Read The Football Fan's Manifesto Online
Authors: Michael Tunison
VIII.4 The Draft Is Excruciating, but in April You’ll Take Anything You Can Get
An oasis in the bleak nothingness of April in the sports calendar, MLB Opening Day and the Masters be damned, the NFL Draft provides a weekend of NFL pseudo-activity that you can breathlessly follow. There are those who dismiss the draft as nothing more than a bland recitation of names, and maybe it is, but it’s a recitation of names you’ll soon be hearing during football games and that’s about the best scrap you’ll be thrown in the days of early spring.
Spread over two days, the draft really picks up steam after the seven-hour first round finally wraps up. It’s also at that point that you’ll find yourself completely in the dark about every player being taken. Not to worry, the NFL Draft drinking game is a time-honored tradition that will keep you entertained as grown men speak in glowing terms about the wonderful physical attributes of other grown men. A few wrinkles can be added any given year.
At the conclusion of the draft, in your supremely intoxicated state, you’re all set to read through the draft grades assigned to each team by any of the dozens of self-described draft experts in the media. Each attempt at grading, of course, is prefaced by the handy reminder that there’s no way of knowing the true value of a draft class for at least several years. If there’s anything TV viewers want, it’s an uninformed kneejerk reaction.
VIII.4. A THE NFL DRAFT DRINKING GAME
Mel Kiper Jr. petulantly objects to a team’s selection because it doesn’t jibe with his draft board.
—Take one sip. How dare those teams defy him? Don’t they know how meticulously he puts that board together? And how many players’ agents he cozies up with to do it?
Chris Berman tips a pick to the television audience before it’s announced by the commissioner.
—Open every beer in the fridge and take the first sip out of the bottle. It’s almost as obnoxious.
Jets fans boo one of their team’s picks.
—Take one sip. This will happen exactly as many times as the Jets have picks. Drink twice if they boo one of the Patriots’ picks. Down a keg if they cheer for something.
A draftee cries or hugs the commissioner.
—Pour one on the floor for his career.
A team selects the “best player available.”
—It
sounds redundant because surely teams should always be taking the best players, but this phrase is used to describe a team drafting a player who is the most talented rather than one who would fill a clear need on the roster.
A mention that a draftee’s stock rose because of his play at the Senior Bowl.
—Take two sips. The stellar Senior Bowl performance is a surefire springboard for a guy who gets taken way too high. Stupid NFL teams, when will they learn?
A draftee is filmed in the green room with friends and family.
—One sip. Three if the player is being shown because he is falling down the draft order and now has a worried look on his face.
An analyst says of a draftee, “I love this guy’s [
fill in the blank
].”
—One sip if that thing is the player’s intensity. Four if it’s his plushie fetish.
Any of the following terms are used: “upside,” “war room,” “character issues,” “motor,” “reach,” “need pick,” “project,” “intangibles,” “combine.”
—One sip per use. Might need to keep a drink in each hand to keep up.
A player is complimented for “finishing plays.”
—Finish the drink in your hand.
A draftee is spotted wearing a yellow, purple, orange, or electric blue suit.
—Take one sip if the player is black. Shotgun three beers if the player is white.
Each time Ed Werder reports from Dallas.
—Make a
manly beer mustache on your face. A goatee if Jason Witten feeds him slander about a teammate.
A team lets its allotted time expire.
—Drink an entire beer. If it’s your team, drink a bucket of varnish. It’s only happened a few times, most infamously in 2003 when the Vikings allowed the time to expire on the number seven pick of the draft, after which two teams rushed to pick in front of them. The Vikings fell to the ninth overall selection.
A mention of Tom Brady being the 199th player selected in the 2000 draft.
—Take one sip. This will keep you going in the later rounds as pundits look for examples of second-day steals. This will invariably be the first one mentioned. And the first one repeated another ten times.
A player from the Ivy League is drafted.
—Chug a bottle of 1943 vintage Château Latour. TV analysts, especially Chris Berman (he only occasionally makes mention of his years at Brown), adore it when one of the downtrodden denizens of the Ivy League gets a chance to shine in the NFL. Because those beleaguered souls never really get a fair shake in the world, do they?
