I Kid You Not: Football Is King

I looked my wife in the eye one day this week and confessed to her that I have a problem.
“It’s only August,” I explained. “And I already can’t wait for football to start.”
As she sympathetically (sarcastically?) assured me that this month will fly right by, I reflected on the fact that there are very few things that can get my insides all squirrelly a full month in advance. Granted, I love Thanksgiving and Christmas as much as the next guy, but once you get past the age of 12, there really isn’t much to get excited about. Except being able to stuff your face, but you can really do that any other day of the year. I mean, this is America, after all.
In the realm of sports, there really isn’t anything that I get this excited about. I grew up playing baseball, and I still get to relive my glory days (those being my MVP season for the City Rec League Astros in the summer of 1993, complete with the accompanying soundtrack of You’re The Best Around by Joe Esposito) on the slow-pitch softball field. I loved watching the World Cup this summer, I really enjoy hockey season (when I can actually find a game on TV, which is rare), and going to see the Padres play is always a good time (especially this year, when they’re actually going to win the division even though they’re going to fold like every other year).
But none of these things really get me pumped up the way that football season does. And I’m not just talking about the NFL, either, although that is the main source of my anticipatory glee. I talked with Valley Center varsity football coach Rob Gilster this week about the Jaguars’ upcoming season, and I have to say, I’m really looking forward to Friday nights this fall. (Be sure to check out the 2010 VCHS football preview to your left).
So I started wondering, what about football season sets it apart from all these other things I enjoy? And why do so many people seem to feel the same way?
I think there are three things about football that make September one of the most anticipated months of the year. And since I like you so much, I’m going to share these three things with you right now. You’re welcome.

1. The Ideal Format
The most basic level of enjoyment in the world of sports comes from simply being able to watch a game. Whether you like the teams or not, whether you fully understand the strategy or not, or if you just want to spend an enjoyable evening with friends, sports are a lot of fun. So the more games there are, the better, right?
Wrong. The Padres play 180 games every year, and last season, they averaged under 24,000 fans in attendance per game. That’s slightly over half the capacity of Petco Park. Ouch. And that’s not saying anything against the Padres, it just proves the point that a Thursday night game in April against the Milwaukee Brewers (attendance: 16,696 for the game on April 29 of this year, by the way) just can’t help but be met with a bit of a collective yawn. Honestly, once anything starts to reach a level of oversaturation, it loses some of its appeal.
In contrast, the Chargers haven’t had a regular-season game blacked out (NFL rules stipulate that a game won’t be shown on local television if the team hasn’t sold all the tickets for that game) since 2004, and there are plenty of news articles written about how the Chargers aren’t exactly the best in the league when it comes to selling out games. And even though NFL tickets are exponentially more expensive than MLB tickets, the Chargers sell out their home games because fans know there are only eight of them every season (plus a few playoff games, if they get there). When something cool only happens eight times a year, it’s a lot more likely that you’ll plunk down the $50+ just to go see it. Even if the team is lame, it’s still better than snoozing through another Jon Garland-vs.-Adam Wainwright one-run shoot-out (from May 25 of this year, attendance: 18,236).
Which brings up another point—football is just more fun to watch. The play happens, there’s a little break for some replays, then another play happens. It’s not stare-off-into-space-while-contemplating-the-cosmos boring like baseball can be, but it’s not continuous action like hockey and soccer. You get to see stuff happening, but you also get little pauses to allow the analysts to help you understand what just happened. As far as fan-friendly sports go, football has the ideal setup.
That format even extends to the way the season plays out. Because each team only plays one game each week, fans only have to block out one day a week to watch their favorite team. If you really want to devoutly follow the Toronto Maple Leafs or the Cleveland Cavaliers (although I can’t imagine why) or the Texas Rangers, you pretty much can’t have a life during the season. Not that anyone who is a diehard Cavs fan can claim to have much of a life anyway, but at least a committed football fan has the luxury of six days a week to do other things. Granted, most of us football fans use those six days to dissect every play that happened on Sunday (or Monday night), but still, it’s nice to know we could have a life.

