The Draw Play

I’ve never found the “guy who spends all day after a loss being shitty and grumpy” to be a terribly common reality. They do exist, but they aren’t a plague. Every one of them that I have met has been an asshole to begin with, so the sports part is really just how some of that stuff is expressed. They are also the types to be really obnoxious upon victory. I think this guy is blown out of proportion as a media trope or a problem by people who don’t like sports in the first place.

In my experience, and certainly in my own life, losses mostly roll off the back because losses are frankly the norm. Most of us will see our team mostly lose. Few of us will experience the perfect ending to a season. Watching your team lose is as natural as breathing. A normal loss, and you are over it within 20 minutes if not less. A bad loss and you might be annoyed for a few hours, maybe the rest of the day. A loss has to be monumental for most people to get caught up in the emotion of it for more than a night. I think the Giants’ historic choke job to Denver last year was the only time in the last 6 years that I felt any real annoyance the next day. It was mostly brought on by opening my favorite various sports websites and seeing headlines about it and deciding I wasn’t going to read about football that day.

One stereotype I do fall into, and see far more often than the negative one, is how Mondays (or any day after a big win) ends up with you spending most of your day just vibing on the sports news. Victory Mondays are so sweet. You can read every article about your team. You browse the team socials for clips and locker room speeches. You read every reaction piece by team blogs. You even occasionally sneak into the spaces of your opponent to drink the tears. You better believe I spent much of this past Monday just lapping up Cowboys fans crying about their terrible defense. The Giants have been ass for over a decade; I gotta get my nourishment where I can.

To be honest, even after losses, Mondays are usually just about reading sports news. Football has always been the perfect watercooler sport. Everybody watched The Games yesterday. With how the NFL schedule works with weekly appointment viewing on mostly one day, and with fantasy football, it is remarkably easy to have a pulse on the entire league at once. That’s not really something a casual Baseball or Basketball fan can have. Too many games, too frequently. You gotta be a sicko to pay attention to everything going on at all times. You end up just occasionally checking in on other teams, or noticing when some drama occurs. Football? You can watch Boomer do his fastest 3 minutes on MNF and have locked-in takes ready to go the next day like an honors student.

When people talk about football’s dominance over American culture, I really think that the accessibility of discussion is overlooked as a major factor why. Football is a complicated sport to actually understand compared to Baseball or others out there, but because every team has so few games at such designated times, you can casually tune in and get a whole slew of easy-to-digest results and opinions with little effort. A casual fan who pays no attention to his obligatory family fantasy league and barely knows players on his own team can still end up comfortably holding conversations with the sicko who is grinding all-22 tape in his free time. It’s beautiful.

Or maybe I’m just in a good mood because the Giants made the Cowboys eat shit on national television. Losses are easy to get over. Wins are like catnip. That’s probably it.