The Fan's Perspective

Everbody knows that feeling. Sometimes there is a day or even worse a stretch of days when everything that possibly could go wrong goes terrible wrong. Murphy’s Law if you will.

Well, I just experienced such a phenomenon last weekend and since everbody loves lists (and also because lists are fairly easy to construct; yes I am lazy) I present to you 10 reasons why the last weekend sucked (for me):

(in chronological order)

• I had to work Friday, which in itself is already a huge bummer, but then I even had to work half an hour longer, because my crazy superintendent thought I was loafing. She basically did everything short of actually calling me a bum. That little rant caught my off guard so much that first I was more surprised than mad. In retrospect I should have given her the patented start-looking-at-her-from-top-to-bottom-then-disdainfully-semi-laugh-at-her-move. My buddy Pascal has perfected this move to the point that he’s even better at it then a “MTV NEXT” candidate (which is saying something). Of course you always come up with these great comebacks after the fact. Oh well.

• Friday night we went bowling with our football team. Now, I know what you’re thinking: “That sounds like fun how can that possibly suck!?” Well, my friends let me tell you why that sucked, because I suck at bowling that’s why. Bowling is one of those things that is not fun unless you are good at it (except you’re drunk or stoned, but booze and pot make nearly everything better so that doesn’t count) and when you get beat by people who have basically reconstructed shoulders and knees (Nope, I’m not talking about a seventy-year-old, I’m talking about my friend Steve who we tenderly call “Bubble Boy”.) it’s even less fun.

• After putting up girl-like numbers at bowling we got drunk out of our minds to celebrate our buddy Martl’s 19th birthday (now granted THAT was fun). But of course it couldn’t be all fun and joy. No, not this weekend. While playing the bench game (great game if your drunk: People start to form benches behind other people who aren’t paying attention or talking to somebdoy else and then somebody comes along and pushes that person over the bench. It sounds complicated, but it’s not and it it is freakin’ hilarious. After a while everybody is really paranoid, because alliances have been formed and are then broken. Actually, it kind of reminds me of the “The Real World Road Rules Challenge”.) I somehow lost my headphones and I only realized it later so I had to walk all the way back and look for them in the dark. I was totally wasted so my vision was already blurred and of course I didn’t find them. Not that they were expensive or anything, but loosing stuff still sucks.

• Saturday evening my friends and I went to the movies to watch “The Taking of Pelham 123″. Now if you haven’t already seen this movie then don’t waste your money on it unless you’re fond of seeing a seemingly fatter than usual Denzel Washington. It’s a generic hostage thriller with no twists and turns. You always know where the movie is going and how it’ll end. The only highlight of the movie was when our buddy Simon fell asleep around the 50 minute mark (which almost made up for the fact that we wasted 9 bucks on a boring movie, almost). He wasn’t just napping he was full asleep. It was great. In the words of Asher Roth: “I wish we taped it.”

• After that awesome movie “experience” we went to THE most depressing dance/prom I have ever been to. For once I’m not exaggerating. I’m 90 percent sure that there where more parents than students. The band was terrible. There was no DJ. (Why not have the band in the big hall where all the couples dance and put a DJ in another area so everbody else can dance there? Is it really that hard to figure this out?) There were so few people that the barkeeper seemed surprised when we approached her for a drink. Oh yeah I forgot I’m working tonight. There were so few people that at around 12 a.m. the cleaning lady showed up ready to clean up the “mess”. The dance isn’t over yet and the cleaning lady shows up??? You gotta be kidding me!! I can only imagine how down I would’ve felt if that had been my prom. Needless to say that my buddies and I were cracking jokes the likes of “Let’s hope we still get in, it seems awfully crowded tonight” and “Let’s stick around a bit longer, because it’ll actually attract attention if we (three people) leave”. It was staggering. You had to be there to believe it.

• Right when I thought it couldn’t get any worse along came Sunday. After a somewhat restful sleep I had a rude awakening when I realized that I had overslept and was an hour late for work. So I rushed to work leaving me no time for breakfast or at least a cup of coffee. Of course I had to work an hour longer and so I was even more exhausted than C.C. Sabbathia running back to the dugout on a hot summer day in Texas.  Sweaty and tired. You get the idea.

• So I dragged my liveless corpse home and collapsed in fornt of the computer to check my fantasy teams. Now, since I had been late to work I didn’t have time to set my fantasy team’s lineups in the morning. You can imagine all the wishing and praying I did all day hoping that I hadn’t started anybody hurt or on a bye week. I was as anxious as Mel Gibson before a roadside breath test, to say the least, but then a quick sigh of relief passed through my body when I realized that I had started the right guys. Or so I thought, because like all weekend long, everything that could go wrong did go wrong and so I got shellacked by a buddy of mine in our football team’s league (stupid David Garrard screwed me over worse than a car salesman: Nono, these breaks work just fine, trust me. Dammit, they weren’t fine, David!!!I trusted you!!!) and nearly lost to another guy in my other league who started two players who were on byes. He played to players less than me and I only won by one point. One point!!!! That could have been the ultimate fantasy disaster: Loosing to somebdoy who has given up his team and doesn’t even set his lienups anymore, which by the way is just a disgrace. I mean if you can’t commit yourself to a fantasy league for three months then what can you commit yourself to?!?! For God’s sake who are these people!? Do they like actually have to think about accepting a free beer?? Is that too much commitment for them?!?! Let’s move on before I have to punch a wall or something. (By the way I think I set the record in that paragraph for most exclamation and question marks. Call the Guiness guys.)

