the final piece of the puzzle. When Tom Brady is behind by a touchdown or two, we say "never count out Touchdown Tom." That's when this nonsense reaches another, even more frustratingly stupid level: we're almost definitely right.

This happened for the millionth time last weekend. Here is Pro-Football-Reference's win probability chart for Saturday's Patriots-Ravens game:

Down 28-14 midway through the third quarter, New England was estimated to have a 9.8 percent chance of winning. When they actually won, it surprised nobody.

Welcome to the world of Touchdown Tom. This week, he sets upon his most foreboding, unknowable adventure yet. I wouldn't count him out just yet:

Music: "Breakdown Dead Ahead" by Boz Scaggs

This week's experiment borrows some elements from an experiment we ran in the first season of Breaking Madden, but it also features elements we've never attempted. This is a two-step operation:

I. WE CREATE AN ENTIRE OFFENSE OF TOUCHDOWN TOMS.

The quarterback is Tom Brady. The running backs, wideouts, and tight ends are Tom Brady. The kicker is Tom Brady. The entire offensive line is made up of Tom Bradys. In total, I created 20 precise replicas of Tom Brady, and I plugged them all into the Patriots' depth chart.

How would Tom Brady play if the Patriots made him switch positions tomorrow? How good of a wide receiver, right tackle, or kicker would he actually be? Madden offers a little trick to help us project this. I pulled up Tom Brady to the edit screen, temporarily re-assigned him to another position, and noted his new skill ratings, many of which plummeted.

For example, his Awareness rating -- which governs how well a player understands what's going on and what he should be doing -- remains unchanged at a perfect 99/99, because he's still Tom Brady. But now he has a new skill, Kicking Power, which the game tells us is 18/99. His Stiff Arm ability is set at 25/99. Et cetera.

So what we end up with here is a quarterback who is really good, but operates within an offense full of players who are really not very good at all. They're not total zeroes, but I mean, they're "Tom Brady as a linebacker."

II. WE MAKE THE COLTS' DEFENSE PHYSICALLY GODLIKE AND HORRIBLE AT FOOTBALL.

This is the twist we've never attempted in Breaking Madden. The Indianapolis defense is now made up of 21 players who are seven feet tall and weigh 400 pounds. They are as fast, agile, and strong as I can possibly make them.

Every skill category that has anything to do with an understanding of football, however, has been yanked down to zero.

The Pats' key advantage here is the Awareness category: the Toms are at 99, and the Colts are at zero. These Colts don't really know how to play football, but they are monstrously strong and unreasonably fast, so does that even matter? I suspect that Tom is still going into this game as an underdog. I'm sure a pack of dogs doesn't know how to play football. They'll still beat you at football, because a dead man cannot win.

These Indianapolis Colts, no matter how physically gifted they may be, figure to be a gaggle of clumsy screwup dipshits. As I often do, I recruited them from the ranks of Twitter.

if you would like to be in the next Breaking Madden, please tell me about a time you really, really fucked up

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) January 12, 2015

There were stories. My God, there were stories. Here's one:

@jon_bois Paid off a man for hitting his car, told my mom I lost my wallet, accidentally got him arrested for theft when he cashed my check

— Janie Campbell (@itsjaniec) January 12, 2015

OK, one more.

@jon_bois 16 year old me drank most of a $10,000 bottle of scotch that was my friend's dad's retirement gift. She didn't speak to me again

— James Dator (@James_Dator) January 12, 2015

OK wait, I lied, one more.

@jon_bois 12yo - poured gas into paper cup, lit on fire & kicked it, yelling "FIELD GOAL!" 3rd degree burns on leg, bedridden for summer. :(

— Ian (@TheDDB) January 12, 2015

And I'm tellin' y'all, these aren't even the worst ones. There were 20 terrible stories in total, and if you'd like, you can read them all here at:

BREAKING MADDEN: ROSTER CUTS.

All right. Nothing left to do but let 'er rip. Godspeed, Touchdown Tom.

THE GAME.

One more note at the outset: everything you see in these GIFs is the computer's fault. At no moment in these GIFs did I actually take control of any player. I just called whichever play Madden recommended, put the controller down, and watched it happen.

Before we even kicked off, my eye caught something strange. Phil Simms and Jim Nantz opened up the broadcast with the same banal non-sentiments they always spout. But I slowed down the tape. Look to the right of Simms' right shoulder.

It's nothing especially wild, but ... it looks almost like a set of chubby fingers, pushing its way into this world for the briefest of instances. I've played tons and tons and tons of Madden, and I've never seen that before. Why would I have? This "Nantz and Simms in the booth" segment is completely canned. It's not interactive at all, and if the computer were ever to screw up and randomly generate something that wasn't supposed to be here, it surely wouldn't be here, right? Are ... are we being haunted?

