NFL-Free Sundays: The Good, Bad and Inconsequential

The first Sunday in March will be the fourth Sunday of 2012 without pro football. With the NFL Combine over and the focal point of the league's annual draft scheduled for a weeknight, a true football fasting has begun. Unless you count the mid-April spring games of many college football programs (and you shouldn't), we won't see any 100-yard action until the league's preseason begins in August, just over five months from now.

Don't go crazy just yet. It'll be all right.

The absence of weekend football forces us to do a lot of things. We have to find other excuses to get bombed on Sunday afternoon, to not do anything around the house. Life, which most of us paused for over 20 consecutive weekends in the fall and winter, resumes, and with it comes all the business that we so artfully dodged while the games were on.

What else would we rather be doing but sitting parked on our broken-in couches, screaming at no one in particular in front of our televisions? The temperature in your neck of the woods is probably still too cold for yard work or squeezing in 18 holes (I'm talking about golf, you pervert). 

It's hard to admit this, but we as a people need a break from football, and we should be grateful that we're getting one. Think about it this way: Eating ice cream once a week is a nice treat. Eating it every day would be unflattering to one's sensibilities (and one's waistline). While Kommissar Goodell is still pining for an 18-game regular season, it may not be very long before he's pushing for one of the 52-week variety.

Imagine a world with a football game (let's suppose at least one, but possibly several) every Sunday afternoon. Wouldn't we eventually grow weary of the game? I'd say we would, especially if the NFL gooses us like they did this past season, and fills half of those nationally televised events with the Jacksonville Jaguars. That's a world in which I don't care to live.

We're getting a break as fans, because we need one. Following the game is fun, but that fun can get expensive and time-consuming. Consuming news, attending games, and burdening our acquaintances with talk about our fantasy rosters takes a toll on our loved ones. Taking a couple months to remember what our spouses and kids look like would hardly be the end of the world. (I don't have any kids, but maybe you do.)

I'm convinced that the idea for "spring cleaning" didn't emerge from the warmth of the weather but rather the lingering space in the sports calendar. The households of America have February and March as the only two months without football or baseball. What better time to start rummaging through the closet to find shorts and pants that still fit? I know that my wife will be handing me the occasional honey-do list (the kid situation might show up on that in one form or another, if you follow me). I might actually stop and converse with folks after the late Sunday service at my church, instead of knocking over elderly folks in a sprint to my car, to my pregame shows.

I'm not the first person to say this, but this is the time to be building up that good will that you'll need to get away with doing absolutely nothing on those fall weekends. And by the way, if you're a young couple looking to lock things down, put yourselves on notice and get it done before Labor Day. I'm serious. Fall weddings are overrated, anyway. And you're just annoying your friends by forcing them to give up a football weekend to come to your stupid wedding. Recent marriage statistics suggest that you're getting divorced in five years anyway. So spare us: Shell out for a summer event or save yourself the price of a stamp by not inviting me.

And don't waste this time getting hooked on other sports. That would be a bad move. Spend this time building up the brownie points, as many as you can, because you'll need that surplus when you shut down the world around you to watch your team clinch a playoff spot in Week 17. So do all of that work around the house now. Make as many pickups and drop-offs to your kid's basketball practice as humanly possible. Be the supreme being in your household for those five months. And then blow them all off when Week 1 finally does get here.

Sundays are precious to all of us, for a multitude of reasons. We need to embrace these empty Sundays while we can. Maybe there's nothing more fun than watching football on our alleged "day of rest." At least we have a few months to investigate.