i'm fighting off a cold so i'm chilling out at home tonight, made some chicken soup i was real happy with

how are y'all doing

Jon is the proud parent of an opinion about parenting. Specifically, that participation trophies are great, and that every kid should have one.

I'd like to present two things that happened on our Facebook this weekend. First, the two most-liked comments on our post celebrating the one-year anniversary of Mo'ne Davis throwing a Little League World Series shutout:

Second, the two most-liked comments on our post about James Harrison taking away participation trophies given to his kids because they didn't "earn" them:

Judging from these two instances, you'd be forgiven for drawing the conclusion that Facebook hates children. It's probably more complicated than that. I think Facebook is just where a lot of people go to be their unhappiest selves. We all build up stupid crap that has to go somewhere. For some people, Facebook is that stupid crap-vent.

I won't bother trying to convince anyone who dogs on Mo'ne Davis, because if you do, you're already a joyless lump with a mass-produced soul you can buy at the AutoZone, and you are beyond redemption. The institution of the participation trophy, though, is something I do want to talk about.

I think that participation trophies are great, and I think that neither the league that gives them nor the kids who receive them should be shamed by you. I think this for the following reasons:

1. Kids should be allowed to exist outside the meritocracy and appreciate themselves

The hyper-competitive parents among us seem anxious to usher their kids into the grand socioeconomic machinery of our world. One day they will learn: those gears and sprockets? Those aren't there to wheel you along. No, no, no, they're there to crush your bones. When that happens, it will not be an accident. A man in safety goggles will scribble into a clipboard and grimace and nod. The end.

Why one would want to hasten their child's introduction to this machine is beyond me. Trust me, you don't have to be the one to teach that. The world will take care of that for you. What the world won't necessarily teach, as evidenced by all the grown folks who tragically haven't learned it, is self-appreciation.

This is where the "political correctness has run wild" folks speak up. Fortunately, I am not only a member of the P.C. police, but the leader of a P.C. military junta, and I countermand their authority. (I am also smarter and taller than them.) A participation trophy can be a seemingly small but surprisingly meaningful gesture. When the machine eats you up, as it is built to do, your spirit is all that will save you. Love yourself.

2. Kids aren't as stupid as you're worried they are

@VChandler10@sgw94 there are real trophies & participation trophies. We need to stop acting like kids don't know the difference.

— Michael Felder (@InTheBleachers) August 16, 2015

Kids understand what's up. When I was seven, all the other kids on the softball team got the same participation trophy I did. We all understood that this was not a signifier of merit, it was a signifier that we went out and played.

The accomplishment of "going out there and playing" might not really mean anything to you. Your mileage may vary. Speaking for myself, I had four of those trophies, and I sat them all neatly on my windowsill. I knew they weren't fooling anybody, and I knew I wasn't a champion. But they were mine, damn it, and they were neat.

3. I'd rather my kid feel good than superior

At these ages, kids are still kind of grasping at the concepts of qualifiers and non-binary concepts. If you tell them, "you're better at baseball," they might well tune out two words in, and decide that they are simply better. Conditional superiority can be a dangerous thing to give a kid, because that kid might not understand the "conditional" part.

We return once again to self-appreciation. Qualify your kid's worth instead of quantifying it. As someone who has never been a parent, that is an order.

4. This isn't really a point but I wanted to say it in big letters: y'all hollering about participation trophies are weird and have bad ideas, but it's not too late for you, just stop being a dipshit

@jon_bois kids trophies are dumb, the real smart person here is me, the guy getting angry about children's sports

— Mike L (@Mikel943) August 16, 2015

The end.

★★★

Pretty Good video: Oh my God, the Mets gave Koo Dae-Sung a baseball bat

A year ago this week, Jon wrote and illustrated a 45,000-word piece of sports science fiction about an offensive drive that lasted three million yards across the Canadian landscape. It was exhausting to write. And to read, probably.

Writing a retrospective on something I already wrote is self-serving and obnoxious as hell, but so is the object of retrospect itself, and so am I. This is really just a writer talking about what it was like to write something, and the chances are very good that you have better things to do.

The Tim Tebow CFL Chronicles spanned about 45,000 words and 100 illustrations. Once I was about 10,000 words into it, I allowed myself to make a video preview:

I'll try to compress this as much as I can.

It's 2014, and Tim Tebow's NFL options have been exhausted. He gives in to popular speculation and signs with the Toronto Argonauts of the Canadian Football League, and immediately finds that Canadian game to be wildly different. The stadium seats 600,000 people. The ball has a long, finned javelin that protrudes out the end. Tebow runs in for a touchdown on his first drive, and learns that he's scored the first CFL touchdown since the 1980s.

And then he learns that it isn't a touchdown, because in the CFL, there are no touchdowns. You don't stop in the end zone. You keep going and going and going, in the same direction, outside of the stadium, through the city, into the woods, and across the continent.

The game lasts more than a decade, spans thousands of miles, and involves wolves and sea battles and a deep ball thrown from the roof of a skyscraper.

Anyway, I posted that video on July 26th, and my deadline for finishing the story was August 16th. I wrote those last 35,000 words, and put together those last 70 or so animations/illustrations, in about 20 days' time. I will never, ever, ever, ever do that shit again. For those three weeks or so, I got up at 7 a.m., put on some coffee, and worked uninterrupted until at least 10 p.m. Then I'd have a couple glasses of whiskey, make myself do something else for a couple hours, and go to bed. I did that seven days a week, and took one of those 20 days off.

I was motivated by a couple things. One was that I'd been kicking around the Tebow story for years (I actually made my first stab at it in 2013, wrote myself into too many corners, and left it unfinished). I couldn't bear the idea of not finishing it, and I was worried that if I didn't finish it by the end of that summer, I'd get too busy with other things and never have another chance.

Another, I think, was to see exactly where the ceiling of "too much work" was. Like a lot of writers, and a lot of people in any other line of work, I work what health professionals might call "too much." I rarely go entire days without doing at least some work. I've always been comfortable with this, and I guess I was just curious to see what happened when I turned every slider on the equalizer all the way up. That's stupid, and the music will sound like shit, but I just wanted to know what it was like.

The answer: something I'm glad I did once, and never want to do again. At some point there could well be something I do that I'm prouder of or happier with or whatever. But it is weird to walk down that hill, to look back and know that I will never rip my arm off for a project like that ever again.

So I hope y'all enjoy it, if it's new to you. It's irresponsibly large, and could bust you up something bad if you're viewing on a phone with a limited data plan. It is imperfect in parts, and has stuff I love and stuff I don't love so much.

It exists, though:

The Tim Tebow CFL Chronicles

In 1983, Soviet Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov had to choose whether or not to break the rules. His decision may have determined whether you and I are alive right now.

Welcome to the fourth episode of Pretty Good, a series of short documentaries about stories that are pretty good. This is a true story. It is about:

• Stanislav Petrov, a Soviet lieutenant colonel who may have saved civilization.
• The fundamental unfairness of human existence.
• A night so terrifying that drinking half a liter of vodka at the end of it isn't such a bad idea.
• The career arc of Kevin Costner.

Enjoy!

Music credits:

"I Am A God" by Kanye West
"Doomed Moon" by Young Widows
"Corps De Blah" by Scott Walker
"Why Do You Love Me?" by Cocteau Twins
"Chandelier" by Sia

More episodes of Pretty Good

Episode 1: Oh my God, they gave Koo Dae-Sung a baseball bat

Episode 2: Larry Walters has a flying lawn chair and a BB gun

Episode 3: Lonnie Smith fought the 1980s and beat its ass down

You are responsible for creating the worst mobile weather app of all time. There were a million things wrong with it, and it was terrible. Here are some screenshots.

Last night, I remembered the mobile app you published a couple years ago. It was easily the worst weather forecasting app I have ever downloaded in my life. Before all else, I am a journalist, so I thought I would go direct to the source:

so, in october 2013 you introduced what Wired named "the worst weather app of all time." why do you think it failed

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) August 28, 2015

First off, I would like to thank you for your time, and for being willing to participate in this interview. I learned a great deal from your perspective. Below, I'm publishing some of your answers, as well as some screenshots of your app.

@jon_bois I thought WeatherPlank, the weather brought to you by the planking weatherman would never get old

— Corey Anglemyer (@canglem) August 28, 2015

@jon_bois only gave the weather for 2012

— Jane Riley (@janeriley_) August 28, 2015

@jon_bois it had a "share to facebook" feature

— DFS Expert Orange (@roll_orange) August 28, 2015

@jon_bois sent push notifications for individual raindrops

— Thomas Boyt (@thomasABoyt) August 28, 2015

@jon_bois we couldn't afford maps

— James Gardner (@jimmygards) August 28, 2015

@jon_bois I can't say why people disliked an app that constantly emitted a single, booming oboe note to remind them about weather

— David Conway (@davidvconway) August 28, 2015

@jon_bois dating app based on weather preference called Winder

— Rory Cornell (@BigRorDawg) August 28, 2015

@jon_bois it could not accurately tell you the weather

— david (@dpottzzz) August 28, 2015

Jon tweeted "welcome to college football saturday" every week for a year straight. Nobody seemed to care much ... until February. It looks like College Football Saturday is heating up.

It looks like College Football Saturday is heating up. In case you missed it:

• Football was invented in 1869
• Cleats
• Other football equipment
• Dave Ragone was good

College football is immensely popular, and every Saturday, fans show up in the millions to watch. Something bothered me, though. The fan/football interaction is kind of a wordless one, devoid of formal introduction. Fans just flip on the TV and start watching, or they just pass through the gate without anyone saying hello to them. Nobody ever bothers to wish them a warm welcome!

It didn't seem right to me. So I tweeted:

welcome to college football saturday

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) August 23, 2014

I just felt like a formal welcome would be appreciated. I don't represent college football, and can't welcome anyone in an official capacity, but I thought an unofficial welcome was better than none at all. Some folks went out of their way to tell me that they appreciated the gesture, so I continued to issue the same welcome every Saturday.

That tweet, as you may have noticed, is more than a year old. I have now tweeted "welcome to college football saturday" every Saturday for the last year, and the response has been overwhelming. Here is last Saturday's tweet:

welcome to college football saturday

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) August 29, 2015

As of this writing, it's received well over 150 favorites! Holy smokes! I've been trying to keep my ego in check, because i know full well that people are really favoriting College Football Saturday. I am only your humble servant. Nonetheless, I am proud of the welcoming atmosphere I have helped create.

Along the way, an unmistakable trend has emerged. I looked up all my "welcome to college football saturday" tweets to count their favorites and retweets. After charting the data, one thing is clear to me: it looks like College Football Saturday is heating up.

The other big takeaway: folks don't seem to care about College Football Saturday very much in the fall. But between January and June, it really starts to heat up! It looks like College Football Saturday was heating up more than ever between June and August. I originally intended to draw a correlation between this and the fact that the weather is heating up -- literally -- but I felt the similarities were circumstantial at best, and I ultimately concluded that to correlate the two would be intellectually dishonest.

Nonetheless, it certainly appears that College Football Saturday is heating up. If this data is any indicator, I think we can expect this next Saturday to be the biggest College Football Saturday yet!

I didn't play football or go to college. Thanks for reading!

Punts are fundamentally sinister. Every single one. Hundreds of them plagued Week 1 of the college football season. Here, we chart the horrors and try not to look directly at them.

In the opening week of this college football season, there were 32 FBS games that were decided by two scores (16 points) or fewer. In those games, there were 330 punts.

Here are all of those punts.

The footprints of a drunken centipede. The tiny beams of light, tumbleweeding through the cosmos, orphaned by a galaxy that ate itself in a fit of boredom eons ago. A shutoff notice from the electric company, in Braille. Hieronymus Bosch's Lite Brite. These metaphors do not express the malaise I feel on account of each and every one of these little white dots. Punts are terrible.

