By no means am I strictly an NFL guy. When the lights dim after the Super Bowl each year, I seamlessly move with the seasons into the maelstrom of college hoops and then the long, drawn-out, slow-motion marketing fantasia that is the NBA. Over a lifetime, I’ve soured on baseball but stayed constant to soccer, the sport I participated in myself as a child, with engrossingly mediocre results.
But then, the NFL comes around again and I’m reminded of how spit-polish perfect a sporting product it’s become. The season, parceled out in 16 sumptuous helpings, strikes the right note from the outset. Right there, in Week One, stakes are actually decently high—yet a stumble doesn’t mean the end of the world, as it does in the college game (Ouch: Michigan, Virginia Tech, UCLA). In just two weeks of Sundays, Saints fans are worried, Texans fans are thrilled with the Matt Schaub Era, everyone’s nice and mad at the Patriots, and everyone’s thoughts and prayers are with Buffalo Bill player Kevin Everett (good news: movement has returned to small degrees to his arms and toes—keep him in your thoughts).
