Friday, September 07, 2007

A Love Letter to Football

I know a lot of you out there in Bloggerland are not huge sports fans, especially when it comes to football, and that's OK. I can deal with that.

But personally when it comes to football, I am a huge fan. That is an understatement really. I have a box full of playbooks. Seriously. I've never coached or played the game in real life, and yet I still have thousands of plays in a box. Don't remember why, but I treasure having them.

The strange thing about my love of the game is that I am not even bound by allegiances to a particular team, division, conference or league. I love football with a terminal and non-specific intensity. And while my distaste for baseball and basketball is almost legendary now, my affection for football of both the NFL and NCAA variety is indeed legendary. Everything that George Carlin said about football vs. baseball is the perfect examination of why I love the game.

I love the rivalries, the personalities, the offensive and defensive formations, and I get a kick out of seeing the improbable, the unbelievable way things go down on the field. I watch heart of Walter Payton and LaDanian Tomlinson with awe, the spring-loaded hips of Barry Sanders with amazement and the motormouth of Chad Johnson with amusement.

The Immaculate Reception. The Holy Roller. The Miracle in the Meadowlands. The Hail Mary. The Drive. All of these moments in sporting history are part of my memory.

And I will watch any game I find. An ESPN classics repeat of the 1982 Stanford-Cal game? I'm there. A preseason match between the Houston Texans vs. Oakland Raiders? Where do I sign up? If I found a NCAA Division III game somewhere deep on the cable dial, I would watch it (Go Poets). I've even watched World League/NFL Europe games when it was still a viable entity.

But my favorite thing to find on the tube is something that NFL Films has put together. The combination of symphonic music and slow motion action shots just can't be beat really.

If I am going to be fair, I have to admit that I am largely disappointed by the games that a lot of the major college teams schedule at the beginning of the season. Of course, every once in a while something extraordinary happens like 1AA champion Appalachian State taking out #5 Michigan this weekend just reinvigorated my love of the game as a whole(and I give App. St. all the credit in that win... saying that Michigan overlooked them or isn't the team the media made them out to be is denigrating their opponent's effort and skill), but because the impossible can happen on any given Saturday or Sunday, it makes every game a thing of magical beauty.

But I will not watch the CFL... that is going a little too far. I'm Canadian, and I have to draw the line at that. 110 yards... why, why?

So, I'm I ready for some football. Damn Right!

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey there, thanks for leaving comment on my blog Bontb (http://www.bontb.com) I really appreciate that. I posted results on same page , thanks to you and others my experiment was successful. Subscribe to my feeds, in few day's I will post interview with Aaron author of SEO BOOK

MC said...

Those were some impressive results indeed.

Brandon said...

You know, I don't really like NFL football all that much. In fact, if I didn't play fantasy, I probably wouldn't watch much NFL. But fantasy gets me excited about it, so I'll be right in front of my tube on Sunday.

College football on the other hand, I love it. I even went to a Division III game this afternoon and had a good time.

By the way, I just read that Get Fuzzy strip that your avatar is from. That's hilarious.

MC said...

I've warmed a lot on NFL football over the past 5 years or so... but let me put it this way:

Seasons played in the Madden games (Detroit, always the Lions)- 7

Seasons played in the NCAA Football games (Florida A&M, Iowa State, Wake Forest and the ULM Ragin' Cajuns in 2000 and Temple in 2005) - 29

As soon as I saw that image, I knew it had to be my new avatar. It was perfect... I almost wrote a post a few weeks ago about how nearly every picture of sloths I've ever seen looked like they were smiling for the camera. I am not making that up.

Viagra Online said...

in fact is a little bit hard to make a comparicion between a sport and other, in fact I'm a great fan of the basketball, but I admire in a great way the rest of sports, specially football.