Hanging out with tech bros, NFL insiders and Papa John at the Super Bowl

We're required to remind you that this is satire and that all spelling errors are intentional, we think. -- The editor.

SAN FRANCISCO -- My knowledge of San Francisco geography is mostly based off rancid lyrics, people making fun of the Castro district until like 3 years ago,  and the movie Mrs Doubtfire so you could say I'm pretty much a expert. Im staying near something called the Tenderloin which means I can walk one block to a store that wont let me in because they think I'm homeless and another block to convenence stores that exclusively serve homeless customers. Best of both worlds.

All the streets smell like marjuana here which is a schedule one narcotic FYI and it seems like the police here should be more consistent when it comes to issuing expensive tickets to the vagrant people here who smoke weed that are extremeley poor. I have been propositioned to give money to vagrants who in the same breath have asked me to sell them weed.

This place kicks ass.

San Francisco has pretty much closed off all of downtown in honor of the week before a football game so that people can attend what amounts to a enormous NFL fan simulator sponsored by Bud Light, Microsoft, Pepsi, Skittles, and Tostitos. This fan central zone is home to numerous things with football logos on them, and 5 offcally licesened NFL fan stores. There are alot of Patriots jerseys purchased by fans who are spending all there time walking around the city pretending that theyre in the Superbowl.

My first night here I deicded to skip dinner in lieu of drinking, which yes, its a common theme for me- but you stick with the devil that you know, and with all the foofooraw about E Coli these days I figured it was better to drink brown liquor instead of eating red meat. It was a great meal and then I got a ride home from a cab driver who immedately started talking politics. Guess I just give of that vibe of a professonal political pundent. Lots of folks consider Frisco to be a extremeley liberal city but this guy started in with the "we need to build a wall" stuff and it kiond of snowballed from there untill by the end of the ride he was educationg me about how Bernie Sanders is a pawn by the Jews to install one of there Elite banker friends as the head of the United States so they can take over the world. Went a little to far for my taste in a 10-minute cab ride. Thats more of a 30 minute cab ride conversaton that you break out as soon as you've covered the weather, favorite sports teams, and which colleges his kids are thinking about going to. Very cool guy.

Then the next night there was the media party fr alll the big shot NFL reporter's and the people who want very much to be big shot NFL reporter's. It was at some sort of art museum with about 12 open bars and lots of free mini donuts.

Now Im not an art guy. Painters make me angry because they dont work at a job they hate and are therefor not contributing anything to society. But the party was cool in the type of way that you always are about 5 seconds from leaving but then you see someone you kind of know so you stick around long enough to allmost leave again and then you see someone else you know. The museum was huge, and feeding about 3,000 media members along with alcohol and venue rental probably cost like half a million dollars. If I was planning a media party I would hire hologram Bruce Springsteen and just make a ice luge of budlight and call it a day.

The night got way more intresting after the NFL kicked us out, because we ran into some good folks covering the NFL from Mexico City. As much as I insisted, they refused to speak english which I thought was a little bit disrepsectful of my cognitive limitations. So I relyed on my broken spanish which is mostly saying beer names in a accent and rolling the "r" when I say "Kirk Cousins" so we ended up becoming good freinds. They all called me Clay Mattews because of my unruly hair, which Im not cutting untill Danny Woodhead wins a Superbowl btw.

After all the pleasantries it was time to talk takes, or en espanol, "tomas." I asked them what they thought of Commissoner Roger Goodell and they immediately repsonded (I am 100% serous) "Roger Goodell is Hitler." I loved these guys and so basicaly Im not racist anymore becuase I got drunk and talked about football with 4 guys from Mexico and they invited me to stay in there house next season and go to 2 college football game with them and eat there food and probably wind up kidnapped.

Radio Row

Radio row was a real treat as allways. There are about a thousand reporters sitting in chairs waiting to intervew each other along with whatever athlete is doing promotional tours for razors or tires or cat medicine or whatever fucking brand sent the most clever email to there business manager. If I was a player I would just straight up be hawking KY jelly just to get some really exellent reactions from the radio guys who would probly try to talk about how they use it all the time just to get on my good side, and then Id say "oh yeah? I've never had to use it personally. Never been a issue." Bunch of losers, no offense.

