The Draw Play

I spoke about weather games on the Monday Chaos Report but it’s a subject that’s been on my mind for a while so I figured I may as well make a full-blown rant about it so I have something to link to whenever I get stuck in the same argument down the road.

There are people who hate weather games. Who cry when the snow flurries fall. Who whine when the rain bogs the field. They demand all football to be best played in a climate-controlled dome. I call them Domers. This is an opinion I simply cannot abide. Weather games rule.

The opinion seems to stem from a desire for purity. Pure football. Minimal variables. Somehow the domers have convinced themselves that the football is always best this way. These other factors? Distraction. Problems. It only makes the football worse. I see what they mean by it. Weather dampens the football quality. Things get sloppy. Playbooks get minimized. Depending on how bad the weather gets, the functionality of the play decreases significantly. If you like flashy plays and such, weather gets in the way. I’m not going to disagree with that. The Denver/Patriots game got pretty ugly.

The thing is, that game sucked before the snow fell too. In fact, the two major plays that ultimately decided the game (The bad 4th down call and Stidham’s idiotic fumble) both occurred before the blizzard. This isn’t new. I have seen an untold amount of shitty boring football played in climate-controlled perfection. In 2023 the Vikings and Raiders combined for one of the worst football games you will ever watch in the pleasant comfort of the Las Vegas Roomba.  I have seen some amazing football played in garbage conditions. Last season, the Browns and Steelers played in a heavy snow game and it was one of the best games of the year.  This is the main reason I have a problem with the Domer mentality.

Weather doesn’t make a game worse. It makes a game different. It changes the dynamics at play. It introduces a heavy new variable to the mix that both teams now have to adapt to and overcome, and seeing how they do so is the thrill. It adds a thick level of tension to the experience because now a single mistake or big play can be the entire game. What is Sean Payton going to do now that half his playbook is neutered? Well, that’s why I’m here. To find out!  I love that weather makes kicking harder. Have you seen what the new K-ball rules have done to our sport? The 40-yard line is scoring range now. I hate that more than I hate a blizzard. Make Kickers suffer again. The Broncos lining up for field goals in the AFCCG was so much more tense because of the wind.

As someone said in the comments of the Chaos report, would anyone remember the Steelers/Dolphins mud punt game without the weather causing the mud punt? Would anyone remember LeSean McCoy running roughshod over the Lions like he was the only player not in a snow game…if it wasn’t a snow game? I can’t remember the last time bad weather made a game less memorable. Football in bad weather is a feast for the eyes, even when you can’t tell where the ball is. Football is a game about order and structure, and that’s why chaos factors make it more fun.

The Domer mentality feels misguided to me. This desire for only the best possible product as if that can actually be achieved by ripping out the chaos and the spice. That’s why the comic above is a ridiculous representation of a slippery slope argument. If weather is a variable that hurts the product, then so are several other things that require addressing. Why are we okay with crowd noise and home field advantages, doesn’t that hurt the on-field product too? In a way that is one-sided? At least weather doesn’t discriminate. You could follow this logic so far up your own ass that you turn into a human Möbius strip.

Domers talk as if they dream of the 2020 NBA bubble playoffs as the ideal of sport. This weird focus on how perfect things need to be to get the best, most distilled essence of football. Fox only, No Items, Final Destination. To me that just removes so much of what makes football great in the first place. The imperfections of art often define it. AI Art is a soulless husk not because it’s bad to look at (at this stage, much of it is perfectly passable), but because it lacks the elements that make it unique and human, and you can tell it’s missing something. Also really annoying people tout it as the future.

Denny Carter, the individual I have decided to playfully lampoon in the comic above and who is generally a writer/analyst and person I like a lot, happens to be a Domer. I feel like the rise of Domers has coincided with the rise of data analysts and stat nerds. To folks like that, weather is a problem. You cannot slot weather’s impact on a game into DVOA or QBR. When you view football through the lens of analytics, or fantasy (Where offensive numbers going up is the goal), weather can only damage your perception. So I kinda get why they hate it. Data nerds hate variables they cannot account for.

Mina Kimes, another prominent Domer (and the one that I’m most disappointed in for being a Domer), is also an analyst who discusses film and numbers a lot. Weather hurts these folks perceptions because they want to watch the players and strategies working as intended. That’s why she’s getting actively snippy about it while the rest of us are just having a good time watching players slip and fall down because things not going as intended is very entertaining. The Patriots had two players slip like they stepped on banana peels in one play. We had yakitey sax ass football on our screen and you are trying to make me feel bad about liking this? This is peak.

The funny part is out of the two Championship games, I remember the Den/NE game significantly more than the Sea/LA game. Most people, myself included, would say the NFCCG was a better football game. But that’s kind of it. It was a very good football game. The AFCCG was stupid…but it was memorable. It was ugly. It was silly. It was beautiful. It had the spice. It had the flavors. It had the vibes.

I know my own biases are also at play here. I do not watch football for the numbers or the data or the hardcore film analysis. I’m here for humanity. I love the unexpected, the stories, the comedy, the chaos. To me that’s what makes sports worth watching. Weather only enhances that experience. I know it’s the same for a lot of people, because anytime a prominent Domer makes a Domer post, they get lots and lots of comments telling them to shut up.

The Super Bowl being a neutral site to reduce weather chances makes sense and I have no problems with it, even if part of me really does want to watch a Super Bowl in a frozen Lambeau field. It’s the final game, the ultimate moment, it should be with no items on final destination and as pure as we can make it. But that’s because it’s special. I also wish stadiums could find ways to shield fans from the weather as best as they can without covering the stadium, because sitting in the rain or snow in the stands does suck.

So that’s my death hill for this week. You will take my weather games from me over my cold, trapped in a blizzard body. You will never convince me snow detracts from the football experience. You will never get me to not laugh when a monsoon game causes a player to slide 10 yards on a tackle and come up looking like a WW1 soldier in no man’s land. Tom Coughlin’s frostbit nose in the 2007 NFCCG is one of the most treasured images of my fandom. Weather games rule.