With all due respect to this evening’s Pro Bowl, this Sunday afternoon represents what all Sunday afternoons will look like far too soon.
I sat with remote in hand, like an amputee with phantom pains from a limb no longer there, flipping from channel to channel but finding no football. I found college basketball. I’ll care about that in about six weeks. I also found NBA basketball. I suppose I may care about that -- a very little bit -- in perhaps four months. But for now I want football, and I find that there is no football to watch.
And so the withdrawal begins.
Perhaps I shall record next Sunday’s Super Bowl. And if we win, I’ll just watch that game again and again each Sunday afternoon until the games begin in earnest again next fall.
If they begin again next fall, that is. The prospect of a lockout makes the culmination of the season next week all the more unnerving.
In the meantime, I am reminded again of what a superior sport football is. The basketball on TV right now just can’t compare. Likewise the nascent baseball season that will become the subject of much sports writing and talk once the Super Bowl is past. But the sports themselves -- the strength of the action, the sophistication of the games, the complexity of strategy, the variety of skills -- are so inferior to the National Football League. I would rather see a 45-31 football game than the frenetic scoring of 110-98 NBA game. And I would rather see a 7-3 defensive struggle on the football field than a 1-0 pitcher’s duel.
No other sport boasts the kind of playbook that a football team employs. No other team spends hours in film study like a football team does. And no other major sport requires an entire week in between games in order to recuperate physically and prepare intellectually.
It’s a great sport. And on this Sunday afternoon, I miss it.
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