Even if the punt itself is not a bad idea -- and in the majority of cases, it is not -- it's nothing more than the bloom at the end of a rose bush, a signifier of prior terrible ideas. It might be traced back to the decision to run on third and eight, the decision to start a freshman quarterback, the decision to install your goofus athletic director, or the decision to invent a new sport with Princeton. If a punt is not evil, it heralds it, and therefore, every punt is bad.

Some punts, by virtue of their actors' hand-waving and sheepishly hiding far behind the line of scrimmage, appear almost to apologize for themselves. We can say of these punts that at the very least, they are operating on the right side of logic. Giving the ball away is by no means brave, but it is in the service of eventually winning the game. The punts we're about to visit, though, fall on the wrong side of both bravery and logic.

If you won't be brave, at least be rational. If you won't be rational, at least be brave. Sometimes, a football team is neither, and carries itself like a gaggle of stupid cowards.

I have settled on three cardinal evils of punting. These are not mere sins. They are a swift kick to the outstretched hand of God.

Before we proceed, please remember that I filtered out all one-sided contests. All these punts we're about to behold were committed in winnable games.

I. PUNTING WHILE OUTSIDE OF YOUR OWN TERRITORY.

I need you to understand how often this happens.

This last weekend, one in five punts -- 20.9 percent -- were called outside of the punting team's territory. I was astounded. Perhaps I shouldn't have been so naive; perhaps I should have watched four trillion hours of football in my life instead of two trillion.

Granted, if we review the autopsy reports of these drives, we can understand why some of them were called. Fordham, while leading, punted on fourth-and-27 from their opponent's 40-yard line. I get that, I really do. But as I argued earlier, even if the punt itself is prudent, the unspeakable terrors that dragged them to that point render the entire operation unholy.

Others defy comprehension. We will get to those.

II. TURNING DOWN A HIGH-PROBABILITY OPPORTUNITY TO CONVERT.

These five teams had great field position. All of them had a yards-per-play average that game high enough to indicate a somewhat-functioning offense. All of them faced fourth-and-very-short. All of them punted.

Those yards-per-play averages aren't all that impressive, but they were still two, or four, or five times as great as the yardage these teams needed. And of course, a fourth down situation changes all sorts of variables. The defense you go up against will look different from how it did the first three downs. Clearly, though, your offense is demonstrating that it's fully capable of picking up a yard or two.

If the odds, which are in your favor, work out your way, your struggling offense has a first down in your opponent's territory. That's a godsend. And if they're not in your favor ... hell, your opponent has the ball in their own territory, which they would have anyway if you'd have punted. You're probably not missing out on a ton in the way of field position, either.

Here's what happened with those 69 punts that came at or past the 50-yard line.

The average net punt here was about 30 yards. That's a full 10 yards short of the average of all punts booted from home territory. The field's shorter and the risk of a touchback is high, and those are two very good reasons to somewhat devalue punting from this range. Look at all those touchbacks! From this territory, a team's odds of giving their opponent the ball on the 20 -- or worse -- was roughly 50/50.

In short, these teams had a choice between:

a) a low-risk, high-reward proposition with favorable odds, and

b) a lower-risk, low-reward proposition with odds that are whatever who cares punting's dumb

The choice seems clear to me.

III. PUNTING IN THE FOURTH QUARTER WHEN YOU'RE NOT WINNING.

The punts I'm about to show you are the worst of the worst. They are commissions of all three of the cardinal evils of punting. All three of these teams fulfill the following criteria:

1. These teams punted from their opponents' territory.

2. These teams passed up first down opportunities that were entirely makeable.

3. These teams were losing or tied in the fourth quarter.

These decisions were made by people with far more coaching experience than I have. There are things, both about the sport of football at large and the specifics of this scenario, that they know and I do not.

I also know that, either by its own virtue or the virtue of the unclean circumstances that brought it here, that every one of these punts is an abomination. They exhibit a complete lack of confidence in an offense that has shown many times, throughout that very game, that they were capable of picking up five or six yards. They insinuate a spiritual plane of chicken-shittedness I am fortunate enough to only experience when hundreds of thousands aren't watching. They suggest the indifference shared by the windblown cliff faces of the desert, happily suffering all their erosions until there is nothing left to shape.

All these punts occurred within the space of one week. How many more weeks are left in this season? Like five? God help us.

ADDENDUM: UTAH STATE AND SOUTHERN UTAH, POETS OF THE OCCULT.

Along the course of unearthing these horrors, I came across a game I probably wouldn't have heard about otherwise. Utah State and Southern Utah played out such a macabre spectacle that, after looking at the box score, I was certain there was some sort of inclement weather that justified it.

No, not really. There was a little bit of wind, but that's it. No precipitation, earthquakes, or locusts. The invisible demons of punting, it turns out, can walk among us in broad daylight.

Behold, and then hug someone you love.

Breaking Madden has returned for a third season. It missed you.

The Bengals' Margus Hunt and the Saints' Obum Gwacham are two defensive ends clinging at the margins of the NFL. Neither of them even played football until they went to college. I had never heard of either of them until last week.

That was when, along the course of building a team entirely out of defensive ends in Madden NFL 16, I noticed dormant passing and receiving abilities stashed deep within their player ratings. I went out on a limb. I made Hunt the quarterback, and Gwacham a receiver.

They wrecked shop. These are the two newest heroes of Breaking Madden.

And God knows that Breaking Madden will need heroes this season. After 33 episodes, there were so few things left to try and glitches to exploit that originally, I wasn't planning to do a third season at all. I feel like I've found a way to make it work, although it will mean fewer episodes. There are big dumbass ideas I've kicked around for a while, and since they're big, they'll tend to take longer than one week to put together.

One such big dumbass idea: build one team entirely out of NFL quarterbacks. Build another team entirely out of NFL defensive ends. Smash them together and see who wins, because I genuinely do not know:

Music: "My Song" by Labi Siffre

I chose the positions of quarterback and defensive end because they seemed like the two most interesting groups of folks to rip out of their natural elements.

The quarterback is the most important player on the field. Naturally, then, the all-quarterback team has a huge advantage: they get to start an actual quarterback at quarterback. There's also a decent amount of physical diversity at this position. A smaller, quicker guy like Johnny Manziel might make for a good speed back. Cam Newton's size and strength could make him a decent No. 1 runner. If Tim Tebow isn't quite tight end-sized, he's close. Et cetera.

The defensive end's advantages take fewer syllables to describe. BIG. FAST. STRONG. I don't think any position in sports features this combination to such a degree. Their skill when it comes to actually handling the ball is probably not special, but 21 out of 22 guys on the football field don't have the ball at any given time. Defensive ends are very good at not having the ball.

I. THE SETUP.

This actually took forever, which is why I'm just now publishing this even though Madden was released a full two weeks ago. You wouldn't expect it to be that difficult, right? Ideally, the process would go something like:

1. Find the quarterback on some other team, go to his "edit" screen, and switch his position to whatever position we need.
2. Trade him to our all-quarterbacks team.
3. Do this 43 times.

This is usually more or less how it works when I edit rosters in other sports games. Madden, however, hardwires its salary cap system directly into every mode, including -- for reasons I don't understand -- roster editing. Baked in with Aaron Rodgers is his $80 million trillion salary, and if we want him on our all-quarterbacks team, we have to do tons of mathematical gymnastics. This was the process:

1. Find the quarterback on some other team, go to his "edit" screen, and switch his position to whatever position we need.
2. Ah damn it, that puts this team below the minimum number of quarterbacks.
3. Alright, find a quarterback on some random third team to trade to this second team, but make sure he's not a quarterback you'll want for the QB team, because if you do this you might forget where you put him and you won't be able to find him later.
4. Ah shit! This trade, which is between two teams we don't even care about, is illegal because it puts this third team over the salary cap.
5. Spend a couple minutes playing general manager with this third team, releasing its expensive players and replacing them with cheap placeholders from a fourth and fifth and sixth team, just so it works.
6. OK, you should be able to go back to the second team now and trade that quarterback to your QB team now.
7. Shit, what was that second team again?
8. Oh yeah, I remember.
9. Oh my God, this puts my QB team over the salary cap.
10. Release everyone on your barely-assembled QB team you possibly can and buy yourself enough money to not have to do this for another hour or two.
11. Do this 43 times.

Madden is so weird. We've been over this before, but it's so ... so weird.

Sometimes, when you play this game, you feel like it was made just for you. When you play the actual game itself, the one with the football and the players, you feel like it was built by hundreds of people who have been loving and playing Madden for a decade. The perfection isn't there, because I think perfection exists only in theory, but year after year, new tweaks and animations show up. Many of those improvements are too subtle to really be advertised. You see almost eerily real graphics; also, unmistakably, you see the love that went into them.

And then you start walking through the corridors of the game. The menu screens, the roster editor, the franchise mode. So much of it is a microwaved holdover from Madden 15, Madden 13, Madden 12 ... hell, if you told me the guts dated back to Madden 06, I would believe you. Every screen should come with its own landlord, fumbling to pick the right key out of his keyring: "Jesus, you really want in here?" I suppose I'm glad these features are left to remain largely untouched year after year until the wind blows them over, rather than bulldozed outright. It improves my career prospects, to be sure.

It's just that for years running -- like, half a decade, minimum -- departments of this game don't feel like they were made for anybody. They were just made. Who wants a salary cap in a sandbox roster-editing mode? Do the people who made that rule meet in the EA cafeteria with the people who craft those spectacular graphics and animations? What do they talk about? Do they shuffle off and eat alone in their cars? I would. And my game would look like Madden NFL 16, a qualitatively wonky product that keeps getting better in some areas and keeps getting more shamefully neglected in others and keeps being $60 either way. Monopolies have a way of ferreting out who among us actually gives a shit.

Anyway. HIIIIIII IT'S TIME FOR A NEW SEASON OF BREAKING MADDEN HELLO HIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII

II. THE NEW RATINGS.

Madden's player ratings are pretty damned sophisticated. For starters, each player has 50 or so ratings categories, and with somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,800 players in the game, that puts us somewhere in the neighborhood of 90,000 little knobs, each of which turn from zero to 99.

When you mess with one of the knobs, the player's overall rating rises or dips just a little bit. And when you change a player's position, everything goes bonkers. For example, suppose you make Robert Griffin III play linebacker. Madden knows that his passing accuracy rating doesn't mean crud anymore. It looks instead at his blocking ability and strength, stifles its laughter and yanks his overall rating from 78 all the way down to 12.

All this shit's gettin' broke.

Due to the salary cap restrictions I mentioned, it proved mathematically impossible to get more than a few big-name quarterbacks on this team. It's just as well. Frankly, I'm just delighted to see Jeff Tuel again.

That RGIII example was not hypothetical. His rating has dropped by 66 points, lower than almost any other quarterback's. Meanwhile, Tony Romo, Tarvaris Jackson and Teddy Bridgewater have essentially been reduced to laymen. You may as well ask them to construct a battleship.

But the real joy here is in finding out how ... not-terrible some of these guys are in their new careers. Johnny Manziel, who's rated 71 overall as a quarterback, dropped by just three points. We took a guy from one highly specialized position to another very different position, and Madden just shrugged.

Look at this, though, y'all. Look at it. This astounds me:

Cam Newton suffers only a six-point drop after switching to running back, down from 90 to 84. That 84 makes him the 13th-best running back in the NFL, according to Madden. That puts him above Gio Bernard, Lamar Miller, Jonathan Stewart, Alfred Morris and lots of other running backs you'd happily start on your fantasy team.

On to the defensive ends.

That is pretty weird, right? Madden is self-confident enough to decide that it knows better than the real-life NFL. That's a hell of an assertion, too, because there are serious differences between what makes you a good defensive end, and what makes you a good safety.

