The game is named for the Hall of Fame coach and occasionally coherent grumbling recently retired broadcaster John Madden, who, in a way, is to video games what George Foreman is to electric grills: a sports celebrity who haphazardly picked something to which to attach his name. However, beginning last year, Madden stopped recording play-by-play audio for the game, thus reducing the number of times you’ll hear “Boom!” during game play by roughly 100 percent. He was replaced by the duo of Tom Hammond and Cris Collinsworth, who have the collective personality of a Tim Robbins beer fart.
Each August, a teeming unwashed horde of single guys in authentic Mitchell & Ness jerseys queue up by the hundreds at the local Gamestop the night of the release to drop sixty dollars on a game that is little more than the previous year’s edition plus a roster update and a few new player animations. Yeah, I know. I love it too.
It’s a joyous occasion for no other reason than that it’s another signal, along with the arrival of training camp and the preseason, that the blessed NFL regular season is drawing near. When you’ve had to endure nothing but months of baseball, you’ll lap up anything resembling football like it’s mother’s milk. What’s more, you can play through an entire season with your favorite team before the actual season begins. You can tell yourself it’s your way of scouting the competition. Did you get the Eagles to finish 19-0 and win the Super Bowl 49–3? On the easiest difficulty setting? Well, surely that’s how it’s going to shake out in real life.
Unfortunately for we socially deficient freaks, this release falls on a Tuesday, smack in the middle of a work week. Just as the government denies fans a vacation day after the Super Bowl, our rights are trampled on with the refusal of time off for Madden Day. Now the drill goes: you get the game at midnight, only so you can go back home and hit the sack before work the next day? Maybe at best you can fit in a game or two, but that’s it. Oh, nononono, my friends. That be some bullshit. Not only have you waited through a seemingly endless off-season, but also a couple hours of standing around in a sausage-fest in order to get this game, and now you can’t even play it? If you’re going to go to that much effort to procure Madden, you need to have a Madden Day Plan in place.
Because Madden sells approximately eleventy-seven trillion copies a year, many employers have now cottoned onto the fact that a metric shitload of people attempt to take off the day the game comes out and have implemented policies forbidding workers from using vacation on that date. Why? Because they’re rank assholes and assholes love nothing more than throwing around whatever meager power they have at their disposal. If you happen to be one of those supervisor humps, congrats. You can take the day off and leave the outraged underlings to choke on your hypocrisy. That was easy, huh?
For the rest of us, there are a number of options available. The simplest solution, of course, is to quit your job. Sure, slogging through med school was arduous and extremely expensive, but not letting you take a day off to play a video game just because you have a surgery scheduled is a crock. Besides, as a surgeon you’re already predisposed with the precise hand-eye coordination necessary to excel at Madden. All that remains is the capacity to yell sophomoric insults over a headset.
Having some foresight can be to your benefit. It’s probably unlikely that a relative will have the courtesy to die around the release of Madden, which would give you an easy out. However, if one should pass away earlier in the year, say around April, prevail upon your family to consider the merits of a summer burial. The soil is less barren and there are more bugs to expediate decomposition. Stick the corpse on ice for a few months and convince the relatives it’s a farewell tour.
Whatever you do, don’t try to feign an illness. Most bosses reflexively won’t buy it, whether you’re actually sick or not, and will demand some sort of doctor’s note, and depending on your financial situation, a doctor’s visit might be a lot to sacrifice for a single day of gaming. Contracting a really serious illness in advance to seal the deal is an extra step worthy of admiration and a surefire way to score some playing time. The nurses can probably rig the game up on your hospital TV. If you can time your eventual passing with the clinching of a Super Bowl victory, you can go out a champion, and perhaps bequeath your screen name to a close relative. That is, until the coroner overwrites the file on your memory card hours later with an 8-8 season with the Chiefs. What a dick.
One thing to keep in mind once you fabricate an excuse valid-sounding enough to get the day off is that you shouldn’t load any Madden highlights you may have that day onto YouTube, not only because it’s an asinine practice in general, but because the time stamp on the videos will give away your ruse. Ridiculous as it sounds, you’d be surprised how Internet savvy employers have become. Also, learning the profile name of the boss’s kid beforehand is a must. The last thing you want is to be playing some thirteen-year-old on Xbox Live and let it slip that you’re skipping work from your teller job at the bank just for the kid to recognize your name from one of his dad’s endless rants about work.
No matter how you go about securing yourself some glorious playing time with Madden, keep in mind that if you ever play the game using any team other than the one you root for in real life, you’re a gutless traitor fit for castration by a scythe. I don’t care if the Saints do only have a 75 rating in the game. If you play with the Patriots, even to beat a clearly superior opponent, you’ve lowered yourself to such an extent that even the most cogent of excuses cannot explain away your fanhood cowardice. Unless you have money on the game. That’s something anyone can understand.
VIII.9 Dupe Yourself into Thinking the Preseason Matters
It’s a well-known but somehow little-acknowledged fact that the NFL preseason is an empty spectacle possessed of a meaninglessness that exists only on par with award shows and philosophy classes. However, after six agonizing months of football deprivation you’d stick your dick in a hornet’s nest to get anything resembling the game you so sickeningly crave. And NFL teams know that. That’s why it’s a perfect opportunity for them to fleece fans with exorbitant prices for what amounts to maybe a quarter of actual football (if that).
