Sunday, January 10, 2016

The screams, the humiliation, the fact that it wasn't the Browns!



Mere moments after the Cincinnati Bengals humiliating playoff loss to their cross-state rivals, the ever watchful Internet of Memes went to work. 

Sorry not sorry

The Michael Jordan crying face was superimposed over the Bengals logo and replaced the heads of various Cincinnati players and fans. Meanwhile, this heartbroken young woman was immortalized in gif form, doomed to weep over her team's failures in a loop forever.

Not surprisingly, Cleveland was dragged into this depressing conversation, thanks to shared geography and a recent history of gridiron ineptitude. Bengals fan and ex-boybander Nick Lachey gave Cleveland its dubious props with this woebegone tweet :


The Tweet of God, always subtle as a kick to the sweetmeats in His holy Cleveland-bashing, had this to report:


I was rooting for the Bengals, mainly because I wanted them to beat the Steelers. However, here in the post-humiliation aftermath I don't exactly feel bad for Cincy's devastated fanbase, either. It's actually kind of nice to have the improbable, embarrassing, grasping-defeat-from-the-jaws-of-victory moment thrust upon another city.

This is an uncharitable thought so devoid of empathy as to be borderline sociopathic. What are you gonna do, though? I can't help it. It's not a matter of schadenfreude, it's more a sense of relief that the shit is hitting someone else's fan(s), for once.

Let another city hand-wring over what could have been. Let them parse that one play that could have turned soul-deadening defeat into the first post-season win in two decades. (Personally, I'd be more haunted by the Jeremy Hill fourth-quarter fumble than Vontaze Burfict and former TNA World Tag Team Champion Adam Jones losing their respective minds. See, I'm not a monster!)

If nothing else, the Bengals' meltdown can take our minds off the latest "smartest guy in the room" shenanigans taking place in Berea. We  have a former lawyer with no personnel experience making roster decisions. What could go wrong? Thanks to Cincinnati's agony-inducing incompetence last night, that's one rhetorical question we don't have to examine for at least a day or two.

Thank you, Bengals!