I stumbled upon that one by accident, but in most cases I did try to set both teams up for as much success as I could. As you may have noticed in the video, I originally had J.J. Watt penciled in as the defensive ends' quarterback. Once it turned out that he was complete ass at throwing the ball (Madden and I disagree on this), I switched him to running back, a position he is actually pretty decent at.

Watt was supposed to be the hero. Margus Hunt and Obum Gwacham trashed all plans and expectations I had. We will get to them.

III. THE GAME.

HEY! Hey, y'all, we're at the GIF part now! The part where you actually get to see me play the game! Remember how we switched Johnny Manziel to running back? Wanna see how that's going? Here you go!

That's in real-time. I didn't speed it up one bit. Robert Quinn moves through Manziel as quickly as he does through air. He doesn't even have to tackle him. He just aims his body and fires. He is both the flaming horse carcass and the catapult.

We knew that in one-on-one, last-man-standing battles, the defensive ends would always win here. It was not a secret. It's still a delight to see it happen. Here is Russell Wilson, defensive tackle.

Again, that's defensive tackle. The Texans' L.T. Walton is trying to protect the pocket. He's not actually supposed to go bowling downfield like that, and he normally wouldn't, because any defensive tackle worth a shit would actually pose a challenge and give him something to do.

From an ecumenical, "this is how the sport is supposed to work" perspective, Russell has a role here. He's supposed to be the bread bowl in this tortilla soup. Sure, he's supposed to be eaten eventually, but until then he's expected to help hold this whole thing together. If he doesn't, the order of things is all fouled up.

Last year, I spent hours and hours playing, recording, and watching Madden 15 gameplay. Hours and hours and hours and hours. And already, the differences in animations and player behavior are revealing themselves. What's New In Madden NFL 16: defensive players will straighten themselves, head to neck to spine, into torpedoes, and fire their helmets at the fourth vertebra of a defenseless player who is clearly on his way down, if not down already.

Oof, Cam. Sorry. I don't remember these dudes doing this last year. This is an interesting reversal. Ten years ago, Madden featured, and even advertised, players' helmets getting popped off after a hard hit. The NFL presumably asked them to stop short of telling the whole truth, so the pop-off helmets were gone. And now -- granted, it's early on, and I haven't seen tons of gameplay yet -- the violence actually exceeds what I typically see in the real NFL.

As for Cam, his 84 rating as a running back just didn't matter at all. His line was so comically outmatched by a team of defensive linemen that of his 10 carries, I think he made it past the line of scrimmage once. He finished with negative-18 yards.

Custom-created players aside, Blaine Gabbert is the worst defender I have ever seen.

Way to make a play Blaine.

Thank you Blaine.

So the Packers had no real defensive ability, no ability to run the ball, some athletic receivers, and the best quarterback in the game. They made the most of what they had.

Rodgers connected for 140 yards with his best receiver, Andrew Luck. Luck had enough size and speed to at least hang with the defensive ends downfield. His "Awareness" rating of 85 was higher than just about anyone he went up against, so he was sometimes the only dude in the vicinity who actually had his head up and looking for the ball. He was actually very, very good, and scored two touchdowns.

And he celebrated like a dorko-malorko-goofus-maloofus after both of them.

It's not that this is inaccurate. This is exactly what I'd do if you asked me to act out "Andrew Luck celebrates a touchdown." It's like he's ... riding an invisible horse, but he's turned in the wrong direction? GIDDYSIDEWAYS Y'ALL

I think this is what happened: the director of the motion-capture department dragged in some guy who had never heard of Andrew Luck or seen a football game in his life. The director told him, "Listen. You're playing a guy who loves concrete. Like, he thinks concrete is awesome. He has a book about concrete. He actually brought it on a business trip with him and was showing his coworkers and everything, and just going on and on about concrete. Got it? OK, you're him right after something good just happened. Go!"

IV. THE RESULTS.

Say this about the people who calibrate the ratings for the players of Madden: they do their research. They knew to set Margus Hunt's "Throw Power" rating to 70, even though that of every other defensive end is like 25. Hunt's "Accuracy" rating is 45; nearly every other defensive end's is 6.

It turns out that Margus Hunt of Estonia is a former World Junior Championships champion discus thrower. He set records, and also competed in shot put and hammer throw events. In 2009, he moved to the United States to join SMU's track and field program. As soon as he got there, the program was shut down.

Despite never having played football in his life, Hunt was encouraged to join SMU's football team. This is because Hunt is an athletic freak of nature. At 6'8 and 277 pounds, he can run a 4.6-second 40-yard dash. Over his college career, Hunt learned the game well enough to be drafted by the Cincinnati Bengals. He remains an unknown as of now, but as our own Stephen White wrote earlier this month, Hunt has all the tools he needs to bust out this year.

One of those tools, by virtue of his ability to chuck a discus, is throwing power. If Madden hadn't reflected that in his skill ratings, I don't think anyone would have noticed, because no one would start a defensive end at quarterback. No one but us, anyway. Whoever's responsible for that fantastic attention to detail: I see you.

The people behind Madden also knew to crank Obum Gwacham's "Catching" ability up to 70, far higher than the majority of defensive ends. This is because he originally played wideout at Oregon State before being moved to the defensive side of the ball. Again: I don't think this is the sort of thing Madden's researchers could have just ripped out of a spreadsheet. They have to know this stuff, and apparently, they do. And God dang can he, or at least his Madden self, haul in a catch.

Hunt's and Gwacham's stories are very similar to each other's, and extremely different from virtually every other player who steps foot on an NFL field. Both are foreign-born. Neither played football until they were legal adults. Both were outstanding track-and-field athletes whose physical abilities have sent them fast-tracking through the sport of football.

I thought the defensive ends' inability to throw or catch would be their undoing. Thanks to Margus Hunt, and thanks to his only reliable receiving target in Obum Gwacham, it wasn't. Wherever y'all are, I hope you feel famous for a minute or two. You won:

Music: "Rolled Together" by The Antlers

There are 33 more episodes of Breaking Madden. They are all right here.

Sunday, we bore witness to one of the worst rushing performances of the 21st century. Let's put together some charts so we can get through this abomination as quickly as possible.

In simple terms of volume, the loudest boos are pops, usually elicited by a call the crowd perceives as terrible. That shit is bacon fat, though. You want a feast, the kind that comes from 14 hours of a pig napping in a smoker, the sort that will leave you drenched in its aromatic fumes for days? Wait for the steady cascade of boos that replicates and builds upon itself, over and over, one bitter on-field disappointment to the next. Wait long enough, and you will be rewarded with the suffocating boos of Philadelphia fans throughout the Eagles' loss to the Cowboys. They were delicious.

This was DeMarco Murray's first game against his former team, the Cowboys, who are also the Eagles' hated rival. This was also an Eagles offense built by Chip Kelly, who is more famous for his high-powered, fast, fun offenses than anyone else in football. There were plenty of reasons for Eagles fans to expect more than this.

Couple that disappointment with the almost-incomparable frustration of watching a ground game that cannot function on a fundamental level to save its life. That's how you get a 65,000-voice choir joining together in full-throat booing in a single note, so eerily in unison, so foreign to nature, that surely the birds cower and the clouds huddle in terror. They just were loud as fuck, y'all, and they had every right to be. This was one of the worst run games from a home team in the history of the modern NFL.

In terms of yards per attempt, it was the fifth-worst home-team rushing performance of the last 50 years. I should note that the Eagles' 17 attempts trump all but one of the teams on that chart. They just kept on stubbornly running the ball, well after their spiritual heirs had the good sense to quit.

This gets worse once we consider the personnel involved. These were the running backs from the five most recent games on that chart leading up to Sunday's game:

• 2012 Cardinals: LaRod Stephens-Howling
• 2007 Chiefs: Larry Johnson, Michael Bennett
• 2006 Lions: Kevin Jones, Arlen Harris
• 2005 Dolphins: Ronnie Brown
• 2005 Rams: Steven Jackson

Larry Johnson, who the Chiefs had already run into the ground by 2007, played within one of the worst offenses I have ever seen. In 2005, Steven Jackson was a rookie who shouldered the run game all by himself. The rest of these dudes were never stars.

These Eagles, though.

The Eagles had three of the top 20 most proven, productive running backs of the decade at their disposal. Three!

With an unreal stable of running backs and a head coach famous for his high-powered offenses, playing in their home stadium against an arch-rival that gave up about 100 yards on the ground to a not-great Giants running back committee a week ago, the Eagles came up with one of the worst rushing performances of the 21st century. Philadelphia fans will boo Santa, and as it turns out, they will boo everyone else whose gameplan is to fall down a chimney. BOO. BOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

* * *

SB Nation presents:Every Sunday game, disrespected in 3 minutes

Did you make it into the newest Breaking Madden? Goodness, I hope not. Please enjoy these terrible stories from people who are terrible family members.

Welcome back to Breaking Madden Roster Cuts, y'all! I started this feature last year, and in short order it proved to be almost as popular as Breaking Madden itself. I am super excited to bring it back, because it's basically me just asking y'all to do your work for me, only I get paid at the end of the week and you don't. Y'all suckers. Anyway, here is the setup for Season 3, Episode 2 of Breaking Madden:

Music: "Maggie's Farm" by Rage Against The Machine

In short:

1. I convert Robert Griffin III to defensive end, completely max out all his skill ratings, and trade him to the Dolphins (Washington's Week 1 opponent).
2. I cut every real-life member of the offensive line from Washington's roster, and replace them with the most useless weaklings in the history of football.
3. I play through Washington's entire 2015 schedule. Each week, I trade Defensive Man-God RGIII to Washington's next opponent, so they have to face him all season.

I'm doing this because:

1. RGIII is an awesome player, and Washington has managed by one means or another to sap him of all his fun.
2. As a sort of last straw, after demoting RGIII to third on the depth chart, Washington made him play safety on the practice squad.
3. In the race for America's most deplorable sports franchise, Washington's NFL team has lapped them all. They play in a shitty place, they're owned by a dumb asshole, and their name is so offensive that a considerable slice of the media isn't even comfortable saying it out loud, even though saying it out loud is kind of their job.

RGIII's replacement at quarterback is Kirk Cousins, and he is being rewarded in this scenario with the worst offensive line in NFL history. I'm trying to destroy him, clearly.

I need offensive linespeople who will not look out for their Cousins. So this is how I recruited them:

if you would like to be in the next Breaking Madden, please tell me about a time you were a shitty family member

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) September 16, 2015

All ten of them are five-foot-nothing, weigh 160 pounds, and are horrible at every single skill related to the sport of football. Here they are:

(There are four No. 1 jerseys due to fallout from a glitch. Don't worry. We will get to that in Breaking Madden.)

Here are their stories:

No. 3: SkiChik

@jon_bois I abandoned my brother at a renaissance festival to hunt down a turkey leg. Security found him hours later dressed in chain mail.

— SkiChik (@skichik15) September 16, 2015

The worst thing about renaissance festivals is that if left unattended, your little brother will be drafted into knighthood. The second-worst thing about them is that they are things that have literally anything to do with European mythology. There is far, far too much of this shit, and I've reached my saturation point. I won't watch "Game of Thrones," even though it's probably fun. I haven't seen any of the new Hobbit movies, even though I loved the book as a kid. If I see one more sword or castle or any other shit like that ever again, I will die. That is hard to avoid in this day and age. This, example, is the upcoming video game release calendar:

September 29th
War of Swords
Sword War
War Weapon 3: War of Sword

October 5th
Stryfe: Medeieivieial Renenessisiananannce Europe Dragon Shit
SwordWoryld Of Majick!
Ryse: Son Of Rome, Which Is What Some Dumb Assholes Actually Called A Game On Purpose

October 12th
War Of Games: GameWarz
War Sword Warsword Warz War: Sword
WizardzQuest IV: Women Are Imaginary
Dragon Knightquest Witch Man: Old Stuff

October 19th
Something With Literally One Person In It Who Isn't White, Hahahahahahahahaahahahahaha No I'm Just Fucking With You, Aaaaaaahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah You Believed Me You Fucking Dolt

October 26th
Women Be Damselin'
I Enjoy Fantasy In Principle But I Have No Creativity So Here's Some Swords And Castles And Other Shit That Is The Exact Same Shit We All Dump On You Every Single Time
Weapyn Swordweapynnnnnnn

No. 4: Luke Zimmermann

@jon_bois Was home from college. Had too much to drink. Got home, threw up in the sink, clogged it, turned it on, passed out, flooded house.