The Lions select a receiver in the first round.
—Take three sips. Sure, the Matt Millen era in Detroit has thankfully been swept into the dustbin of history (even if he returned to the broadcast table at NBC somehow). But that doesn’t mean his successors
aren’t capable of repeating his mistakes. For the purposes of our enjoyment, let’s hope they do.
A punter or a kicker is drafted.
—Everyone knows you don’t need to draft a kicker or a punter, not when any number of adequate ones will be available on the free agent market. Take two drinks if the punter drafted won the Ray Guy Award in college. Take three drinks if the pick is in the third round or higher. Then call your friend the Raiders fan to laugh at him.
The telecast cuts away to commercial on the second day of the draft before you have a chance to read your team’s selections on the scroll.
—Throw a bottle at the screen.
A montage of Mr. Irrelevants
.—Drink whatever you got left. Looks like the draft is coming to a close. Mr. Irrelevant, the name attached to the final player selected in the draft because this player seldom even makes the team’s final roster, has to be paraded around and embarrassed for not being a prized prospect. Still, it’s better than not being taken at all. Those players are likely to be joining you on the couch, forty-ounce in hand, in a few months, if they’re not being used as tackling dummies for a team’s starters.
While nowhere near the embarrassment that was Vince McMahon’s XFL—at the top of its litany of ills during
its one-year existence was the resurrection of Tommy Maddox’s career—the Arena Football League is an ongoing (well, maybe not) putrid blight upon the sporting landscape and, worse still, is responsible for Kurt Warner’s emergence as an NFL signal caller. Russell Athletic ESPN Arena Football, as the longwinded official name of its broadcast goes, isn’t so odious because arena football is any less watchable than baseball, hockey, or any of those other piddling games for pussybaskets. No, since Arena Football bears a tenuous similarity to the glorious game that gives us a good dose of nonsexual wood, its continued presence insults the NFL. At least its disparity in skill level does.
This is a league that features padded sidelines, rebound nets that the ball can bounce off of and still be in play, a four-point dropkick field goal, and players who are a dropped pass away from bagging groceries or, if they’re lucky, playing a guy bagging groceries in a porn flick. It’s no wonder that the league had to cancel its season this year due to economic woes.
Meanwhile, the minor league version of the Arena League is called af2, or arenafootball2, which is spelled out like a retarded teenager’s message board commenter name. This is a league that boasts teams named the Oklahoma City Yard Dawgz, Quad City Steamwheelers (were the Quad City DJs too obvious a reference?), the Tri-Cities Fever (which, to its credit, does sound like a virulent strain of taint itch), and the Bossier-Shreveport
Battle Wings (which are very good in mambo sauce, I hear). This couldn’t be any more of a Mickey Mouse operation if the league had advertisements on its sidelines. Oh, wait, it does. Mitsubishi has the naming rights to all the league’s divisions, for marketing out loud! The funniest aspect of the Arena League shuttering for a season is that its independently run development league is continuing as planned. So, if you can’t do without the palpable charge that comes from watching a glorified substitute for indoor soccer, treat yourself to the players who couldn’t even qualify for that.
In the glaring absence of the indoor Nerfball league that is constantly plugged by ESPN (not surprising, considering the network’s partial ownership stake in it), the all-too friendly Canucks will be glad to offer you a summertime dose of their bastardized version of the One True Sport. As one might expect, Canada makes a complete hash of it, giving you a joke of a league that has 110-yard playing fields and twelve players on each side going through three-down possessions. What’s more, there are quotas in place to guarantee that each team maintains a certain minimum of Canadian players. Meaning there is a defined ceiling for how good any CFL team can be before it gets weighed down by the suckage of homegrown players unfit for local municipal hockey leagues.
Granted, the CFL has helped develop a handful of talented players and coaches for its immeasurably superior American counterpart, the most notable among them
being Warren Moon, Doug Flutie, Marv Levy, and Joe Theismann. Nevertheless, any league that awards a point for a missed field goal or a punt out of the back of the opponent’s end zone is possessed of a uselessness on par with Matt Leinart.
