From the fannish side, there have been a pair of middling-at-best campaigns mounted in Pittsburgh and New York (New Jersey) this year for my wife and I to ostensibly cheer on. The Steelers are 7 and 7, the Giants are 8 and 6, but they’ve both been struggling lately, banged up, in freefall, however you want to characterize it. Technically both teams are still in the hunt, as the sports pundits like to say, but it seems less and less likely that either will make good on those possibilities. This may just not be their year, in either case. My wife and I are both reasonably ok with that. I’ve talked before about how statistically unlikely it’s been that one or the other of us has had a legitimate rooting interest in the Super Bowl more of the Februaries we’ve been together than not, and the other day my wife and I were discussing how, frankly, it can be exhausting. We agreed that it would be refreshing and enjoyable to go to a Super Bowl party this winter where we honestly had no emotional investment in the outcome and we could merely enjoy the food, laugh at the commercials, and appreciate the back and forth of a hard-fought game without our heart in our throat. I acknowledge that may sound a bit like sour grapes, but there’s really no self-deception involved. Just reading the writing on the wall and not only not being terribly put out about it, but (at least partly) relieved.
Meanwhile, on the gambling side, the football pick’em pool has been a lackluster enterprise, as well. My wife simply has not been feeling it, due to the distractions of being pregnant and changing jobs, along with the quirks of an online system that requires setting all the week’s picks up online before the first Thursday night game each weekend (you can always go back on Friday, Saturday or early Sunday morning to switch the non-Thursday picks based on changing situations, but still). There have been a couple of weeks where my wife simply did not submit her picks at all, and that has dragged down her overall score for the season, which creates a vicious feedback loop wherein it’s hard to be motivated to do your Week 13 or 14 picks when you’re so far behind in the overall standings. I, on the other hand, have dutifully submitted my picks every week, but I got clobbered more than once, a couple of weeks where I only managed to pick 5 games correctly and one improbable week where I only got 3 correct. The rest of the season I’ve been utterly unremarkable, getting 7 or 8 or 9 right. I’m currently in a 3-way tie for 21st place out of 35 people. (Or arguably 32 people who submitted picks every single week; in addition to my wife, my cousin skipped doing her picks a few weeks as well, and one of the alleged members of the pool has nothing but 0’s across the board for all 15 weeks.)
I can, however, happily report that my sainted grandmother is still at it, and in fact she won Week 15 with 12 games picked correctly AND the closest guess to the total MNF points. So there’s a bright spot.
But as I’ve alluded to before sometimes it feels like football is kind of slipping outside of our sphere of awareness anyway, in no small part due to our kids, who usually keep us way too busy to devote three or four (or six or nine) hours every Sunday to doing anything that isn’t centered on keeping them amused and out of trouble. We’ve been gradually giving up on the idea that we can all just sit on the couch and watch football together, mostly because of the little guy. He often protests that football is boring (and, to be fair, sometimes he’s right) and when that’s not happening, he’s very likely to be getting unacceptably riled up by the Dolby-mic’ed, Hi-Def contact sport playing out before his eyes. As of the next season opener we’ll have three offspring under the age of five, so we might be on a bit of an NFL hiatus by then, and come back to it some time around 2018 or so. If anybody wants some action on the over/under for expansion teams or relocations between now and then, just let me know.
No comments:
Post a Comment