Football Hates Me. And I it.

Kazzy 69 Comments

The Eagles are mired in an eight game losing streak and seemingly have no direction or much interest in playing football.

The Patriots will and the Giants are likely to make the playoffs, which history tells us means one of them is very likely to win the Super Bowl.

The Tigers blew a very winnable game against Alabama that might have had them in the BCS Championship.

The Irish are undefeated, ranked #1 and, for the first time in a long time, are not overrated.

Either the Irish or the Tide will be National Champions.

I played touch football 12 days ago and am still gimping around.

I wish I didn’t care so much about any of this.  But I do.  The baby should change that, right? [pauses… looks around… sees baby-sized LSU T-shirt Zazzy bought at Gap]  Nope.  Apparently not.

How are your various seasons going?

 

Kazzy

One man. Two boys. Twelve kids.

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69 Comments

  1. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. You don’t hate football. You love it. You need it. You’re going back for more. Don’t even pretend you aren’t. You’re football’s bitch.

    • The sad thing is you’re totally right.

      I was trying to explain sports fandom to a friend who gets why people enjoy watching sports but doesn’t understand the attachment folks like myself have with them. It really is irrational.

      Which I’m totally okay with. I am STILL watching the Eagles games. And I will be watching them next year, no matter what. And the year after that. But for the first time in a long time, they truly look hopeless. There is no silver lining right now. I mean, MAYBE Bryce Brown. But otherwise, ugh… can I catch ONE break?

  3. My prep school alma mater just won state for the third time in a row (Go Rocks!)

    The University of Louisville is playing Florida in a BCS bowl.

    And the Irish.. oh, the Irish. The national championship game is finally going to mean something to me again AND there’s an opportunity to defeat an SEC team for the title. Happy days…

    • ND there’s an opportunity to defeat an SEC team for the title.

      Hehe… we have different definitions of opportunity.

      Oh, and Kazzy, a team that needs overtime to beat Pitt is not overrated?

        • Irrelevant, but thanks.

          By the way, I was at that ’96 Vanderbilt game. That was a Vanderbilt team that went 2-9, and Notre Dame, when it was still considered a genuine national power, won 14-7. It was ugly.

          I actually think this year’s Vanderbilt team would probably beat this year’s Notre Dame team 6 out of 10 times.

          I think South Carolina, Georgia, LSU, Florida, and Alabama beat Notre Dame 8-9 times out of 10 (Alabama, Georgia, and Florida might beat them 11 times out of 10), this year.

      • Chris,

        Unlike many, I put a lot of faith in computer rankings. They don’t have the biases that humans do. Most are black box, so it is hard to say definitively which are best, but most of them have had Notre Dame ranked at or close to #1 all season, including having them as a unanimous #1 right now.

        Notre Dame’s defense is legit and on par with probably anyone from the SEC save for Alabama. Their offense is their weakspot which is why I think ‘Bama will nip them in the end.

        They may not be a historically great team, but they are legitimately the number one team in the country after 12 (or 13) games have been played.

        • I’m down with computer rankings, though having watched Notre Dame this year 4 or 5 times (thank you, NBC), and having watched at least one SEC game a week, I can make a few observations:

          1) Notre Dame’s team speed isn’t even at the level of lower tier SEC teams (they might outrun Ketnucky… maybe).
          2) Notre Dame’s defense, while good, would probably be the 6th or 7th best defense in the SEC (after Alabama, LSU, Florida, South Carolina, and maybe Georgia or A&M). They’re slower, and more reliant on one or two stars. Plus, their secondary isn’t really all that good. Most of those SEC teams has good to great college corners.
          3) Notre Dame struggles, offensively, against teams that would finish in the bottom of the SEC. Their one impressive win this year was Oklahoma. If it weren’t for that win, I’m not sure they’d be a legitimate top 10 team, much less a legitimate #1.

        • Notre Dame may be legit but the only time I cheered for them was to cheer for Rudy…GO BAMA!

  4. I’m trying to convince myself that there’s some reason that the Rams are especially tough on the 49ers, who will still be able to beat teams like the Giants and Falcons in the playoffs. It’s not working.

    • Mike, you’re killing fairies each time you refuse to believe.

      • The 49er’s biggest problem seems to be that their kicker has lost his mind.

        • That would have won last Sunday, but barely, over a team they should have crushed.

  5. Green Bay is 8-4* and currently holds the tiebreaker for the division championship. If the Forty-Niners stumble (game against New England coming up) they could get a first-round bye. It’ll come down to the Chicago game — as it should. Packers/Bears games ought to matter.

    * Ought to be 9-3 but for the Fail Mary call in week 3.

    • I’m still debating on whether I want the Pack to get a first round bye or not…..seems to me they play a whole lot better when they don’t sit a game. Injury wise it would be nice to have an off week, but hopefully we have most of them back by the end of regular season. Great news, Woodson could be back this weekend!

      Any week the Pack beats the Vikes, and the Bears and Lion lose is a great week. Throw in the Badgers making their way for a third straight year to the Rose Bowl…things are looking pretty good!

