It was a rainy day in Charleston so I settled in to watch some footballs. With three games left in the NFL's regular season there were several near-elimination contests whose outcomes really mattered. For sure Fox and CBS would show the Dallas-Green Bay showdown whose loser would be in deep playoff purgatory or the Miami-New England contest critical to the Dolphins ' playoff push.
After all, making the post-season tournament is all that matters. As anyone who's followed the NFL even casually knows all too well, any team can hoist the trophy once they qualify for the tournament. Last year, the 10-6 Baltimore Ravens played three games, two on the road, on their way to Super Bowl victory. The year before, the 9-7 NY Giants ran the same gauntlet. In 2010, the 10-6 Green Bay Packers slipped in on a Wild Card and swept three road games en route to the championship. And so on.
In other words, every player, coach, GM, owner, writer, broadcaster and fan knows that seeding is irrelevant. Home field confers as much advantage as the return from injury of a flanker. A first-round bye guarantees passage into the second round -- and nothing more.
So what game did I see? That riveting Seattle-Giants affair, a Seahawk whitewashing that had utterly no relevance in the standings. Seattle had already clinched. New Jersey was already eliminated. Why on Earth would Fox show this desultory affair? It's not like I live in the Pacific Northwest or the teeming metropolis.
Then, adding insult to injury, the announcers on the Seahawks-Giants fiasco mentioned the high drama taking place in Miami. With their playoff hopes hanging by a thread, the Dolphins led New England by four points with Tom Brady poised a few yards from the end zone as the final seconds ticked down. And my television continued to show a meaningless 23-0 egg-laying.
You'd never know of my contest's irrelevance from the network description. According to them, Seattle was battling to maintain their home field playoff edge. The Seahawks, they said, were in a dogfight with New Orleans for that coveted one-seed and needed to defeat today's foe.
The next day, a national sports talk show asked its four hyperbolic panelists if Miami gained more than New England lost. This tripe was presented as a matter of opinion, as if New England's playoff seeding were as momentous as Miami's uphill climb into the postseason.
There are only two possibilities here: everyone involved in the game is lying through their teeth or there is a conspiracy of willful amnesia. The constant talk of seeding as if it correlates with playoff success requires that all the analysts, observers and fans squeeze their eyes shut so tight that they momentarily forget that most of these games don't matter.
We see this in sports all the time. The talk about NBA playoff seeding is so totally laughable it goes beyond amnesia to schizophrenia. Fans of the sport are so paralyzed by grief for any drama in the season that they remain stuck in its first stage -- denial. College pigskin fans work themselves into a lather every season fretting about multiple-undefeated-team scenarios that never pan out. And, of course, all sports fans invoke "momentum" as if it's a guarantor of future events rather than a description of the past.
Wake up everyone, so on a rainy day I can watch a game that has some meaning.
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