UNDERSTANDING FOOTBALL

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (10-13-22)- Please remember small business in your town during this coronavirus pandemic

     Now that we've settled a few weeks into the football season, I must confess that there are still some things about the game that remain inscrutable to me. For instance, I don't understand the running back who just finished running 40 yards for a touchdown. He's tired, that I can understand, too tired to lift that plastic bottle of Gatorade, so somebody runs up to him and squirts it in his mouth. First of all, he has to blindly trust that the guy has good enough aim to get it in his mouth, and not squirt some of it up his nose. Then, as thirsty as he is, he spits it all right back out. How is he going to recharge his electrolytes doing that? Thank god no one offers him a bowl of borscht after the touchdown.

     I don't understand why some of the penalties seem way too severe, and others seem way too lenient. If your kicker kicks a kickoff out of bounds the other team gets to start from their 40-yard line, which seems excessive to me. Yet, right after the quarterback throws the ball, you can pick him up by the nape of his neck, shake him like a squeaky toy, and toss him back down on his head and no one will think any less of you, except the quarterback. 

     I'll admit I can waste a lot of time doing dumb things. For instance, I can easily spend 20 minutes scraping all the mayonnaise out of the bottom of the jar, not because I'm so cheap that I can't just buy another jar, it's because I don't want the mayonnaise to win. But I can't fathom the amount of time people spend playing fantasy football. My friend Paul says it's not a waste of time, he won $100 last year. He said he's been doing it for about six years, and it only costs $200 a year to get in. We have different ideas about some things I guess, because I'm pretty sure there aren't any guys at all on MY fantasy team.

     Sports betting has spawned a whole new industry of stat-keeping, if you can understand the bets themselves. You can just choose your favorite team and bet the spread if you want, and either give away points or take points, based on who is projected to win. If you're feeling frisky you can choose a parlay bet, explained in simplistic terms on the internet as, "a single bet on three or more unrelated events. Each of those events is referred to as a ‘leg’ of the bet. The entire stake is applied to the first leg. If it wins, the total return from that first leg is used as the stake for the second leg." A picture is worth a thousand words, but that's going to require a two or three thousand-word picture.

     They have something called "sabermetrics" for baseball, which means: the quantitative analysis of data relative to the comparative performance of individual players. Before I knew what sabermetrics meant I was totally against it, because it sounded like an exercise class that my wife might try to shame me into taking. But now that I've seen the definition, I have even less idea what it actually is than I did before.

     I don't understand the need to see a player sustaining that gruesome injury in super slo-mo, over and over, from different angles. Players have gotten so big and so fast that they can cause the human body to twist in directions that are not represented on the average compass. If someone's knee ends up looking like a German wurzelbrot, I do NOT want to see how it got that way. In fact, even if you invite me to dinner and cook a German wurzelbrot, I do not want to see how it got that way. 

     I don't understand why anyone plays the game at all. Through the years, safety equipment has come a long way, but helmets still have those guards around the player's mouth to prevent them from biting anybody. And today there is much stronger attention to brain injuries, which can be hard to diagnose. The symptoms can mirror other conditions such as amnesia. If a player forgets who he is after a blow to the head, it can be time consuming to narrow it down using the process of elimination. 

     I'm six-foot-two, and if I enter any home built before 1955 I will definitely knock my head against a low-flying beam at some point during the visit, possibly damaging the structural integrity of the house. When that happens, I want you to administer the following test: Ask me what a parlay bet is, and if I answer it correctly, please have me airlifted to the nearest hospital.