posted 2007/09/16 at 21:43
When I taught at UT my classes were on Mondays and Wednesdays, so during the fall semester pre-class conversations would invariably turn to the previous day's football games. The combination of me teaching on Tuesdays and Thursdays now, along with the relative lessening of importance of Monday Night Football after its move to ESPN, means that it doesn't feel like we'll have that much football talk in my class this term. Out of curiosity, though, I did ask for a quick show of hands from my students, and even though Monroe County isn't that far removed from UT, I've still gone from classes of mostly Browns fans to a class with no Browns fans whatsoever. After watching the Bengals game earlier today, I'm going to be quite glad of that fact when I go up to teach on Tuesday. That was a painful game to watch, especially since that was pretty much the only "gimme" the Bengals had in their September schedule; I don't think this loss bodes well for the rest of the season.
On the subject of football, I'm still using My Yahoo! (or more specifically the beta of the upcoming new release), and I use the "scores of your favourite teams" unit on several pages. As the NFL's preseason drew near, though, I noticed something which kind of irked me; although the unit in question only displays the current and previous day's scores for the teams you pick, if you have any NFL teams chosen, you get reminders up to a week in advance of any game. Now, I'm fully aware of how football-crazy this country is and how the NFL does such a good job of keeping its fans salivating for their product by making it so scarce, but still, I don't think it's right that football is the only sport where My Yahoo! extends its usual preview window from a day to a week. I can't even turn it off, although if given my choice I'd keep the option for an extra-long preview for one league; for me, though, that league would be the NHL.
On the subject of sports, with the Tigers and Yankees fighting for the AL wildcard, things here at the house have gotten just as tense as they were during the ALDS last autumn. I'm fully expecting the Yankees to win the wildcard, and I guess now I kind of wish I could believe that, in addition to the overt conspiracy on the part of the sports press to keep pushing and promoting the Yankees as somehow being a kind of "America's team," that there's also a more covert conspiracy on the part of baseball big-wigs to keep the Yankees in the playoffs year after year because they think the Yankees are the only team that will generate good ratings for the playoffs. I can't believe in it because it doesn't exist, but I'd sure like to believe in it once the Tigers get knocked out of the playoff hunt. It's lovely how sports can make us want to shut off our common sense just for the sake of a childish assertion that our team really is the best and they'd be the champions if it weren't for some force, whether bureaucratic or cosmic, preventing them from winning their league's title.
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon