Football blips
Years ago I was laughing at the wistful deep dive rooting interest of pre – BCS football fandom, plucking through college football scores and saying hopefully “that team beat that other team! That’s good, because my team beat the team that beat them, and the one loss team we need to usurp to get to number one list to the team that lost to them!”. In reality, it is a bit of over I complexity — in a world where college football rankers kind of petered these out after ten or fifteen and the coaches just had subordinates shrug about to fill the rest up. No one was keeping that deep dive score but the fans marshalling their grudgeful arguments on why their team got screwed.
The NFL season proves fascinating for fans of the team from Southern Alaska / Football Siberia. They are relevant by tangent — no one nationally cares about the Seahawks except for their current relationship with the Denver Broncos. And because this year’s team is and always has been a marginal playoff team at best and possibly has shown that they are about where everyone expected them to be pre-season only a couple bits of luck to move them a game or two up — fans interest seem more primed on the fate of the woeful Denver Broncos and where they will give up their draft picks at than the middling Seattle Seahawks.
So. What. Denver. When recapping the season there will be two moments that symbolize their tragedy, both from gimmick encrusted alternate broadcasts. One is the reaction shot from Peyton Manning as the team lined up for a 64 yard field goal instead of trying to convert a fourth down and five. The analytics for the former play is something like … Two percent chance of success? … While the latter is at something like 46. Also they are paying the hot shot QB a quarter billion dollars to make plays. The other moment, forever to be dumped in any reel of the teams’ season, is a fictional starfish from Spongebob Squarepants on Nickelodeon’s alternate broadvast responding to a Russell Wilson throwing an interception with “That’s not what he wanted to cook.”
A curious thing, though. Seattle and the Pacific Northwest are not getting the Broncos – Chiefs game. Instead they have a game that has some theoretical bearing on the Seahawks’s playoff chances — if the Giants lose twice more, the Seahawks can get in. This, despite the fact that, Seahawks fans are lukewarm on that part of the equation and care more about the failings of the Broncos, hoping for that miracle top draft pick. CBS oughta be showing the Jaguar — Texans game, itself a gambit of comedy in that it has only the slightest chance of mattering for a backup playoff appearance for the Jaguars ahead of next week’s divisional title win and in game.