Are You Ready for Some Sports Ball?

by Chris McGinty of AccordingToWhim.com

I’m not into sports. They bore me. Except that’s not entirely true. I enjoy playing sports. I haven’t played anything with any real frequency for years, but playing is fine. There are social situations where I can sit in front of a screen and watch what people do with a ball, but if I’m on my own I just won’t sit down and watch sports.

In 2018, everybody was all like, “Hey, the Super Bowl was super boring this year,” and this boggled my mind, because it’s a sport. The teams play each other. They try to keep the other team from scoring and they try to score. They aren’t there to let touchdowns get through so that you can yell at the TV and high five your friends.

I looked up the game on YouTube, and I told myself I was going to watch it a couple of minutes at a time just to see if I thought it was significantly more boring than it normally is. I didn’t even get to the start of the game. I just really didn’t care.

I kept trying to tell people that there was the possibility for a dangerous precedent from complaining about how entertaining the “big game” was, which is that if they complain too much about how entertaining the games are, they will start scripting the games. When I would point out that they have to play the game legitimately, meaning that they can’t choose when a game is exciting, people would act like they didn’t understand what I was saying. They would double down saying that it’s just because it was the Super Bowl. The Super Bowl should be an exciting game.

Um, not if they’re playing legitimately. It should be just as exciting as it legitimately played out. I promise you I’m not exaggerating people’s confusion. Maybe I wasn’t explaining it well, but people were genuinely upset that the game was boring, and they can’t be if they want it to be real.

People don’t believe me, but I’ve learned my lesson about not pointing things out like this just because they seem a little farfetched. If I end up being right, I need to have it in writing. Consider how much people pay to run ads during the Super Bowl. Someone is going to suggest a couple of exciting plays to keep viewer interest if the ratings start to slip. The league may not listen to the suggestion, but the suggestion will happen.

Luckily, it’s unlikely that there will be consistently boring games during the Super Bowl, but if it were to happen and viewership were to start dropping, we could easily have another quiz show style controversy. The Milli Vanilli of sports.

I think that it’s interesting how much I know about the rules of sports. I don’t know who’s playing. I don’t know any statistics. But I understand most of the rules. I even understand some of the strategy. I don’t want to oversell this. I’d do a worse job at colour commentary than Dennis Miller did. I’m just saying that for someone who has no interest in watching these games, I know things.

I got to thinking about why this might be, and the best answer I could come up with is that I did play some of the sports as a kid, so I’ve retained some information. I believe that as an amateur game designer I also have some valid reasons to understand what makes these games work. I can follow a discussion on a radio show or a podcast when they’re talking about rules issues or strategy debates, but when they start talking about teams, players, statistics, and all that crap, I tune out.

In the late 90s, there were only 30 NFL teams and I owned a 30 sided die. I had the brilliant idea of rolling randomly to see what order I ranked teams. I realize that this is absolute blasphemy for some people who believe that you should be a diehard for your team, but I’ve never had a team. I would just root for my dad’s team.

There was something interesting though about having a list that I could decide who I was rooting for consistently without having to worry about things like knowing who the teams were and why I cared. Besides, there really aren’t very many uses for thirty sided dice. The thirty sided die and the twelve sided die are like the Milli Vanilli of dice.

The problem was that one year they suddenly decided to add two teams to the NFL, and that threw everything off. There were still ways I could have randomly figured it out, but the thirty sided die was already complicated enough. There are now dice apps, and most of them allow you to make custom dice. This means that I can actually use the app to roll a thirty-two sided die and figure out what order I rank the teams this year.

I’m going to warn you though. All three times that I did this, I immediately put the list away and didn’t care anymore. In truth, I’m just going to root for my dad’s team regardless of what my stupid list says. Unless I decide to do something as a topic for the blog, I doubt this is going to have any relevance for me after I roll it up.

I’ve found an alphabetical list of the teams by city name, and I’m going to start rolling the die. My rule was to keep rolling until a number that isn’t assigned comes up. I think it would probably be easier to round up to the next available slot, or down if there is no available higher slot. This would mean that the list would always be decided in 32 rolls. I think the reason I didn’t do that was that it felt weird that I might roll a 22 later in the process and end up assigning it at position 5. I’m going to go with the method that the number has to come up in the roll still, but the other thought will be in the back of my mind if I ever do this again.

1. Tampa Bay Buccaneers

2. New Orleans Saints

3. Greenbay Packers

4. Atlanta Falcons

5. Miami Dolphins

6. Tennessee Titans

7. New York Giants

8. Denver Broncos

9. Pittsburgh Steelers

10. Kansas City Chiefs

11. San Diego Chargers

12. Minnesota Vikings

13. Washington Redskins

14. Detroit Lions

15. Buffalo Bills

16. Jacksonville Jaguars

17. Dallas Cowboys

18. San Francisco 49ers

19. Arizona Cardinals

20. Cincinnati Bengals

21. New York Jets

22. New England Patriots

23. Indianapolis Colts

24. Cleveland Browns

25. Houston Texans

26. Chicago Bears

27. Carolina Panthers

28. Oakland Raiders

29. Seattle Seahawks

30. Philadelphia Eagles

31. St. Louis Rams

32. Baltimore Ravens

I was starting to wonder if I was ever going to roll a 1. By roll a 1, I mean touch the screen and have a 1 come up. So there are my teams for the football season beginning in 2019. Now if anyone asks me who I like in the game, I can go straight to the blog and find out who I like.

Chris McGinty is a blogger who loves football season, because he still delivers pizza. This means that there are deliveries to take and tips to make… as long as he doesn’t explain to the potential tipper how he chose his favourite team.