• After checking my lineups I scrambled to find information on the Red Sox – Angels game (Of course I could’t get a stream going, but on this day nothing could surprise me anymore.). They were up 2 in the 8th. Usually with that kind of lead that late I would’ve been fairly confident, but not with this Red Sox team and not on this particular day. (Bill Simmons brings it straight to the point in his podcast with JackO: They had no heart and no passion this season and at no point did you ever get the feeling that they had that special IT this year. All that’s left now for Red Sox fans is to root against the Yanks and maybe even try some voddoo to stop the evil empire in it’s tracks. Seems like it is 1999 all over again. Yikes!) And so the inevitable happened and my beloved Sox blew the game in the worst way possible. By giving up three crucial runs in the 9th at home. A terrible ending to a secretly terrible season.

• When the Sox lost that’s when I should’ve known that the Pats-Broncos game wasn’t going to bode well for Pats fans. (Somehow the Boston teams feed of each other’s energy. I can’t quite explain it, but there is some connection between them.) It wasn’t really a game I expected the Pats to win, but still as a fan you always talk yourself into stuff. I felt pretty good at halftime, but there where some red flags. Brady overthrowing wide open guys (he has had this issue the whole season long, let’s hope it doesn’t become a bad habit) for example. I also felt like we should’ve been up by way more at that point in time. Not to go all NFL boradcaster on you, but it is still true: If you let a good team like the Broncos hang around for too long, they will come back and beat you. The Pats didn’t put the nail in the coffin and that’s why they ended up six feet under. I wasn’t all that mad about the loss, because after all the Broncos are a pretty darn good team, but what did concern me was Brady. He just doesn’t seem like the same since that injury. All Pats fans can do right now is hope and pray. Just hope and pray.

• Finally when I thought I had endured every possible bad scenario my ODS formula basically went up in flames. It imploded like a house of cards. It busted into pieces like a handgrenade. It burst like Shavonne’s implants on “The Real World Road Rules Challenge: The Ruins”. (Second Ruins reference in this post. Translation: If you haven’t watched this show yet then do so right now at http://www.mtv.com/shows/rwrr_challenge/the_ruins/series.jhtml. I mean it. Right now. Alright fine you can finish reading this post, but after that go watch the show. You won’t be dissapointed. I guarantee.) It … alright you get the point. It didn’t do as well as expected. I went 9-5. Now, that’s not terrible, but it’s not good enough. The results should be better and they will be going forward. You have to understand that the formula is build on the premise that it gets better and especially more accurate with each week. (Plus, in my defense some of the games I picked wrong were either really fluky or really close.) At the end of the post I will give you the new (meaning adjusted based on the new numbers) ODS picks for this week’s games.

You probably can understand that I was really glad when the weekend was finally over and actually also happy I came out of it unharmed (not countig, of course, the emotional scars I suffered from the Pats and Sox’ losses), because with so many bad things happening at once you never know. I could’ve been hit by a coconut (granted a little unlike since palm trees are a rare phenomenon here, but still anything could’ve happened this weekend) or blindsided by a bowling ball (now that’s a risk factor right there). Fortunately none of that happened and so I’m poised to look towards blue skies and sunshine. In the words of Jimmy Cliff: I can see clearly now, the rain is gone…Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind… Here is the rainbow I’ve been prayin’ for…It’s gonna be a briiiight, bright, briiiight, bright sunshiny day…

Important note: In order to keep the ODS numbers comparable from week to week I have come up with a new wrinkle to the formula. From now on the strength of schedule numbers, meaning the combined opponent wins, will be divided by the times the formula was used in a season. In other words: Last week was the first week I used the formula that’s why I divided the combined opponent wins by 1, this week by 2 and so and so forth. To the picks (home teams in caps, ODS number in parentheses):

ATLANTA (5,789085914) over Chicago (5,144456482)

CINCINNATI (7,246906429) over Houston (3,453898305)

GREEN BAY (6,819754156) over Detroit (4,765220788)

JACKSONVILLE (3,972004361) over St. Louis (1,139282108)

Baltimore (10,08189118) over MINNESOTA (6,485231366)

NEW ORLEANS (12,24478485) over New York Giants (11,01611607)

NEW ENGLAND (11,20993789) over Tennessee (4,488552804)

NEW YORK JETS (6,755681818) over Buffalo (2,559653114)

PITTSBURGH (7,908619212) over Cleveland (2,660485825)

Philadelphia (5,401577016) over OAKLAND (1,542030079)

SEATTLE (8,976629712) over Arizona (5,332397004)

Carolina (2,440379308) over TAMPA BAY (2,414993647)

WASHINGTON (3,361298184) over Kansas City (2,969198119)

Denver (21,03062783) over SAN DIEGO (4,254865104)

Last week: 9-5