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Explaining the wacky NFL season
Posted: Wednesday December 15, 1999 09:22 AM
Suppose your cousin from the Peace Corps arrived this weekend for a holiday break. Suppose he'd been in Zambia or the Fiji Islands or somewhere off the coast of Madagascar for most of this calendar year. Suppose he was a football fan. How could you ever fill him in? "Who looks good for the Super Bowl?" he might ask. "Denver and Atlanta again?" "Well, no," you'd have to say. "Denver and Atlanta have been eliminated." "Green Bay and New England? Dallas? San Francisco?" "Well, no. They appear to be shot also. The hot teams seem to be Jacksonville and Indianapolis and St. Louis..." How do you explain Indianapolis and St. Louis? How do you explain, say Kurt Warner, when your cousin never has heard of Kurt Warner? How do you tell him that Dan Marino, in Miami, was benched in the fourth quarter last week in favor of someone named Damon Huard? How do you explain that the New York Jets crumbled after their quarterback went down in the first game of the season? How do you explain Minnesota on the ropes? How do you explain the Tennessee Titans on the rise? (The Tennessee Titans?) How do you explain the Tampa Bay Bucs and a rookie quarterback named Shaun King? Talk about culture shock. The key, I suppose, is to be gentle with your Peace Corps relative. Talk in a calm, reassuring voice. Lay out everything in a reasoned, analytical manner. Talk about parity, the law of averages. And stay away from college football. The news about Virginia Tech might be too much for the poor soul. Sports Illustrated senior writer Leigh Montville appears regularly on CNN/Sports Illustrated. The opinions expressed here are solely those of the writer.
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