It’s not enough that Alabama has to lose to Auburn – Auburn’s in the national title game, with a high school offense and a defense that Vanderbilt thinks is weak. It’s not enough that Cal has to lose to Stanford – Stanford, a school which should have all the same troubles as Vandy, is in the Orange Bowl, playing in a New Years’ Day game that a similarly-ranked Cal team was denied in 2004, behind the coach of the year. And Vandy has no coach – and right now all the oxygen is being consumed by the openings at Florida and Miami and the like, and one high-profile candidate (for us, anyway) after another is saying ‘not interested’ while we wind up looking at the same mishmash of other people’s coordinators and low-conference head coaches as ever.
I think God definitely wants me to stop caring about football. If He wanted me to care about football, He would have pointed me to the Saints before supporting them turned into flagrant bandwagon jumping.
As an aside, Vanderbilt would have gone on the road with an 8-man team, playing against a Mike Anderson press run by the #15 team in the country (or #11 depending on whose poll you buy), and absolutely curb-stomped them…if we could hit a free throw. Instead, our traditional strength at the line blows up in our face, and 50% FT shooting leads to a 3-point loss in overtime. This is more frustrating, as Redd Foxx said, than finding out for the first time that you can’t do it the second time. (He memorably defined panic as “finding out for the second time that you can’t do it the first time.”)
At some point, I need to do a rank-order of the teams in which I am genuinely emotionally invested. And then see about shutting them down to the point where I don’t need to worry about games as a triggering mechanism for protracted melancholy…or a straw on a camel’s back.
By the way, if your computer won’t start up, before you call your tech support, remember this: THERE’S AN ON-SWITCH ON THE POWER STRIP. Dumbass.