There were tons of celebritys rolling through like Gronk, JJ Watt, Bruce Smith, and I even got to meet Papa John. Heres the thing about Papa John- he is a incredbly weird looking guy up close. He also rolls with a securty team that was as big as any players. His head securty dude looked like John Malcovichs Cryrus character from Con-Air, except with a more aggressive constant alert look that tells me hes definitely killed a man in a legally sanctioned war. Type of guy thats got "better to be judged by 12 then carried by 6"  on his doormat. But I still managed to get a little present to the P-Man himself- check it out:

Papa held this damn shirt up for about 45 seconds as a group of press photographers gathered around snapping pictures that are for sure eventuialy going to appear in repuatable newspapers. What this pic dosen't convey is the weird little breathing giggling sound Papa was making into my ear the entire time we hung out, "eeeh-ehhh-eeeeh-ehhh-ehhh." It was like a chipmunk with asthma. Extremeley creepy, and it was constant. Hes probly won some millin-dollar negotaitions with real eastate developers just because they dont want to sepnd a extra mnute in the same room as this guy- being incredbly annoying is actually a great business practice.

I rolled through radio row in my Cleatus outfit while legally intoxicated for reasons that should be pretty apparent but I'll spell them out for you anyways:

1. If your wearing a costume, any woman will hug you. Dosent matter how much you've had to drink, or how terrible your robot costume is, or how mad there husband looks.

2. You can walk through all the live bropadcasts while playing the "penis" game and no one realy bats a eye. I probably "penised" 20 people and it was a real hoot. For those of you who never had fun in junior high, the "penis" game is when you just yell "penis" louder and louder until you go hoarse or get sent to a alternative school. Lots of fun.

One other great thing about radio row is the professonal autograph seekers, and you can spot them a mile away. The offical uniform is a flat-brimmed hat, forearm tattoos, a small child, and literaly 4 suitcases filled with helmets and shirts and other NFL material there wheeling around. And when players and coaches have to do all these radio hits they get swarmed by the professonal autograph hounds  and cant walk around.

This one dude was rocking a bluetooth and telling his kid to "get the fuck in there" to get a Rob Gronkowski autograph, and later berated him for not being aggressive enough. Alot of these guys had kids with them that werent even there own that they would use to send over to the players, because for some reason atheletes dont want to sign autographs for adult men. Its a classic twofer of ageism and sexism and these heros are the modern-day Jackie Robinson of autograph resellers. But then one of the pros ran out of ink in his sharpie and had to hop on the phone trying to locate a backup-and folks this is the type of stuff that gives autograph collecter's a bad name. Bringing two pens is autograph collecting 101. Show a little professonalism.

The Media Toilets were a predictable disaster by the way. Giving a thousand journlists 7 toilet stalls is like trying to invade Normany with a army consisting of Mike Tysons first 6 opponets and the Cleveland Browns. One of the toilets looked like a straight up murder scene:

There was a series of scheduling snafus early on mostly do to the fact that the NFL media ap wasnt working on my league official sponsor Microsoft Surface Pro 3. They had the ap in the android store and the apple store but not in the windows store even though Microsoft pays them a gajillion dollars to try and make them not look like assholes 17 weeks a year. So to use it I had to click on the "HTML5" version but as everyone knows if you have 5 HTMLs you dont have one, and it didnt realy work so I missed the very important NFL technology summit with Blain Gabbert. Fortunately they seem to of straighted their mistakes out so I can use it again but folks this thing was buggier then a Scot Pioli conference phone.

Silicone Valley

So what else is San Francisco known for? Hippys, spazes, and hi-tech startups. This is the place you go to strike it rich, where anyone could be a investor. You meet with a guy who says "Do you have a idea for a app that will shave .25 seconds off of the human internation necessary to make a business $10 dollars? Great here's 80 million  welcome to California, all your friends from your home town are stupid."

