If your break was anything like mine, you probably spent a lot of time on your parents’ couch watching football.
Football fans laughed, cried, celebrated and mourned with their teams over the past month.
If you are an Alabama fan, your tears were lessened only by Auburn’s stinging last-minute loss to Florida State.
If you’re a fan of the Kansas City Chiefs, you returned from a season-long high to normalcy. If you are a Cowboys fan, you’re used to it.
The nation watched as some teams fell and others rose to great occasions.
We waited patiently to see who would return and who would be drafted, who would be fired and who would be hired.
As the New Year came and went, so did the staples of many teams.
Johnny Manziel signed with LeBron James’ representatives (in true Johnny Football style).
Charlie Strong is headed to coach at Texas (and on a newsworthy side note, Strong will be the first black head coach of any Longhorn sport).
Dorial Green-Beckham was arrested for the second time in his short college career for possession of marijuana.
Laughing, crying, celebrating and mourning is no understatement. The bombardment with news about football couldn’t help but make me wonder why we care so much.
As Americans, we invest a great amount of time, money and sometimes emotion into a sport that most of the world doesn’t even care about.
We follow teams near and far, and if you watch ESPN at all, then you most likely have opinions strong enough to rival Stephen A. Smith.
It is not like most of us have had the opportunity to play football at a collegiate level, let alone professionally. As a girl, I never had the option to play at all (besides intramural flag football, which is a whole other column just waiting to be written).
Most of us don’t know the players, coaches or franchise owners, so why do we stay so invested? I know a lot of people who take fantasy football quite seriously, but their love of the game came before they were ever old enough to gamble on players.
Is it because football is “the American thing to do”? No, baseball is credited as America’s pastime.
In fact, the number of football games adds up to only a small fraction of what most other sports play – and I think that is where our attachment comes into play.
Maybe we love this game for the same reason that we love shooting stars, lightning bugs and Winter Break.
Maybe we love it because it’s a small, fleeting escape from reality. A Sunday filled with football is a day for all of us to be analysts, reporters and judges.
It is a short amount of time for us to coach without truly coaching, to give feedback to a television and pretend that we’re actually making a difference.
It is a time for many to relive their high school glory days. It is a chance for the person who never wins at anything to one-up a friend.
When our teams win, we win with them, and when they lose, we lose without facing any real repercussions.
So I may not have run any routes or done any drills over the break. I wasn’t training for the playoffs, or starting my offseason. But I did watch a lot of football, and I became a part of many teams.
The NFL would not be a multi-billion dollar business without the people at home watching from their couches.
Calling football “entertainment” is an understatement. Football is an escape.
Column by Mallory Tucker, Staff writer