Are You Ready For Some Football?

I need to confess -- throughout high school primarily, definitely all the way through college, and even a little during my post-graduate days, I totally faked liking football. I had to pretend to like it in high school because I was in marching band and attended EVERY SINGLE FOOTBALL game for four years straight. You would think that I might have picked up on some of the finer points of the game -- for example, that the players are actually running plays out there and not just running around hoping they'll be in the right place to catch the ball when it's thrown. Nope. I didn't pick that up.

And in college, when I was in Golden Pride and it was my job to encourage my "adopted" football player during the week, you would think that I would have at least paid attention to and learned what he was at least doing on the field so that each week I would have something more encouraging to say in my note to him other than, "Go Lions! Way not to get your uniform too dirty last week!"

And seriously, I dated my fair share of football players (if by "date" you mean "tutor") and one coach (I really did date the coach, though I'm not sure he would totally agree with my characterization of the relationship), for that matter. So you would think that I would have made an effort to understand the game and actually try to like it. But I didn't. It was so boooorrrrring! I have faked it for lo these many years and I feel as though I owe lots of people (men, primarily) an apology for that.

But last night, Joe and I caught the tail end of the Bears/Falcons game -- the last 4:00 of the game (which of course took 35 minutes to play) -- and suddenly, it all clicked. It was fascinating! The plays! The flags on the plays! The drama! It was so great!!! I knew who the running backs were and the linebackers and what the refs were talking about when they doled out the yardage penalties. All the pieces of the game suddenly fell into place and it was like I understood a foreign language I had never been able to understand before.

So to what can we attribute this sudden dawning of understanding?



Casey may still be trying to grasp a better understanding of the game, but I've apparently been hanging on Coach Dan's every word.