No, I'm the Dummy, Dummy!

There was a time when I, like many people, accepted the stereotype that football players are not very smart. No longer. Now that I am finally trying to learn the actual rules of the game, I have realized that football players can not possibly be stupid--it's just that once your brain is filled with the rules of football, there isn't any room for anything else.

This is not the first time in my life that I have attempted to learn the rules of football--wait, no, this is the first time that I've tried. But I was supposed to have been taught them in middle school, when for some reason it was decided that the eighth-grade girls should have a six-week football unit in PE. Our middle school (Eleanor J. Toll; go Titans) was built on a hill with the front of the school facing upwards. Behind the school and approximately one and a half stories below the entrance was our eating area, paved with asphalt, which was also on a slant and about forty feet wide. At the bottom of this was a steep incline onto another asphalt area which we used for PE, to play sports like volleyball, basketball, and for a brief, strange time, tennis. And finally, below the asphalt game courts was one last ramp down to a large grass field which we would use for soccer and track and field events. And once and once only in the history of EJT Middle School, flag football. We were taught the rules and split into maybe eight teams, and sent down onto the soft grass to hit the gridiron.

That lasted for about a day, which was all it took for us to realize that our gym teachers were using our play time as an extended smoke break and would never follow us all the way down to the grass. So after that, I think about five of the eight teams decided that we weren't into getting dirty and elected two or three of our most coordinated members to throw the ball back and forth occasionally to give the semblance of activity. The rest of us convened immediately at the bottom of the ramp (in case a gym teacher did look down to make sure we were running around, she would be looking right over our heads), and probably played MASH or something. We didn't move around a lot, is all I remember.

Which is why I now have been reduced to checking out Football for Dummies: Howie Long Makes it Simple from my local library (subtitle added). Thank God Howie is making it simple, because I could not handle complicated. Here is a direct quote from the book:

“The offense has 40 seconds from the end of a given play, or a 25-second interval after official stoppages (such as replacing a wet ball with a dry one), to get in the proper position after an extremely long pass gain. If the offense doesn't snap the ball in that allotted time, it's penalized five yards and must repeat the down....With the exception of the last two minutes of the first half and the last five minutes of the second half of an NFL game, the game clock is restarted after a kickoff return, after a player goes out of bounds on a play, or after a declined penalty.”

Oh, of course. When do I light the acorn on fire?

But then Howie adds insult to injury on the very next page, by teaching us that

“Every football contest starts with a coin toss. Selected members from each team come to the center of the field, where the referee holds a coin....one player from the visiting team calls heads or tails, and that person must do so before the official tosses the coin into the air, hence the term coin toss.” (Emphasis Howie's.)

Hence. The term. COIN. TOSS. I don't know if I can handle this. This chapter is 25 pages long and it's harder to read than Deuteronomy, although the part about not putting eggs to close to a fire during the pre-season was an interesting bit of trivia.

Obviously, something like football is all about action and movement, and is difficult to break down into something that is interesting on the page. So in order to really understand the game, I went out and bought a copy of last year's Madden NFL for the Xbox, and I intend to learn by doing. Which is why I had to get this post written, because all of a sudden a holographic John Madden is trying to give me a personality test to see how much I know about football and if any more happens and I try to put it all into one blog entry it will quite possibly explode my brain.

So that's what's going on so far. And now if you'll excuse me, I have a paper bag around here somewhere that I'd like to breathe into for a while.

And the winner is....

Okay, I spent a lot of time trying to think of some hilarious way to choose between my four division favorites, but I couldn't come up with anything and in real life I'm about three entries ahead of myself. So, because I can't stop giggling at the idea of a dolphin in a football helmet, I'm choosing the Dolphins (sorry Josh), and I promise I will have a new real entry tomorrow and it will be full of awesome.

On the off chance that anyone is reading this, that is.