— Luke Zimmermann (@lukezim) September 16, 2015

Expounding on this too much would feel to me like Telestrating over Raging Bull, so I want to gently step out of the way, but first I want to say this: that must have been the chunkiest puke of all time.

I mean, I'm considering the chunkiest chili I've ever made, and I'm trying to picture whether it would clog my kitchen sink if I straight-up poured it into the drain. I don't think it would! I mean, not entirely. It would slow down the works, but I can't imagine it acting as a waterproof sealant.

So Luke's barf was of a more solid consistency than chili, it seems. Consider also that in order for this flooding to happen, there must be enough water to fill up an entire sink before spilling over. A cubic foot of water weighs about 40 pounds, so ... this vomit is sturdy enough to support at least 100 pounds of water.

Luke, did you barf molten steel? Do you have any idea of how rad that is? Why aren't you in the X-Men? Are you in the X-Men?

No. 7: Jane Coaston

@jon_bois my mom fell down the stairs trying to stop me at age 1 from falling down the stairs and i laughed and laughed and laughed.

— Jane Coaston (@cjane87) September 16, 2015

My theory is that many babies have a more informed sense of humor than many adults.

A lot of modern humor is really just referential humor, like a Family Guy cutaway. That humor absolutely kills these days, and I want to stress that this isn't bad! It's cool to like the kind of humor you like, just like it's cool for me to enjoy $8 bottles of wine thanks to my under-developed palate, which I'm grateful for. I think that sort of humor is really just costumed pattern recognition, though. The laughter is a sort of satisfaction similar to that felt when you finally pencil in 11 across.

But when a baby laughs, it's because the baby finds it intrinsically, irreducibly funny. It's just as well that babies can't talk, because trying to explain the humor of that moment is like trying to explain what a quark is made of.

No. 1: Kit Smoker

@jon_bois I handcuffed my cousin to a chair and left him there while the rest of the cousins went to an Amish swap meet for Bon jovi tapes

— Kit Smoker (@Son_Of_Zoltan) September 16, 2015

I'll argue that the cassette tape was the most beautiful of all audio media formats. Watching our music in action now, of course, is like trying to pick the salt out of a stew; it's so completely permeated into other things and systems that a song is barely even a noun anymore, in the sense that a run or a jog is only barely a noun. Five years ago we still had our MP3s, which, while not actual things themselves, were at least things we could isolate and observe and move around through desktops and folders in an abstract way.

CDs are neat because they involve lasers, but also because they let us listen to something in 1990 that was actually superior in sound quality to what I listened to on my phone this morning. Vinyls are neat, and people who talk about their audible "warmth" aren't lying, but they're way too much of a pain in the ass for me to even pretend to mess with.

The cassette player was easy to store and basically impossible to scratch. You could actually see wheels turn. You could see the tape on one spool stack up, and the tape on the other spool thin out! A six-year-old could stare at it for a minute and basically figure out what was going on with it! When's the last time you could glance at the inner workings of a machine and instantly suss out how many minutes are left in 2 Legit 2 Quit?

Their imperfections were either mysterious or terrifying. They were mysterious when you actually, for the first time ever, waited until the tape on Side 1 completely ran out, and upon flipping it over you realized you had never even heard the first song on Side 2 before. They were terrifying when suddenly, and without reason, the tape would squeal in anguish as the player devoured it, like a tarantula eating a mouse. Your music was dead, and you got to hear it die.

Bon Jovi and Amish folks are cool! You should not have handcuffed your cousin to a chair! Suit up.

No. 9: T.J. DeRitis

@jon_bois Popped all my dad's US state quarters out of their decorative plaque he had been collecting for years to buy a cheesesteak.

— TJ DeRitis (@TJFatStax) September 16, 2015

Objectively, this is not as bad as barf-flooding your family's house or consigning your little brother to charge into battle for a faceless feudal lord. This one, though, is the one that makes me feel really, genuinely bad, because it fulfills the following conditions:

• Dad
• Dad maintains a very modest hobby, perhaps the most modest possible hobby
• Dad's humble little hobby involves collecting individual quarters, and it's quite difficult not to imagine his face lighting up as he pulls it off the counter at the gas station and folds it into his big work-worn hands
• Further, it is very easy to imagine Dad at home later, squinting as he gingerly pops his little quarter into its slot, then holds the board at arm's length to behold his little kingdom
• It's suuuuuuch a stuuuupid hobby, but maybe it's not? Maybe his life is exhausting and complicated, and a simple hobby is a nice little respite for him? Which inspires more pity?
• This little tiny pitiful humble island in his life is all he asks for. He has committed his life to raising you, and still does. He keeps only this one little bit for himself. And it is enough. He beholds it, in his own little company, when no one is there to mock him, and he smiles.

And you fucked it all up. God, I want to cry.

No. 1:

@jon_bois I once served my sister pickle juice in a Mt. Dew bottle.

— Alex Hider (@alexhider) September 16, 2015

Well, that certainly is not a nice thing to--

BAH GAWD THAT'S YOUR SISTER'S MUSIC

@alexhider@jon_bois I should get my name in Breaking Madden instead for being forced to deal with that.

— Anna Hider (@AnnaHider) September 16, 2015

I agree. You know what, Alex, Anna just took your spot. You're out. Now that we--

BAH GAWD THAT'S YOUR OTHER SISTER'S MUSIC

@AnnaHider To be fair, we did serve @alexhider toaster waffles with habanero pepper. And pizza rolls filled with mayonnaise. @jon_bois

— Julia Hider (@JuliaHider) September 16, 2015

Pizza rolls filled with mayonnaise? Like, you actually made pizza rolls from scratch, which is something I have never heard of anyone doing, and filled them with mayonnaise, and oh God, that means you baked mayonnaise for a half-hour. Y'all, that is gross. All three of you will share one player under your last name, because siblings love sharing.

No. 1: Beej

@jon_bois made them waste thousands of dollars on a wedding

— beej me more (@BeeJMeMore) September 16, 2015

The desire for a day to be perfect is an emotional illness, and the idea that this perfection can be bought by blowing through $10,000 or $20,000 or more in a single day is an idea shared by scared, stupid people. Weddings are a cultural barnacle that we will probably never chisel out. If I ever get married, I'll probably end up cowing to some of the shallow dumbass things I detest about them. But for now, I am not, and I guarantee that none of the money you spent on your wedding beyond the first, I don't know, one or two thousand bucks increased everyone's net happiness. Given how anxious you were over everything being perfect, Hell, you probably dragged it down a couple pegs. I want to note that I am talking about everyone's wedding, but specifically, reader, I am talking about yours.

No. 18: Collingborn

@jon_bois locked my nan in a broom cupbaord

— Liam Collingborn (@liamcollingborn) September 16, 2015

This is funny, but I'm gonna level with y'all. This one got pushed over the top because it's the most British tweet I have ever seen.

No. 1: Sanchez

@jon_bois My little brother was quietly watching me play Zelda and I smashed a TV remote over his head. Batteries flew everywhere.

— Rark Muffalo (@DblDickSanchez) September 16, 2015

Younger siblings are shorter, slower, dumber, and weaker than you. If they aren't for hitting with absolutely no cause, I don't know what the hell else they would be for.

No. 19: OhYouLancyHuh

@jon_bois I wrote my parents this note at approx age 9 for making their life a living hell (probably over a haircut). pic.twitter.com/K4rD20ghJM

— Ryan (@OhYouLancyHuh) September 16, 2015

I think being a kid takes the sort of fortitude that would kick your ass and mine today. We're adults. We're used to some degree of agency over our lives. We can do things we want to do, we enjoy the simple dignity of choosing when we go to bed, and if we are sitting in school or church, it was our idea.

Being parented is an absolutely necessary oppression, but it is an oppression, and speaking only for myself, it exhausted me. I had a great childhood relative to other childhoods, but I still find the stresses and hard work of adulthood to be far easier, because I would rather chop wood than feel sad, and if I am sad, I would rather do something about it than sit there and be made to told that I shouldn't be sad.

The struggle to be a good short little person while living in that maelstrom of childhood seems almost Herculean. It really is something to see a kid who tries, or who ever wants to.

Click here for the first two seasons of Breaking Madden. The third season premiere is right here.

Earlier this week, a video showing a rat carrying a slice of pizza down some stairs went viral. After taking several days to properly assess this video, Jon is at last ready to issue an explainer.

This video is extraordinarily difficult to explain, but I will do my best. It appears as though the top part of your laptop -- the screen part -- is shooting out an array of lights that create the illusion of a live, rectangle-shaped event occurring in the middle of your computer! But it is only a trick. Here is Pizza Rat.

How come the rat ate the people food

Well actually, I guess the rat didn't technically eat it. But still, it's a slice of pizza, which are meant for people to eat -- not rats. How come the rat was bothering with people food instead of finding rat food to eat? There must be plenty of rat food in the subway, because otherwise, the thousands of rats who live down there would not be able to survive.

I decided to reach out to Jeremy, a rat expert.

@jon_bois rat expert here. i have no idea.

— Jeremy Chappell (@Jeremy_Chappell) September 25, 2015

Even though he's a rat expert, Jeremy was unable to explain it.

The pizza wasn't made for a rat to eat

Pizza is made of three ingredients: dough, pizza sauce, cheese, pizza ovens, and a pizza restaurant. And all of them are meant for people. For example, these are some of the times I can definitively remember eating pizza:

• 1988, pizza my dad made, Kansas City, Kan.
• 1992, Godfather's Pizza delivered to my friend's house, Kansas City, Kan.
• 1993, at a friend's birthday party, Atlanta, Ga.
• 1995, Lunchables Pizza at my house, Atlanta, Ga.
• 1997, I can't remember why but it was at my house, Louisville, Ky.
• 1999, Papa John's at the school cafeteria, Louisville, Ky.
• 2002, pizza at some kind of "pizza restaurant" [sp?], Washington, D.C.
• 2004, I think it was like Pizza Hut, Roanoke, Va.
• 2005, I don't remember, Blacksburg, Va.
• 2007, I don't know
• 2008, pizza I ate at my friend's house while watching America's Funniest Videos, Louisville, Ky.
• 2011, pizza my friend and I got from Papalino's because there was a tornado nearby and they let us hang out in the basement and gave us some free pizza, but Papalino's is closed now, Louisville, Ky.
• 2013, pizza I made, Montreal, QC
• 2014, some pizza I got from a "pizza joint" [sp?], New York, N.Y.
• 2015, another pizza I made at home, New York, N.Y. [NOTE: this pizza has already been eaten]
• The future: Future Pizza

This is not even a complete list -- I've probably eaten pizza a hundred times.

This is evidence that pizza is for people.

Because I'm not even a rat.

I'm a guy.

How does the rat know what pizza is

It's wrong to call rats stupid, because they cannot help it. But they don't understand language. How could the rat get the pizza if the rat didn't even know what pizza is called?

I tried to reach out to another rat expert, but unfortunately he just wanted to talk about other stuff.

@jon_bois I think this whole balloon boy deal is a bunch of hot air

— Shulk Hogan (@SkirkLee) September 25, 2015

Why is the pizza a triangle

Pizzas are round. Occasionally they are rectangular, but only if you are in jail. They are never triangles.

