The Enemies List Presents: Top 5 Zombie Sports Franchises

Hola, NESWers, it’s your old pal DMtShooter from Five Tool Tool with this week’s festivity of malfeasance. Ah, February. Is there a time of the year that makes an otherwise sentient and alive person less interested in paying attention? Small wonder The Man made this Black History Month; it’s the month that no one else wants. Crappy weather, unwelcome snow still pounding down, holidays celebrating fat earth rats, greeting card companies and dead Presidents and seemingly no end in sight. Makes a man want to lurch from side to side in a lazy stumble, give no credence to any kind of human emotion, and eat someone’s brain. Well, OK, maybe not the last part. But you get the point. Be prepared!

This post was inspired by See Me Rot, perhaps the most apt use of social media yet on the Web (in that it’s pointless, quease-inducing and utterly self-centered while still having a certain level of morbid rubbernecking fascination). Let’s kick off this week in hate with the teams that also just seem to drift in out of their fan’s lives, sucking their brains and leaving them lifeless husks. Good times ahead!

5) Kansas City Royals. How undead is this franchise? So much that a historically great 2009 Cy Young turn from previously frustrating prospect Zach Greinke did nothing more than make old-timers wonder if 1973 Steve Carlton had less to work with, and how quickly an MLB+ market could swoop in and airlift the ace out of Missouri and into relevance. You’d think that in the decades since the Royals played a meaningful game, they’d stumble into more Greinkes, seeing how they draft high every year, but no such luck. The smell of rotting flesh here is so bad, it even overwhelms the reek coming off the Chiefs.

Definitive Zombie: Mike Sweeney

4) Philadelphia 76ers. My favorite recent Zombie Moment for the Sixers came at the NBA trade deadline. As the rest of the Association was firing off blockbuster deals to move big names like Tracy McGrady and Kevin Martin, and teams scrambled to cut all payroll in advance of this summer’s LeBron James Auction and next summer’s surefire league-killing lockout, the Sixers… moved Primo Brezac to Milwaukee for Jodie Meeks. Which led all of us who follow the team to remember that Brezac, who moves only slightly slower than the average member of the walking undead, exists… and that he might be more of an NBA presence than Meeks, who had one good year at Kentucky before going pro and is shooting 35% in his NBA career. Isn’t the D-League already full of zombies?

Definitive Zombie: Willie Green

3) Cleveland Browns. UnliKe many other shambling NFL wrecks, the Browns don’t even manage to get face time while stumbling about as a walking abomination in the eyes of the Lord. They’ve never made a strong chase towards a winless season, and they’ve also still, somehow, have friends that care whether they are set on fire, shot in the head with a shotgun, or Unlike the Lions, they don’t go winless, or even get really high draft picks to ruin. If zombies took over Cleveland, would anyone notice?

Definitive Zombie: Jamal Lewis

2) Oakland Raiders. The Raiders personify the Zombie Ideal better than any other major league franchise in North America. From walking nightmare Al Davis to thuggish embarrassment head coach Tom Cable (yes, he’s still got the job! just like a zombie, really!), the Raiders stink from the head down, get the official disapproval of authority in the form of penalty flags, and are no threat to anyone who has the brainpower to create fire. FIRE BAD!

Definitive Zombie: JaMarcus Russell (who, to be fair, has been successful as a zombie, since he’s clearly eaten 4 to 5 people already)

1) Los Angeles Clippers. I kind of wanted to give this to the Warriors for keeping an actual zombie on staff in head coach Don Nelson, but while Nellie couldn’t care less and lives to cash a fat paycheck while ruining young talent, the Clipper tandem of Mike Dunleavy and Donald Sterling are just operating at another level. From the racist landlording to the cursed high picks, plus the godawful in-game management and substitution moves, this franchise has, more than any other, shown the skills that have trapped the Clipper Fans in an unsafe panic room, with an ever-shrinking supply of ammunition and no way out. I repeat, with a growing sense of dread and doom: NO WAY OUT.

Definitive Zombie: Dunleavy, but only because no zombie has ever looked as frightening as Chris Kamen.

Fellow haters, that’s all I’ve got for this week. And since Frank Zappa is no longer with us, or even a zombie, let’s take Ike Willis’s Pojama People with personal friend Glenn Leonard on drums giving us the Zombie Woof. Just about as evil as evil can be.