Do Not Watch This Game 11.22.14 Weekend Edition

For sports fans, the weekend is a cornucopia of wonderful games to watch. This is particularly true in the fall with its traditional pattern of College Football on Saturday and NFL Football on Sunday and Monday. As the parent, child, girlfriend, boyfriend, partner, husband, wife, roommate, or best friend of a sports fan, this can be a challenge. It must be true that some games are more important to watch than others but it’s hard to know which is which. As a sports fan, the power of habit and hundreds of thousands of marketing dollars get in the way of remembering to take a break from sports and do something with your parent, child, girlfriend, boyfriend, partner, husband, wife, roommate, or best friend. To aid all of us in this, and just because it’s fun, I’m going to write a weekly post highlighting a single game that is ideal for skipping. Use this to help tell yourself or someone else: “Do not watch this game!”

Thursday, 8:25 p.m. ET, NFL Football, Kansas City Chiefs at Oakland Raiders. It’s on the NFL Network, but do not watch this game!

Some weeks, it’s difficult to write this post. After all, I am a big sports fan. I play fantasy football. I often say that I’m happy watching any kind of sporting event at all, and it’s true. I’ve got a long record of stopping on the sidewalk in New York to watch kids play basketball or handball. One of the elements of a trip in Europe I took last year which I loved was watching all the weird sports they televise out there in hotel rooms. Plus, I’m an optimistic guy — I always think the underdog has a chance to win. So, it’s sometimes tricky for me to pick a game to suggest skipping. The way I usually write the post is this. I head over to 506 Sports NFL maps to see which games are being televised when and to who. There’s no point in recommending that you skip one a game that only a small portion of the country could see anyway. For that reason, I look at the nationally televised NFL games first — Thursday, Sunday, and Monday nights, and then if all of them are too good to miss, I look on Sunday afternoon to see if there is a relatively big game that’s worth looking twice at. I look at point spreads to find games that are unlikely to be close and read other people’s previews of the NFL to hear what they think of the weekend’s slate of games.

I didn’t have to do any of that this week. This week, the answer is so clear, it basically leaps up out of my laptop screen and slaps me in the face as if I’m in Monty Python and it’s a fish. The Thursday Night football game this week is absolutely not worth watching! I’m not even going to provide an alternative this week. If you’re a Raiders fan, then… I’m sorry but save yourself the heartache and do something else. If you’re a Chiefs fan, have some mercy. You don’t need to see your team blow the poor Raiders out of the water.

The Raiders are winless so far this season and they look suspiciously like they might end the year that way too. It’s not all bad for them, they’ve been starting a rookie quarterback, Derek Carr, who looks like he might be quite good at some point. After all, even great quarterbacks like Peyton Manning (who went 3-13 his rookie year) need some time to mature. The Raiders have also managed to keep a bunch of their games relatively close. They came within a touchdown of beating the Chargers last week. They stuck nicely with the Seahawks a few weeks ago as well as the Patriots in Week 3. The problem is, the Chiefs are not to be trifled with right now. After starting the season slowly, they’ve won five games in a row and seven of the last eight. They’re fourth in the league at running the ball, averaging over 140 yards per game at an average of almost five yards per rush. The Raiders are the sixth worst in the league at rush defense. Not a combination that’s going to make for a good game.

Look, I can’t lie to you. There’s a part of me that does want to watch this game. There’s a 99% chance that it’s going to be horribly lopsided, which means there’s a 1% chance that it’s going to be hysterical and exciting to watch the Raiders win. In some ways, that’s more fun than a game that’s 50/50. Still, if you want to skip a night of sports, this is a good one to skip. We’re about to enter a period of eight days with an extra full day of football (three games on Thanksgiving) so it’s probably a good idea to store up some non-football watching goodwill.

Thanksgiving football gifts

Thanksgiving is a celebration of abundance. As divorced as most of us are today from the actual harvesting of food, we can still give thanks for the many good things we have in our lives. The ideal Thanksgiving celebration has lots of everything: food, family, cheer (both emotional and liquid,) and lots of football! Thanksgiving is not really a gift giving holiday but why not celebrate the abundance of life with some enjoyable Thanksgiving and football related presents. I know it’s getting close to Thanksgiving itself, but thanks to the wonders of Amazon and their horde of delivery drones [note from the federal government: Amazon is totally not using drones, we are sure of that. Well, pretty sure anyway.] it’s not too late to get yourself or a family member a lovely Thanksgiving treat. In addition to our free Thanksgiving Guide to Football for the Curious, here are a few fun selections:

Gobble Gobble T-Shirt or Onesie

By far the most elegant of the Thanksgiving Turkey/Football clothing I found, this clever design creates the shape of a football from the words “gobble gobble” and thereby inextricably links holiday meal to sport and vise-versa.

Gobble Gobble

The Main Course is Football T-Shirt

If you like colors, this shirt comes in thirteen colors ranging from the expected white, grey, and beige, to unexpectedly bright greens, yellows, and oranges. The design shows a football with a drumstick attached. The makers of the shirt do not recommend you actually serve a football to your Thanksgiving guests but that could be one interpretation. If you decide to give it a try, please write me and tell me how it goes.