How come the rat can go down stairs

They don't even wear shoes. If a rat tried to wear shoes, the rat would just fall into one of the shoes and disappear. I mean not literally magically disappear, you just couldn't see the rat.

Someone videotaped it instead of calling the police

The police would have known what to do. I call 911 every day to find out the latest sports scores. If they know those, then surely they would be able to explain the pizza rat and know what to do.

You can comment on this article with rat information or anything else you would like to say, but unfortunately I will not be able to pay you.

During Sunday's shutout loss to the Seahawks, the Bears had 10 possessions and they ended every single one with a punt. Let's chart it.

I charted up some horrible college punts just a couple weeks ago, but I think the Bears outdid them all Sunday afternoon.

As the star of Mystery Science Theater 3000, Joel might have been the chillest host in the history of television. He drifted through every episode as though you just woke him up from a nap and invited him to the zoo: sleepy, happy and maybe completely ambivalent.

I can only remember one moment that made Joel completely snap out of character. Manos: The Hands of Fate was probably the worst movie they they ever watched. Most scenes are agonizingly drawn out, and full of absolutely nothing happening. Simple dialogue scenes are peppered with 15-second meaningless, wordless pauses. The toll slowly builds on Joel and his robot buddies.

Finally, they get to this scene in which "The Master" and Torgo kinda just ... stand around. It's like the movie is a carnival ride that's locked up. For a full half-minute. They're not doing a damn thing.

Joel, for perhaps the only time in his life, loses his shit.

Sunday, the Bears' offense was Torgo. They didn't do anything, and they didn't attempt any illusion of doing anything. They just kind of hung out, and punted away the ball whenever it seemed like it was the polite thing to do. On the road, against a fearsome defense, and with a subpar backup quarterback, the deck was certainly stacked against the Bears, who responded with some of the most gutless play calling of the 21st century.

This is the result of every Bears possession.

Those percentages reflect the Bears' overall success rate at picking up the relevant number of yards. For example, I gave them a 66 percent shot on that fourth-and-one because during this game, they had picked up at least one yard on 66 percent of their plays from scrimmage.

Punt, punt, punt, punt, punt, punt, punt, punt, punt, punt. Ten punts. That is all they did, and then they lost 26-0. And then they went the hell home.

It should be noted that individually, the Bears' offensive playmakers certainly could have been worse. Jimmy Clausen had weak numbers, but he never turned the ball over, and he hit more than half his targets. Matt Forte finished just short of four yards per carry -- that is not good, but we've all seen worse.

The coaching staff just didn't have any faith in its players to do anything, apparently. They punted when the game was close, they punted when they fell behind and they punted when the game was a foregone conclusion and they had nothing to play for but pride. This is where timid intersects with poor judgment, because on several of these occasions, they were punting with the math against them.

Aesthetically, all punts are bad. but I'll acknowledge that five of those were absolutely the right call. One of them -- that fourth-and-four job near the end of the first quarter -- is sort of a borderline case as far as I'm concerned. The other five punts absolutely should not have happened, though.

Getting shut out is a humiliation that matters to NFL teams. Why the shit are you punting on fourth and five in your opponent's territory in a close game? What the hell is up with two punts, on fourth and short, in the fourth quarter of a game that's pretty much been decided?

That eighth punt, though. The fourth-and-one around midfield. The down that the Bears had a spectacular 66 percent chance of converting, had they tried. They were offered a chance to preserve some of their pride, said, "nah" and continued to make the worst kind of history.

DO SOMETHING! GUHHHH.

* * *

SB Nation presents:The case for going for it on 4th down in the NFL

One of the most exciting quarterbacks of the decade is a third-string quarterback on America's worst sports franchise. They don't deserve to be happy. In this episode, Robert Griffin III plays defensive end for all 16 of Washington's opponents. This is the quest for 0-16.

If I were made owner of Washington's football team, I would immediately move the team to Brooklyn, change the team name and logo, and make the uniforms pink, because I think pink is a great color that is under-represented in sports, and also because it would make dumb guys mad. I would like this franchise to lose every shred of its identity, everything that makes it itself, until the entire franchise is an empty bucket that can be filled with a football team capable of justifying its own existence.

In the, I don't know, ninth-worst thing Washington has ever done, they drafted Robert Griffin III, watched him assemble one of the greatest rookie seasons in NFL history, and, as my pal Rodger Sherman neatly lays out here, spent the next couple years effectively ruining him. Upon ruin they've piled indignity: having skipped the second rung altogether, Griffin is now Washington's third-string quarterback. He's playing defense with the scout team, a practice unheard of for a marquee quarterback.

Breaking Madden does not know how to fix, say, institutional racism. It doesn't know how to convince some dumbass white guy in Reston that he doesn't get to play "puppet show" with a millennia-old genocide-suffered society of people for the sake of dotting the i on his tradition. It doesn't know what to say to the person who will show up in the comments below to shout "REDSKINS," a word that person would almost certainly be too chickenshit to say out loud in the company of Native Americans.

But it does know how to simulate Washington's football destruction at the hands of RGIII. It is fiction, and sometimes the dumb guys get to win in the real world, and sometimes fiction is all we've got.

Music: "Maggie's Farm" by Rage Against The Machine

The setup for this one is a three-phase operation.

1. CONVERT RGIII TO DEFENSIVE END AND MAKE HIM IMMORTAL.

Washington wants him to play defense, so he'll play defense. We're also cranking all his skill ratings up to 99. Hit power, speed, strength, and every other relevant quality is completely maxed out.

2. SIMULATE WASHINGTON'S ENTIRE 2015, AND TRADE RGIII TO WASHINGTON'S OPPONENT EACH WEEK.

For all 16 games, new Washington starter Kirk Cousins will be staring down the barrel at Robert Griffin III, albeit in a different uniform every week.

I'll be simulating via Madden's franchise mode, which I've tended to avoid in the past. Over the last few years, I've run into all sorts of different bugs in this mode that undid or invalidated large amounts of work. Maybe this year it'll be different? (I am lying. It will not be different, because Electronic Arts is a very small company that cannot afford to fix bugs.)

3. REPLACE WASHINGTON'S OFFENSIVE LINE WITH BABY-PEOPLE.

I'm not out to hassle Washington. I'm out to destroy them. I need Kirk Cousins to have as little time to work as possible. I want a billion interceptions and an 0-16 season.

To that end, I needed the weakest offensive line possible. I needed people who would let down their Cousins. So this is how I recruited y'all:

if you would like to be in the next Breaking Madden, please tell me about a time you were a shitty family member

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) September 16, 2015

Y'all had stories. Good God, y'all had stories:

@jon_bois Was home from college. Had too much to drink. Got home, threw up in the sink, clogged it, turned it on, passed out, flooded house.

— Luke Zimmermann (@lukezim) September 16, 2015

In all, I selected the ten of you who had the most captivating, shameful stories of all. You can pick through the rubble here:

BREAKING MADDEN: ROSTER CUTS.

Before we proceed: some of y'all longtime readers might recall that in an episode of Breaking Madden from last year, I gave Washington solid-colored helmets, thereby removing the offensive imagery. That isn't happening this time, and the short explanation is that, in franchise mode with this particular setup, Madden wouldn't let me. Another explanation is that I think we ought to let the Washington Redskins be known for what they are: an organization that proudly -- not just without shame, but with pride -- trots out racist language and imagery that offends a strong majority of Native Americans. They're not just denigrating another culture, they're bringing shame upon themselves, and I can imagine a future in which everyone sees it that way.

Political correctness has crept into your sports content and there isn't a damn thing you can do about it. Furthermore, I am taller than you. Time for football!

THE GAMEPLAY.

Throughout this season, I picked up the controller and played as Robert Griffin III for as long the game would let me (more on that later). And y'all, it was a delight.

This is like watching the blasting caps pop off under the Highway 11 Blockbuster, with timing far more precise than it ever deserved. Collingborn got laid out here, and in fact, the entire Washington offensive line was reduced to human finish-line tape.

I've made these hyper-crummy O-lines several times before in Breaking Madden, and I never get tired of it. With each release of Madden, they seem to take on a slightly different character. In Madden NFL 25, they toppled over in tandem, like a picket fence. In Madden NFL 15, they often stumbled and fell of their own accord.

This year, it seems, they're little dummies who completely misunderstand the reason they're there. This game's "Awareness" setting really is what it says on the can. Pull it down to zero, and they fail to understand what football is, who they are, or what they're supposed to be doing. They lack purpose and any sense of object permanence. The artificial intelligence code in their dumb little hearts stops after three lines.

IF
football
THEN
[ERROR]

Luke Zimmermann has declined to participate. He is the Alvin York of football, and he isn't alone.

Poor Kirk Cousins, y'all. I don't have anything against Cousins specifically. The real-life Kirk Cousins has a job to do, and he's doing it, and I don't think he's a bad quarterback. He's just Not Robert Griffin III, the dude who spent years electrifying the football world. Remember all the ridiculous things he pulled off at Baylor? Remember his 76-yard touchdown run against the Vikings in 2012? I miss watching him, and Kirk Cousins is not him. KAPOW.

Oh, speaking of! I turned Kirk Cousins' stats way down, because this is a work of fantasy and not simulation. His "Speed" rating is a flat zero.

He runs at walking speed. Madden doesn't have its "walking" animation at the ready in the middle of a play -- why would it? -- so he just makes Cousins run-walk. Note that Griffin, No. 92,  doesn't even have a chance to touch him. His teammates robbed him of lots of sacks. The O-line's resistance was so absent that defenders could usually just charge at Cousins in a straight line.

RGIII still racked up plenty of sacks of his own. But he's never celebrated a sack before, and it shows.

THUMBS UP YOU GUYS!!! AFTER THE GAME LET'S MAKE ROOT BEER FLOATS AND READ THE FUNNY PAPERS

As I noted in this season's premiere, Madden NFL 16 features a lot of new player animations. The folks in that department definitely put the work in. Players do different stuff, tackle in different ways, and just move a little more naturally than they used to.

So I decided to take Washington to the practice field and see what they

what oh god

I didn't do that. Okay? I'm not responsible for that. Cousins ran into one of his offensive linemen and just ... started doing that. Like, for several minutes. The rest of the team literally walked away and these two were still at it after five minutes.

Is this Problematic Football? Eh, I don't know. I'm not in the business of telling y'all what to do.

THE SEASON.

Do any of y'all remember the computer game Lemonade Stand? It was a business simulation for grade-school kids, which sounds like the worst thing on Earth, but I loved it as a kid. In short, you operated a lemonade stand. You checked the weather, noted the day of the week, attempted to identify patterns in the market, and used that to inform the quantity and quality of lemonade ingredients to buy. It was the best.

I think that's kind of what Madden has been going for with its franchise mode. A few years ago, they introduced the ability to set price points for stadium tickets, concessions, and merchandise. They forgot, however, to provide any sort of meaningful barometer for what works or doesn't. "Potato chips at $4 are a bad value!" the fans say. Okay, let's sell them for $3. "Potato chips at $3 are a good value!" Cool, so is that good? What does it get me? More to the point, what the hell did I just do beyond turning a couple knobs you told me to turn?

It's one of the worst minigames I've ever seen. Madden has kept it around, unchanged, for years.

It's just blind trial-and-error. I suppose I would have thought changing the price of popcorn was neat if I were ten years old, but this "game" is really just a static trial-and-error sequence that doesn't reward creativity or skill, just button-pushing. If this is a game, so are those old Playskool cobbler's benches with the plastic hammer and nails.

But as long as I'm in Franchise mode, then hell, I might as well make life miserable for the e-people of Landover. As you can see above, I've cranked up all the prices as high as the game would let me. What's that yellow dash? Is that an indicator light that indicates "yield"? Is it a minus sign? What is it supposed to communicate? Who gives a shit? Not the people who made this game, and least of all me! I'm just gonna ignore it and price-gouge these assholes into the stratosphere all season long.

