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September 10, 2005

The Return of My Favorite TV Show, Interactive Product, and Live Event

IT'S FOOTBALL! REAL FOOTBALL! ON TV! ON MY COMPUTER! IN THE STADIA!

And we can breathe again. After seven months and two days, official NFL football is back! (And it's worth noting that the exclamation point from the previous sentence is actually sincere/ non-ironic. That's maybe the third such non-ironic deployment of an exclamation point of my life. Such is my giddiness!)

Excited as I am about the onset of football season, it's prehaps worth a sober moment to evaluate what the return of the NFL means to me. On one hand, I don't have to watch any more make-believe sports. No more pretending to be interested in baseball or (worse still) actually sitting through pre-season games. (Full disclosure: I actually have three (3) Birds preseason games saved on my DVR.) On the other, football means that I am officially subtracting a day from my week from now through February. Great knowing you, Sunday.

All things considered, though, I'm pretty fired up. Some quick hits on what we've seen so far:

Stupid Pacific Time: I wish I could say that one of my biggest concerns with the move the Left Coast wasn't that NFL football would now phase-shift three (3) hours in the wrong (that is, early) direction. This was -- literally -- one of the things that concerned me about the move (pitiful, I know). But the Eagles open the season on Monday night at 6 pm. SIX PM!!! With traffic, it's going to be borderline impossible to make it anywhere for the opening kickoff, and that's even with a very early work departure baked in. I suppose the upside is that I won't be hungover and drowsy on Tuesday morning owing to being at some bar downtown until 1 am.

I have NFL Platform Issues: Right. So it isn't enough that the NFL Sunday Ticket is available only through DirectTV. (How much money did Rupert Murdoch give them? How is it possible that they allow themselves to go exclusive on one platform at this point? How? Also, Rupert Murdoch is out of his mind right now -- $650m for IGN? I need to write about video games more often.) I signed up for the NFL Field Pass product (video highlights and radio feeds). Would you believe that it's only available on the dread-I-can't-ever-get-this-effing-thing-off-my-computer Real Player? ARRRRGGGGHHHH! This is me having a seizure. Not shockingly, I couldn't get it to work on my corporate machine. Hmmm. Go figure.

Imaginary Football Innovations: I'll try not to bore you with the details of my five (5) fantasy teams, but I have to tip the cap to Yahoo! for a couple innovations this year: (1) they've added polls to each matchup so that everyone in your league can vote on who will win each game and (2) they actually project points for each matchup, meaning that each matchup will actually have a POINT SPREAD attached to it. Talk about understanding your audience! Bravo, Yahoo!, bravo. (Though I'm still waiting for someone to connect my fantasy roster to my copy of Madden so that I can play the other owners in my league in video-game football. But I've been down that road before. I'll stop.)

Was it a night game? Uh oh....: While he was with the Giants, the running joke in my neck of the nape was that you could never trust Kerry Collins with a night game. That is, if it's a 1 pm start, he knows that he has to get up early and be functional, and will stay in the night before. But if it's a night game, well, maybe Kerry thinks he can "stay up late." (You know, that's not really fair. Oh well.) After watching last night's game, I'm convinced that Kerry Collins is going to be a great fantasy QB and a lousy actual QB. That is, he'll toss lots of TDs but make sure that he doesn't make any big plays, gets flustered at the slightest hint of pressure, and cough up two game-killing turnovers when it mattered. As a Birds fan, I kind of dug on that. Now that I'm not involved anymore, I feel like said observations are that much more credible.

[In re: Collins, it sure looked like he was looking for Randy Moss every time he dropped back. Which only makes MORE SENSE THAN ANY OTHER POSSIBLE OPTION. So we don't blame him for this. Still, he needs to work on the jump ball thing more -- need to keep that shiznit in bounds if you want Randy to run and get it.]

What down is it?: maybe I'm delusional, and since I didn't DVR the game I'll never know, but were there moments (certainly in the third quarter) where the telecast wasn't showing the down and distance on every play? Were they hiding it somewhere? I shouldn't shout "What down is it?" when I'm watching a game on TV. And certainly not on the most expensively produced version of the NFL regular season.

Actual Football Thoughts: The Raiders are not so good on defense. The Pats are strong but beatable. Tom Brady is just very chill back there -- doesn't even seem to notice the rush. As opposed to Collins, who was throwing off his back foot the entire fourth quarter. Yuck. You're too old for that, Kerry. (See above in re: fantasy versus actual performance.) Also, Corey Dillon is such a nice thing for the Pats to have. He's turning into Emmitt Smith from the mid-90s: the guy who just churns out yards in the second half and kills your team. Only I don't hate him as much as I hated Emmitt back then (and his padded stats playing behind the best offensive line of the past 25 years in blowouts most weeks, but I digress).

Official Eagles preview forthcoming; at some point in the next week I'll write about something that isn't football.

Posted by thatkid at September 10, 2005 9:16 AM under Sports

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Posted by: Thorles at September 11, 2005 9:04 AM

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