So obvously I came up with a couple ideas for a app. Maybe I could strike it rich while Im here.

First one is basically Tinder for people who hate Cam Newton. It allows people who complain about Cam Newton to connect online and perhaps spark the begining of what could be a beautiful relatonship based on a mutual distrust of Cam Newtons antics and me-first demeanor.

The first rule of thumb when you have a app is you need to drop a vowel out of the name no matter what. Chip Kelly has been meeting with Sillicon Valley thought-leaders to figure out ways to learn from there success and I'd be shocked if by 2017 Chip Kelly hasnt changed their named to the Ninrs. Your going to see that offense operating 20% faster and blowing past the NFC west- which has the highest ratio of vowels to consinents in the entire league. Its all about matchups.

Recepton was luke-warm from people that I spoke with, but then I realized that the people who design apps dont have a clue about what app users really want. Its basicaly like if you named Antonio Cromartie chairman and CEO of Durex and expected record profits. We spend all this time talking about monopolys well have you ever noticed that all the people who make apps are the ones who are intelligent enough to know how to design them?

So I gathered a group of three hi-tech San Francisco professonals to convene at a local bar so I could pitch them my app. One industry insider named Sean suggested  that maybe Im just being too agressive. Instead how about "I start locally in just Seattle- a region thats known to have many Cam Newton detractors... Thats how Facebook started."

Then a guy came to our table and told us he was gay but he hated other gay people and snorted a bunch of cocaine and left so that kind of took the steam out of our stratgizing. Had to put a pin in this topic, or move it to the parking lot, or whatever the hell people are saying these days when they're being too PC to tell someone they have terrible ideas.

Then Alex who works as a IT professonal for a company I'm not aloud to name suggested that I was on the right track, but "wasnt thinking big enough. Why limit it to Cam Newton?" And hes absoluteley right. Imagine a dating app that has a dropdown menu where you could select which NFL player you hated the most and it woud match you up with likeminded individuals. I know for a fact that if you hate Danny Woodhead, me and you arent going to make it past appetizers. But the folks who hate Michael Vick are going to be a entirely diffrent audience of animal rights activists and vegans who would probably enjoy boning one another, and likewise the ones that hate Tom Brady are just going to be haters and losers and they would actually probably be very happy together. Matching people up based on what they love is something straight out of the 60s, nowdays its way more benficial to match people up based on what they hate.

I should also menton that the bar I was at is called "The Mucky Duck," and it is a good sports dive bar that just so happen's to be th named plaintiff in a enormous class-action lawsuit aganst the NFL. According to a bartender there, the league charges 18,000* dollars per season to sportsbars to broadcast the Sunday ticket , and while many dieheart fans spend at least that much on our tabs over the course of 17 weeks, I feel like a child caught in the middle of a divorce between the NFL and alcohol. Dont make me choose.

*This number might be way higher then what they really pay at the Mucky Duck, but I choose to beleve it because it makes this paragraph sound way more enticing. In realty most small bars pay around 2,000 and big clubs shell out more then $100,000.

In Conclusion

In conclusion, this week has been alot of fun. I had 1 on 1s with Washington TE Chris Kluwe, NFL Networks Ian Rapoport, I got hit sticked by a 8 year old, I passed out in a trash heap wearing a Fox NFL robot costume, and got to cover some breaking news. Nameley the fact that the NFL is creating a Rooney Rule for women to be intervewed for any open executive positions. But its a very slippery slope mandating that teams must intervew women for jobs too. What's next? Are we going to have people who arent related to the owner also working for NFL teams? Slippery slope.

Im going to get absoluteley hammerhoused, attend Goodells press confrence, and run the NFL combine drills. There should be a video of all the things I mentoned above getting posted sometime soon. But for now Im exhauseted and I feel like my liver is about to join a gang so it can have me whacked but all in all its been a real treat so far and I look forward to blasting you all with more takes from now til Sunday.

God bless.