Continuously serving Kosciusko County since 1854
People recommend starting new habits when you spend a week on vacation. I’ll spare you the details on things like stretching, and improved sleep patterns.
One of my sports viewing changes will be watching a condensed 40–50-minute replay of selected NFL games in the 2025 season on my NFL+ app.
I know I told you I used this app during recent seasons, but once – this season – mid-October arrived I fell further behind my catch-up viewing because of work and public address obligations.
There are only three or four weeks between then and when I left for Florida last Saturday that I did not work in my accounting role continuously through its seven days.
Many times, I had the games on, but my face was in my laptop and it’s two big screens, struggling to pay attention to games of interest I might discuss in this column.
I spent this last week vacationing, however, and found a way to catch up with a lot of heard-but-visually-missed NFL action.
I usually bounce around looking for the best games each week. Instead, I am picking teams with interesting and successful seasons, focusing on their biggest wins, and a game where they lost to a considerably inferior team.
When I finish with that - among the L.A. Rams, Super Bowl LX champs, Seattle, the New England Patriots, and the Denver Broncos – I’ll look at teams whose won-loss records were adversely affected by injuries (Tampa Bay, Indianapolis, Baltimore).
The rest of the off-season viewing will be among dumpster fires: Cleveland, New York Giants, and a few games with the New York Jets with particular focus on why the Jets’ pass defense went almost the entire season without snaring a pass interception.
Some of these groups among those tiers will likely wind up being watched playing among each other so I’ll kill two birds with one stone.
I’ll have some time in the spring to keep this thing going, and it’s a fantastic opportunity to see certain pro gridders – their accomplishments fresh in my mind – while they test the waters of free agency in March and April.
I have one (or possibly two) planned spring sports announcing events, likely lending a hand on a few back-up calls, so spring is wide open.
I pruned my fall 2026 sports announcing tree, too.
A few weeks ago, a “guess-timate” of scheduled fall events were on a sheet of paper that fell out on the floor. It listed at least 30 dates between mid-August and mid-November. I realized I needed to prune my fall announcing tree, too, and did so more recently.
Bottom line in the fall: more football, much less soccer (except for backup).
Football feels like a sport where the game’s final horn sneaks up on you, and I’m most comfortable with its cadence.
I enjoyed soccer as my time in that press box progressed, and I had a greater appreciation as each of the last five seasons passed why it’s called the beautiful game. Soccer matches are quick events, too, but I just want fall to be more about Warsaw’s football and unified flag football programs.
With all this said, here are some closing thoughts:
Good luck to the Whitko Wildcats girls’ basketball team in their semistate quest this afternoon. If they advance to this evening’s finals, I hope they face Bremen for the nighttime contest and beat the Lions soundly.
It would be nice to have another area girls’ basketball team closing the month of February in Gainbridge Fieldhouse.
Fun fact (it would be even more fun if the Lady Tigers were part of today’s semistate action), the orange and black beat two of today’s Class 4A semistate challengers (Northridge, Norwell), and two of today’s Class 3A semistate challengers (Bellmont, Fairfield), only losing to the South Class 3A challenger, Jennings County.
In the meantime, I’m eager to see how well my aggressive timeline for catching up on the most recently completed NFL season goes in the days and weeks following my flight’s landing in South Bend around suppertime.
