Dan Marino

The Afternoon After: Day in the Sun

Esoteric Leave a Comment

As I explained last week, I’ve expanded my weekly football thoughts to include some non-football stuff, primarily since I don’t have an enormous breadth of knowledge about the sport and don’t always get to watch games. That won’t stop me from offering up some picks, but if you place bets based on them, I’d be forced to characterize you as foolhardy.

Heart attack on a grill

I’ve made no secret of the fact that football doesn’t rank particularly high on my sports hierarchy, placing behind pretty much every other major sport besides hockey, which I never got into. That said? It’s good to have football back, primarily because it’s woven into what I believe to be the best time of year.

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The Afternoon After: Rex in effect – Jets proving smashmouth still works

Esoteric 3 Comments

Thomas Jones wins it for the Jets in a no-brainer call by Rex If there’s one thing Sunday’s games reminded me, it’s that I’m not a gambler. (Remember: I offer a disclaimer every week with this where I don’t actually claim to know anything about the game itself, I just like writing about it)

I missed – badly – on every single one of the games I picked, not just against the spread, but the results straight-up. I got caught up too much in the premise of the “hot team,” and forgot that some teams were just flat-out better, and those teams were playing at home.

The one road team to win was the Jets, in what was an upset to everyone but their coach. I have no love lost for the Jets personally as a Dolphins fan, but I respect the style they’re winning with in that they’re spitting in the face of the current football convention.

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The Afternoon After: Specter of pain remains a constant presence

Esoteric Leave a Comment

Here are my weekly football thoughts. No LT sightings this week.

Feeling his pain

Pain is such a part of life that we take for granted the times when we don’t feel it. Never again will I do that after a year in which much of it was spent dealing with injuries of various sorts, and mine were brought on solely by running, the repetitive stress of pounding your lower body against the pavement again and again.

Football pain is on a whole other plane. And in a sport predicated on sheer physicality and enormous husks crashing into each other haphazardly, something catastrophic can happen in an instant. Other sports have injuries, obviously – I have a colleague who acutely observes that all pitchers are injured by sheer definition of what they have to do to play the game – but it’s nothing like what we see in football.

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