I'm beginning to think that the best thing about the start of the NFL season--and I mean the real start, not the Mediocrity Bowl between the Jets and Skins--is that now, at least all the sportscasters will stop salivating about the start of the NFL season. The only thing about the upcoming season that was worse was listening to said 'casters complain about the fans' complicity in all the preseason games, and this after they themselves had spent the last two months working the fans up into a frenzy over football.
If you're a football fan, you'd have to have spent today under a rock to have missed the hot new thing this year for spectators: the "suicide pool." You get a group together, and each person picks one team a week to win, and you can't pick the same team twice in the season. Last person standing wins. Three observations:
First, I'm not sure how picking winners each week equates to suicide. Given the point of the thing, it would be just as meaningful to pick one team that would lose. And that would make more sense.
Second, our buddies on the ESPN NFL pre-game show--which began at about 2:00 pm last Tuesday, I think--inaugurated their own suicide pool with only 2 of the 5 of them actually winning. Two picked the Dolphins, and one picked the Patriots. To be fair, it was Rush Limbaugh (!!!) who picked the Pats. I'd like to be able to say that Rush knows nothing about football, but that would require me to watch him, and I haven't managed that quite yet.
Third, it was downright bizarre to see them doing something that didn't carry its corresponding page on the ESPN.com games site. It would be stunningly easy to put a suicide pool on-line, and given all the announcers who have been talking about them, I was pretty surprised that this wasn't part of a marketing push. Then again, if you're an enterprising marketer, how quick would you be to sponsor something with the word suicide in it?
As for me, I'm still watching baseball. And no, it has nothing to do with the fact that the Cubs, a 10-2 winner today, outscored the Bears, a 49-7 loser.
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