The Eight Stages To Watching Bad Football
The stages of bad football, or what America experienced if they watched Cardinals/Seahawks on Sunday Night.
I still can’t believe that game happened. That game is going to go down in history for how it ended but it almost doesn’t deserve to because it might have been the most boring, terrible game to watch since the Miami/Pittsburgh “Punt stuck in the mud” 3-0 game many years ago.
I don’t really want to hear people defend that game. Yeah the defense was good but if you’d actually watch that 5 quarters of nothing happening over a game where touchdowns sometimes happen then you’re the weirdo. I can appreciate the Seahawks and Cardinals defenses in that game, but it wasn’t actually much fun to watch. Good defense is fun to watch up to a point. That game went far beyond that point. Part of great defensive games is wondering when either team is going to break through. Neither team broke through. It was an entire game of nothing. No touchdowns. No really exciting plays. Nothing. Then two kickers miss easy field goals and the game becomes legendary because at that point all of us who stuck with it had gone completely insane.
Bad football is a depressing experience. Even clownball is fun to watch, but bad football (aka 3 and outs for 4 quarters) is just a boring slog and probably the worst football watching experience. There comes that time during a bad football game when nothing has happened for what feels like ages and then you look at the clock and it’s still 4 minutes left in the 3rd quarter. There comes a time watching bad football when you realize just how much time of your life you’ve wasted watching grown men run into each other. There comes a time watching bad football when you either just say “screw this” and do something else or you stubbornly sit down and hate watch the rest of the game because you are an addict and you are afraid you might miss something, like most people who turned off last week’s Texans/Colts comeback. And of course, there comes a time in bad football, near the end, when you think it can’t possibly get worse, and it does, and your brain breaks.
At least that game gave us probably the greatest gif of the season.
i feel like Catanzaro and Hauschka purposely shanked their kicks because they realized this game could be a nihilist masterpiece and either team actually winning it would only shatter the sublime nothingness of it.
This game was actually scripted. There is literally no other way that happens.
maybe changing your name somehow affects your game lmao
it’s like winning but also losing at the same time. what does it mean? nothing. that there was two hours of football, played without meaning. in the end, we are the losers, all of us. maybe that game could be interpreted as some kind of nihilistic performance art piece about the futility of life.
Don’t hand me no points and keep your hands to yourself
I watched pretty much that entire freaking game, because apparently I am a masochist. Even when I gave up and decided to just go to bed, I decided to check the score one last time, saw there was little time left, and figured I may as well watch the rest. And then a FULL FLIPPING OVERTIME.
But don’t worry Dave, we have Jaguars @ Titans coming up on Thursday night! ARE YOU READY FOR SOME FOOTBALL(ish)?!?!?!
First to 12 fumbles wins
Good defense is boring to watch when paired with mediocre-to-good offenses. GREAT defensive games are fun as hell to watch, especially when paired against good-to-great offenses that at least make you wonder if THIS is the drive that breaks it all open.
Great defenses get those high-energy Von-Miller-on-Cam-Newton type plays. They energize the game, even if there are no touchdowns. They create huge plays that are just exciting to watch as great offensive plays. Good defensive play stops offense, but doesn’t really create anything of excitement itself.
Personally, I don’t mind boring games; I enjoy the strategy and the tactics, and I love watching great players make their craft look mundane, but I can also readily and totally agree that it’s not /exciting/, and football, and its core, should be exciting. And the only exciting moments of that game were missed field goals, which… doesn’t speak highly of the excitement of the game.
It was all worth it when they both shanked easy kicks, that was beyond hilarious
By the end I was simply saying “Both these offenses are so bad, neither team deserves to win…” And so neither team did win, and all is right with the world. 🙂
I like this one better:
https://cdn3.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/7204693/billsmash.0.gif
Lmao that was me watching Bucs/Panthers a couple weeks ago.
lolololol
Why is it daytime in the background?
Dave moved to Hawaii for 5 hours.
Nighttime lighting is harder to draw and the game started during the day for me anyway since Im west coast
Worst tie ever.
At least that ‘skins-giants game in 97 had Gus Frerotte fight the wall at RFK and the ’08 Eagles-Bengals game was 4 hours of clownball that ended in McNabb not knowing what ties were.
These types of games are great for testing the mettle of the announcing crew. Al Michaels swinging between anger and exasperation at the ineptitude on the field was fantastic. Collinsworth continuing his usual insincere happy idiot routine was less so… he really is the Steve Garvey of football.
Ties in general a great, once every couple years, just to remind people that they can happen and to make playoff prognosticators do some math.
Cris Collinsworth Celebrity golfing?
Yes, with the comedy stylings of Michael Floorwax and a special appearance by Earl Christensen from Toshiba.
Waxy Lou and Joan Rivers corpse
Al Michaels snark is the best snark. Towards the end of the game he said something like, “We are the winners because we’ll get to see a better game next week.” Classic.
Doesn’t take much for a game to be better than one with 16 combined punts, lol.
Jags – Titans on Thursday
I always say the best football games are the ones in which both teams score in the 20s. That’s the balance where you have just the right amount of scoring and just the right amount of stops. If they score in the 30s, the defenses aren’t doing their jobs. If they score in the 10s, the offenses aren’t doing their jobs. A 6-6 tie is something I couldn’t conceive happening in this day and age. How on earth did the lowest scoring tie in NFL history happen in an era where teams are scoring the most points?
If you like clownball, you can’t get much better than Vikings/Eagles this past week. I thought it might warrant a comic, but honestly that game was enough of a joke in and of itself.
The sad part is that was still the most interesting game all day Sunday.
The Browns also had a game that year where they beat the Bills 8-0 in whiteout conditions on two chip shot field goals and a snap that went 20 feet over Trent Edwards’ head. The only interesting things that happened were a punt that got blown backward 30 yards and a pass that got stuck in Joe Jurevicius’ facemask. He ran like 20 yards with it like that because he couldn’t get it out.
Gonna have to disagree with you on this one Dave, this was probably the most entertaining game of the season by far.
Here’s the question
would you still say that if it had ended 6-3 at regulation
the ending in overtime turned a terrible experience into a masterpiece
Id have to agree. And I enjoyed it the whole way through. Would have been perfectly satisified with it ending 6-3 in regulation. But I wont argue that this makes me the weirdo…
right there with ya my friend
I’m a Seahawks fan so I had no choice but to stick it out. I literally busted out laughing when Haushka missed that field goal. Oh well, a tie is still better than a loss.
What was Pete Carroll reacting to in that gif?
Hauschka’s miss at the end of overtime.