Football Is Fun, But Also Hard To Follow Sometimes
Posted
Roger Grossman, Lake City Radio-
I was thinking Sunday as I was watching the Indianapolis Colts get dismantled by the Buffalo Bills that “Andrew Luck may not want to sign a new deal with Indy if this is the best offensive line they can put together to protect him.” I got caught in it – “it” being football, the sport of over-reaction. Colts fans are ready to fire Chuck Pagano, Bills fans think they are ready to overtake the Patriots, Marcus Mariota is the next great quarterback in the league and Peyton Manning is finished as an elite quarterback. We got all of that from one week of games in the NFL. Football is a game that lends itself to over-reaction. We really can’t help ourselves, and here’s why: • THE LOW NUMBER OF GAMES: High school teams play nine games and are guaranteed a playoff game. College teams get 12 plus a bowl game if you win six. And NFL teams play 16. That means each game means more. Let me make this make sense for you: Major League Baseball plays 162 games, NFL 16. So imagine a baseball team losing 10 games in a row. THAT is what it means to a football team that loses ONE GAME. That puts so much more pressure on every play in a football game compared to any other sport. One play can change everything. • ABSENCE MAKES THE MIND GO COO-KOO: Fans of most teams go nine months without football because they didn’t go far in last season’s playoffs. Nine months is a long time. Think about a woman who gets pregnant. She doesn’t find out she’s pregnant for at least a month, so she has seven or eight months of waiting and anticipation for the arrival of her little cherub. Then the big day comes and the labor pains and the pushing and the cursing at her husband for ‘doing this to her’ and then … the birth. They clean the baby up, wrap it up to keep it warm and bring it to the new mom. She sees her baby for the first time –a girl – who has a mullet that looks just like her good-for-nothing loser brother-in-law. Ugh! It’s jarring! But she loves her anyway. THIS is what happens at the beginning of a football season for some fans. That baby could grow up to be beautiful and very successful and rich and/or famous. A rough start doesn’t mean anything in relation to where the end result might be. • THE EMOTION OF FOOTBALL: Just to participate in football means you are buying into the concept of offering your body to be hit by opponents who are trying to stop you from scoring touchdowns or by throwing your body at someone to stop THEM from scoring on your team. There is a lot of emotion that has to go into that, especially if you are choosing to continually do that ‘for fun’. When you or the team you coach or the team you cheer for doesn’t succeed in that, emotion can get the best of you. That leads to emotional rollercoasters, and that’s a hard way to live. So the quest to win a football game carries with it a heavy emotional price, and losing means you put a lot into that game and didn’t get the payoff. • SPORTS TALK RADIO: Yep, WE are part of the problem. We have an entire week to sit and stew over, analyze and over-analyze and project the eternal meaning of every play in every game … because there won’t be another one for what seems like forever. So we in sports talk radio become the safe harbor for fans who are looking to beat down someone because they lost. We, collectively as an industry, open the phone lines or social media posts up to whoever loses and half the teams that win because their fans are either mad at play calling or other coaching decisions, the highest paid players on their team who under-performed, and the talk show host for speaking against how they are feeling about it all. It’s what we do, but it isn’t always pretty. It puts a lot of extra pressure on coaches and high-profile players, and not too many people perform well under that extra weight. But all that said, THAT is what we LOVE about football! It’s once a week, it’s a limited number of games per season, it’s special, and every little detail matters. So Colts fans … chill out. Notre Dame fans … be real. Remember, it’s only one or two games … right?
