The Demise and Rebirth: Inside the Mind of a Football Fanatic

You sit in front of your television set and watch the Super Bowl like it's the last thing you will ever see. You scream and holler at the screen as if the players can hear you. When halftime hits, instead of watching a band from the early '80s perform for paid screaming teenagers, you talk to your friends about the halftime adjustments your team should make.

As you sit there and replay that interception the middle linebacker should have had early in the first quarter, it hits you.

This is it. The Super Bowl is the last official game of the season. I mean, you have the Pro Bowl, but who actually watches that anymore? Your favorite player decided to opt out of playing because of that “lingering” hamstring injury.

College football ended almost a month ago and you realize that all is lost. No more football for the next six months. In the life of a die-hard NFL fan, six months seems like a lifetime.

Then you start to go through withdrawals. You watch SportsCenter replay the big game for the thousandth time, and you even start to watch games that you DVR’d early in the season.

You keep your television set locked on the NFL Network, but they are just as bad as ESPN with re-runs. At this point, you have finally realized that there is nothing more to do but wait.

So you struggle through the rest of the sports season. Sure, you watch March Madness and get a little excited over the hoopla, but it isn’t the same. Then you see that there is light at the end of the tunnel. The NFL draft is coming really soon and you start to break down which players your team should select.

Maybe replace that linebacker that dropped the INT in the Super Bowl? Draft another running back to split carriers with the workhorse your team already has in the backfield, or maybe shore up the O-line by choosing a hoss that is sure to keep your quarterback standing upright instead of eating turf.

You even go so far as to create a list of players that you rank from 1-100; specifically placing an asterisk next to the ones that your team needs. The draft finally arrives and your team chooses the players that weren’t even on your radar.

As you play close attention to ESPN’s Mel Kiper’s hair and his prediction for your team’s players, you are slowing starting to think that your team has had the best draft in years. You are assured that the team that you live and die for will make it back to another Super Bowl or at least make another playoff run.

The draft comes and goes and your attention starts to shift toward minicamps and signing draft picks. You take a peek at the free-agent pool to see if any of the players available would mesh well with your team.

Add a wide receiver here and a 330-pound nose tackle there and your team has filled all of its holes. Then you see that the coach, GM, and owner are all on different pages. The owner wants another receiver, the coach is in desperate need for help in the secondary, and the GM is busy worrying about staying under the salary cap.

You think to yourself, will this lead to discord in the locker room? Then you shake off any notion of conflict in the locker room because your team’s veteran leadership is just that good.

July rolls around and its almost time for training camp. You start a rolling countdown of days left before training camp starts. Before you go to sleep each night, you check ESPN.com to see if your team has signed their draft picks or has made a blockbuster trade.

When you arrive to work the next morning, your co-workers make it a habit to tease you about “the days remaining before camp starts” question that you ask each day.

You finally are close to arriving to your final destination. The season is right around the corner and you are about to burst with anticipation. Your eagerness to see new players and coaches in new places is only tempered by knowing that you are going to attend a real life NFL training camp with real life NFL football players.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the life of a football junkie. The one shot in the vein comes few and far between after the Super Bowl ends. But when the feeling hits you, it feels like none other. For the next six-and-a-half months, fellow football junkies across the country will join me in partaking in a sport that has become the pastime in America. The NFL.

-JH