The latest emergent alternative for that football dollar is the United Football League, which is all but destined to fail like the USFL before it, even if Roger Goodell said he envisions the UFL eventually becoming a development league for the NFL. The league is officially scheduled to begin play in 2010, with an abbreviated inaugural season set for this fall, thus ensuring it gets buried behind the avalanche of NFL action. In a minor coup, the league has tapped former NFL coaches Dennis Green, Jim Haslett, and Jim Fassel, as well as former defensive coordinator Ted Cottrell, to helm its four teams. Undoubtedly, nothing stirs the masses like inferior talent led by once notable head coaches who’ve all squandered their fifth chance at success.
Fans would love nothing more than having the possibility of year-round football, but not at the price of a game with an over/under of 700 points and a quality of play even lower than a Week 17 Chiefs-Rams tilt (but without the added entertainment of recalcitrant players taking plays off and openly flouting coaches). In the end, the worst of the NFL far outstrips even the height of what the Arena League and the CFL have to offer. Let’s not kid ourselves with these cheap imitations. As
everybody knows, an arena is for Judas Priest concerts, a stadium is for football. And Canada is for the poutine-stained denim jacket-and-jeans combo. We should keep it that way.
VIII.6 Beware the Post–NBA Finals Misery Vortex
Of the desolate voids that typify the ungodly horror that is the off-season, none is worse than the month that lurches from the end of the NBA Finals in mid-June until the NFL teams report to training camp in the third week of July. There you will find nothingness. Then more nothingness. Then some sunny nothingness. Then some goddamn baseball, followed soon after by another unbroken stretch of nil.
Sure, post–Super Bowl February is plenty dreadful, but at least the buzz from the recently concluded season hasn’t entirely subsided. Plus there are still coaches and GMs being hired and fired, which is a delight in and of itself. And, hey, March Madness is right around the corner, which is actually kinda-sorta fun for the first two rounds, until you lose your office pool to a girl who picks the Final Four based on where she applied to grad school. In the following months you get a little caught up with playoff hockey and basketball. You even go to MLB Opening Day and decide it’s a little charming, but still don’t watch more than three innings of baseball until September.
By then, the thought that you might just tough out this off-season is winning out. That is, until you hit the early summer wall and are staring down the biggest lacuna
in the sports calendar. NFL news, if there’s any at all, is scant. The only goddamn sport to watch is baseball. Summer movies are out but two-thirds of them are piss-poor comic book adaptations and assorted retreads.
The best you can hope for is a scandal on the scale of the Michael Vick fiasco to crop up, but those only come along once every so often. Granted, there’s typically one decent scandal per off-season, but that was a particularly good one. When they’re bad, they’re Favre-speculation-about-unretiring bad.
Every football fan struggles during this stretch, but it’s incumbent upon you to forge through the abyss with your sanity intact. Heading to the beach for several weeks and getting really blotto will not only help the time fly by but will give you the rare exposure to the sun that you’re usually robbed of by spending months in a bar. Conserving your vacation time so you can attend training camp? Throw yourself into your work. The sudden uptick in production may offset the dozens of days you took off because you were hungover the year before.
Enough time goes by and, then, one magnificent morn, you switch on your television and, hark, what delightful sound strikes your ear? News of a holdout? JaMarcus Russell won’t be reporting to camp next week because of a contract dispute. Truly this marks the first sign of a re-birth, of a season starting anew.
Yes.
It begins!
8.7 Training Camp Is Miserable for the Athlete, Only Kind of Boring for You
Without exception, NFL players loathe training camp. For them it’s an endless procession of rote drills and grueling two-a-days cruelly imposed by taskmaster coaches. It’s where players who report 30 pounds overweight from the off-season bust their asses for a few weeks only to possibly not even make final cut. As Redskins tight end/H-back Chris Cooley put it so eloquently in a post on the toweringly sexy football humor blog Kissing Suzy Kolber: