February 22, 2021

Is This What the DTs Feel Like?

Just because the NFL season has to end sometime, doesn’t mean it should. It also doesn’t mean we’ll handle it well when it does.

You can never be blind-sided by the end of the football season, since you know well in advance when the Super Bowl is going to be played. You can see it coming all the way down the block. However, it’s easy to play the denial game until after it’s gone. It’s not that big a deal, you tell yourself. It’s not really going to end, I’m just imagining it.

For anyone who watches the NFL, there’s an awful lot of excitement leading up to the big game. Some of it is generated through the playoff matchups preceding the title game. A lot more comes from the immense amount of hype in the two weeks after the conference championship games. Media attention is enormous. Stories about the league, the game, the participants and football in general clog the sports and news airwaves day after day. It doesn’t have to be related to the game itself, just as long as it has to do with the NFL. More or less.

You tend to just soak it in right up to the roughly14 hours of pre-game programming TV offers up before you get to the Super Bowl.

Once the game starts you are preoccupied by the action (hopefully there’s action – sometimes not). Eventually you get to the end of the contest and you have a champion for another year. You watch the post game, maybe the news and highlights later on to rehash the same stuff over again and eventually turn in for the night, exhausted from the hype, food and probably drink that have dominated your day.

The next day you're reminded the season’s over but are placated by the sports channel highlights and analysis that go on and on. As the week goes by the Super Bowl chat becomes less and less, the further removed you get from the game. Then the weekend comes and it finally dawns on you THERE IS NO MORE FOOTBALL! What am I going to do now? Profuse sweating, anxiety and confusion follow as you pace around the room holding your TV remote.

After a great deal of ruminating and feeling sorry for yourself it occurs to you that there’s the upcoming combine, the draft, free agency and possible trades. In other words, the NFL never really ends, it just transitions to the next season.