First of all, Thursday night games, in theory, are great. You get a bonus NFL game before the weekend. It's something to look forward to and it helps break up the workweek.
But generally, these games are pretty bad as both teams are preparing on a short week. And if it's your team that's playing, it's a no-win situation. Either you take the day off and trudge up to the stadium on a weeknight (home games), or you pray your team doesn't sleepwalk through the game after adding a travel day to the short week mix (away games). Pick your poison.
Secondly, it was a divisional game. That would seem like a good thing, right? Not when your team is playing in the bastardized NFC West.
No matter how hard the league tries to stuff it down our throats, the Seahawks belong in the AFC, the Cardinals in the NFC East and the Rams in Los Angeles. There are no historical rivalries within the division anymore. I wouldn't pay a dime to see the 49ers battle the "rival" Seahawks for NFC West supremacy after sitting through 30 seasons of San Francisco-Seattle snorefests during the exhibition season.
The Cardinals? Please. One recent Super Bowl appearance with Kurt Warner is the only thing keeping them from complete irrelevance over the past 50 years. And Warner's first team, the Rams, play in a nondescript dome in a nondescript midwestern city (yes, I'm still smarting from last night's demoralizing St. Louis Cardinals beatdown of the Giants in the NLCS) that has negated what was once a passionate "NoCal vs. SoCal" geographic rivalry.
That's your NFC West: the 49ers, one dull team, another duller team and one more dull team.
So there's three games you can toss off the schedule every season. Throw in two preseason exhibitions, and you're already looking at five games (half the home schedule) that I wouldn't waste an entire Sunday for, let alone PAY for.
But hey - the Niners won last night, stay atop the NFC West, and I get to enjoy an NFL Sunday without stressing about my team. You take what you can get.
No comments:
Post a Comment