It's Like a Tournament Where Nobody Gets to Play!

I have a job which requires me on a more or less regular basis to make small talk with strangers. This is how I know that when someone you don't know very well mentions a sport, the proper (courteous) response is, “Oh, who's your team?” And then they tell me, and I say, “Ohhh,” and try to sound very interested and then we're both very quiet and then one of us changes the subject. Someone who knew anything about sports might have a conversational follow-up depending on what team or sport was being named, but obviously I am not that person. However, by taking the previous information and applying the scientific method, I can discern that if a person is a fan of a sport, it is assumed that they will have a particular team that they support above others, which is why I have decided that I, too, must select a team to root for as part of my quest to understand football.

Most people feel a a connection with the team that plays in the town that they grew up in, but I live in Los Angeles, which lacks a football team, so I have been granted a certain amount of freedom in my choice. Once again, I have chosen to do as little research as possible, so my choice of team is going to be based on the very little knowledge I have unwillingly absorbed up to this point, with a heavy emphasis placed on the awesomeness of the team logo. After spending a little bit of time at nfl.com looking at the list of all 32 teams, I have decided that the only fair way to go about this is to go through each team individually, so here is how this is going to work: I will write one blog entry for each of the four cardinal directions, so one each for AFC/NFC North, South, East and West, although not necessarily in that order. In each of these entries I will select one team, and then I will write a final entry comparing my four initial picks and choosing the team that I will follow either until Super Bowl 2011 or until I get bored or something else happens. And by the time I've written all that, I'm hoping that Football for Dummies will have shown up via my inter-library loan so I can start learning about rules and stuff. We begin tomorrow.