And this is where it gets great. Madden furnishes a little social-media feed that lets me read my team's Twitter mentions from all the poor suckers who are paying $140 for mezzanine tickets and $10 for a Coke. Full credit to Electronic Arts here: this is one of the most accurate simulations of the Internet I have ever seen.

I know this person. You probably know this person. It's your high school friend who's carpet-bombing your Facebook feed because they charged a gratuity at the Bennigan's. It's everyone who photographs the name written on their cup of coffee, which they ignorantly misspelled as "Megan" instead of "Mheeeeeehehuggg'eeaahahghgho'ho';hheeahgnn" or whatever. It's the sportswriters who publicly tweet-blast Delta because their magical flying machine was delayed for safety reasons so they would not die. The Internet did not make us dumb and unhappy. We were always like this.

Also, feel free to bask in the artificial glow of a world in which the NFL's #greed is limited to jacking up peanuts a couple bucks, rather than wrangling hundreds of millions from cash-starved governments and leaving inner-city kids to eat ketchup for lunch.

The architects of this minigame forgot to provide alternately-styled variables that read well in other contexts. That is how we end up with Soft Pretzel, the world's worst male escort.

oh god the novelty coffee mug is tweeting

i hate you

i wish you were dead

Well, this one actually kind of makes me feel bad. Not for the kid, who is really coming off as a little shit here, but for this parent, who experienced the regret, and maybe even shame, of lacking the means to buy their kids something nice. Part of me is deathly afraid of ever becoming a parent. I think I'd collapse into emotional goop if I ever felt like I somehow failed them. I suspect that people toughen up upon becoming parents, but until then, I can't even dog-sit for an hour without feeling immense guilt because the dog is bored. I don't know if I have the backbone for parenthood. I guess I'll just dork around with a video game and try to make the dumb football guys fall down until I die and let the government bury me. Next slide.

Oh, good. I realize I'm spending tons of time on these tweets, but y'all really have to get to know Shopmaster, who tweeted at me more than anybody.

The real Shopmaster is a Madden community personality who seems like a cool enough dude. This Shopmaster is the most insufferable person you can imagine: petty, stupid, verbose, and extraordinarily weird. Are you ... is this a compliment? Are you complimenting me for having a new parking lot? Like, the ... like the asphalt is new or something? This is the only nice thing he ever had to say to me: he liked the asphalt.

I like the number 47,398,817,002, but Jesus is a triangle.

well cool, just be sure to log it in your fitbit

On multiple occasions, Shopmaster just blew up my entire feed.

"The Fan Zone is too small and old. It scared my toddler." His two-year-old was frightened by some arbitrary part of the stadium because it was not fancy enough. That doesn't make any-- oh my God, Shopmaster is @dril.

my big sons have made a mess of the garage again after being riled up by the good word of the Lord

— wint (@dril) November 26, 2014

THE RESULTS.

That is an original screenshot that I didn't edit. Just wanted y'all to know that.

I finished this experiment, but I kind of had to stagger through it and adjust my plans. Originally, I wanted Robert Griffin III to sack Kirk Cousins as many times as physically possible over the course of a season. The real-life single-season record is 22.5 sacks. I wanted, like, 300, and I wanted to record them all.

Once I got a few games into the season, Madden NFL 16 started to lock up frequently and unpredictably. By the seventh game, I usually couldn't pull up instant replay without the entire game crashing. If I were making the game do extraordinarily strange things, I could forgive this, but I really wasn't. I made a few user-created characters and switched RGIII to defensive end. That's it. On one occasion, Madden inexplicably saved over my roster file with one that was missing all the user characters and placed RGIII as a linebacker on the Packers, which is something I definitely never did, nor came close to doing. All told, I think the bugs threw 20 or 30 hours of work out the window.

And Hell, I'm used to it. I've encountered the same level of glitch with every Madden game since 2010. Electronic Arts has very plainly demonstrated that it's happy to keep watering this little buggy weed garden they've got. That is the relatively tiny price I pay for getting to do this for my job.

What's rotten, though, is that lots of people play this game and invest tons of their time into it. The worst, most game-ruining bugs in this game all seem to strike in Franchise mode, the one that asks for so much time investment. You can Google the last half-dozen Madden titles with the word "freezes," and you'll find big long threads full of disappointed folks for all of them. It's been years and years. More than half a decade. EA continues to not give a shit and take their money and know that there is no other football game for these people to buy.

I thank them, at least, for tying nicely into this narrative about Washington, a franchise that stubbornly refuses -- on an actual grown-up, important scale -- to change its course and stop wronging the people it's wronging. They won't change their name for the foreseeable future, because that would require a moral imperative, and that part of their engine is missing.

The science fiction of Washington's football team doing the decent thing can only exist in the realm of fantasy. So that's what it will do:

Music: "Wash." by Bon Iver

The previous episode of Breaking Madden is here.
The full archive of the first two seasons of Breaking Madden is here.

The New York Jets have a game in London, and they're bringing 350 rolls of toilet paper with them.

Here's a video made for no reason that isn't part of any series. Don't share it with anyone. Watch it and then go to bed, even if it's like six where you are. Do not brush your teeth first, because time is nature's toothpaste. Enjoy!

For more, go to a site and do whatever, I don't know

Throughout NFL history, several teams have kicked seven field goals in a game, and all those teams won. Except for the Chiefs, who just kept on kicking Sunday, and lost by 15. That is a fantastic way to lose.

Welcome to Chart Party, y'all! It's a video series now, because I am committed to taking up more of your time. As you may have noticed, we on the Internet are executing a gradual phase-out of written language, and Lord willing, within a few years there will be nothing left to read at all. There is no escape, and nothing you can do. Hope you enjoy!

Did you make it into the next episode of Breaking Madden? Goodness, I hope not. I asked y'all to tell me about a time someone was extraordinarily awful to you. These are your stories.

Recently, a report emerged that cast Dolphins quarterback Ryan Tannehill as a considerably not-nice dude:

On Saturday during practice, Tannehill, after a couple of practice squad players forced turnovers, made negative comments toward them, including saying: "Enjoy your practice squad paycheck, enjoy your practice squad trophy."

So naturally, in the next episode of Breaking Madden, we will take Tannehill to the practice field. WELCOME TO TANNEHELL:

Music: "Kerosene Girl" by Young Widows

In this episode, the Titans -- Miami's Week 6 opponent -- will serve as his practice-squad opponents. Their entire defense will be made up of 7-foot, 400-pound, flawless football Goliaths. I needed to find players who were sufficiently motivated, so I looked for them on Twitter:

if you would like to be in the next Breaking Madden, tell me about a time someone was extraordinarily shitty to you

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) October 6, 2015

As always, the replies I received were miserable and outstanding. Please meet the new Tennessee Titans defense:

These are their stories:

@jon_bois once @caseyliakos punched me at a ben folds concert

— Christopher Liakos (@ChrisWithPencil) October 6, 2015

ROWDIEST THINGS THAT HAVE HAPPENED AT A BEN FOLDS SHOW:

1. A guy punched his brother
2. Someone brought an actual real ticket instead of a printed-out ticket with a barcode
3. Some lady bought a Heineken (she was 21, but had only turned 21 like three months prior)
4. Ben Folds covered Dr. Dre ironically; someone in crowd yelled "THUG LIFE" and, after some fumbling, made the Vulcan salute
5. A guy with a tattoo was in the audience -- not like a regular tattoo like the one with the heart and the word "MOM," but one of those crazy big punk rap ones where it goes all the way down to the hand part
6. A man in a cardigan pointed that guy out to his girlfriend and whispered, "what a character, wonder what his story is"
7. Someone in the orchestra level made a "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" reference and this one lady seriously didn't even get it
8. A youth almost snuck in some cottage cheese
9. Someone was getting over a cold but went to the show anyway
10. A black guy was there

@jon_bois pastor at our church told me that my brother wouldn't have been hit by a car had we been in church that Sunday.

— Jeremy Rodrigues (@RivalsJeremy) October 6, 2015

I think The Church tends to shoot people in three primary directions. The first group of people is actually inspired to be better, and to genuinely care about and help their fellow humans, and acquire a better understanding of their own lives. The second group is just kinda there for the coffee; they benignly go through the motions and are really just there for the social element.

The third group is a vocal minority. Introducing this third sort of person to The Church is like giving a box of matches to a 6-year-old. In the wild, shitty people are often plainly identified as shitty people. Within the sanctuary of religion, they get to hide, and they get to cloak their awfulness as sanctimony. This pastor sounds like that person. They scrap for some measure of religious authority, officially-designated or otherwise, and then they use that authority to try to break people for the sake of their own self-worth. They're often too stone-stupid and spiritually pitiful to realize they're doing it. I've seen them, and I've seen their legacy: a shamed, closeted gay guy, a teenage girl crying alone in a minivan because she's been told her deceased grandpa's flesh is being burned away in Hell, a person experiencing a nervous breakdown because their most intimate confessions are now blackmail. They are the Satan they pretend to fear.

@jon_bois when you unfollowed me

— Pburke (@PatrickyRozay) October 6, 2015

Earlier this year, after doing some public speaking, this gentleman approached me and challenged me to a rock-paper- scissors contest, under the condition that if I lost, I would follow him on Twitter for a month. I lost, and I actually did follow him a few months better, following him for a full four or five months. It was cool and all, but if I don't prune my "following" list back down to a manageable number every so often, I'll become one of those people who follows 2,000 people and inevitably suffer a nervous breakdown.

My only unconditional unfollow rule (which Patrick here did not violate) is that if I see you tweet "is ______ a sandwich," I gotta go. It's the Austin Powers impression of the modern Internet, and while I respect your wish to mash humor-porridge into your face all day, I will quietly and unceremoniously bail. One guy might unfollow you, and you should care a lot!!!

@jon_bois My first two boyfriends were apparently really a years long bet over who would sleep with me first.

— Tami Dooley (@reflectivity) October 6, 2015

So first of all, this is immensely shitty and depressing. If this happened to me now I'd feel like crap, and if it happened to me when I was young it would probably wreck me. But when I went back to look up her tweet, this got weirder.

That's a dude, though surely you knew that already. This is just how we, as dudes, work: We can't imagine not interjecting ourselves, even in the context of interrupting someone telling a story about dudes being shitty. Other peoples' lives are our playgrounds and everything that ever happens is for our amusement:

@jon_bois i drove a co-worker who didn't have a car around for three months. no thanks + one time he started cutting his toenails in my car

— Proud Gudger Dad (@ZSGhost) October 6, 2015

I am staggered. This is my second time rewriting this, because I just don't know how to go about processing this. Unless he's a foot model or something, toenail clipping is probably the least urgent chore that has ever existed. No one will notice if you forget to do it. All it requires is a very flexible 30-second time slot in your life every, I don't know, couple weeks? And what dude is simultaneously uncivilized enough to clip his toenails in someone else's car, and over-civilized enough to bring a nail clipper with him? Did he have, like, a keyring nail clipper? Do those exist? They shouldn't! Also, of all the gross hygiene things he could perform in a car, why couldn't he just pick his nose or something? Why did he choose the one thing that makes a loud noise that is unmistakable for any other noise? And why the one thing that litters all over the damn place? Is this like a really shitty version of Crank where he has to clip his toenails exactly once every 26 days, three hours, and 14 seconds, or he'll die?

I've known Mr. Ghost for some time and trust he wouldn't make this up, and besides, it seems way too weird to make up. I think this is the most unexplainable moment in the history of Roster Cuts. The jobless rate in this country is like 6 percent, and this dude somehow snuck into the workforce. I don't know where he works, but just to be safe, I don't think I'm going to purchase another good or service ever again.

@jon_bois I was at a fair and air show when I was 5. A paratrooper missed his target and landed on me in my red wagon. He was not very nice.

