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Football is back. The college season started in earnest last weekend – Go Hawks – and on Thursday the NFL begins its domination of the airwaves. This marks the time of the year when five out of seven days of the week you can watch live American football. They kind where they rarely use their feet. On Thursday, you can watch the NFL’s newest product, Thursday Night Football. If that’s not your speed, some of the lesser lights of the NCAA also ply their trade on everyone’s second favorite day of the work week. Fridays you can watch more college games, and if you live in a richer neighborhood, or anywhere in Texas, high school football. On Saturdays from about 10am central to past midnight you can watch the big stars of D-1 duke it out on variously colored gridirons across the country. Sunday the NFL rolls out its big guns and airs game from 11am Central to 11pm Central. To finish off the week on Monday there’s a nice little game thrown in after work. Tuesday and Wednesday are off days, reserved for giving your internal organs a break from processing all the salt, fat, and alcohol you’ve consumed during the rest of the football watching week. I guess, if you looked hard enough you could probably stream some sort of D-3 or high school games those weeks, but the product just won’t be any good.
I’ve written about this before, but football can be a tough thing to watch. It can also be an outstanding display of athletic prowess, team coordination, and tactical genius. The sport is dangerous, the league is run and owned by a collection of insane plutocrats, and many of the star payers have refused the COVID vaccination, among other things. So, I get it if you don’t watch football at any level. The business of sport, and capitalism, creates material conditions that make a less than desirable environment. Though college players can now sign endorsement contracts, so that’s nice, I guess. In any case, I still watch, and probably will keep watching for a long time. I’m nothing if not problematic in that regard.
I don’t want to spend this whole newsletter bemoaning my various moral fallibilities when it comes to football. Other people have done that much better than I ever well. The point has been made to death. If you don’t know the problems with any professional sport, you’re either willfully ignoring them or living in a cave. A cave that somehow gets cable TV, but a cave nonetheless.
So instead of boring you, my dear readers, with my pointless soul-searching, I’ll pivot ever so slightly and instead bore you by writing about my favorite NFL team, THE Philadelphia Eagles. The Eagles, a pre-AFC/NFC merger team, are perennial losers. Just like one of my other favorite teams, the Philadelphia Phillies. They’ve only won one Super Bowl, in 2018, despite regularly making the playoffs. Their fans are almost universally regarded as the worst in NFL. Not me of course, everyone loves me. Stories of Eagles fans throwing batteries at Santa Claus, and other indignities placed upon the players abound in Philly sports lore. Hell, the worst characters currently on TV, the It’s Always Sunny crew, are Eagles fans. It just makes sense.
The fans are not the team however. Despite that, the team will also not be good this year. Our Super Bowl winning coach was recently fired because he refused to acquiesce to the owner’s demands. Not because he wasn’t winning, or wasn’t taking the team to the playoffs, but because he didn’t pass enough to appease Jeffrey Laurie’s appetite for high-flying offenses. For my non-football obsessed readers this is a bad reason to fire a coach. Owners who get involved in the play-calling and game-planning for their teams notoriously never know what they’re doing. The owner’s only job should be to give money to the team, fire/hire General Managers and Coaches when they’re not doing their jobs well, bilk home cities out of hundreds of millions of taxpayer money for stadiums redevelopments, and sit in the owner’s box on Sundays. That’s it. Unfortunately, football team owners are on the whole either the fail-children of billionaires, who have never worked a day in their life, or evil business tycoons who think that because they were able to successfully exploit the labor of their workers, they’ll be able to micromanage a football team to multiple Super Bowls. That’s a long sentence, but the point is that team owners are all megalomaniac ego hounds who have no idea what they are doing. The best of them don’t try to coach, the worst do.
So, what does this mean for the Eagles? It means that we have a rookie head coach who no one else interviewed, a General Manager who has sunk his Svengali-esque claws into Laurie, an aging core of important position players, and a QB who no one call tell if he’ll be good or bad. In other words, a recipe for disaster. My hope is that the team will win six games. The Eagles play seventeen games. So not a good record. Of course, the beginning of a new season always brings a little hope. The hope that perhaps our wide receivers will be better than advertised, that our D- and O-lines will dominate the competition, and that Jalen Hurts will prove to be better than Tom Brady in his prime. After all, stranger things have happened. The realist in me says that by mid-November the Eagles will be out of the playoff hunt and be playing for draft position. In the scheme of things this is fine. Not every team can be good every year. Losing is part of fandom, especially when you’re a fan of Philadelphia sports. Even in losses there are still incredible feats of athleticism, thrilling finishes, and moments of joy. Finding those moments, and not letting the bad ones get to you are keys to being a fan.
I don’t want to make it out as if I’m sort of self-help guru. Figuring out how to deal with your fandom. So don’t take this that way. I am not a certified counselor. Or even a Lucy from Peanuts type counselor. I’m just a guy with a newsletter.
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Yet another enjoyable one Dylan, almost spit-take worthy with that line about owners bilking taxpayers over renovation projects. BUT: I was hoping this column would all be one big set-up to you simply crowing at the end: AND THE GRIZ BEAT THE HUSKIES!!! So that was a little disappointing...