NFL: The Beginning Of The NFL Can Be The End Of Everything Else

Week 1 of the NFL season has become one of the greatest weeks in sports. If you ask me, it's almost as great as the first weekend of March Madness. But while March Madness gives birth to last second heroes and David-beats-Goliath subplots, Week 1 of the NFL Season symbolizes death. Death of baseball, death of relationships, and ultimately, the death of getting anything accomplished.

Baseball Is Going, Going, Gone

As a Mets fan, I'm usually done worrying about the day-to-day  standings in the National League East by September, but I still watch the games. Once the first NFL week springs upon me, I basically forget that baseball even exists.

Unlike baseball, the NFL seems fresh every week, and even if the team I root for stinks, winning a game against any other team gives bragging rights. In baseball, they play 162 games, so when a first-place-team loses to a bad team, it quickly becomes old news. In the NFL, a bad loss can sting all year, and even motivate an otherwise uninspired team.

Fantasy sports play into this equation a great deal, too. Being a member of both baseball and football fantasy leagues, I can tell you that having a player on a bad team is not enough to make me watch a bad game.

Owning Ryan Zimmerman will not provoke me to watch a Nationals-Pirates game. The issue is that in the NFL, a bad team will still get the ball for almost half the game, giving you a chance to root a heck of a lot more of the time than you would during the 4-at-bats an MLB player gets.

How did this happen? In one sentence: There aren’t enough playoff teams in baseball. Major League Baseball does not give me enough of a passion play coming down the stretch. With 162 games played, why should I care about game #130 of a team that is playing around .500 ball and can’t possibly compete for the playoffs.

Teams are forced to dump players for salary and make trades for instant gratification so that they can prepare for the next year almost as soon as the all-star break ends. If baseball increased the amount of teams to qualify for the playoffs to six per division, like the NFL, or eight per division, like the NHL and NBA, the excitement would exponentially increase.

Teams would hold on to their players longer, teams would play harder knowing that they still have a chance, and fans that have been robbed all season long for every penny owners can squeeze out of them, might actually fill stadiums in September, and maybe even buy a few more $5.00 hot dogs.

Baseball may be America’s pastime, but the operative word is “past”. The NFL is not going anywhere and may even add two more games to the season. In my estimation, these games would be added in August, not January, taking another two weeks away from baseball, possibly even three if the NFL decided to add a second bye week.

I believe in tradition, but not at the expense of the sport. Baseball needs to get with the times or the boys of summer may become the boys of spring.

It's a Terrible Week To Have a girlfriend.

After the Monday Night Football double header opening weekend, I remarked to a friend that this would have been a terrible weekend to be on the rocks with a girlfriend/wife/significant other. If there is a guy out there on the fence with his girl and is in to football the way I am, this was definitely a make-or-break week.

Consider the way my week evolved:

It actually started Labor Day with my fantasy football draft. Of course, my girlfriend didn’t understand how I could spend two hours in front of the computer screen to do a draft, while staring at the screen so intently that it looked like I was decoding a bomb to save a school bus full of children.

But, she knows I love it and understands that I am at the mercy of the rest of the league. A lot of other guys aren’t as fortunate. The week progressed to Thursday night’s opening game between the Vikings and the Saints. I spent Friday talking about Thursday night’s game and almost forgot about the Saturday of awesome match-ups that waited for me.

I know this is about the NFL, but the NCAA must be mentioned when a weekend includes, Notre Dame-Michigan, Miami-Ohio State, Florida State-Oklahoma, Penn State-Alabama, etc. After an exhausting Saturday, Sunday rolls in with a full slate of games.

In the past, after the four o’clock games, a girlfriend would be excited to have me back for Sunday night and become angered by the fact that there was still a Sunday night game coming up. With my girlfriend not present, I avoided this let-down.

Many neglecting boyfriends are not presented this same situation. So with my football obsession being satisfied, the coup de grâce comes Monday night with a double header of games that start at 7:00 pm and don’t end until 1:00 am. Being the driven fan that I am(with girlfriend out of town), I pretty much watched every second of every game on the four TVs set up in my living room. Another thing my girlfriend doesn’t understand, but that’s another article.

Knowing what I know about fragile relationships—and I am the Stephen Hawking of the subject—anyone who was involved with football as much as I was this week and was in a relationship on the fence, probably watched the second Monday night game from their hotel bar or listened to the game on the car stereo while driving to stay at their mother’s house.

This kind of indulgence is not generally tolerated, and in my opinion, the NFL is fully aware of it. If every week had a Thursday night game, Sunday day and night games and a double header on Monday, I submit that the divorce rate in this country would triple. I love football, but it’s too much.

Not Gonna Happen

With all the hype surrounding the first week of the NFL, I got nothing done. And I mean that literally. I daydreamed at work, I didn’t make it to the gym, and time I would normally spend at home doing something domestic, or even work-related, took a back seat to reading about the NFL, talking about the NFL and watching the NFL.

I love this week, but I’m glad it’s’ over. I’m sure there are quite a few men with some ticked-off girlfriends who agree with me.