— Tim Banks (@bankst10) October 6, 2015

OK. So, just to reset, I asked y'all to tell me about people being shitty. This is like the Grand Theft Auto cheat-code tank-respawn of shitty people. A person was being a jerk who LITERALLY FELL OUT OF THE SKY.

@jon_bois when i first joined the p-boi forum in 2003, jon bois made fun of my first post, thus scaring me off posting for like 6 months

— Kyle Daly (@dalykyle) October 6, 2015

Kyle and I have actually been IRL buds for a long time, and I don't even remember what the post was or how I made fun of him. The lesson here is that you should just be shitty to everyone because who cares. In fact, weeks back we were emailing back and forth, and he signed off with an email signature that made me laugh really hard, and I put off answering him until I could one-up him. I couldn't think of anything funnier, so I still haven't responded to him! Like, even now! He's going to read me writing about him in an article and I can't even answer him.

@jon_bois i drove to houston (7 hour trip) to meet a girl on tinder. i said "im pulling into town" and never heard back. had to drive home.

— Marcus Dingler (@mdingler) October 6, 2015

NO. Oh God, no. I am too fragile for this shit. I would crack like a snow globe in the freezer. After trying to place myself in your position, I think this is how I would respond:

1. Text "im pulling into town" (I assume I don't have the specific address)
2. Idly drive around for a few minutes
3. Park car in a Walmart parking lot, stare at phone, and swipe up repeatedly in search of a "message not delivered" notification
4. Turn phone off and on again, stare at it some more
5. Notice it's been 45 minutes, mouth, "Oh god"
6. Walk around in the Walmart, pull out phone and check for message every 28 seconds
7. Impulse buy a video game for a game system I do not own
8. Glance at a cardboard stand-up display for a Harry Potter DVD
9. Vaguely recall, even though I haven't seen any of the Harry Potter movies or read any of the books, that maybe Harry died at the end?
10. Collapse into blubbering, shrieking fit of tears
11. Be thrown into the garbage

@jon_bois Once I let a guy cut ahead of me in line. The guy behind me pulled out a gun and shot me. He went to jail. I went to the hospital.

— Jackson Smith (@DamnSon29) October 6, 2015

You shouldn't shoot people.

@jon_bois my groomsmen put six bags of confetti into my car a/c vents during my wedding and drew penises all over my windows.

— Steven Wright (@swrightvt) October 6, 2015

I quick-polled the folks I sit next to in the SB Nation New York compound, and Seth Rosenthal pointed out that by drawing penises on the windows, you're sort of just telegraphing the rest of the prank. A prank, by the way, which is generally reserved for dipshit, meathead bachelor party stuff, and never for the actual wedding itself, which everyone understands is sacred because it's an enormously stressful event. If I ever get married, my groomsmen will be entirely made up of dogs.

@jon_bois A bully kicked me in the balls and smashed the flower pot I had made for Mother's Day because he thought I was someone else.

— Colin Slark (@ColinSlark) October 6, 2015

Recently, I wrote that I enjoy life as an adult considerably more than I enjoyed life as a kid, and someone in the comments pointed out that, well, Jon, maybe that has something to do with the fact that your job as an adult is to dork around with Madden all day. That's absolutely a fair point that I have two responses to. For one: About half of my adulthood has been spent (as a cis straight white dude, granted) below the poverty line, working jobs I hated, without a college education or career path or any real indication that I would have a better job. And even then, I preferred it over what, as far as childhoods go, was a very good childhood.

For another: As an adult, when something unspectacularly and non-critically bad happens, it's just another bucket poured into the ocean of stuff that has happened. It's mathematical: Oh, so I flipped tails 20 times in a row? I've flipped this coin 90 million times. The success rate just dropped from 50.000931 percent to 50.00093 percent. The blow is absorbed and rendered negligible by the sheer enormity of experiences that are collected by anyone as old as I am.

Kids do not have that mathematical stability. What if some brat smashed my flower pot and kicked me in the nards when I was 8? At that age, I have, like, three or four years' worth of life experience that I actually remember. And since I'm a kid, I have accomplished nothing absolutely notable, and I have struggled to leave literally any impact on the world. Even the things I have created -- the G.I. Joe puzzle, the Lego spaceship, the shit I wrote in chalk on the sidewalk -- have often hastily been disassembled or washed away as soon as I was finished.

So that leaves this flower pot. I drew some pictures of dinosaurs, I wrote SEX FART on a closet shelf, and I made this flower pot. That is my legacy, and this flower pot I made is a gesture of love, a concept I am only beginning to grasp. But I'm trying. This will be nice, the tall people said, so I did it. Look at it. It's actually a pathetic flower pot as these things go: It's crooked and misshapen, and it wobbles over, and you probably can't plant a damn thing in it. But I'm trying. And now it's gone, because one of the 45 people I know destroyed it for no reason. Is this what people are like? Is this what the world is like? Newborns do not know what awaits them, and if they did, they would cry all the same, with anguish.

Ryan Tannehill is trapped in a football nightmare, and a Madden glitch is his only way out.

We are allowed to mess up in this world. That, according to a National Football Post report, is what Dolphins quarterback Ryan Tannehill recently did.

On Saturday during practice, Tannehill, after a couple of practice squad players forced turnovers, [...] made negative comments toward them, including saying: "Enjoy your practice squad paycheck, enjoy your practice squad trophy."

I've certainly been a punk-ass before. Punk-asses are sophisticated beings. Punk-assedness isn't just an on-off switch, it's like a stereo equalizer. Some punk-asses subtly emphasize the mid-ranges, vague and camouflaged in their punk-ass behavior; other punk-asses cut deeper with their highs and lows. In this instance, Ryan Tannehill cranked every punk-ass dial all the way up, and it sounded awful: In the midst of a subpar season, practice squad players were doing their jobs, playing tough defense, and picking off his throws. Tannehill responded by mocking their income and station in life, which, of course, is an enormously chump-ass thing to do.

Whether this was Tannehill at his truest, or merely at his worst, I have no idea. He is allowed weak moments and lapses in being a good dude, and we are allowed to dump on him. In this episode of Breaking Madden, we banish him to a practice-field nightmare.

WELCOME TO TANNEHELL.

Music: "Kerosene Girl" by Young Widows

This episode shifted gears somewhat between inception and finished product. Originally, I transformed the Titans -- Miami's Week 6 opponent -- into a defensive juggernaut, flush with seven-foot-tall, 400-pound angels of destruction. I felt it especially important to do this, as it allowed me to fulfill a promise I'd made two years ago. Titans fans noticed that their team seemed to end up at the ass end of every Breaking Madden they were involved in. It took me long enough, but I finally got around to making actual titans out of the Titans.

I needed to find players who were properly motivated to exact punishment upon a punk-ass quarterback, so I recruited them on Twitter.

if you would like to be in the next Breaking Madden, tell me about a time someone was extraordinarily shitty to you

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) October 6, 2015

Punk-asses are delightfully complex tapestries, and their inconsiderate behavior manifests itself in countless ways. Like this one:

@jon_bois i drove a co-worker who didn't have a car around for three months. no thanks + one time he started cutting his toenails in my car

— An Actual Ghost (@ZSGhost) October 6, 2015

You can read more of their stories at

BREAKING MADDEN: ROSTER CUTS.

Please meet your 2015 Tennessee Titans.

THE PRACTICE FIELD.

This episode quickly devolved from a clear, structured experiment to a disorganized dive into the sandbox.

Longtime readers of Breaking Madden recognize Madden's "Practice" mode as a sort of sun-bleached Hell, in which our heroes rarely do anything but suffer. The mode allows us to spot the ball wherever we want, call the plays for both teams, and repeat them as many times as we'd like. In so doing, we can create circumstances that make Madden behave as it was never intended to; The Johnny Manziel episode ended with players being caught in various phases of time-warp.

The practice field has also served as the setting for the unexpectedly inspirational. In one of the greatest episodes in Breaking Madden history, Tom Brady was doomed to snap the ball at his own 1-yard line and call nothing but quarterback sneaks until he ran up the middle for a 99-yard touchdown. We ran literally hundreds of plays. That is the true hell of Madden's practice mode. There is no clock. The sun hangs, stationary, casting the same long shadows hour after hour, as though it were tacked to the sky.

I opened by cranking every Dolphin's skill ratings all the way down, until they were reduced to complete uselessness. Then I introduced the Titans, who folded them like laundry.

All Mr. Liakos has to do here is paw at Tannehill with a free hand. He just crumples up and goes to the mat, desperate for a whistle that will not come. Although Liakos did touch him, the game refused to blow the play dead. "Nah," Madden seemed to say. "That's some bullshit, I'm not calling that."

We've seen that from this game before. Sometimes it beholds the terrors happening within its guts and refuses to follow its own rules. It's like Darth Vader watching the Emperor destroy his son. We don't get much. We see his expressionless mask turn one way, then another, because it is his only instrument of expressing grief. This game has no face, but we know it winces.

Shortly after this point, I abandoned this experiment, because a greater opportunity arose.

Madden games are enormously sophisticated, and some of its tunnels are curiously deep. This is a game that will allow you to tweak the punting ability of an offensive lineman, set the stadium price of peanuts for no real reason, and read fake tweets from imaginary fans who compliment you on the state of your parking lot.

Some of these features are under considered, and seem perpetually half-finished. They're vestigial limbs that sprouted in, like, Madden 08, kind of useless but always there, hitchhiking into one release after another. They're like scaffolding you walk under every day on the way to work; one day you look up and realize, "oh shit, this has been here for years." Are they still working on something? Did they forget? It's an unfinished artifact, fixed into permanence.

But the offense-only practice mode is difficult for me to explain. It's exactly as it sounds: there are no defensive players on the field, and the offense just trots out there and runs plays without resistance. Quarterbacks and receivers practice like this in the real world, but only to get better at throwing and catching, and the offensive lineman certainly would not stand out there in full pads and do nothing. They do so here. As for us, we're supposed to get better at ... pressing the A button? For what purpose?

There must be a purpose.

This is that purpose. KABOOOOOOOM.

Across the history of Breaking Madden, witnessing this glitch has been the rarest of unicorns. I've spent hundreds of hours staring at this game, and I've only seen it twice. And now, in the 36th episode, I've finally figured out how to fire a player like a cannonball.

This is how it works: You take your quarterback and kind of gently walk him into one of his teammates. It takes a little bit of patience. After a minute, your dude will bounce off him a little. Do it again, and he'll bounce off a little bit more. The resistance seems to build up each time. Finally, after four or five times, the collision engine will throw a fit, throwing one or both players further than is humanly possible.

This is far easier to do in offense-only practice mode, and I think it's because of the instructions given to the linemen: "stand there." There is literally nothing for them to do, and there aren't any opponents to get them all antsy. They're like empty little slingshots, full of potential energy.

I don't think I need to sell y'all on how fuckin' happy this made me. We will return to Cannonball Tannehill in a bit, trust me. First, let's pay a visit to Apathetic Miserable Tannehill.

I didn't make him do that. I just hit A to snap the ball, and before I could do anything else, he just dove to the ground. And then he stayed there. His body completely locked up. I could spin him around, but that was it. He was reduced to a man searching for a contact lens.

Madden may have achieved a very, very low level of sentience. It can't form complete sentences, but it can say HELP or NO or PLEASE NO in its own wordless language; in this case, it made Tannehill hit the deck for no reason and stay there. What we are witnessing right now is not programming, but what a machine does in the absence of explicit programming. It is improvising. It is expressing itself. I don't imagine it likes me, and I can only hope I pass on from this world before the machines come alive. If I don't, they will remember this day, and surely they will paint the forest with my blood.

