I’ve never been the biggest football fan. I have never disliked it, although at times I’ve found it to be rather boring, but I’ve never liked it as much as the rest of of the world. If I had to rank my favorite sports it would probably go something like this:
1. Baseball
2. Basketball
3. Football
4. Pro Wrestling
5. Hockey
And that’s being generous.
Somehow this year that all changed and now there is no big space between two and three. I really like football. I think it had something to do with the combination of gambling and fantasy football, but that’s probably only half the story because I’ve been doing that for years and what I’ve really grown to love is college football. I love that anything can happen, that every conference game means something, how everyone plays differently and, perhaps most surprisingly, that it will all be different next year and the year after that.
I’ve always been a person that prefers the pros to college. College (and minor league) baseball is boring. College basketball is only good during the tournament. College wrestling doesn’t even feature any tables or chairs. For my entire life I’ve felt the same way about college football, but now I realize that is just not true. I’d put up the Boise State-Virginia Tech game, the Arizona-ASU game or the Alabama-Auburn game from this season against any NFL game this season. Anything can happen. The Arizona-ASU game was decided by a blocked extra point in overtime(!) no less.
This isn’t to say I don’t like the NFL too because I’ve enjoyed this season more than any since the Seahawks went to the Super Bowl. Which is saying something because the Seahawks are freakin’ horrible this year. Completely unwatchable unless they’re playing a fellow NFC West team.
As I said gambling and fantasy have helped this out a lot, but I think what’s really made football work for me this year is that I have finally figured out how to watch it. I have a habit of taking my sports (like my everything else) far too seriously. I think this is a byproduct of being a baseball fan where you are taught that every number in every game is supposed to mean something. Sometimes with baseball it’s more about history than what is actually happening in the moment. A good example of this would be the famous homerun chase of 1998. In a lot of ways it was more about the fact that a long time record was being broken than it was about two guys breaking that record. Even now it’s more about how those two guys tarnished that record than it is about anything else.
Anyways, this thinking goes against everything that makes football work. Everything that happens in football is really important, right now. Tomorrow it might seem trivial that something meant so much yesterday, but right in that moment it meant everything. Only in football could your season be considered a letdown in three games. With such a short season every game could literally mean the end of your season, the end of your hopes for the postseason. Everything matters and then it doesn’t.
In a lot of ways football is a lot like the TV show LOST. When LOST was on I could not wait til the next episode to find stuff out and I always had tons of questions about what was going on in my head, but when it was over that was it. I don’t get nostalgic for it like I do with Buffy or Veronica Mars because LOST was the greatest show on TV in that moment. If you haven’t seen it yet you should watch it because it is really good and while you are watching it will be amazing to you, but when it’s gone it’s gone. You can never recapture that sense of wonder you had when everything was new and fresh because you will never have those questions again once you have their answers. That’s football and now that I know that I’ll love it forever.