Round Four: Northern Divisions

This will be our final preliminary round before I am forced to choose the team that I feel most closely represents me within a constructed world of large men trying to run past larger men who like to knock them down. If it feels like there's been a longer wait between entries this time, it's because I worked all weekend, and that made it much easier to procrastinate. But now, down to business.

BALTIMORE RAVENS, AFC – The Baltimore Ravens are unique as a football team in that they seem to have some sort of literary pretension. They are named after Edgar Allen Poe's poem, “The Raven,” and one of their players is that giant kid who went to live in Sandra Bullock's house that time she had a southern accent, and they wrote a book about it. Remember when they used to do weird TV specials where they'd get professional athletes to run through obstacle courses tied to a dog or walk on a tight rope with an actress on their head or something? I think they should revive those, but make the events even more different from playing football. NFL Spelling Bee. I'd watch that, and I'd bet all my money on the guy from the Ravens.

CINCINNATI BENGALS, AFC – I assume that the word “Bengal” in this case refers to a tiger, and not a person of South Asian extraction (the big tip off being the orange and black stripes in the logo), but if the Redskins can have a Native American warrior as their mascot, I see no reason why the Bengals shouldn't have a guy who wears a turban and seems to have mystical powers of assassination that we cannot wrap our puny left-brained Western minds around. For the half-time show he could walk across hot coals and play a flute to a snake in a basket. On their fan gift days they could give away tiny flying carpets. If you're the owner of the Bengals and you're reading this, you should totally do that. You don't even have to credit me or anything for this idea--I am giving it to you for free.

CLEVELAND BROWNS, AFC – See? This is why nobody likes Cleveland.


PITTSBURGH STEELERS, AFC – Can somebody please tell me, are all Hooters Steelers bars, or just the one by my house? Because we're nowhere near Pittsburgh. I really like the concept of the Steelers, though. Pittsburgh is like, the capital of the Rust Belt, and they own it by saying yeah, you know who represents us? Steel workers. Not a bird from a poem, not a cartoon cat with a dopey name. A dude. Who makes things. Out of steel. Want to fight me? I didn't think so.

CHICAGO BEARS, NFC – The Chicago Bears are an institution. I know this because George Wendt told me so when he hosted Saturday Night Live. Wikipedia tells me that there are only two teams still left from the NFL's inception, and they are the Bears and the Cardinals, so these teams have some cred. Also, my sources tell me that former coach Mike Ditka had superpowers and could defeat any opponent, with the possible exception of a hurricane, if the hurricane was named Hurricane Ditka. This seems to have become classified information, because NBC has made sure that only one of the Chicago superfans sketches can be found online, and it's not even the good one.

DETROIT LIONS, NFC – Listen to me, ladies, if you ever find a man who is a Detroit Lions fan, marry him. You will be able to do whatever you want--cheat, ignore him, get fat-- it won't matter. He will stand by you. Because when I know a team is bad, it's real bad, and when someone can cheer for that team anyway, they can overlook any faults in anything. I would like to see the Lions get good, though. Their logo looks sort of like a medieval coat of arms, and they've been around almost as long as da Bears. They deserve some success for once. Also, I need to say that the first half of this entry is in no way meant to be a slight on my own mother, who is very beautiful and also married to a Detroit Lions fan.

GREEN BAY PACKERS, NFC – Cheese. They pack cheese, okay? And I'm not going to make any jokes about anything else they might or might not “pack,” because that's cheap. Especially when all of their fans work so hard to remind us that they're only packing cheese by wearing ridiculous cheese hats wherever they go. If Pittsburgh can celebrate their town's primary industry via the medium of football, there is no reason why Green Bay shouldn't be able to do the same thing if they want to. There's nothing wrong with packing cheese. It's a good job, it puts food on the table, and the rest of the country needs their cheese to be packed. So just shut up, all right?

