football thoughts
My response, which I’ve spouted a thousand times, is always the same: What the fuck do you think I have to do on a Sunday? Seriously, what else is there for me to do on a Sunday but sit there, get drunk, yell and watch football? Do you think I’m going to say, “Sweet – it’s 4:15pm. The games are over and I still have time to go pick out a new comforter!” No way, bro. Football is about waking up hungover from a late Saturday night, quickly showering and catching a cab to a bar where your buddies are, and spending the next six to nine hours eating wings, drinking and talking about sports and boobies, only to return to your apartment bombed and heartburned to pass the fuck out.
This is not how I watch football in LA. There is no late Saturday night, since I’ve pretty much given up on going out around here – I’ll go out when I’m back in NYC, but in the meantime, I’d rather stay in and save money so that when I return to NYC I have enough money to buy a slave for my new apartment. I don’t wake up late or hungover, since it’s hard to do that when your weekend nights are spent sitting in your yard drinking beer by yourself, staring at the fire pit and weeping silently so your neighbors don’t hear you. And I don’t take a cab to meet my buddies out, since the “Eagles bar” that they go to is all the way in Santa Monica, which means if I want to drink I have to pay about $120 in round trip cab fare, or otherwise spend six hours nursing four beers (sounds sweet, right?).
(While we’re here, I used to be a baseball fan. I say “used to” because all the teams I want to watch start their games at 4:05pm. I work until at least 5pm, which means the earliest I’m home is at 6:15pm, or right around the 6th or 7th inning of a Phillies game. So instead, I get to watch a lot of Mariners, Giants, A’s, Dodgers, Angels and Padres games. There are 30 teams in Major League Baseball. Of the 30, I can’t name many that I’m less interested in than the Mariners, Giants, A’s, Dodgers, Angels and Padres. Even the good ones are boring; before Manny, it was “Russell Martin – James Loney – Derek Lowe: Dodger Fever, Catch It!” and “The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim in Southern California: Seriously, We Won the World Series a Few Years Ago. Swear.” Continually being forced to watch baseball played by the Mariners, Giants, A’s, Dodgers, Angels and Padres is like continually being forced to watch porn featuring 300 pound people having sex. Your curiosity might be peaked at first, but then you’ll feel disgusted with yourself and what you see, then you’ll get sad, then you’ll just lose interest in the whole thing altogether and forget why the real thing even interested you in the first place.)
However, I have to admit that my own personal football set-up could be worse. In my living room, we have a 60″ or 62″ HD television. It is, without exaggeration, the largest TV I’ve ever seen in a home. We also have DirectTV and the football package, so we get every game. Even when the games stink, there is something called “The Red Zone Channel” which flips to any game when any team gets in the red zone – it’s like watching football on speed. So not bad. Not bad at all.
But here’s how it works. My roommate Mark will watch football on the big screen in his bedroom. I don’t begrudge him this, since he does not have a laptop and needs to use the computer in his room to stay up to date on his four fantasy football teams. As someone with four teams myself, I totally understand. So I sit in the living room watching football alone. However, sometimes I have a guest watcher or watchers. This weekend, it was my other roommate Selena and her friend Sarah. While I watched the games, they sat on the other couch discussing all manner of things, from engagement rings to hair coloring to, I don’t know, periods or dolls or whatever it is women talk about (I sort of zoned out). If they hadn’t made some wonderful caprese for me (and later a lovely dinner), I surely would have injected something into my neck that maybe wouldn’t have caused me death, but at least temporary unconsciousness.
So that’s what I’m looking at for the rest of my football Sundays: alone on the couch, laptop on lap, checking fantasy teams and talking to myself (or to girls about “What Guys Really Want”). To that end, here is a random collection of twenty thoughts from football on Sunday and last night:
1) Vince Young, you stink. You were a great college quarterback, but it was apparent that you were never going to be great in the NFL, with your low arm slot delivery and your inability to read (not defenses, but words). Still, you could have been a more than serviceable pro quarterback, but now we can add crazy to your stinkiness. Titans fans, I feel for you (good thing you live in a such a cool city and state). There is no greater sin than being blessed with an extraordinary ability and wasting it because you are a whiny bitch.