2. The Popularity
I’ve admitted before that the way my sports fanship has come about is because of my sports hatred. Basically, the teams I like are the rivals of the teams I don’t like. I like the Miami Dolphins because I grew up in Western New York and was sick of all the Buffalo Bills fans. I like the Mets and the Red Sox in large part because I can’t stand the Yankees.
A lot of the reason why I don’t like certain teams is because they’re overly popular. I still can’t talk about Jim Kelly, Thurman Thomas or Andre Reed without getting a look of snarling anger on my face, because when I was growing up, all the Buffalo-area news stations would just gush about the K-Gun offense and Marv Levy and Cornelius “The Biscuit” Bennett and the amazing (read: cheating) comeback against the Houston Oilers in January of 1993 and all the rest.
So why would I advocate the benefits of enjoying something that’s popular?
I’m glad you asked. Really, it comes down to accessibility and the potential for enjoyment that comes from being able to get into something easily.
And football is easy to find. If you want to know who will be the starting running back for the Seattle Seahawks this season, there are plenty of experts whose job is to watch the Seattle Seahawks and tell the world which tailback figures to get the most touches this season. If you want to find out how to spot an outside linebacker blitz, I know of at least four different shows on television that feature experts explaining these “X’s and O’s” kind of details. If you want to know which NFL player Kim Kardashian is currently exploiting dating, it doesn’t take more than a couple clicks of the mouse.
In short, it’s not hard to go from casual fan to diehard with very little personal effort. My wife is a good example—back before we got married, I started inviting her over to watch football with me on Sundays, and before the end of the season, she knew more about some teams than I did. OK that’s probably a bit of an exaggeration, but not really by a lot. She knows her stuff, and she’s looking forward to the season almost as much as I am.

3. Fantasy Football
The final threshold for the transition from casual fan to diehard, fantasy football is almost a sport in and of itself. It falls into the previous two categories we’ve discussed (it only happens once a week and it’s popular) which makes it an ideal way for football fans to add another layer of enjoyment to the game.
I’ve played fantasy football for the past seven years now, and I have to say, I’m probably more excited about my various FFL (Fantasy Football League) drafts than I am about the NFL’s opening weekend.
If you still don’t know what fantasy football is (apparently those people still exist), it’s basically a league of people who take turns picking the various NFL players to form their own teams. Each player earns a certain number of points based on how he performed in his NFL game that week (as in, if Tony Romo throws a touchdown pass, he gets six points for his FFL “owners”) and the teams in each FFL compete against each other using these point totals to determine a winner each week. There are different formats and different scoring rules depending on the league, but the basics are the same.
What fantasy football does is give football fans an excuse to be interested in players and teams that they may not pay much attention to otherwise. Last season, I had Washington Redskins receiver Santana Moss in one of my leagues. Would I pay much attention to the Redskins if I didn’t have Moss? Probably not. But because I counted on him as my number two receiver, I had to find out if he was getting the ball as often as he should, and if he was getting chances to score touchdowns, and if he had any injury concerns. I learned more about a player, his team, and other players at his position because I was invested in my fantasy league.
And before you wonder just how big of a nerd I am, I have to say that all the investigation I did took very little time. Fantasy football is pretty universally free these days, and especially if you go with a site like ESPN.com, you get outstanding updates, live scoring and all the latest tools right at your fingertips. We literally had a seven-year-old owner in one of my leagues last year, and he did pretty well. He made it to the playoffs, if I remember correctly, and that’s not exactly a given.
I’m planning on writing a more robust fantasy football column in the next few weeks, complete with a few of my sleepers and snoozers, so if you’re at all interested in fantasy football, check back with us each week and be sure to write in to sports@valleycenter.com to share your thoughts on the subject.
In the meantime, I’m going to go curl up with a recording of Tom Jackson breaking down the zone blocking scheme in minute detail.
And I’m going to count the minutes until September.