MINNESOTA VIKINGS, NFC – Thousands of years ago, a race of proud warriors, with no fear of ice or sea, traveled thousands of miles on dragon shaped boats. They journeyed for months across water, and then land, in the frigid north, with nothing at all to guide them because they were traveling to a place they had never before seen. They trusted their gods to guide them: Thor, of the Thunder, with his mighty hammer; Loki, the Trickster; and Odin, the One-Eyed Father who yet saw more than any mortal could ken, and they made their way to where they would eventually settle. Minnesota. It's in the middle of the country, as far away from an ocean as you can get, there's more snow than Norway has ever seen, and the closest thing they have to fun up there involves accordions. So great job, Odin.

THE WINNER


There are two sides to the coin that is the American South. The side that most of us normally see is Jacksonville, Florida, where people value football and crazy mascots over education. But there are a few urbanized, super crazy areas like Savannah, Georgia, and New Orleans, and Baltimore, Maryland, where the streets are still cobblestoned and people like it there so much that they like to stick around and just hang out, even after they die (sometimes as ghosts, sometimes as sculpture; it's really case-specific). The living people talk with soft, genteel accents, and still take into account the rules laid out by Emily Post, whenever she did that. This is a culture I can sign on to. And I'll start by cheering for their poetic, spelling-bee winning football team.

Round Three: Southern Divisions

So, in the strictest sense, this is a sports blog, and because it is a sports blog, I ought to mention that the Olympics are happening right now. And now you know as much about it as I do.

Today, I make my selection out of the teams from the Southern Divisions. This was tougher for me than East or West, because there are a lot more teams on this list that nobody I know personally would ever consider rooting for. Still, I made a commitment and I intend to honor it, so here's my stupid take on the Southern Division of the NFL.

INDIANAPOLIS COLTS, AFC – Strangely enough, most of the things I actually know about football are related to Indiana. I had a teacher in college who made his students watch Rudy on a regular basis, so I know about Notre Dame (I could never figure out why a school whose mascot was a leprechaun would discourage a hobbit from playing on their team. Inter-species rivalry?), and despite my near-total ignorance of the NFL I couldn't not know about Peyton Manning, the Susan Lucci of football. This could be a great team for me to watch not win.


HOUSTON TEXANS, AFC – That's right, they're so scary they don't need a mascot. Just the regular old residents of their state will be able to take you down. As a matter of fact, sometimes they replace their regular players with adolescent Texan girls, just to give the other team a fair shot. I think the logo of this team might also be their state seal. Or a portrait of their governor.

JACKSONVILLE JAGUARS, AFC – The excuse me? From where? Because I didn't think I'd ever even heard the name of this team before, I went to Wikipedia because that's what I do, and I learned all about their team mascot, Jaxson de Ville (his name is spelled Jaxson because Jacksonville is often shortened to Jax, duh). Direct quote: “Jaxson is known for his crazy antics. He is very interactive with the crowd and the Jaguars (if they're not too busy), and sometimes interacts with the opposing team's players as well. He often mocks and jokes with the other team's mascot, if they are present. These acts got him into trouble in 1998 and stemmed the changing of the NFL's mascot rules, and also caused him to calm down.” Jaxson once got so worked up in 2007 that he had to spend an entire game in a cage, but they did let him out periodically to ride his scooter. Jaxson is really a guy named Curtis Dvorak, who I'm sure is having no trouble paying off his student loans.

TENNESSEE TITANS, AFC – I went to Eleanor J Toll Middle School in Glendale, California, and I was even a cheerleader there, because at our school all the pretty girls who could dance joined the Drill Team. Our mascot was the Titan, so I know lots of really good cheers incorporating the word “Titans,” which I will never forget no matter how hard I try. However, I think it would have been more fun to be a fan of this team when they were still the Houston Oilers (apparently, “Texans” these days are trying to distance themselves from their working-class roots), and their logo had an oil derrick on it that was named Ol' Riggy. Yes sir, good times come and good times go, but Ol' Riggy will always be there, spewing crude oil until she rusts away into nothing but a depleted well of pollution.

