Last fall I was nestled into the couch with the dog and a bowlful of salty snacks, watching a slew of football games. My wife, whose NFL knowledge breaks down into arbitrarily asking, “Is that one of the Manning brothers?” wandered by and asked which team we were rooting for. “Neither,” I said. We were just watching the game. She stopped and asked again. Surely there was some back-story or prejudice that led us to root for one team over the other. “Nope,” I said. Just watching the game.
We both kind of let that float in the air for a few minutes. Then I went back to shoveling Ms. Vickie’s chips into my mouth with reckless abandon. The game was on and it demanded my attention. But it was pretty clear that this was a season unlike one she had ever witnessed before.
No drafts.
No bets.
No fantasy football.
No weekly picks.
Hey now.
What I Did
For nine years I wrote about the NFL at my site WideRight.com, ‘a lone fan’s attempt to explain an entire NFL season.’ I predicted the outcome of more than 2,000 games and compiled a better record against the spread than most sports columnists. My straight up record was pretty stellar.
Some of the boys at NASA became quite partial to the picks, and posted them in their lunchroom from time to time. I got some very energetic hate mail when the picks were bad, and a rare smattering of applause when things went well. We made terrific fun of football dot com (sorry, still can’t bear to send them any traffic). For a while I stayed in touch with PR reps from various teams, and got invited as an official visitor to Bears camp in 2002.
Some friends helped out from time to time. We ran a couple of contests and gave away a boatload of NFL DVDs. I got to interview some great writers. After a few years the place got even busier, with friends including Markzilla, The Goodwin Files and Tim Parry throwing in guest articles and columns. I hold very fond memories of my friend Pierre, aka The NYC Bruiser, and his ‘Con Ball’ series that tracked the criminal activity of NFL Players. We used the Alaskan penal code as a benchmark of performance. Due to the enormous amount of criminal activity on display, it took forever to format those posts. My fingers still tense up just thinking about it.
After a while, predicting the games became a chore and I decided to change it up. By 2006 video was becoming prevalent on the web – I was particularly inspired by ZeFrank and The Show – and decided to create short video clips for WideRight’s 9th season. I bought a video camera, dry-cleaned my white shirt and spent a few days learning how to use iMovie to edit clips together.
After a few years of writing out the picks, I had it down to about a 90-minute exercise; the video & editing work blew that schedule right off the field. Completing the clips took anywhere from three hours to a whole day. Most of my regular visitors hated them. I knew that was a likely outcome, but before the season I had committed to seeing it through. By the time the Super Bowl wrapped up, even if I wasn’t aware of it consciously, I knew I was done. I wasn’t going to devote that much time to making picks the following year, and going back to plain text would have felt like a defeat. In my own small way, I went out on top.
After this sunk in, I decided to make a clean break. No football-related activities other than watching the games. And that’s how the 2007 season began.
What I learned
As the season drew near, the earliest event I missed out on was the fantasy drafts. It was the first time in over a decade I hadn’t huddled up in front of the computer with my massive collection of printouts, sweating out the late rounds so I could make my annually futile pick of Jeff George, just in case some team decided to let him air it out one more time.
I missed the drafts. It’s my favorite part of fantasy football. But since I had no intention of following through with weekly rosters, it wouldn’t have been fair to take part.
The regular season rolled around and I confess to a little post-partum depression when I confirmed that, in fact, an NFL season could go on without my prognostication. As the weeks ticked by and New England made their run at perfection, I started to realize what a tremendous pressure lifted from my shoulders when I was simply a viewer.
The amount of anxiety that goes into watching an NFL game when you root for individual players to score in specific manners, never mind having a three-team reverse parlay teaser riding on the final result, is enormous. Taking a step away from these activities allowed me to focus on the game…and I’m pretty sure I observed more, learned more and enjoyed them more without all the other thoughts clouding my head.
I know this is the manly equivalent of going to Vegas for the spas, or giving up on beer because of the carbs. But it was true, for me anyway.
I did make one exception. My wife’s cousin comes in from Boston once a year to watch to the Patriots pummel the Bills. Since this was part of New England’s historic run I decided not only to go to the game, but also to put down small wagers on every exotic bet I could think of. I bet that the Bills would choke under pressure and call the game’s first timeout and challenge, among others. Of course I forgot how hyper-competitive Bill Belichick is and lost both bets en route to the Patriots’ 56-10 pasting of Buffalo.
The experience itself was wonderful though. I tailgated with a bunch of loudmouthed chowder heads for 12 hours in a frigid Buffalo parking lot – and starting talking like them after my third beverage. I can only describe my New England accent as a cross between Mayor Quimby from The Simpsons and a half keg of Pabst Blue Ribbon.
I enjoyed the season very much. The return of the Browns as a legitimate NFL team; 16-0; Green Bay’s first playoff game; the Giants’ meteoric postseason. And much like eating chili out of a bread bowl, when it was over, it was over. Nothing left to clean up.
What’s next?
Absence makes the heart grow fonder. This is a shiny new website, only one post old, and I’m visualizing how lovely the place will look with lines like “Pittsburgh Steelers (1-0) @ Cincinnati Bengals (0-1): Bengals -6.0” dancing all over the screen.
But what used to be driven by passion is now tempered by experience. I read, and was greatly moved, by Fooled By Randomness, Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book on chance and its hidden role in life. It would take me hours to (badly) summarize his arguments. I’ll crib from (and agree with) Amazon’s summary, which states in part that the book, “examines what randomness means in business and in life and why human beings are so prone to mistake dumb luck for consummate skill.”
I look back at the picks I made (against the spread specifically) in light of Taleb’s book, and see nothing more than a guy who got lucky more often than not. I have no special skill at divining the outcome of football games. Anyone who claims such skill is a liar, a thief, or a columnist at football dot com.
I know that every time I correctly guessed which team would beat the spread, I felt my insights were ‘vindicated’. When I guessed the incorrect result, I maintained that my logic had still been ‘theoretically correct’ and should that game be replayed a number of times, I would be right more often than not. I am not alone in feeling this way. There’s simply no other way to explain how intelligent people can end up one or two picks over a .500 season and consider themselves geniuses. Listen fellas; it’s darts. You throw ‘em at a board and hope you end up with more in your column than the other guy. That’s it. That’s all.
I can still see posting some game picks. It’s great fun and is always a great conversation starter among degenerates. But after my thousands of little posts, a respectable library of NFL books and a solid decade of studying the philosophy, poetry and violence of NFL, I think Bill Parcells still summed it up best.
“Don’t worry about it. It’s just a bunch of guys with an odd-shaped ball.”
This post is tagged
No Comments