in moderation

Current Mood: anxious

I am going to try and stay away from repeating last year's football mania, where every week I wrote up a summary of the action in both NCAAF and NFL of all my favorite teams, their rivals, my hated teams, and division and conference foes, plus can't miss highlights. I say this for a number of reasons - most people bored of it quickly, it became something of an obsession, and it took a ton of time, and towards the end I felt compelled to do it for completeness, as part of the status quo, rather than for fun. It felt like a chore, and if it comes to that I should probably either put that writing on another site (a sports page) and/or try to get paid for it. There are plenty of people who get paid to do that sort of thing and I'm not going to try and compete.

That said...

I am way stoked for football to come back. Purdue's coach Joe Tiller is retiring this year, and our QB Curtis Painter has a ton of experience and should put up great numbers. Jenny and I are tripping to Green Bay for a preseason game (on ESPN for Monday Night Football - you all should watch), I have a new jersey to wear, and let's not forget fantasy football.

More people are gonna play FF this year, my roommates are way more into football than last year (which isn't saying much...I'm pretty sure John couldn't name more than 2 NFL players - and that's okay, I'm just trying to give some perspective). Roommates have cable TV with DVR and get ESPN plus I have a bunch of bar-age friends to go watch games with at fun sports bars.

My, how times have changed. I like to play Madden now, fer chrissake.

Some hopes:

*Purdue finishes with at least a winning season for Tiller, and Painter gets drafted by the NFL (joining Drew Brees and Kyle Orton) to a cool team. While I'm at it, let's pretend I get to go see Purdue beat OSU @ Columbus.

*This Favre/Rodgers deal gets situated soon, and Jenny is happy, and the Packers community escapes with dignity intact and the least amount of feelings hurt. Favre wins all of football and then retires for real, having had the best season in the history of ever with a super bowl win, then Aaron Rodgers steps up and does great things.

*Tony Romo doesn't fuck up in the playoffs...again.

*Carson Palmer finds targets downfield and the Cincinnati D becomes an unstoppable wall of menacing talent. Chad Johnson settles down and makes Randy Moss look like a CFL player. Nobody on the team stabs, robs, rapes, burgles, or frightens anybody else for one whole calendar year.

*The New Orleans Saints win their division, having been carried there by the stunningly brilliant Good Brees and Good Saints.

*The Patriots and Colts hate each other so much that neither of them bother playing anybody else, and the result is that some other teams get to play in December.


I'll leave the nasty stuff about the Bears, and the Steelers, and the Browns, and Tom Brady, and IU and Notre Dame and Michigan and the Yankees for some other time.