ATLANTA FALCONS, NFC – Unlike Indianapolis, there are a lot of things to do in Atlanta, and unlike New Orleans, their football team is not especially good, which is probably why you don't seem to hear a lot about the Atlanta Falcons. Or I don't, at least, maybe you do; I'd ask people not to send letters about this if I thought anyone was reading. They do offer a pretty respectable front, though: decent choice of mascot, non-frightening home town, and pretty cool-looking logo, which means I'm having a hard time figuring out any jokes. But does there always have to be a joke? Is that what life is, just a series of jokes, in which nothing can truly be appreciated sincerely? I'd really like to think so, but apparently not.

CAROLINA PANTHERS – The Carolina Panthers joined the league as an expansion team at the same time as the Jacksonville Jaguars, and they basically have the exact same mascot except one has spots and one doesn't, so I immediately checked the Panthers' mascot page to see if they have anyone who can possibly out do Mr. Jaxson de Ville and was not surprised to find out that they do not. Sir Purr's Wikipedia page is meager and bleak in comparison, despite the fact that he has apparently been granted a knighthood, despite living in the United States and being an anthropomorphic cat. Also, in 2003 the Panthers were nicknamed, the “Cardiac Cats,” but I can't tell whether that's because they won a whole bunch of games within the last two minutes of playtime, or because approximately half of the people working for the team that year were diagnosed with terminal illnesses. It's probably safer not to ask.

NEW ORLEANS SAINTS – WOOOOOOOO!!!!! WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!! SUPER BOWL MOTHER FUCKERS IT'S MARDI GRAS!!!!!!!!!! SHOW US YOUR TITS!!! THIS YEAR EVERY WHORE IN THE CITY IS NAMED KATRINA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

TAMPA BAY BUCCANEERS – So, I think their mascot is a pirate but their logo is just a pirate flag, which doesn't make any sense but now I'm tired from Mardi Gras so I really don't care any more. I'm sort of partial to the Bucs as a person who tries to make things funny, because so far this team is far and away the number one team that looks like they'd have sex with another football team. They hardly ever win, they've got a super swishy image, and their Wikipedia page lists no less than FIVE team colors, one of which is “pewter.” As soon as you start using color names that can't be found in a eight pack of Crayolas, you're looking at sex with dudes. The last time I started making up facts, the Bucccaneers were trying to convince Lady Gaga to design new outfits for their cheerleaders.

THE WINNER

After all those mean jokes about the Buccaneers, I think I'm going to choose them after all. I went to acting school, so I'm comfortable around gays. And even though Jaxson de Ville and his scooter almost won me over, I have a pretty good impression that going to Jacksonville for any length of time would be way more unpleasant and scary than even hanging out with Raiders fans, so I'd like to minimize the risk of anyone thinking I ever ought to go there. So I'm throwing my rose to the Pewter Pirates (which is a name they sometimes go by, says Wikipedia). Maybe they'll add a couple more colors to the flag on their helmets and just go with a rainbow.

Round Two: Eastern DivisionS

I have a husband who is a guy and he knows things about sports, and last night he said to me “Um, just so you know...the AFC and the NFC are different, so there are two Western divisions.” He used the same tone of voice that a woman would use if she were telling you that you had menstrual blood soaking through your pants--very quiet and apologetic, but sort of spitefully mocking, too. My response was a little bit different though, because I felt none of the shame I guess he expected me to feel. When it comes to knowing the difference between the AFC and the NFC, I sort of know and I sort of care, but not very much of either. However, for the sake of this blog we'll assume it matters to me, so for the rest of my Every Team Rundown I will make the distinction.

And now, it's time to figure out which Eastern Division(s) team I like the best.

BUFFALO BILLS, AFC – I love the silliness of a city in New York naming their football team after a carnie who lived in Wyoming. According to Wikipedia, Buffalo Bill Cody did bring his Wild West Show to Madison Square Garden for a while in the 1880's, but if he ever made it to Buffalo, nobody cared enough to write it down. Also, how many people in Buffalo can tell you who Buffalo Bill Cody was? That's an honest question. I'm willing to believe that it's a lot. It probably isn't though.