It's nothing. I'm sure that it's nothing and that it foreshadows nothing.

So, about these Colts. It's a miracle that they even know where to line up. They clearly have never seen or heard of the sport of football. The game just told them, "THAT IS BALL. GET MAN WITH BALL." What does that mean? Does that mean, say, using your arms? Hell if they know.

Jane Coaston just kind of sprints in the general direction of the man with the football, arms flopping around like vestigial mistakes. Madden was really getting into the spirit of this endeavor. It piloted these players, more or less, like shuffleboard pucks, except it didn't try to get them to rest at the edge. There was no steady hand here. The game just shoved these dudes as hard as they could.

Please forgive this big long GIF. I just wanted to show this to you, because it cracks me up. Surely at some point they'll stop flinging their fool asses into nowhere. They just keep going and going and falling.

I knew they didn't understand how arms worked, but I didn't expect such explicit evidence.

Yes. Yes, those are arms. Weird, right? I've never seen a player in Madden do this. Hypothesis: a developer was hired by Electronic Arts to program player animations. "I think it would be nice," this developer said, "if the players could dice invisible cucumbers! I also feel that football is an adjective and the Moon is made of crayons." This individual was fired, but not before programming Phil Simms' commentary.

Let's check in with Mr. McCue, who has been assigned to play zone coverage, I think.

This is where ideas like conviction and self-actuation go to die. I was able to see which plays the Colts were calling, and I know that no sort of "QB contain" or "QB spy" play was called here. Half of him seemed to want to continue to play zone, despite the fact that all the receivers were clearly running verts, and none of them were anywhere near his zone. I see that GIF and remember every time I've been stuck with a shitty grocery cart.

There was a lot of, "well, I guess I'll see what all these Tom Bradys are doing and kind of follow their lead."

"Huh? Oh yeah, OK, I'll see what's over here."

Visually speaking, these players are actually kind of adorable. They're like enormous tardigrades. Y'all ever seen a tardigrade? They're these chubby, microscopically-small animals who are far cuter than any creature that size has any business being. Like the tardigrade, these Colts could probably survive in space, and should probably be sent there.

Here's a curious thing about the Madden Patriots: they are not coached by Bill Belichick. While every other team gets to have its real-life coach in the game, Belichick didn't allow his likeness to be used in the game. Instead, they're coached by a generic shithead asshole, who will be revealed as a shithead asshole in short order.

See, the kicker is Tom Brady, who possesses a 18/99 in kicking power, and a 17/99 in kicking accuracy. That's no good. He's so untenably bad that he can't even kick an extra point. Generic Shithead Asshole Coach knows this, so understandably, he never, ever sends him out to attempt a field goal.

Problem: the Patriots face a fourth-and-inches at the Colts' 28-yard line. With a field goal attempt ruled out, they can either go for it, or they ... they punt. THEY PUNT.

I couldn't take this shit. This might be the first time Madden actually made me angry. This game was really tough sledding, and if Touchdown Tom had any chance of pulling out a win, he needed to take advantage of every opportunity he was given. Generic Shithead Asshole Coach was ruining everything.

I made that GIF back when I imagined that was the worst it would get. It wasn't. Look. THEY PUNTED AT THE COLTS' ONE-YARD LINE. GOD DANGIT, LOOK AT THIS SHIT.

LOOK AT THAT PIECE-OF-SHIT ASSHOLE. It's actually fortunate that the Patriots' coach turns out to be a pretend person, because I would never tell a real person, nor the avatar of a real person, "I am going to drag your shit-for-brains ass up a church tower and ring 6 o'clock with your face."

If you've never seen a punter try to coffin-corner a punt one yard from the opponent's end zone, well, there you go. That's obviously a touchback, which gifted the Colts' offense 19 yards for free.

Speaking of, I haven't even mentioned the other half of this game, because I didn't even touch it. It served as the control group: the completely normal, Andrew Luck-led Colts offense versus the completely normal Patriots defense. That was Touchdown Tom's challenge: he had to rise above this wonky Hellscape and compete against the normal world.

Tom has made a habit of surprising us in Breaking Madden. Remember last year, when he overcame a 74-0 halftime deficit to beat the Colts in the playoffs? Remember earlier this season, when, after 343 tries, he finally scored a 99-yard touchdown on a quarterback sneak? In those times, I knew not to count him out. But as this game rolled on, I found myself in an unfamiliar position.

I, of all people, was beginning to count out Touchdown Tom. You may recall that as a general rule, I do not count out Touchdown Tom, and I recommend that others also do not count out Touchdown Tom.

