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9.11.05 The F word by Matt Worley Stop me if you've heard this one before: Denver quarterback Jake Plummer is the Billy Graham of the NFL. He can make 70,000 people say "Jesus" in unison. Football is back. Try to get away from it, but you can't. Floods, terrorist attacks and partisan politics cannot stop it. Players collapsing and dying won't temper the enthusiasm. Suspicions that 350 pound lineman aren't natural (possibly genetically-enhanced superbeings from another planet?) won't stop the wild-eyed irrationality of a man who is watching his fantasy picks fail one by one. But it's not just the NFL. It's football everywhere. Football (almost) all the time. I grew up in Clovis, New Mexico. A small town on the New Mexico/Texas state line. We might not have actually been Texans, but the passion for high school football was real. Friday Night Lights was close, but not quite the real thing. It was PG-13 after all. Real life, even in a conservative Republican town like Clovis, is rated R. And what comes out of ordinary citizens during football season--it ain't Disneyland. There is something primal about football. George Carlin had a routine where he compared baseball and football. The gist of the joke is that football is the animal and baseball is civilized. I like them both. And I will watch entire baseball games, just to watch the little white ball fly all over the place. But football is like getting punched in the mouth. Repeatedly. And you don't move your face out of the way of the fist. You just keep taking it. I don't do the fantasy football thing. I think it places way too much emphasis on offense. And individual players. Football is a team sport. Golf, tennis, shot put, these are individual sports, for the most part. Football is about a bunch of people coming together for a common goal. It's not really about the individual stats. Ask any player and they'd tell you they'd rather win the Superbowl than be the most valuable player on the fantasy football depth chart. Although, I'm sure there is a little bit of pride in being picked in the first round by a majority of fantasy heads. Nope, I like football. The game. And I want to see a team win. If my quarterback got over 300 yards and three touchdowns, but didn't win the game, then I'm not happy. My first real taste of the football this year came last week. My college alma mater, the University of New Mexico Lobos, was playing conference rivals UNLV. UNM came out strong and built a quick lead. UNLV looked demoralized, the game seemed over after the first quarter. Then the momentum switched. For the rest of the game, UNM was on its heels. They let UNLV come back and almost tie the game in the final minutes of the game. Then UNLV recovered an onside kick to get the ball back with less than two minutes to go. All they needed was a field goal to take a game they'd never been leading. Out of the blue came a flash of red. A cocky cornerback named Fullbright pulled UNLV's chance of winning out of the air and crushed it. UNM won by 2. In the gut-twisting world of college football, this is regular. Kids with stars in their eyes, looking for the chance at the lottery of an NFL career, routinely come up short. They don't mean to. They don't want to disappoint, but someone has to win. And someone must lose. And my high school, Clovis, looks to have a pretty good team this year. After beating a Texas high school last week, they demolished Highland High School on Friday 41-7. I live about five blocks from Highland today. But I still want Clovis to win. The amount of irrationality involved in watching football and rooting for teams is astronomical. It defies all natural order. I have no idea how my NFL team is going to do this year. We get very little information about the Chiefs down here. The 0-4 preseason mark might mean something, but it could be a phantom, too. I won't know for a few hours. You could check for me right now. Just look at the sports page. Am I sporting a red shirt on Monday morning, or will I quietly go on with my work, wondering if the next 15 game weeks will be as demoralizing as this Sunday was?
And, who knows, I might wear that red shirt anyway. Just to show the blood running down my sleeve.
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