NEW ENGLAND PATRIOTS, AFC – My husband is from Cape Cod, so he loves the Patriots like kidnapping victims love Stockholm. I appreciate the solidarity of five or six tiny states in the upper right hand corner of our country deciding to magnanimously share one football team, even though everybody north of Boston is just tapping maple trees and marrying people of their same gender, so they don't own televisions. I do think that naming your team the Patriots is sort of a passive-aggressive move, though. “Oh yeah, I'm a Patriots fan. That means I love my country. I mean, it's cool to like another team, if you don't like patriotism. Whatever you want, dude, I don't judge.”

MIAMI DOLPHINS, AFC – Florida doesn't have to be holier-than-thou the way that frigid, Puritan founded New England chooses to be; they remind the rest of the country that they have a better life than us by pretending that nothing exists in Florida except for tropical beaches. So their mascot is a dolphin, and their logo is the same dolphin frolicking in front of a cheery sun. Despite the fact that their image was designed by Lisa Frank, they are the only team that has ever gone an entire season undefeated, which is something I know because once I was accidentally listening while my husband was saying something, and that's what it was.

NEW YORK JETS, AFC – I can figure out the logic behind the mascot selection of the other AFC East teams, no matter how misguided, but the Jets have me stumped. The team was founded in 1960, were they named after JFK airport? That was around then, but it wasn't called JFK yet. Were they called after the white gang in West Side Story? Because that's weird and gay. They don't even have a jet in their logo. Believe it or not, their website doesn't have a “history” link (because who cares, right?), but according to Wikipedia, this team was originally named the Titans and they changed their name to the Jets to form a connection with the baseball team the Mets, which is like what happened out here in Los Angeles a few years ago when somebody bought out a lot of Vons supermarkets and replaced the Vs with Js to make turn all into crappy supermarkets named Jons. Everybody knows you're cheap when you can't even bother to change the whole name of your franchise.

DALLAS COWBOYS, NFC – The Dallas Cowboys have described themselves as God's team, which I think probably means that God doesn't really care all that much about football. But now things are getting kind of interesting and incestuous, because we have the Buffalo Bills of the Wild West Show competing against actual Cowboys, who populate the Wild West Reality, and looking at it from another angle, this is God's team in opposition to the Patriots, who love their country, which if you follow my train of logic one step further, implies that since God loves the Cowboys and not the Patriots, maybe He doesn't love America, which makes the Cowboys anti-American and honestly, probably terrorists.

NEW YORK GIANTS, NFC – Now I feel like they're not even trying anymore. Apparently, if a team is from New York, their identity has more to do with New York than whatever their mascot is, which would be fine if they didn't have five teams for each sport, thus dividing the New York community to no good purpose. Listen to me, New York: either tell me why I should like a Giant more than a Jet or a Met more than a Yankee, or else (and I think this is a better strategy for you) please combine all your sports teams into one team called the GiantMJetKees that will dominate the entire land in every known sport and forge true solidarity in your asshole city. Actually on second thought, please don't. By keeping your residents pitted constantly against one another, you make the rest of the world just a little bit safer.

PHILADELPHIA EAGLES, NFC – Cheese Steaks Rocky Liberty Bell Not Pittsburgh Kirk Cameron Michael Vick Sam the Eagle Donner Party Will Smith Brotherly Love Avatar Penn State Hershey Kisses Chupacabra.
We didn't start the fire.

WASHINGTON REDSKINS, NFC – Maybe naming a football team the Redskins is racist and maybe it's not, but when was the last time anybody saw a Native American in Washington, DC? It's not that I think anyone would mind, it's just that what with stealing all their land and driving them onto reservations and all a while back, a red-skinned person is not the sort of person I would expect to see in Washington DC and I don't think that anybody else does, either. Then again, I would be even more surprised to see a giant in New York City, so I think I'm the jerk here. I apologize to any Native Americans who might be reading this, and I want you to know that I love your fry bread.