Here concludes the Touchdown Tom Trilogy. Here are your game highlights. Godspeed us all:

Music: "Sigur 8 (Untitled)" by Sigur Ros.

Click here for many more adventures in Breaking Madden.

Make a donation to the charity of your choice, and you might make it into the season finale of Breaking Madden! We're going to kill football, and you will be to blame.

Longtime readers of Breaking Madden may recall what we did for last year's Super Bowl. I asked y'all to make a donation to the charity of your choice, then placed you into a random drawing to appear as a player in the game: either a seven-foot, 400-pound superhuman, or a five-foot, helpless baby person. You awesome folks raised an estimated $5,000 for charity. That went very well, but the game itself went very, very, catastrophically wrong. Here is what it looked like:

Music: "The Dead Flag Blues" by Godspeed You! Black Emperor

You can witness all the horrors here, but in short, the game ended when Madden exploded into a fit of glitches, took all the players on the field, and replaced them with an unholy, terrifying fetus creature thing. The screencaps are in that post; otherwise, I wouldn't expect any of you to believe me.

This year, we're doing something similar. Every defensive player on both teams will be a helpless baby person. Every offensive player will be a monstrous, 400-pound Goliath. There will be at least 80 custom-created players, and all of them will be named after you.

Here are the rules, if you'd like to participate:

• Donate a minimum of $10 to the charity of your choice. I'm setting a $10 minimum because donations cost charities a significant amount of money to process and feed through the proper channels. Although it won't improve your odds of being selected, you are certainly encouraged to donate as much as you'd like.
• Only one entry will be counted per person.
• For legal reasons, I can't recommend a specific charity for you to support, so it's (almost) entirely up to you. Maybe you'd like to give to a charity that provides support for battered women, or an institution that fights malaria in third-world nations. You might want to donate to your local homeless shelter. The only exception: I won't accept donations to political parties. This is because politicians are lizard-people.
• When you donate, be sure to get a receipt, and email it to breakingmadden@gmail.com. Most charities will send you a "thanks for donating" email, which you could forward to that address. Or, if necessary, you can send me a screencap from the charity's website that confirms the donation. This is important: before sending me anything, be sure to black out or delete any personal information you don't want to share, such as your address or credit card number. If you don't, I will steal your identity and you will have to live in the middle of a cave forever.
• Also, in your email, please provide the name you'd like your player to have, should you be randomly selected. Both the first and last names can be up to 10 letters in length.

From there, I'll use a random number generator to select who makes it into the Breaking Madden Super Bowl. If chosen, you might be on the AFC team or the NFC team. You might be a gigantic superhuman monster, or you might end up a tiny helpless baby-person. Unfortunately, I can't take requests toward this end. (Side note: last year, the overwhelming majority of participants asked to be the baby-people.)

Submissions will remain open until at least this coming Monday, Jan. 19. Given the amount of time it will take to produce, we kind of have to do this in a hurry, so y'all get givin'!

The exact number of roster spots hasn't been finalized, but there will be a minimum of 80 spots available. For reference's sake, I received about 150 entries last year, so each donors' chance of making it in was better than 50 percent. I bet we'll have more donors this year, so your odds this time around probably won't be that high, but you should totally have a decent shot.

Good luck, y'all. Together, we kill football.

Mike McCarthy is the head coach of the Green Bay Packers. Here are 18 things about him.

1.Screws the cap back on the beer bottle when he's not drinking it

2. Sous-vides SweetTarts

3. Replies "ok. from, mike-mike" to emails that tell him his bank statement is ready

4. Walks on his knees whenever he goes to amusement parks so that nobody will make him go on any of the rides because he is too short

5. Uses Drano instead of Tide

6. Writes FOREMAN GRILL on his Foreman grill with puff paints

7. Starts a playoff game on the road by kicking consecutive field goals from inside the opponents' 2-yard line, despite having a very good short-yardage running back and the best quarterback in the NFL

8. Complains to the "Federal Breast Inspector" shirt company because he just wanted a shirt that said FBI

9. Wins paper airplane contests by wadding up paper and just throwing it

10. Loves pennies, wishes they were nine-foot metal planks

11. Boils steak in his toaster oven

12. Gasps when the man on TV says "for a limited time"

13. When a server says "enjoy your meal," reflexively replies with, "I hope that you also enjoy the meal that you are eating, Mike"

14. Wears Windows Vista poncho indoors

15. Wears 3D goggles while watching Night Court

16. Prints map of Target, goes to Target

17. Slices his sandwich laterally so it just goes through the stuff in the sandwich and doesn't do anything; frowns, but will do it again next time

18. Refrigerates his salt to see what will happen