Just Play to Win the Game

An old man yelling at clouds about (American) football

This year marked a bit of an uptick in my football watching, after quite a few years of a downturn caused partly by the kids wanting to be in the living room on Sundays but mostly by the New York Giants, my primary NFL team, sucking. The Giants still stink— they lost yesterday to finish the season 3-14— but after years of professing no interest in football, The Pip and some of his buddies in the eighth grade started a fantasy league so suddenly he wants to watch the games¹. His team cruised to the championship yesterday, so I guess that’s worked out for him…

(Over the holidays, he expanded to watching a lot of college football, as well, largely because he’s reached an age where there’s not a whole lot he’s interested in doing when we visit the grandparents… Trying to explain why there are so many bowl games, most of which mean absolutely nothing, was quite the experience.)

Generated from “old football player yelling at clouds”

Weirdly, I haven’t really stopped consuming football content during this stretch, mostly in the form of a couple of Ringer podcasts: I listen to Bill Simmons’s Sunday night episodes because I enjoy the banter with “Cousin” Sal Iacono (though as noted elsewhere, I’m increasingly uneasy about the gambling content), and Ryen Russillo’s podcast generally (though I skip past the college football stuff to get to Life Advice). I’ve also followed a whole bunch of sports people on social media over the years, meaning I get a lot of football content pushed into my various feeds.

The last couple of weeks in the NFL have, as always, heavily featured my least favorite thing in sports, namely bad teams jockeying for draft position. I especially hate the #discourse around this, which includes a lot of fans openly rooting for their teams to lose, and even to (essentially) deliberately throw games by playing third-stringers. This has a long and storied tradition going back at least to the infamous Santa Claus game in Philadelphia in 1968 (fans were mad that the team had won just enough to miss out on the top pick in the draft, which was going to be O.J. Simpson), but it always irritates me.

This is exacerbated by my choice of podcast listening, of course— Simmons is one of the absolute worst sports media figures in this respect, often seeming more interested in transactions than games (he’s even worse when it comes to the NBA, just endlessly banging on about potential trades and contracts, even in the middle of the season). It’s very widespread, though, and even The Pip (who, as noted above, only just started paying attention) got in on it a little bit. I think it’s ultimately pretty dumb, though.

For one thing, I generally agree with Derek Catsam (who, like Simmons, is a Patriots fan) that if you’re bad enough to be in contention for the #1 pick, you’ve got bigger problems than you’re going to fix by drafting one player. Yeah, it’s true that the Giants need a quarterback, and those are only available at the very top of the draft. But as I keep telling The Pip when he asks me about it, even more than a QB, they need an offensive line— it doesn’t matter who you put under center if you can’t protect them.

More than that, though, the draft is anything but an exact science. The other big source of NFL #content for me is Ryen Russillo, who does a bit every year or so about what a crapshoot the draft is. He counts up the quarterbacks taken in the first round, and looks at how many of them are reasonably successful five-ish years in, and the answer is “about half.” And that’s with a pretty generous definition of success— something like “starting at quarterback for some NFL team.” So even getting the top pick is a coin-flip at best; this is particularly acute this year, when everybody seems to agree that the draft-eligible QB pool is pretty weak.

(The Pip keeps asking who I want the Giants to get, and my answer is “Just not Shedeur Sanders, because I loathe Deion Sanders more than maybe any other NFL player², and do not want any more of him in my life.”)

And, ultimately, the whole idea of tanking for draft position is, to me, antithetical to the whole point of sports. If you’re going to play at all, you try to win. Otherwise, what are we even doing? This is especially true in a game as violent as football— if you’re sending guys out their to risk gruesome injuries just as a formality, that’s pretty gross.

This is, I am told, an “oldhead” position, but, you know, I’m willing to accept that. Also in the “oldhead” file, I disapprove of good teams resting starters in the final week (as Buffalo and Kansas City did), and I would’ve sent two DB’s to blow up Mike Evans at the line when the Buccaneers ran that horseshit play to pad his stats at the end of their game³. I hope all those teams lose in the first round of the playoffs, and if that makes me an oldhead, so be it.

And on that note, I’ll give the final word to the oldest of oldheads:

---

So, yeah, I’m yelling at clouds. If you like this, here’s a button:

If you want to call me old or misguided, the comments will be open:

1. For a very Zoomer value of “watch the games”: he puts the game on the big tv, but then mostly watches YouTube shorts on his phone, only occasionally checking in on the actual football.

2. Michael Irvin is neck and neck with Sanders, and Ray Lewis not far behind.

3. For that matter, all the counting stats and records should have asterisks applied given that they added yet another game to the season a couple of years ago.