2) Maurice Jones-Drew is absolutely killing two of my fantasy teams. Thanks for the touchdown this week, but 92 total yards in two weeks? I liked him this year because he’s only 23 years old with two years under his belt and Fred Taylor’s 32 years old with a lot of wear on that body. Something’s gotta give eventually. Instead, Jacksonville loses two of its starting o-lineman, Garrard’s thrown more picks in two games than he did all of last year, and the RB combo of MJD and Fred Taylor’s been good for 97 yards in two games. Yikes.
3) My roommate Selena asked me why the player was waving when the ball was kicked to him on a punt. I explained that he was calling for a fair catch, which meant that he was signaling that he would not run the ball and would down it when he caught it, but the other team then must not hit him while he catches the ball. She said, “Awww” and added that it was a “nice promise.” This is how I’m going to spend my Sundays for the 2008 NFL season.
4) If you’re in a survivor pool, it might be wise to pick against KC and St. Louis every week. I think that St. Pius Prep might get three against the Rams and five against the Chiefs.
5) Further, it’s fair to say that USC could win the NFC West, right? That’s not even a joke. The division, however, certainly is.
6) I don’t think I can recall a game in which the offense played with less zest and the coaching, um, coached, with less real, actual knowledge of the sport of football than in Washington in their loss in the opener to the Giants. Therefore, this week, if I owned a home, I would have bet it on New Orleans +1 at Washington. I could not believe this line when I saw it earlier in the week, and further couldn’t believe it when it didn’t move by Sunday. When lines don’t move, that’s bad – it’s like Vegas saying, “Fuck you – we know what we’re doing, so if you think you’re hot shit, bring it.” New Orleans was up 24-15 by the end of the third and I was cursing bloody murder that I didn’t bet on the game. As soon as my rant ended, Washington scored. Then scored again. Final: Washington 29, New Orleans 24. What do I take away from this? Both Washington and New Orleans stink. And I stink at not-gambling.
7) If I had to pick an AFC team to root for, it’d be the Jets. They remind me a lot of the Eagles: usually pretty shitty; green uniforms; rabid, overweight fan base. When they got Favre I was a little less of a Jets fan, but with that lil’ acquisition they went from “unwatchable” to “alright, I’m in.” The game against New England this week…very, very frustrating. A winnable game, marred by suspect play calling (you have BRETT FAVRE! Why would you run three times from inside the five?). I’m not going to provide any insight that you haven’t read elsewhere for this game (or any game), but it bothers me that now New England’s thinking, “We’re ok with Cassell!” when they should be thinking, “Thank god the Jets let us off the hook!”
8 ) Jay Cutler is The Truth. Wow. I had a little bit of a man crush on him before the season – laser rocket arm, great mobility (he ran the option his first two years in college), diabetes, a name that reminds me of chicken cutlet – all things I look for in a football player. The Raiders game affirmed by crush and now we’re entering the danger zone. Six TDs in two games in a weak division….30 is very much in the discussion.
9) Seeing Cutler on the sidelines, my co-watcher Sarah asked why all quarterbacks wear hats on the sidelines, and I could offer no explanation. Then we discussed men in their 20′s and 30′s wearing hats and surprisingly, we all agreed on many points. First, hats are ok only at sporting events; otherwise, it just looks like you’re hiding hair loss. Second, there is no excuse for a white man over the age of 25 wearing a backwards hat. This is so awkward that it’s embarrassing – it’s ok if you’re coming back from a long study season in the college library, but you got to let it go once you finish your last bio final.
(I subsequently discussed this with a New York-based female friend to see if this was just a west coast bias, but she agreed: a backwards hat on a 25+ white guy is as much as a dealbreaker as “wearing jean shorts.”)
10) It was a fumble. If it had gone against the Eagles against, say, the Cowboys, I’d be in jail right now, three quarters of the city of Philadelphia would be on fire, and every person named “Hochuli” would be wiped off the face of the earth. Thank goodness it happened in San Diego, where fans of the Chargers responded to the game-deciding bad call by throwing their Abercrombie and Fitch catalogs across their rooms and having another white wine spritzer – easy on the spritz.