      Some might say that Bielema leaving for Arkansas is icing on the cake too. Bielema hasn’t been able to win the big one. It would be Awesome to see Alvarez on the sidelines coaching Jan 1, especially if he keeps his Rose Bowl steak alive.

      • Speaking of throwing things, let us pray to Bebby Jeezus that Mr. Rogers does not throw any more picks, giving Christmas Presents to Undeserving Children.

  6. The Tigers blew a very winnable game against Alabama that might have had them in the BCS Championship.

    Dude, Auburn never had a chance at the BCS Championship. 😉

    But, yes, the Irish suck, and an ND/SEC matchup for the national championship is in fact the worst of all possible football worlds. The gods must be crazy.

    • Maybe if Verlander hadn’t started choking, the Tigers would have fared better this fall.

      • Id that were the problem they’d be losing to the Pandas.

  7. I laugh in the face of your pathetic pantomime of football hatred. Some of us have been honing our hatred for lo these many years, and your sniveling attempts pretending at it amuse us.

    • These are very different kinds of hatred it.

      You hate it the way a layperson might hate Angelina Jolie from afar… you don’t understand what all the hubbub is or you don’t like her movies or you think her acting is putrid or maybe you’re a little jealous of her looks or her life.

      I hate it the way Jennifer Aniston* hates Angelina Jolie… with the fire of a thousand suns but a completely inability to look away.

      Your hatred cannot compare to mine, good sir.

      * That’s who Pitt was dating when he left for Angelina, right? I am woefully ignorant on pop culture gossip.

      • Fie and faugh.

        You know not the hatred that burns deep with a chest encased in ugly polyester, marching in the freezing cold while trying to blow air through an ice-cold trumpet in order to instill “spirit” in the audience watching your infinitely more popular peers pummel each other. Peers wearing ridiculous pads and silly pants. Not one of whom will secretly make out with you.

        Fiddle-dee-dee to your hatred, which is like unto a peevish schoolgirl whose beau is late to bring her flowers. Mine is a mighty thunderhead of loathing, raining down a bitter sleet of contempt.

        I don’t mind the pants.

        • Two responses:

          1.) You were in the band? I… I… I had no idea. My condolensces.

          2.) You have made MD hostile to men. Stop objectifying the poor athletes.

          • Piss on your #1, you musically challenged jock. You probably can’t even recognize your favorite team’s fight song, or at least can’t hit all the notes right when you hum it.

          • My fellow band mates and I used to sit in the stands and chant, “Let’s go home! Let’s go home!” Our team sucked and it gets damn cold in Kansas in October and those band unis were cheap and thin.

          • My high school had an amazing band; the type of band that emulated an HBCU. Band members were some of the coolest kids in school. I assumed all bands were like that.

            Then I went to college. BOSTON College. Oh god… we were awful. And the band kids… jeez… I mean, I count two among some of my closest friends, but both quit after frosh year when they realized the fun was in the parking lot before games.

            So, while I can appreciate a truly elite marching band, I can’t get behind what most schools pass off nowadays.

          • If he didn’t want Russell to objectify him, he shouldn’t have worn those tight pants. Dude’s just asking for it. “Look at me! Look at me!”

          • At my college (CMU), the band geeks were more popular than the football team.
            We’ve even mostly stopped having “homecoming” as reunion week, instead switching it to Carnival in the Spring.

        • Band camp, I am told, is a “hotbed of teenage hormones” in a way that the football locker room can never be.

          I have heard many stories of band camp.

          • I suspect that band camp is a hotbed for such shenanigans because there is generally a roughly equal mixture of boys and girls in proximity to one another, relatively low levels of teacherly supervision as compared with athletics, and most importantly, less pretense and prestige to interfere with hookin’ up (“we’re all band geeks already, so what the hell, just go for it”).

            Drama club has many of the same elements, only less time on a bus and less lighting.(Erm. …Not that I would have known anything about that in high school.)

            But face it, parents, your teenage kids are gonna have kissyface opportunities in pretty much whatever kind of school activity they wind up doing, pretty much no matter what it is.

          • “a roughly equal mixture of boys and girls in proximity to one another, relatively low levels of teacherly supervision as compared with athletics, and most importantly, less pretense and prestige to interfere with hookin’ up”

            This is close, but not quite. My ingredient list would be
            1) 20 year old camp counselors who used to do the same things themselves
            2) “teachers” are mostly talented performers themselves, and thus expect that everyone should be driven by internal motivation, and fixing people is a fool’s game.
            3) high levels of mutual respect from watching each other bleed (literally) to do something good.

            The football locker room might not be a hotbed of teenage hormones, but I’ve heard co-ed soccer camps are.

  8. The Chiefs are so so so sooooooo bad this season that it’s actually spoiled football for me. I haven’t actually sat down and watched more than a few minutes of any NFL game in about four weeks. Can’t wait for this miserable season to be over.

  9. At my first ever attempt to follow sports, I have chosen the Steelers as the team to cheer for. They seem to both win and lose and I find this appealing. It doesn’t sound like this with take them to any bowls though.

    • “It doesn’t sound like this with take them to any bowls though.”

