Easily the most pretentious blog title I’ve written so far. You may have heard, but the Steelers were eliminated from the postseason last week. I haven’t talked about it here yet, firstly because it’s always a good idea to give it some time before reflecting on the end of a season, and secondly because this week has served almost as a reprieve from football.
Yes, we all love football. It’s my favorite sport (even though many of my least favorite people play it). But with the Steelers falling to Baltimore on Saturday night, I felt almost like a weight had been lifted. I finally didn’t have to worry about how the Steelers were going to perform next week. Given that the team’s ultimate goal is to win the Super Bowl, I know that’s a strange thing to be satisfied with. But here we are.
The day after the loss, there were two games. Colts/Bengals and Cowboys/Lions. I didn’t really watch either of them. You could chalk that up to disappointment in the Steelers’ finish the night before, and you’d make a decent case. But this weekend’s games look like another helping of bland, uninspiring teams I’m not invested in. Did you mark off your calendar for Seahawks/Panthers?
Of course, I still follow the playoffs. I know who’s playing and whatnot, I’m just not that interested in spending my weekend on it. I might check out Championship Weekend depending on who’s playing (and how likely they are to beat the Ravens or Patriots), and I’ll definitely watch the Super Bowl, because the Super Bowl is an American tradition and should be followed by a national holiday. You could say that the Super Bowl is THE SUPER BOWL of football, which sounds redundant until you realize that it serves as the comparison to every big event ever.
No matter how uninteresting the game itself would be (Cowboys/Patriots), you get to at least have fun with the hundreds of different facets to bet on. But for divisional weekend, football isn’t terribly interesting to me. Do you feel different? How do you stay engaged in games played by teams you don’t care about?