THE WINNER


My choice here was really a foregone conclusion, because if you look at the dolphin on the Miami Dolphins' logo, you'll notice that it's wearing a football helmet. This football helmet is covering its blow hole, thus rendering the dolphin unable to breathe. This dolphin is so incredible at football that not only will he kick your team's ass even though he doesn't have any legs, he will not even breathe while doing it. I'd like to see a cowboy try to win a football game underwater.

Round One: Western Division

I have chosen to begin with the Western Division because it covers all of the teams that currently and formerly played in California (that I know of), and being from Los Angeles, I feel that I should at the very least begin on the west coast because as I mentioned in my last post, it seems most natural to cheer for a local team, even if there isn't one. My source material consists entirely of nfl.com (which is a very useful resource), and my own brain (which is not). I will consider the teams in the order in which nfl.com lists them.

DENVER BRONCOS – I feel like the Denver Broncos are a good team because if you blindfolded me, spun me around, and then ordered me to list as many NFL teams as I could, they would probably be one of the ones I wouldn't forget. If you then held a gun to my head and asked which of the teams I'd just remembered had been to the Super Bowl, I would say Broncos probably third after the Saints and the Red Sox. Also, they play at Mile-High Stadium, which is pretty cool. If you think about a bunch of actual broncos running around on a mountain a mile up in the air, you get a very cool, Macchu Picchu sort of image in your brain, but that being said, the horse on their logo looks like it's suffering from altitude sickness.

KANSAS CITY CHIEFS – According to nfl.com the Kansas City Chiefs were formed in 1960, but everything I know about Kansas I learned from In Cold Blood and The Wizard of Oz, and everything I know about 1960 I learned from Mad Men, so the Chiefs don't register in my brain. I also feel like every team that has some sort of Native American reference is getting in a lot of trouble for racism lately. This might not be the team to latch on to.

OAKLAND RAIDERS – A lot of people here in LA are still Raiders fans, but I'm not sure whether that's out of nostalgia, or if nobody got the memo that the Raiders don't play here anymore. I mean, I'm sure that letters were sent out, but I know I won't offend any Raiders fans by saying in text form that very few of them consider literacy to be a priority. To give credit where credit is due, they do manage to have at least one of the top three most amazing logos in the NFL; putting Dick Tracy in an eyepatch and a football helmet combines three unrelated types of badassery in a way that shoots WAY off the charts without even really trying. On the other hand, nfl.com says they don't win much, and I'm almost positive that they won't even sell Raiders tickets to anyone who doesn't have a neck tattoo.

SAN DIEGO CHARGERS – I can't figure out what this team is supposed to be. Their symbol seems to be a lightning bolt and in general I think of a “charger” as a device relating to a cellphone or possibly just a battery, so I guess that the Chargers are supposed to be low-powered electricity storing devices? I just don't think something like that could beat a wild horse in a fight.

ARIZONA CARDINALS – In David Foster Wallace's epic novel Infinite Jest, he portrays the fictional kicker for the Cardinals as a former tennis prodigy whose house is infested with cockroaches. He cannot bring himself to crush or poison these bugs, so his only means of killing them is to trap them under heavy glass jars which they fog up as they suffocate to death, and then his horror of the insects is too strong for him to even remove their dead carcasses, so his bathroom is filled with upside-down juice glasses. He eventually dies, in a fantasy sequence in which he is trapped under a giant version of one of his own juice glasses, in an ironic, Kafka-esque twist. He is also afraid of heights. That is everything I know about the Arizona Cardinals.

SAN FRANCISCO 49ERS – Despite their disappointingly unmockable logo, I am sort of drawn to the 49ers. The nerd in me appreciates the historical allusions of the mascot (referring, as it does, to the California Gold Rush of 1849), and since everyone in my family except me went to BYU, I actually know not only that Steve Young was an NFL quarterback, but also that he played for the 49ers--connecting a player to an actual team is not something I am able to do very often. On the other hand, I have been told that San Francisco is full of hippies and turds. So that's a strike against.

