My football season is over.
In a soul-crushing span of 24 hours, both of my teams flopped around on national television and stomped my ardor back into the turf.
I admit it: After years of following Texas A&M and the New Orleans Saints, one would think I’d be satisfied with a Super Bowl victory and defeats of ranked Oklahoma and Nebraska teams in the same year… but like Icarus, we always want more – and when the bright light of expectation (and national television) shines upon us, we can bask briefly in its glory (maybe for a quarter) before we come crashing back to reality.
And this is the reality of a football fan in Arizona: Thank God that’s over, now I can go outside and do something worthwhile with my time.
As the rest of our nation suffers under the gray cloud of winter, the sun shines on our desert playground. With lows in the mid-40s, highs in the upper-60s, every Sunday is battle between the Red Zone Channel and the better angels of our natural environment: Our hiking boots, our mountain bikes, our endless skies. Now I don’t have to fret that dilemma – now my Sundays will be free from disappointment (the Arizona Cardinals, the Cleveland Browns, the Seattle 7-9 Seahawks? REALLY?) as I bask in the life-affirming goodness of tending my vegetable garden, reading books on my patio, or passing an afternoon accruing much-needed Vitamin D beside a swimming pool.
And if I keep telling myself that, I might actually believe it – because every summer, when the mercury scoots past 110, I long for the air-conditioned goodness of a TiVO’d early-season game (TiVO for 30 minutes, then watch football commercial-free). I also pine for the rare overcast day in the mid-50s (WINTER!) when we can make gumbo during the early game, taste it during the afternoon game, and eat it during the night game.
Damn you, football gods! I raise my fist in rage… and I resort to that sad balm of sportswriters everywhere – the 2010 Season Postmortem aka Closure for the Defeated. Bear with me, I’m a little rusty on this one. First the Aggies, who lost to LSU, 41-24, in the Cotton Bowl on Friday night…
Living as I do in the heart of the Pac-10, I was able to see only parts of just three Texas A&M games this year – Oklahoma (3 quarters), Texas and LSU. I followed the rest of the games – real-time scores only – via the USA Today app on my iPhone, and whatever I could gather through newspaper websites. So it’s best for me to approach this from the opposite perspective: I’ve seen a shit-ton of LSU games this year because of the CBS contract and our squatter’s proclivity for rooting for a school to which he neither matriculated nor graduated. (That would be Ross – Pat has historically been lukewarm about the school he attended briefly, but now he has Ross to egg him on, and so I am treating them both to Lolo’s Chicken and Waffles).
I could never say this in a newspaper, but I’m glad to say it here: Les Miles has a horseshoe up his ass. I have no idea how he won many of his games (Tennessee? Ole Miss?), and it finally caught up to him with Arkansas. I felt that LSU was beatable – especially if their Jeckyl and Hyde quarterbacking crew showed up, and the Aggies defense kept pressure on them (and managed not to turn the ball over 4 times). If only…
Football begins and ends at the line, and the LSU offensive line manhandled the Aggies – opening avenues for Stevan (I’m as eligible as anyone from Ohio State!) Ridley and Spencer Ware, while giving Jordan Jefferson all kinds of time to provide Terrance Tolliver with another circus catch for his highlight reel. Both teams are young – A&M has only five seniors, including all-universe linebacker Von Miller – and when bad things happen to young teams, i.e. Michael Hodges goes down on defense, an entire gameplan can collapse.
Speaking of gameplans: Why didn’t we blitz more? Jordan Jefferson isn’t the second coming of Joe Montana… or even Matt Hasselbeck (more on that in a moment) – but still, even though we lost one of our linebackers, dance with the horse you rode in on. Keeping pressure on Jefferson necessarily means Les Miles might make a dumb decision and bring in the back up… or that Jefferson would do something epically stupid, as is his nature. You cannot allow 41 points and expect to win the Cotton Bowl!
Hodges’ injury was the difference. The Aggies were in it through the first quarter, gamely responding to LSU’s parries, but when Hodges wasn’t there to plug holes in the middle, and more importantly, to provide leadership, the Aggies lost confidence.
And you need confidence to play in the SEC. I’ll be deemed a traitor by my Big 12-minus-2 friends, and likely some of my Pac-10-plus-2 friends will sniff down their wine glasses at me, but I’ve unwillingly watched a lot of SEC games this season, and frankly, every game is a bowl game in the SEC (and not the Beef o’ Barley Bowl or even the Pinstripe [!] Bowl, either.) Coming into the Cotton Bowl, LSU had played more big games through the span of the previous three months than Texas A&M had – and it showed. If A&M wants to contend for a national title, we have to win those games consistently – and we have to play more of them.
And speaking of Big Games, I feared the Seahawks coming into the Wild Card game, and the Saints didn’t let me down. If you follow my twitter feed (@stacyblog) or my facebook stream, you know that I have an irrational hatred of certain college football coaches, Nick Satan comes to mind, along with Rick Neuweasel, and the indefatigable (or perhaps unindictable) Pete Carroll.
If Pete Carroll and Nick Satan were in a cage match, I’d root for the apocalypse. Instead, I had to watch his smug ass – and his sorry-assed Seahawks – make the defending world champions look like chumps. Having watched New Orleans play the miserable Arizona Cardinals live this year, I am intimately familiar with the Saints’ distinct ability to play down to the level of their competition. It didn’t help that all of our running backs were out for the Seahawks (and though he’s a terrific offensive weapon, Reggie Bush doesn’t count as a running back – as he doesn’t really run so much as he jukes around), but we might have bothered to bring our defense.
Stop me if you’ve heard this before: Speaking of gameplans – Why didn’t we blitz more? Matt Hasselbeck isn’t the second coming of Joe Montana… or even Matt Hasselbeck – after all, he’s coming off an injury, so why not get in his face and make his life miserable. You cannot allow 41 points and expect to advance to the second round! Oh, and while we’re at it, I appreciate Gregg Williams’ “turnover-generating” defense, but creating fumbles doesn’t matter when YOU CANNOT MANAGE TO TACKLE MARSHAWN LYNCH AS HE’S RUNNING DOWN THE FIELD THROUGH THE HANDS OF YOUR DEFENDERS WHO CAN’T BE BOTHERED TO GRAB HIM BY THE SHOULDER PADS AND THROW HIM TO THE GROUND. Watch the replay: The Saints had opportunities to tackle him, but they were way too busy trying to punch the ball out of his grasp, thereby making him look like some kind of superhero.
As I was saying, a hypothetical fumble doesn’t much matter in the face of a momentum-killing, game-clinching, Super Bowl-hopes-destroying touchdown.
That said, the Seahawks (8-9) are moving onward, and the Saints are joining the Aggies on the slag heap of the 2010 football season, and my Sunday has opened up to an infinite wonderland of sunny possibilities. Now I just have to figure out what I’m going to do with all this gumbo.