ready for some football?

So it's Super Bowl Weekend, and I even know who's playing this year. That's an accomplishment, given that I'm one of those pretentious twits who sniff and say, "I prefer real football," meaning soccer, but that's what comes of trying to talk sports with a bunch of French high schoolers whose football is played with round balls by handsome men in shorts with no helmets. Despite my year on dance team in junior high, I never really picked up the fundamentals of the game (by which I mean I didn't understand what downs were), but once it was explained to me, I found it much more stimulating.

This year I'm excited because my default team to cheer for is in the Bowl! Hooray! I know nothing about football, quarterbacks, running backs, and the merits of the various teams, but by God, if the Patriots are playing, I'll cheer for them. I am not sure why this is, whether I liked their uniforms or whether it all started because my little brother liked the Patriots, but I am all over it now. I even know who Tom Brady is (admittedly, mostly because they did a piece on national morning news the other day about how everyone had a mancrush on Tom Brady, except when they polled people on the street, they didn't explain the term mancrush, so everyone denied it at the risk of looking randomly gay, and anyway, he's still not doing as well as Jesus).

It's weird that I never thought about football much until I went abroad. I missed hearing the marching bands practice. I missed the games being on in the background. So I went to a few of the home games this year, despite the fact that I'd not been to a college football game since the tender age of four or so, and that was just the end of an LSU game. Now I almost know what a running back is (with DMac and Felix Jones around, who could help it?), but my appreciation of the game is rather limited to enjoying watching muscled men fling themselves into heaps over a piece of leather, and also trash-talking the other team, even if my insults are more along the lines of, "Your understanding of differential equations lacks nuance! You wouldn't know a trochaic foot if it bit you!"

My Superbowl Sunday will mostly entail waiting for House to come on post-Bowl, but! The Patriots are going to crush the Giants and I don't care who knows it. After all, I'm fairly certain that the Giants couldn't replicate Rutherford's gold foil experiment with a lunchbox, a sheet of paper, and a rubber ball.

For that, you need Quiz Bowl.