In the best of circumstances, preseason games are where closely contested arcane position battles are settled (the battle for third-string tight end is on!). It’s also where a team decides whether or not to carry a fourth safety or a seventh linebacker on the final roster. Truly riveting stuff, I know. For everyone on the field whose job isn’t on the line, it’s a tedious dress rehearsal where coaches try not to reveal too much of their playbook and the main goal for players is not to get hurt. Donovan McNabb, especially, likes to save his injuries for the regular season.
But knowing it means nothing to the players themselves, how then can the preseason be more exciting for you? Yes, there’s beer. And whiskey. And tequila. And vodka. And paint thinner. All these intoxicants will be necessary in surviving this stolid ordeal. Just remind yourself that consequential football is drawing near. Drawing from your powers of extreme self-delusion, you’ll make it through this thing yet. Delude yourself enough and you might even learn to enjoy it in a Stockholm syndrome kind of way. Because, after all, in preseason games either team’s starters play anywhere between one drive and little over one half of the game. That’s a lot of empty time to fill with guys who are getting cut in a week. Your psychosis might as well pick up the slack.
Watching at home, this is no biggie. You could simply change the channel. Then again, it’s the summer, so nothing is on except baseball and second-rate shows networks haul out for the dry months. But that’s irrelevant. You’re a real fan, one of the true believers who forked over fifty dollars (plus fifteen for parking) to see your favorite team take the field in a meaningless scrimmage. Because your season ticket package required you to. That expense has to be justified. Here’s where the self-delusion comes in handy.
As with any destructive habit, you must give yourself to it completely. In many ways, like the players, you too should approach the presea
son as a dress rehearsal. Except, unlike those players, you should care. A lot. Like Ron Paul supporters a lot. Whipping yourself into a frenzy for the regular season isn’t a switch you can just flip on and off. Weeks of building up alcohol tolerance and ascertaining the best routes for eluding security will give you an edge many lesser fans will lack, thus landing them either passed out or in jail.
Having readied yourself for spectator misbehavior, you must now work your expectations for your team’s upcoming season into a fine, ranch-flavored froth. This means outrageous, even wholly insane pipe dreams with no basis in reason and without regard to past performance. Redskins fans have perfected this art. Because of the parity that has come through free agency and the salary cap, teams can swing between being dominant and dominated from year to year. For the majority of teams in the league (everybody except the Lions) there exist some faint glimmer of hope that this can be the year when it all comes together for a title run. Just look at the Falcons and Dolphins in 2008. And nowhere are those delusions stoked more pathologically than during the preseason. Massage that faint glimmer until it become a powerful klieg light blinding to anyone foolish enough to question your team’s chances.
With so little exposure to the players that will be carrying the team throughout the regular season, every iota of playing time in the preseason must be overexamined and treated as though it’s indicative of the entire year to come. Did the starting quarterback go 5-for-5 with a touchdown in his only drive? FUCK YEAH! EMM VEE PEE! SUPER BOWL YEAR, BAY-BEE! Did the starting running back average under four yards a carry in his two touches? Wonder how he feels about a severed pig’s head in his mailbox? Similarly, the preseason can be a minefield for spiking the fantasy football value of some minor-role players, who end up racking up insane numbers against third-string defenses, only to return to being regular old Kevin Jones in the regular season. Don’t be fooled by these preseason stalwarts.
The presence of irrelevant players is no reason to stop caring about the outcome of the game, either. Just because your team was ahead 13–10 when the starters got pulled doesn’t mean victory has been attained. Do you want them to finish with a losing record in the preseason? That’s just the kind of weak momentum that can carry over into the regular season, dooming what would have surely been a memorable title run. Yes. That’s more like it. Scream your lungs out at the sparsely filled stadium. You’ve already started to care about these meaningless second-half scrubs, haven’t you? So begins the descent into the fan madness.
After each contest, be sure to call in to local radio shows to express your overzealous observations of these pointless affairs. It may not seem so, but coaches regularly tune in to these programs before making important roster moves and playbook alternations. Generally they only heed the loudest, most deranged testimonials, so keep that in mind if you get on the air.
ARTICLE IX
Taking Fandom to Unhealthy Levels—Then a Little Further
IX.1: Fandom on the Intarwebz!!11!
Finding that your manic pleas for the fullback to get a few more touches per game have fallen on deaf ears? You’ve tried writing four-page profanity-laced screeds to the local newspaper columnist. You’ve kidnapped the pets of the area sports radio call-in show. You’ve yelled vehemently at anyone on the street wearing your team’s colors. You’ve run cars off the road bearing a team logo bumper sticker, then proceeded to berate and frighten the driver as he reaches for a cell phone to call the cops. In a final fit of pique, you even stood outside the team’s headquarters dressed in animal pelts with a bullhorn and poorly edited signage. What’s a monomaniacal true football fan to do?