      …sigh…

      • Why “…sigh…”? Is it because, and this is just what I hear from other fans so correct me if I’m wrong, they were quite the team in the past. I was under the impression they were likely to win a great deal, although, this is not why I chose them.

        When I became a “fan” I figured I should purchase some sort of outerwear to show my support. Holy cow! They make an unnecessarily-large-number of crap stamped with their logo. By the quantity alone you would think they were the most popular team, ever. People throw way too much money at these sports franchises.

        • I was mocking sighing your easily mistaken conflation of college bowl games with the Super Bowl. The Steelers are an NFL franchise. If they do well enough in the regular season, they advance to the playoffs with a chance to play in the Super Bowl for the league championship.

          Big time college football (formerly known as Division 1A and now now as Division 1 Football Bowl Subdivision or FBS) does not have a playoff, though they are slowly moving towards one. Instead they have a series of Bowl games which seems to grow every year. Teams that are .500 or above (at least as many wins as losses) are eligible to play in a bowl. Some bowls carry more prestige and there is currently a system in place where the participants of a particular bowl vie for the National Championship, but it is not a true playoff system. The Steelers don’t have hope for a “bowl” in the common sense of the word as they are not a college team.

          The Steelers are more popular than most teams because they were hugely popular in the late 70’s when football was becoming the juggernaut that it was today. Fans who grew up then grew up rooting for the Steelers and are in their 40’s and 50’s now, so the team is hugely popular.

          • Oh no! My mistake. I thought those other bowls came before the Super Bowl. I assumed that’s what made it Super. I will pay more attention next time, thank you.

          • Oh, I was just teasing. The college system is REALLY confusing and the use of similar language between the two systems is even more so. It is my hunch that the Super Bowl took it’s name from the system of college bowls, as no other league/sport uses that language. And the college bowls DO happen before the Super Bowl chronologically, lending itself to that understanding.

          • “The Steelers are more popular than most teams because they were hugely popular in the late 70′s when football was becoming the juggernaut that it was today. ”
            This explains why they’re more popular in Mexico.

            They’re superpopular in PA for other reasons… “Our city is falling apart, everyone’s leaving, but we can still cheer for our rocking football team!”

          • I was speaking more about their national following. They and the Cowboys (and to a lesser extent, the Raiders) enjoy a national appeal because of their success during that time period. Similarly, the Cowboys are more widely popular with folks in the 90’s and the Patriots have emerged as a national team for folks in this generation.

            You won’t find Jaguars fans outside of Jacksonville (or even in Jacksonville). Falcons fans are almost exclusively in Atlanta. But you can find Steelers fans EVERYWHERE! You can find at least one, if not multiple, big time Steelers bars in every city. But Pittsburgh’s particular passion (which I just experienced firsthand and is unlike any football city i’ve visited) was a part of that, I’m sure.

          • Kazzy,
            Most of those steelers bars are populated by former western pa residents (or NE PA, which for some reason has always liked Steelers. I blame the coal/steel industry).
            😉
            As a Steelers fan, I’m obligated to growl at the Patriots (it’s fun watching GRRM do it, gotta admit.)

          • The Super Bowl was originally called the “AFL-NFL Championship Game” (the first four were pre-merger.) During the merger talks, Lamar Hunt, owner of the Chiefs, joked “I call it the Super Bowl”, and the name stuck.

          • Mary,

            Here is one: http://www.barflymag.com/bar/a-and-l-pub.html

            I just found that with a quick Google search, so no promise it is a good one. But I’m sure you can and will find in Portland. Even lesser teams often have official or unofficial bars in big cities, but the Steelers lead the way in this regard.

          • Dude, you rock. I was going to google later but this is better. Thanks!

          • There is probably a better one, or at least a better way to find one. But if you are in a big or even medium-sized city, you are likely not far from a Steelers bar. If you know any real Steelers fans who’ve been in the city a little while, they can probably point you the way to go.

            Generally speaking, “team” bars fall into one of three categories:
            1.) The owner is a fan of the team in question.
            2.) A small group of fans sought out a place to watch games together for strength in numbers. The reputation spread and the following grew. Sometimes this relationship will be codified officially but sometimes it remains unofficial.
            3.) A bar owner recognizes a glut of fans of a particular team in the area and decides to cater to them to ensure their business. This is often (but not always*) tipped off by the bar being an “official” hangout for a number of unrelated teams, e.g., a former Eagles bar in Manhattan that also doubled as a Yankees bar and Florida State bar.

            *I say not always because I am someone who shows no rhyme or reason for the teams I route for (Eagles, Red Sox, Stars, T’Wolves at one point, LSU) so it is possible this type of bar is really type #1 with an eccentric owner.

          • Kazzy—you have a Minnesota roots somewhere? Did you route for the Stars when they were the North Stars?

          • Nope. I liked the T’Wolves when they drafted KG and the stars because of Modano and Belfour.

    • I live in Pittsburgh. Therefore I root for the Steelers. Also the Penguins, and the Pirates (yes, for all my carping, still a fan).
      My goal, in following sports, is to be able to have a reasonably intelligent conversation on the bus (plus, it’s fun to root for Pittsburgh!).

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