House Raiders

The Wound

This house has moved three times. Oakland, Los Angeles, Oakland again, and now the desert — and each time it took the same swagger to a city that had not asked for it.

The swagger is the wound. Just Win, Baby is the most famous motto in the sport and this house has won three games in a season. It has not won a playoff game since January 2003. The identity is entirely intact and entirely unearned, and everyone can see it.

The Uncrowned

This house held the first overall pick and spent it on Fernando Mendoza. First in the entire realm. The single most valuable thing a losing house is given, and the only real compensation for a year of humiliation.

He is the backup.

Kirk Cousins — thirty-eight, twenty million guaranteed, on his fourth house — will take the field first, and the young man the whole desert came to see will hold a clipboard and watch. The steward, Klint Kubiak, is in his first year here and was asked when Mendoza might play. His answer was “let’s work to Miami first,” which is what a man says when he does not have an answer and would prefer you stopped asking.

The cruelty is in the calendar. There is no bye until Week 13. There is no Thursday game, no Monday game, no natural seam anywhere in the schedule — no gentle moment to hand over a throne. Which means the succession, when it comes, will not be planned. It will happen mid-afternoon, after something goes wrong, in front of everyone.

Everybody in the building knows how this ends. Nobody will say so, and the waiting is the whole season.

The Lord

Kirk Cousins, temporarily, and everyone involved knows the word.

The Knights

• Tyler Linderbaum — eighty-one million for a centre, which is the most serious thing this house has done in years and the least glamorous.

Ancient Grudges

• House Chiefs. The long humiliation.
• House Broncos, House Chargers. Divisional, and conducted with more volume than consequence.
• House Ravens. New, and bitter. Baltimore agreed to take Maxx Crosby for two first-round picks, examined his knee, and walked away from a settled deal. Las Vegas announced the collapse publicly and pointedly. Crosby’s own surgeon disagreed with the diagnosis. Nobody has explained it to anyone’s satisfaction and the two houses are not speaking warmly.

What Changed This Spring

Cousins, Linderbaum, Kwity Paye, Nakobe Dean — and Geno Smith sent to the Jets. A house buying competence in bulk after three wins, while the first pick in the realm waits his turn.

Prophecy

That Mendoza plays before Christmas, and that everyone pretends this was the plan.