It's the Hap-happiest Time of The Year

Now some of you probably have the Yule Log cranked up and ready to go, the carolers are running rampant in the street and those sleigh bells are indeed ring-ring-ring-a-ling ting-ting-ting-a-ling tee if you know what I mean. Just a week until Christmas eve and the last second panic shoppers are flipping the calendars and realizing that they don't have that last weekend to get this thing done. They might actually have to traverse the consumer mileu and purchase something before the 23rd and enter into the bowels of hell with the rest of the shoppers over the next 48 hours. Frightening, I know, and more than a few of you are probably sipping your morning coffee, reading this and coming to the realization that I may be right--sorry to alarm you at this hour.
That being said, the holiday season for me is only a backdrop for my enthusiasm right now. Sure, I love to get into a bloody brawl with Mrs. Anderson at Circuit City when the last of the miraculously last-minute arrival X-Box 360's is within arms reach for both of us as much as the next guy, but this time of year is when the NFL starts giving us Saturday football to bridge the void that is left behind as we await the kickoff of the college bowl season. Magically, I can finally watch my beloved Bucs on television as they get their asses handed to them in the blizzardy mudpit that will be Gillette Stadium in Foxboro today.
We live in football Purgatory here in Arizona, and I say that with all due affection and love of those cute little Cardinals down in Tempe (soon to be Glendale). I remember a similar world in Tampa, back when we wore the Creamsicle with pride and all 200 Buc fans that showed up would try to make enough noise that the Packer fans who had taken over the Big Sombrero knew that we meant business. There was nothing like showing up to that vacuous stadium with no tickets and spending about three hours buying some poor season ticket holder's four forty yard line seats for $20 and turning around and selling them for $20 each to some other poor sap who was still getting them for 30% of face value.
But the real shame of living here in Arizona now, or Tampa in the early 90s, is the NFL's policy on television regarding sellouts. This policy basically works like so: if there aren't enough football fans in the 5.8 million people in the Greater Phoenix metropolitan area and suburbs to fill a 78,000 seat stadium, then the rest of the 5,722,000 of your don't get to watch the Cardinals play on TV. The policy makes perfect sense, and in the other 31 markets out there, this rarely causes much flap, because the games are sold out for the next 50 seasons or so with waiting lists that transcend three generations. But here in AZ, we don't sell out games, and I don't mean all the games--I mean any of the games. I have been here for five football seasons now, and quite honestly, I cannot recall a sellout. When I went to the one game in SunDevil Stadium (yeah, they do play NFL football in a rickety 60 year old college stadium with aluminum bench seats here) against the Bucs to end a miserable season last year, there were more Buc fans in the staduim than Cardinal fans. How many freaking transplants from Tampa come out to Arizona, seriously? So when the Cardinals have a home game, we don't get a replacement game to watch, instead, we just lose the chance to watch a game. In other words, everywhere else in the country, you get two early games (East Coast) plus an afternoon game or one early game (West Coast) plus two afternoon games.
On the weeks that the Cardinals are traveling to another city, we always are afforded the opportunity to watch this train wreck of a team (who has probably won three road games in the five years I have been here). Good times for all. Which brings us back to my original thought which was--holy crap, I wrote a lot of ramble here, hold on a second and let me scroll back up--holiday season...shopping hell...X-Box 360 (boy that'd be nice to get this year, maybe I can try to track one down)...Gillette Stadi--oh yes, my beloved Bucs on TV today. Due to the fact that Tampa sucked last year (5-11--we actually lost to the Cardinals at the game I went to last year--who the hell loses to the Cardinals for crying out loud?), they get no love from a national TV perspective the following season. This is also a policy that makes no sense--since there is consistent parity in the NFL, nobody really knows who will be good from one year to the next, but they announce the nationally televised games as soon as the schedule is posted. Why not change it up as the season progresses? If you know after three weeks that Green Bay is just God-freaking-awful, pull their Monday night games and put on somebody that we want to see. The Bucs were supposed to be another disaster this season, an aging defense, an unproven offense and a pattern of a quickly spiraling downward win loss ratio (12-4 in '02, 7-9 in '03, 5-11 in '04), so expectations were extremely low. Look, let's be honest, at the beginning of the season, I didn't circle Superbowl Sunday as the most exciting upcoming football event, I circled the first day of the draft in April. I was praying that Matt Leinert made it through the season unscathed, because there weren't going to be too many teams with the opportunity to draft a player before Tampa.
But somewhere along the way, somebody forgot to mention this to those beautiful Pewter pirates (wow--two days in a row where I mentioned pirates in a posting--you don't think I have a problem or a fixation or anything--note to self, next time in counseling, make sure to discuss pirates with Dr. Smith) who have gone 13 weeks into the season and still sit perched atop the NFC South (well tied actually, but atop none the less) with a stellar 9-4 record. They have a chance to double their win total from last year if they can pull off a sub 20 degree miracle in Massachussetts this afternoon. I fear, however, that this week a dose of reality will set in. For those of you not familiar with this franchise, they are a snake bitten group (who admittedly rose from the depths of despair to win a Superbowl in 2002). There are a few things that have been let's say elusive to Tampa over the years. It took them 25 years to return a punt for a touchdown--that's right 25 years at 16 games a year plus an occasional playoff game, over 400 games before somebody actually returned a punt for a touchdown. They have still never returned a kickoff for a touchdown (that is 30 years and counting), and until they went to Chicago the last game of 2002, they had never won a game where the kickoff temperature was below 40 degrees, and have proceeded to do so twice (three weeks later in Philadelphia) in their storied history.
I hope that I am wrong, we need this win badly to maintain our playoff standing in a very tight NFC race. If the boys can manage to put together 60 minutes in the sludge that is Gillette Stadium, I will believe that they are back and ready to reclaim their form of three years ago. Today, for the first time all season, I will get to watch them and find out. Thank you NFL, thank you for getting me an early Christmas gift. Now let's just hope that Belichick and Brady are feeling as giving at 12:30 EST.