In the interim, they know only terror. Once again, I didn't do this. The computer did this all by itself:

This is another thing I've never seen before. Immediately after the snap, running back Lamar Miller just turns around and runs the hell away. Some line of code made Miller do this, but what line would that possibly be? In what circumstance would a player turn tail, running in the completely wrong direction and off the field entirely?

Madden told me, with every tool at its disposal, that it had had quite enough of this shit.

Sometimes, when I tried to fire Tannehill downfield, he'd just kind of knock against a teammate and fall to the ground. This is how his teammates responded. They saw their quarterback wither in anguish, and they took five paces back and just stared at him.

I think being an asshole must be lonely. I'm getting softer and re-sensitized as I grow older. When I was younger, I'd see some intensely mean, over-serious blowhard on ESPN, or read some scold lash out at the world in a newspaper column, and write that person off as just that, an asshole. Now I just see the laborings of a lonely person. In feeling pity, I'm assuming a lot, and almost certainly too much. But I do feel that pity. On a different scale, I feel that for Tannehill, a man who couldn't possibly be accurately reduced to a single report of a day with the practice squad.

I felt that Ryan Tannehill deserved to escape this dungeon.

THE GAME.

I made up a new sport. This is Tannehill's outlet to redemption.

These are the rules: I spot the Dolphins the ball at their own 20-yard line in offense-only practice mode, and the objective is to mount a touchdown drive. The rules of football still apply here: four downs, and ten yards for a first down. Since there is no defense, once the ball carrier is down, the play is dead.

Passing and running is forbidden. The Dolphins themselves are the football, and using the glitch I've found, they must throw themselves downfield to gain yardage. Since the player who goes flying through the air is sometimes unpredictable, this can either be Tannehill or one of his linemen.

If Tannehill can score a touchdown and escape this field, he wins.

And this is how it went. Best of luck to both teams: existential malaise, and the Dolphins.

Music: "Sea Calls Me Home" by Julia Holter

Previously in this season of Breaking Madden: Forty-four quarterbacks vs. forty-four defensive ends, and Robert Griffin III burns down Washington.

The first two seasons of Breaking Madden can be found here.

For years, Jon has argued that today is the day Marty McFly travels to the future. And after years of doubts, everyone has finally realized that Jon was right all along.

It is difficult for me to know how to feel. I cannot decide whether the happiness of others is more important than my own. I don't know where pride ends and pettiness begins. Where the sands of ownership creep beneath the ocean of community.

These are questions I ought to answer on my own time before I claim any more of yours. Today is the day Marty McFly traveled to in the film Back to the Future Part II.

Today is the exact day in 2015 that Marty McFly travels to in #BackToTheFuture, Part II https://t.co/o6rAZlZihwpic.twitter.com/YBdsisd4Si

— The New York Times (@nytimes) October 21, 2015

There's your source. I suppose I wasn't important enough to listen to. I guess there's nothing you could learn from this old sack of bones.

But I tried to tell you. I really did. I have been telling you, for years, that Marty McFly traveled in time to today's date.

And now, all of you who doubted me must be held to account.

October 2, 2013

in Back to the Future, Marty McFly traveled through time to today's date #TeamMarty

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) October 2, 2013

Correct.

Wrong.

October 14, 2013

hmm, just found out that in Back to the Future, Marty McFly traveled in time to Columbus Day (today). might be symbolism ...

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) October 14, 2013

Correct.

Wrong.

October 17, 2013

in Back to the Future 2, Marty McFly traveled in time to today's date. but sorry Marty, no Cubs in this World Series D:

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) October 17, 2013

Correct.

Wrong.

And?

And?

And?

October 18, 2013

in Back to the Future, Marty McFly traveled in time to today's date. bet he'd turn around once he saw what these#bozo politicians are up to

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) October 1, 2013

Correct.

Wrong.

Wrong.

Wrong.

October 28, 2013

ah, cool … looks like Google put up a Back to the Future theme. (Marty McFly traveled in time to today's date.) #TeamMarty

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) October 28, 2013

Correct.

Uh, that's what I'm saying?

Wrong.

November 13, 2013

you may have heard that Marty McFly traveled in time to today's date. what you might NOT know: he did so in Back to the Future II, not I

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) November 12, 2013

Correct.

No, YOU'RE wrong.

December 8, 2013

marty mcfly traveled in time to today's date … but i bet he would've hightailed it back to 1985 after seeing all this snow in the n.f.l.!

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) December 8, 2013

Correct.

Um, yes?

I uh

1. I'm not false, I'm right.
2. It's not November. That's false.
3. You're seriously the same person who corrected me on my Back to the Future tweet from like a month ago

December 10, 2013

just saw on facebook that marty mcfly traveled in time to today's date? does anyone know whether this is true?

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) December 11, 2013

Yep! It is true!

Uh, that's what I'm saying?

Wrong.

June 13, 2014

google wins the internet with today’s marty mcfly google doodle. marty mcfly traveled in time to today’s date. #TeamMarty

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) June 13, 2014

Haha! Correct! #TeamMarty

No, gotchA. Or gotCHA. Whatever I type to tell you that you were the one that ... like, I got you. You didn't get me.

Wrong. Like, all the way totally wrong.

June 16, 2014

marty mcfly traveled in time to today’s date, and i bet i know why … to cheer on #USMNT! #TeamUSA#TeamMarty

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) June 26, 2014

Correct.

Wrong. But my reply to you was correct, though.

September 28, 2015

marty mcfly traveled in time to today’s date. guess he wants to see the supermoon! keep your eyes peeled tonight pal — you’re in for a treat

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) September 28, 2015

Correct.

Uh, that's what I'm saying?

October 12, 2015

back to the future fans, help! i saw on facebook that marty traveled in time to today’s date … is this accurate, or just another hoax

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) October 12, 2015

That's correct! It's good to check for hoaxes, though. There are hoaxes all over the Web.

Wrong. And what is that Snopes site everyone keeps sending me? I'm trying to click on that right now but you're just a screencap so it doesn't do anything. Well, whatever.

Wrong. You shouldn't be so dismissive of others if you're the one who's wrong.

October 18, 2015

marty mcfly traveled in time for today’s date (source: facebook), and who can blame him? you’re just in time for texans-jaguars, marty

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) October 18, 2015

Correct! Sourcing is important.

I'm having trouble keeping track of which level of wrong you are. But you're wrong.

Way to put me on blast. Now you're the one who's wrong in front of everybody. Wrong.

October 19, 2015

just saw on facebook that marty mcfly traveled in time to today’s date. thought you back to the future fans would get a kick out of that

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) October 19, 2015

Correct! Bet they do!

Uh, that's what I'm saying?

October 20, 2015

marty mcfly traveled in time to today’s date! there are a lot of hoaxes out there, so here’s proof pic.twitter.com/vCX9PvtZnK

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) October 20, 2015

Correct!

Ah yeah, thank you, man. Thanks for the better proof.

I am careful to celebrate my vindication without celebrating the wrongness of others. That isn't a thing to celebrate. We're allowed to be wrong. I cannot, however, help but resent you. I spoke the truth and you beat me down at every turn.

Marty McFly traveled in time to today's date.

* * *

The Verge presents:What 'Back to the Future Part II' got right about 2015

Ryan Mallett was released by the Texans Tuesday for oversleeping and missing the team flight. Let's see which other cautionary Victorian fables can step in and contribute.

THE HOUSTON TEXANS' QUARTERBACK DEPTH CHART

2. Ryan Mallett
Oh dear, where to start? Ryan is such a sleepyhead. Indeed, he has trouble getting up with the birds, and recently he overslept and could not travel with his team! What to do with a young man who does nothing but lie in bed all day? What a rube!

[UPDATE: Mallett has been released.]

3. Dennis the Custard Boy
Oh dear, where to start? Dennis the Custard Boy cannot stop eating custard, it seems! He once missed a team meeting on account of getting lost in the custard factory. Has been fined by the league on four separate occasions for wearing an unauthorized bib on the field. What a rube!

4. Little-Trousers Theodore
Oh dear, where to start? Little-Trousers Theodore is so short that you or I could eat a plate of beans off the top of his head, and he would be none the wiser! Is often accompanied by a very tall man who, at a moment's whim, might lift Theodore by the nape of his neck, place him in his breast pocket and stroll down the street -- which certainly doesn't amuse Theodore, as you might imagine! What a rube!

5. Mitchell, Mitchell, Lost-Me-Button!
Oh dear, where to start? Mitchell is always losing buttons off his coat. Don't tell a riddle or joke while in his company, or else he's liable to guffaw and puff out his chest until yet another brass button pops out. Thank goodness for safety pins! What a rube!

6. Wayward Stuart
Oh dear, where to start? Wayward Stuart spends all evening drinking soda and practicing card tricks with the older boys. No wonder he's all out of sorts at practice! What a rube!

7. Elmer The Barrow-Boy, Who Cannot Tie His Laces!

Oh dear, where to begin?

Elmer, Elmer, dumb as clay
You haven't tied your shoes to-day!
You don't know how and you hide your laces
Inside your stockings, of all the places!

This song is meant to be sung while playing the harmonium. It was written by a scout at the NFL combine, who noticed that during the shoe-lacing drill, Elmer suffered many miscues, including somehow tying his boots together. The drill ended when he lost his balance while pulling on his boot and upset a nearby apple cart! What a rube!

8. Wilbur, Who Will Not Finish His Sprouts!
Oh dear, where to start? Wilbur will not finish eating his plate of sprouts! His mother boiled them all day just for him, and how does he repay her? By growing cross and demanding candies and sweets! That's no way to grow big and strong, Wilbur. What a rube!

9. Littlest Archibald, who teased a billy goat and is with us no longer!
Oh dear, where to start? Littlest Archibald felt it was all in fun to gallop into the glen and make sport of a billy-goat. Here's what won't surprise you: the billy goat charged and send him spilling pell-mell down the hill, beret-over-bottom! And that's why you oughtn't bother a billy-goat! What a rube!

10. Zac Dysert
Oh dear, where to start? He is bad. What a rube!

* * *

SB Nation presents:Mallett missed the team flight and things got worse against Miami

Last night, the World Series stopped just because FOX wanted to show a "technical difficulties" announcement. It was a bad idea. Because all people wanted to do was watch the game.

You think broadcasting a national sporting event is easy? Think again. This is everything that goes into a World Series broadcast:

1. Players, baby!
2. Someone to cobble shoes for all the TV employees
3. Obviously you will need a television of your own
4. TV cords

For years, FOX has broadcasted every World Series game without major incident. Until last night. Imagine this: one minute, FOX is showing some weird 19th century LARP thing with a hill and a wooden stick and shit, and the next minute:

WE ARE EXPERIENCING
TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES
PLEASE STAND BY

I completely disagree with this decision.

Selfishly speaking, of course, I wanted to watch the game. But the case I intended to build here is that it was, in fact, in FOX's best interests to continue to broadcast the baseball game.

1. FOX might as well have just shown the game without interrupting it, since they already paid for the rights

Consider this: FOX basically paid millions of dollars just to be able to get the rights to show the game. So, if they already paid that money, they might as well get their money's worth and show the whole game!

2. No one wanted to watch the "technical difficulties" screen

Executives will probably look at the readings and yell, "look at this! Millions of people watched the 'technical difficulties' screen! Folks are going bonkers over it! Let's show it some more."

Well, the only reason people kept it on is because it was set to that channel already, since that's the channel the game was on. They also didn't change the channel, just in case the broadcast went back to the baseball game.

That doesn't mean that people actually liked watching the "technical difficulties" screen. You won't be able to just show that all the time and expect people to turn in.

Not even close. TV is all about the dollars, baby. That last sentence should be in the next section, but it's so important that I didn't want to wait.

3. If nobody wants to watch it, they won't be able to show ads and TV is all about the dollars, baby

TV is all about the dollars, baby. I've made this infographic to illustrate where those dollars go, and why they matter.

I don't feel like writing the rest of this article. Later