SEATTLE SEAHAWKS – The people that I know who are from Seattle are wonderful. The people I have known that moved away to Seattle were all eco-jerks. Their logo is awesome; it looks like one of those optical illusions where if you look at it one way, you see a bird, but if you look at it a different way, you see a bullet train. A bullet train full of recycling and coffee.

ST LOUIS RAMS – The Rams are the other team that used to play in Los Angeles, and I know a handful of Angelenos who still root for them, I think mostly out of sadness and fear of Raiders fans. I appreciate how they've made the Rams' horns look like a football helmet, and I like that he looks mean. The Raiders guy looks like an ad executive who has a meeting to get to as soon as he's allowed to take the eyepatch off. The main problem I have with the Rams is that their stadium is named after a guy named Edward Jones, and it was built in 1937. Really, St Louis? You take a football team all the way from Los Angeles, you have all kinds of time to plan, you make all these guys leave their homes and move to a place where winter happens, and you don't even take the time to build them a new stadium with a bad ass name? It's not like you didn't know they were coming. That's pretty weak.

THE WINNER

The other thing about the Cardinals in Infinite Jest's odd, dystopian near-future world is that they enter all of their home games by skydiving into the stadium with fake cardinal wings on their backs, and when you take that into account, none of the other teams in the Western Division can compete. Of course I realize that Wallace's book is fiction, but that's still so mind-blowingly cool that I have to pick the Cardinals in hopes that someday I'll get to see one of the players fall to a spectacular death in front of a stadium full of screaming fans before the game even starts. I'd buy season tickets to anything if I had a chance of seeing that.

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.

Bench Writing Launch!!

Most people who are women do not care about sports. And there's no reason why we should. At the turn of the twentieth century it was decided that men would waste time by watching other men run around and chase a ball and women would waste time by spending money on accessories, and everyone in the United States signed off on that and we all collectively forgot that we used to go outside occasionally and make things we needed for ourselves.

The snag in that plan is that we live in a gender-integrated society, and if you are a woman it is not unlikely that you will occasionally get stuck in a room where people are watching sports and there will be no way at all to buy shoes. You will probably be unprepared, but panicking never helps. I have found that the best way to cope with this situation is to stay really quiet for the most part, but there are simple tricks you can use to look like you understand whatever game is on the TV. For example, when I'm trapped in a room with a football game, I just wait until I see somebody run really far all at once, and then I act really excited. It doesn't matter which team he's on, because if it turns out he's one of the enemy you can just pretend later that you were mad about him doing well.

Today just happens to be National Care About Sports Day. And although I am a woman and I don't care about sports, I had nothing else to do today so I watched the Super Bowl with my husband. It gave me motion sickness. I have less practice even than most women at watching football because I grew up in Los Angeles, where there hasn't been a team for twenty years (or so, I am not checking that fact). Our family was an all-girl house of supernerds, and even our dad was kind of a puss. He did watch BYU games every once in a while, but that was just because he was the mascot there for a while. It could have been a whole year, but I can't be sure because I refuse to check that fact as well. I know he kept the cougar head under his bed because he told me a story once about how he tried to impress a girl by showing it to her, but I guess even in the seventies a giant felt cougar head was not a turn-on for women, because she was apparently horrified. She did make it all the way to his dorm room, though, so if he'd had a designer handbag under the bed instead of an amusement park costume he might have gotten a little action.

It would be easy for me to spend the next 364 days pretending that there is no such thing as a Super Bowl, but the truth is I'm bored, and I am smelling an opportunity here. So consider this my official announcement that I am hereby jumping on board the “Blog Project” train. I am going to spend the next year learning and blogging about football, and after next season's Super Bowl I can quit my job and join the circus or something. Actually, I'll probably just go buy a hat.

Next week, I pick my team. If you are one of the three people reading this and you have any suggestions, I welcome your input.