First Down-the Hatch

With all due respect to baseball fans... I cry uncle.  It's mid-October and... enough already.  Even the announcers are disinterested and the sportscasters on my local news station are reporting on baseball with all the enthusiasm one would bring to the Bataan Death March.  I don't even understand how teams keep playing when they know they can't go to the World Series.  That's as pointless to me as window shopping.  Or exercise.

So I think the overwhelming question is this:  Are you ready for some football?  Yeah?  Well, let's go to the map:

Um, what's up with the way Texas is split 70/30 Cowboys/Texans?

My team is the Philadelphia Eagles.  This statement generally generates the "Oh, are you from Philly?" question . I'm not.  The next question is always "Why Philadelphia then?"  Well, quite simply, I'm a girl.  So when the Oilers left my hometown of Houston and I was forced to pick another team, I deployed a tried and true female tactic:  I went with my favorite color, green.

As I saw it, the color green gave me three choices:  the Jets, the Packers, or the Eagles.  First, let's get one thing straight:  This Dan Jenkins-reading girl was never gonna cheer for the dog-ass Jets.  And the Packers?  Please.  That just sounded gross.  But the Eagles-- now they sounded like a good, solid working-class team.  Plus the mascot is an animal and everyone knows animals are cute.

Okay, maybe not this animal.



Yes, I now know there was a fourth choice in the Seattle Seahawks but it was the nineties and I honestly was unaware that Seattle had anything except coffee shops, grunge music, and the Space Needle.

And that's the beauty of football:  It doesn't have to make sense.  Any game that asks morbidly obese men to wear white stretch pants while playing in the grass is pretty much saying "Get your freak on, baby.  All are welcome here."  Feel like arriving at the stadium at 8:00 a.m. to stand around and eat burnt hotdogs from a football helmet-shaped grill?  Help yourself.  Feel like foregoing your shirt and grease-painting your expansive belly and man boobs in sub-zero temperatures?  Well, why the hell wouldn't you?  Want to throw batteries at Santa Claus? Welcome to Philadelphia. The City of Brotherly Love.

Football is an hour-long game that inexplicably takes four hours.  For years you had John Madden yammering away like someone's half-deaf grandfather gone off his crazy pills.  Yeah, Turducken, we get it. Now stop screaming and scrawling on the Zonkastrator like a spastic toddler.  There are scantily-clad pole-dancers/cheerleaders, keeping the fans warm with their all-American ass-shaking/team spirit.  Serious sportscasters talk with deep gravitas about some guy's groin injury as if it were a matter of national security.  An almost life-like Troy Aikman quotes statistics like a wooden-faced puppet who just wants to be a real boy.  There's $20 parking, $12 beer, $7 hot dogs and the ability to shriek "We're number 1!" for absolutely free.

I'll admit that in 1994 I didn't know a thing about football.  All I knew was that I was newly-married to a sports fanatic and if I didn't learn the game I'd never see the man.  (Had I known then what I know now about said fanatic, I'd have stayed ignorant.)  But like the dutiful little wife I was never destined to become, every Sunday I sat in front of the TV with a football encyclopedia in my lap and each time a penalty was called or I heard one of the announcers mention the name of a play, I'd look it up in the book.  If that's not dedication people, I don't know what is. Sadly I eventually realized I loved the game more than I loved the man... and threw a philosophical flag at the entire marriage.  Personal foul, you creep.  100-yard penalty.  4th down?  Nah, hit the showers, asshole.

Once I truly understood the game, I really enjoyed watching it, if only for all of the sexual innuendo.  Get your backfield in motion? Ooo-ah, ooo-ah!  Taking it deep into the end zone?  Bow-chicka-wow-wow!  Splitting the uprights?  Oooooh yeah.  The endless possibilities totally appeal to the 12-year old boy in me and any given Sunday will find me giggling like a school girl over the unintentionally erotic quotes from whatever game I'm watching.

So my thought is this:  Let's just end the baseball season due to lack of interest.  Let's talk more football.  In fact, let's talk a lot more erotic football-- and let's have the sportscasters keep score of the outrageously sexual things that get said during a game. 

Even better, let's make it a drinking game.  There are definitely a couple of tight ends that I'd like to see go bottoms up. 

And I honestly don't even know what that means.

What's your favorite football-related sexual innuendo?  I need to add to my repertoire.  And stock my liquor cabinet.