Dan Mooney

With today being both Sunday and a defacto national holiday, I don’t want to take too much time away from doing nothing by doing, well, anything — but I just wanted to take the opportunity to throw my helmet in the ring and say the Monday after the Super Bowl should absolutely be a day off across the country.  I’m not the first to suggest this, by any means, but I totally agree with the sentiment.

If you think three Mondays off in two months (with Martin Luther King Day and Presidents’ Day) is too much, all you’ll have to do is this:

Hold the Super Bowl on the Sunday before President’s Day.

This scenario is actually quite plausible.  But I can also see several arguments against this, which I’ll now argue away:

a) That’s the weekend of the Daytona 500!

No biggie.  The affiliation is a loose one.  Since the race is usually held the second OR third Sunday in February, I see no reason why the Daytona 500 could happen the week after the Super Bowl (especially should the Pro Bowl be played the week before the Super Bowl).  For the apparently huge portion of the country that enjoys the Daytona 500, it”d be a nice pair of weekends, not unlike Christmas falling precisely week before New Year’s.

b) Mid-February?  That’s awfully late for a Super Bowl.  Rectify that.

No problem.  If the NFL is serious about moving to an 18-game schedule, and judging by how profitable football is, I see no reason why it wouldn’t be, that right there would fill in the two weeks that, for instance, this year lies between today and President’s Weekend Sunday fourteen days from now.

I’ve read that if the NFL does switch to 18 games, they would come out of the preseason which stretches on for four pathetic weeks in which starters dip their toes in to see if they remember how to play, then coaches pull ‘em to give an arsenal of backups their only game time of the whole season (barring injury, of course).  I’m sure everyone’s used to the calendar flipping to August and training camps starting, but if you were to put that off for two weeks, things at the back end will fall seamlessly into place, PLUS you have a whole nation chomping at the bit for the season to start.  Or, you might just hold two more weeks of practice, it doesn’t really matter.

c) Doesn’t that demean the Presidents for whom the day has been so honorably dedicated?

Not as much as you might think.  It used to be just “Washington’s Birthday.”  Then Lincoln got involved, still does in some states, so for most of the country the sanctity of their birthdays has already been compromised somewhat by forcing them to share a day of celebration.  And if two things can be celebrated that day, what’s one more?

…Especially when that one more is so utterly American.  People gathering to drink too much, eat too much, watch TV, stare at advertising, ogle women, and somewhere in there, watch championship sports?  There’s probably nothing more American than that.  And if that’s America, that’s also the nation that Washington fought for, and Lincoln kept together.

Super Bowl Sunday IS togetherness.

It’s filled with the holiday spirit.

It totally merits a day off from work for observation… and sleeping in, Bloody Marys, drinking lots of water, eating leftovers, lazing around, cleaning up, and so on, and so on, and so on…

It was my first football-free weekend in quite some time, this past one.  I was away, got some fresh air in the country, thankfully not sitting in my apartment otherwise wasting my time twiddling my thumbs wondering what to do when there’s no football to be watched.

But it’s Monday now, and so begins a week of excessive speculation, analysis, and dissection of the game of all games, the Super Bowl.

The whole endeavor makes me appreciate all the more the weekends leading up to the Super Bowl, when there are two, and before that four, games to be enjoyed - so much football, most of it good, some of it fantastic.  That division rivalries showed up all through this year’s playoffs confirmed for me my preference for those weekends, pound for pound, over the bloated exercise coming up this Sunday that nonetheless is one of the few collective experiences we have anymore, seriously worthy enough to merit giving the whole country that Monday off.

My team, on the other hand, is not one of the two playing this coming Sunday.  Hasn’t been to the show in a while, though I can look over at the NFC Champs and see how long Super Bowl droughts can be.

Me, I cheer for the Bills.  I pulled for them against the Giants all those years ago.  Was as happy as I could be when Frank Reich led them back against the Oilers.  Was as sad as anyone when Tennessee took an illegal pass and turned it into a “Miracle.” When I was 9 and I went with my family to Niagara Falls, my dad bought me a Bills jacket.  This Christmas, my girlfriend (a Buffalo gal)’s parents got me a Bills hoodie.

Know why I like rooting for them so much?  They play in New York, dammit.  Sometimes Toronto, yeah, but that’s because the owner hates everyone in Buffalo just slightly more than he loves himself.  But never New Jersey.  Never all their home games in Jersey.

One day they’ll be back to the Super Bowl, however many years from now.  And I know they had their chances those four consecutive seasons.  If a dynasty is continued excellence, that one from the early 90s is hard to argue against, even without the big win.

The Bills’ biggest obstacle to getting back to the Super Bowl actually isn’t how bad they are.  It’s how good they are.  They’re solidly mediocre. And it’s killing them.

They’re a hair under satisfactory.  7 wins, 9 losses in each of the last three seasons.  That’s not good, but it’s far from awful.  When you’re not awful, people don’t pity you. They just write you off and forget about you. More importantly, you don’t get the top draft picks.  You just pick 10th-20th every year, not getting the franchise quarterback you desperately need to be courageous enough to take the reins once and for all. You get stopgaps at a position here or there, nothing more, and it’s never enough. I’d much rather sit through one awful season just to win a Super Bowl in any of the next four years.  .500 is a tiresome thing.  To strive for that percentage is to know just how low the bar is set.

Now, this isn’t just a Bills issue – this could absolutely be written about most franchises in sports, certainly most football franchises.  In a league where dominance is shunned, where as many people root against the pursuit of perfection as for it, all so that 32 teams can play evenly matched games, a case like the Bills’ isn’t unique. We just must understand that close games are not necessarily good games, or entertaining games to watch. Sometimes yes, but many times no.

While I’m watching, waiting for the Bills to put it together, I’ll amuse myself thinking how far this parity thing will go.  What’s the end of that road, every team finishing at .500?  32 8-8 teams?  How about 30 8-8 teams, one 7-9 team, and one 9-7 team who’ll get home field advantage in their conference’s playoffs.  In the other conference, meanwhile, 12 tiebreakers will be needed to solve which 8-8 team is marginally better than the others.

It’ll come down to whose grass is greener, I’m sure.

Yesterday, August 3rd, was the day of the Great Shift in sports coverage from baseball to football.  Gone is the non-waiver trade deadline, more gone is the Hall of Fame induction, way gone is the lovefest that was the All-Star Game celebration.  In their place are the stories of NFL players reporting to camp, not reporting, maybe reporting, holding out for more money, pouting, posturing, posing, whimpering, punching people, punching each other, punching themselves (in the face); almost getting murdered, murdering others, getting arrested for some of it but punished for hardly any of it.  Baseball players aren’t all mature, harmless do-gooders (the steroid scandal, Ugueth Urbina, Josias Manzanillo, and others) but thank goodness those in charge let us get through one full month of summer – July – before “whetting our appetite for Fall” by posting what amounts to little more than a police blotter.