11) On Monday night, I watched the national anthem being performed and thought to myself, “Is this me or is this terrible?” Maybe it’s because I’m old-fashioned or maybe it’s because I’m racist, but I like a nice, normal rendition of the national anthem, not one filled with dips and trills and the like. So this pop songstress gets up and oversings the hell out of it and when it’s over, GETS BOOED. I never thought I’d have even a modicum of respect for Cowboys fans, but I did right then and there. If this is possible, the whole Mid East puzzle can be sorted out.
(Seriously, it was the worst rendition of the national anthem ever, save for star-duds like Carl Lewis and Roseanne. You can see it here. Poor quality, but you can hear it. Which is not a good thing. You can’t, however, hear the boos, which is a shame.)
12) Speaking of Cowboys fans, I know that Philly fans are not exactly exemplars of sophistication, but at least we don’t have gun racks in our pick-up trucks and vote Republican. Good lord – as they scanned the crowd at Texas Stadium, I couldn’t help but think two things: “These people have not studied Latin” and “These people hate – and I mean, hate – Barack Obama.”
13) My whole thought going into the Eagles-Cowboys game was that an Eagles loss would not be devastating. We’re talking about a team that went 8-8 last year going into Texas Stadium for its last Monday night game against a team that went 13-3 last year and after Week One had the best Vegas odds to win the Super Bowl (the Eagles were also without their top two WRs, but saying that’s a handicap is like saying me going into a pie eating contest with my shoelaces untied is a handicap). So I could deal with a loss, as long as it wasn’t a blowout.
Wrong. Tough loss. Tough, tough loss.
14) At one point, Tony Kornheiser said that Andy Reid dealt with a “horrifying tragedy” when his two sons got arrested last year. Um, isn’t what happened to Tony Dungy’s son – you know, when he killed himself – more of a “horrifying tragedy”? Two adult sons getting arrested for drugs and guns is not a horrifying tragedy; two adult sons eaten by wild dogs would be a horrifying tragedy. C’mon, Tony.
15) Speaking of Tony, in emails today my buddy (a Jew) and I decided that we hadn’t realized it until last night, but TK is one of the Jewiest Jews that ever Jewed. He also reminds me of an ex’s dad (my roster of my ex-girlfriends reads like a “Greatest Hits” of the female names of the Old Testament). God love him (or rather, G-d love him).
16) I’m not sure why Andy Reid didn’t tell the corners to jam TO at the line in the first half. This strategy has worked in the past: get up on him, rough him up, disrupt his timing. Instead, they sat back and let him run like a gazelle in the open plains and were so devastated by his big plays that they completely altered their defensive game plan in the second half, abandoning their aggressive (and very successful) pressuring of Romo and instead switching to a prevent-like defense, thus allowing the Cowboys to pick up small chunks of yardage at a time. THIS was the key to the game, because unlike the McNabb/Westbrook fumble in the fourth, this was preventable. Don’t abandon the blitz, keep the pressure on Romo, body up TO and let them beat you with Whitten. Instead, they kept their LBs off the o-line, gave Romo plenty of time, and though they took TO out of the game, still they couldn’t stop Barber and Whitten.
(Also, I don’t want to admit this, but B-Dawk…not looking so great. That’s all I’ll say about that, out of respect.)
17) That’s the thing that Andy Reid has never appreciated with WRs – a great one will make you alter your game plan. A stud WR will force you a blitzing team like the Eagles into a cover-2 or cover-2 type scheme, which is not how they play their game. As much as I hate to admit it, TO was the key to that game because he did just that and forced the Eagles to NOT play their game defensively in the second half. Dallas 41, Philly 37.
18) I’m not a sore loser (well, maybe I am), but let’s just say I wouldn’t feel too great with Romo under center in a game that matters. Like, for instance, in the playoffs. Where he’s 0-2.
(Nice fumble in the end zone, pretty boy. See you at the Linc on December 28.)
19) The game itself was magnificent, as much as an Eagles’ loss to the Cowboys can be magnificent. One thing that you can take away from this game, brilliantly put by Jaws or TK: How many teams out there are better than the Eagles or Cowboys? I know I’m biased, but if you don’t think they’re two of the top six teams in the NFL, you’re just plain wrong.
20) DeSean Jackson…don’t do that again.
