hahaist011's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- there's a really stupid simile in here go hornets! three teams made states, so they cancelled school for the day. so it'd be possible to follow the teams around. i can't figure out how the heck the football team made it anywhere. i watched those kids get flattened week after week. until like three weeks ago when they destroyed monument valley. and i just figured that monument valley (john ford's home-away-from-home) was just a rilly poor team. because it's not like ganado looked that great. it's hard to tell with high school football, you know? unless there's a standout player (think lavar arrington at North Hills, circa 1994) who i can watch and judge others by, i can't tell if anyone's any good. it does seem that at smaller schools (or in fledgling-type programs) high school football success hinges so much on individual players. the score ends up being a consequence of having a really fast kid at fullback or outside linebacker or wide out or safety (or any other stand-out kinda position). it doesn't seem all that related to play-calling (though it is...in these cases, i think the plays are always "Get the ball to [name]!") but there's no way to judge a team's strength then, right? sometimes it's really boring to watch high school football. that's partly, i think, because of all the missed tackles and incomplete passes (kinda like how girls basketball always seems so sloooww if you watch any other type). mostly, though, it's because it's all keystone kops chaotic. every man for himself, etc. what makes games exciting is watching a tight offensive line or secondary. it's exciting because there's no way the line can hold permanently, right? blocking is like sandbagging as the tidal wave is rising, and so it's about producing somehow that fraction of a second that really counts. so it makes offensive plays tense and flavors them, most of the time (fuck you brady!) with some kinda underdog thing. good offenses can look like machines (again, fuck you brady!), but there is still something thrillingly impossible about what they do. a truly commanding defense gets me the other way. they make it look like Nature--inevitable. and everyone agrees with me: blitzing is like lightning-storming the passer. or the secondary can become an ancient immovable mountain, all You Shall Not Pass. (or, come to think of it, you could picture it as, ahem, drawing an impregnable curtain fashioned, say, from an alloy of iron and carbon!) i guess the excitement is in watching the facilitation of victory. yeah, individual talent blahblahblah, but it's the team that lets people get awesome. (time out--zack morris style. what is the deal here? this entry is like an accidental love letter to the fuckin pats. god.) it's the most obvious thing in the world, then, that i don't like fantasy football, isn't it? sure, it's fun, but what it does to a sunday is stupid, baseballesque even. you have people checking on players' individual stats all during games. players' individual stats?! on sundays, when the show is right there, who fucking cares? (that kinda RBI, batting average nonsense is for the rest of the week.) when someone is exceptional, it's fun to know where they stand on like the all-time rusher list, but the only numbers you need concern yourself with during a game are TOTAL rushing yards (not LT's personal number!), time of possession, third down conversion, pass completion, turnovers, maybe average yards per carry, and yeah--the goddamn score. that's the beauty of (professional) football, right? all that matters is who won. that one game. on that one particular day with all its weather and wind and everything. maybe your team played monday night and had a short week, but so what. and ultimately, it comes down to how many times you won. sure, there's some calculating to do at the end of some seasons, but you can't count on things like points scored/points scored against, etc. being meaningful. that's the college way, but in the pros, nothing matters outside of the context of that 60 minutes. (holy shit! it's like New Criticism! no wonder i dig it.) your schedule doesn't matter. your division doesn't matter. just win as many games as possible. and then keep doing it. Fantasy is the geeked-out place where the guy who says, "Actually,..." or "Technically,..." is making a valid point. (i have a hunch that a lot of favre's excitement over the td record had to do with the pack starting the season so strong. like i think he was almost as happy about getting six points as he was about getting to the top of the list.) fantasy football has made mainstream that subculture in which Dan Marino is King. (or that more recent manifestation in which people were always cryin, "even if the colts never get a championship, peyton manning is still gonna go down in history as the best quarterback ever!" a really silly position to take...unless you're from indianapolis, and then it's cool.) i know people, i really do, who UNTIL THIS SEASON, would be all, "tom brady's not that good." look, i'm the last person who even wants to acknowledge the the talent of that preppyass modelizer, but dude: are you serious? brady is like ridiculously beyond other QBs, and--god i hate this--you can see him make a decision about what _should_ happen and THEN see him _make it happen_. like the old steely look comes over him, and the pats win again. (i would love to say that this is due only to illegal camcorder activity, but you know that's just not true.) anyhow: the pats startling record isn't enough to impress these Fantasy types. because that's not how their brains work anymore. bellachek (sp!) was a goddamn alchemist! those teams made a fool out of math! there was no way, by the numbers, that those teams should've taken championships! but they did! how did these Fantasy people miss this? i guess that as the new england machines magicked its way to late January, these people were on the internet, checking jeff garcia’s rating. but now, they see it. _now_ they're impressed with brady. (you do know where i'm going with this, don't you?) so, what's the difference between this season and past seasons? why, suddenly, are people willing to admit that probably the best QB we've ever seen in real life is any good at all? motherfuck: randy moss. randy baby-ass-brat-fucking moss! that's the real problem with the Fantasy World. players like moss and t.o. (and their forefather, corey dillon) are vaunted heroes. nobody cares that these players refused to do their fucking jobs _until_ they get on a team that they think is good enough?! i am all for free agency. i really am. this is not about hating on players who leave for more money elsewhere; i am not mad at randle-el. or players who leave for more ball-time; i am not mad at plaxico burress. (though, of course, what makes me crazy as a rez dog sucking on a plastic bag is this barry bonds/bobby bonilla shit. so now, because brady has moss, the Fantasy people think brady's good. thank god: now that brady has moss i have a new way to be disgusted by him. because this sermon i've been preaching is like walking the razor's edge, you know? (i end up over-persuading _myself_, and the next thing you know, i actually *like* "It's a Wonderful Life," instead of just adequately deflating uninformed criticism of it.) 11:18 a.m. - 2007-11-03 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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