Stop Making Sense
NFL games are fake. They’re not the real world because they’re not normal. People don’t usually solve their problems by running full speed into someone and knocking them over, or by devising a scheme with which they will confuse someone and run away from them.
I love NFL games for exactly this reason. They are a bizarre simulation of real life, where people do act with their instincts and their emotions, but there are 900 million complicating factors that get in the way of those natural instincts and make human beings do crazy things.
Where NFL games do echo the real world is in the simple fact that quite often, they make no sense. Just like life.
In preparing to watch the Dallas Cowboys open their season last Sunday night against the New York Giants, I was prepared for all rhyme and reason to go out the window. The Cowboys have played many games on Sunday Night Football that may have taken actual years off my life, not necessarily due to physical stress but due to mental strain. The painful losses have caused me to act in ways that once resulted in my wife calling me stupid. And she was correct.
When you have been flustered and bamboozled so many times, you almost expect it. I went into the Cowboys’ season opener ready to get weird.
And brother, it got real weird.
At halftime, the Cowboys had outgained the Giants by 125 yards, yet they were down 13–6. This was due to that curious problem that can happen to a football team where literally everything goes wrong for them. Romo was firing passes like usual, the new running game did fine, and they got into position for scores, but it didn’t click. And then tiny Cole Beasely gave up a fumble and it got ran back for a touchdown, with Romo’s effort to tackle Dominique Rogers-Cromartie looking like this:
I love my Tony, but what IS that shit?
So anyway, the rest of the game happened and it continued to be a horrorshow. Two Romo interceptions occurred, neither of which were really his fault, but rather the fault of gravity and human movement and other bullshit. This resulted in the game basically looking over with 8 minutes left. All of those old Sunday Night memories flooded over me, like a calm rush of water coming to drown me and kill me sweetly. I was accepting it with peace.
And then, because suddenly shit can stop making sense for everyone involved, the Cowboys came back and won. This was due to some conservative Giants defensive drives, followed by a blindingly ignorant play by Eli Manning that put way too much time on the clock for his opponents. You know how sometimes you’re watching an NFL game and you get the feeling that you could at least be a marginally successful NFL coach when considering some of the idiotic decisions you see? This was exactly that type of decision.
And even when the final snap dropped out of Romo’s hands and it looked like this game would end in even more embarrassment and lunkheaded fingerpointing at Romo, he calmly picked the ball back up and let his superstar offensive line protect him. He threw a touchdown to Jason Witten and it was over.
Is it fair to brag when your team played terribly, and really only won because the other team did something even more terrible?
The answer is “Yeah, for sure,” so I’ll do that.
What I can’t be happy about is the fact that my favorite player, Mr. Desmond Demond Bryant, broke a bone in his foot and will be out for something like six weeks. Maybe longer.
The image you see above is of Dez Bryant in the tunnel after the game, hobbling around on one leg and congratulating the shit out of his teammates. If you need further proof that Dez is the absolute best dude ever, look no further than a guy who knows he won’t be able to play for almost two months, but is choosing to shun his personal problems for the greater good of the team he loves to the very depths of his soul.
That’s my guy. And he’s going to be gone for a while, for no real reason other than the fact that this is the kind of thing that just happens in NFL games. It is chaos and it never makes sense, and somehow, that’s why it seems right.