Lucky for you, you live in the age of the Internet, which was created primarily to give people with singular obsessions and foot fetishes a venue in which their vices can fester and grow larger from finding other like-minded and like-perverted freaks, most of whom have the spelling ability of Terry Bradshaw. Utilizing this wondrous medium, you can air your views on any and all subjects, no matter how ill-informed and laden with obscure Simpsons references your commentary, to an audience of potentially dozens. From now on, no one will be able to ignore your calls to bench the starting quarterback after Week 2 or trade for a star receiver, even though the team has neither the trade collateral nor the cap room. That’s the beauty of it. Anything goes! Even the asinine. Even gratuitous pictures of cheerleaders. Especially gratuitous pictures of cheerleaders!
Despite what clueless old dipshits like Michael Wilbon will tell you, the Internet is not a monolithic entity. There are, in fact, a very large swath of worthless places for you to visit online while being unproductive at work.
Mainstream Media Sites
The MSM presence online is largely composed of reprinted content that originally appeared in your daily newspaper, weekly newsmagazine, or up-to-the-second cable news network broadcast, most of which is just rewritten Associated Press stories. The material typically strives to be balanced and dispassionate, though it favors the East Coast, liberal values, Disney’s financial interests, scrappy (white) players, and athletes who don’t reflexively hate reporters. Because its sports coverage depends greatly on the privileged access to athletes and league officials that media professionals can’t afford to lose, the MSM tone is by nature antiseptic and inoffensive, and therefore painfully, painfully boring.
In terms of utility to the modern fan, these are good places to get immediate news alerts, scores, the recap of a game you already saw the highlights from seven hours ago, injury reports, and canned quotes from stars. Keenly sensing their own obsolescence, many MSM outlets have tried to incorporate elements of new media, such as blogs and comment sections (which are mysteriously closed for some more high-profile writers), into their sites. However, as these features are subject to the same standards of decency as their parent companies—no swearing, no overt misogyny, no trash-talk, no threatening statements—they are of little use to actual fans.
Message Boards
Message boards are visually Spartan and aggressively unedited forums where groups of anonymous mouth-breathers bandy petty insults, usually in a tone marked by misanthropy, profanity, and casual racism (though not in the excusably clever way sports satirists employ these ills to hilarious effect). All this putative discussion is done in the context of discussing a subject in the news. Message board commenters are of the opinion that the Internet peaked with the advent of the Drudge Report’s siren GIFs.
As a rule, the titular subject in any message board thread is discussed rationally for an average duration of two or three comments, at which point it veers wildly off course as someone’s mom is compared to Hitler and chaos breaks out in a flurry of LOLspeak and run-on insults. Of course, the first casualties of any Internet flame war are proper syntax and the ability to make moderate use of capital letters. JUST LIKE THIS! DOESN’T IT MAKE MY WORDS SEEM STENTORIAN AND DIM-WITTED AT THE SAME TIME? Someone will spell “bitch” with a percentage sign. Don’t be alarmed. That’s just sort of how it goes on messages boards.
Though the level of discourse contained within message boards hovers somewhere around “shit you’ll hear in a mall Lids store,” these forums offer the closest approximation of the drunken trash-talking that goes on during tailgating most Sundays. The difference being that, while it’s an often innocent and amusing way of provoking knife fights in the parking lot, it’s suddenly unbelievably dorky when you do it on the Net.
Blogs
Though MSM writers continue to propagate the thread-bare, wildly inaccurate stereotype that bloggers are unemployed losers sitting in their parents’ basements pissing away their pathetic lives spreading unsubstantiated rumors about public figures, most bloggers actually work in their parents’ living room, thus granting themselves easier access to the kitchen and its multitudes of Supreme Pizza Hot Pockets and Shasta Cola. Successful blogs, by and large, combine the qualities of mainstream media sites and message boards in a crude, tantalizing admixture that requires of their authors shrewd news jud
gment, a lapidary wit, a taste for vulgarity, and deep cache of Erin Andrews pictures.
Unlike message boards, with their armies of subliterate posters, blogs are typically written by an individual or a small group of authors who are for the most part capable of stringing together complete sentences, if not always coherent thoughts. The writing style is often lazily referred to as snarky, though it has yet to be proven that the fictional snark created by Lewis Carroll ever wrote for a Gawker site. Often, authors of blogs have at least some minor background in writing (composing fake Craigslist ads does count as writing experience), a boring office job, a boring spouse, and lofty career goals they would strive toward if only they weren’t spending the time blogging.
Blogs can be many different things, all of them as frightening to Bob Costas as the ghastly practice of gambling on sports. The route a blog can go is entirely up to the author. It can be something as basic and innocent as a personal diary (of sex), a journal of someone’s vacation (sex cruise), or even quick ruminations on topics of the day (sex advice). Accordingly, they can be broadly thematic, narrowly focused, or just a collection of images of awkward-looking people with superimposed LOLCats-inspired captions. With eleventy million blogs forming every hour, you have to do something to be distinctive and build a readership. That way, you feel like people are tuning in for your views, when really they want to jerk it to the Keeley Hazell photo you posted. Either way, the delusion is intoxicating.
The Football Fan's Manifesto Page 18