Happy Thanksgiving

Baby Demands Football and Turkey

I have to say, if you’re looking for something to put your baby in that’s Thanksgiving themed, you can do a whole lot worse than going with the football element of the holiday. Half of the baby clothes I found on Amazon involve dressing the baby up as a turkey. Oh, sure, it’s totally common to say that a baby is cute enough to eat but I think actually camouflaging your baby as the main dish may be one step across that invisible line. This baby bib matches my Thanksgiving sentiments exactly and simply has the baby demanding turkey and football.

Bib

Peanuts Deluxe Holiday Collection

Who doesn’t love the Peanuts? This collection includes Its the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, A Charlie Brown Christmas, as well as the classic A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving. It also has special features like this free video of behind the scenes footage describing the creation of the famous scene where Lucy pulls the football away from Charlie Brown.

Of course, if you’re worried about keeping your family busy while you cook (or conversely while you watch football if that’s the side of the holiday you’re on…) then you’ll need The West Wing so you can watch this:

 

Sports Forecast for Thursday, November 20, 2014

Sports is no fun if you don’t know what’s going on. Here’s what’s going on:

In today’s segment, I covered:

  • NHL Hockey – St. Louis Blues at Montreal Canadiens, 7:30 p.m. ET on regional cable.
  • NHL Hockey – Tampa Bay Lightening at Toronto Maple Leafs, 7:30 p.m. ET on regional cable.
  • NBA Basketball – Los Angeles Clippers at Miami Heat, 8 p.m. ET on TNT.
  • NBA Basketball – Chicago Bulls at Sacramento Kings, 10:30 p.m. ET on TNT.
  • NCAA Basketball – Syracuse at California, 9 p.m. ET on ESPN 2.
  • NCAA Football – Kansas State at West Virginia, 7 p.m. ET on Fox Sports 1.
  • NFL Football – Kansas City Chiefs at Oakland Raiders, 8:25 p.m. ET on NFL Network.
  • And more!

For email subscribers, click here to get the audio.

You can subscribe to all Dear Sports Fan podcasts by following this link.

Music by Jesse Fischer.

What happened on Wednesday, November 19, 2014?

  1. LeBron loses the ball and the game: The Cleveland Cavaliers had the ball, two points down, with six seconds remaining in their game against the San Antonio Spurs. Most of the time, that’s more than enough time for LeBron James to run down the court and get a good shot off. Last night, however, he stumbled a little while navigating around a couple Spurs defenders, and lost control of the ball. Game over, Spurs win — a familiar feeling for LeBron, who lost last year’s finals to the Spurs as a member of the Heat.
    Line: LeBron just lost the ball. Seems like that wouldn’t of happened the last few years in Miami.
  2. Howard doesn’t play, Lakers win: The other nationally televised NBA basketball game last night was the Los Angeles Lakers at the Houston Rockets. The most compelling thing about the game was the potential of continued animosity between Kobe Bryant and Dwight Howard. Howard missed the game with a knee injury, so that storyline withered. The Lakers beat the short-handed Rockets. This is their second win in a row after losing nine of their first ten games.
    Line: The Lakers are on a roll! [said with a certain amount of irony because even two wins in a row only means they’ve won 1/4 of their games.]
  3. Creighton upsets Oklahoma: One of the fun things about writing about sports is making LOTS of predictions about games. Because of a natural human tendency to ignore uninteresting things and remember interesting ones, this means that when I get something right, it’s more memorable than nine other times I get something wrong. I got this one right yesterday when I said to watch out for a Creighton upset. Indeed, they came from 18 points down to beat Oklahoma 65-63.
    Line: I told you so!
  4. Running rules the day in college football: One of the fun things about college football is that because the level of general athleticism is just slightly lower than in the NFL, a wider range of strategies are viable. Take the game last night between Bowling Green and Toledo. Toledo won 27-20 while running for 325 yards and passing for only 63. That type of play distribution, slanted so heavily towards running, is unheard of in the NFL, mostly because it simply wouldn’t work.
    Line: 325 yards of rushing to 63 yards passing? And they won? Gotta love college football!

What does it mean to throw the ball away in football?

Dear Sports Fan,

What does it mean to throw the ball away in football? I’ve been watching some football and I’m not totally ignorant about the game, but this phrase has always confused me. I know there’s a foul for intentional grounding. How can throwing the ball away be a good thing if there’s a foul for it?

Thanks,
Diane

 

Dear Diane,

Throwing the ball away in football is what a smart quarterback does when he scans the field and realizes that none of his wide receivers or tight ends are far enough from a defender to safely throw the ball to. The cost of an unsafe throw can be very big. If a defender catches the ball (called an interception,) the quarterback’s team loses possession of the ball. On the other hand, throwing the ball where no one can get it simply results in an incompletion. It wastes one of the offensive team’s downs (or chances they have to advance the ball) but that’s usually not a big loss. The trick is, as you mentioned, that sometimes simply throwing the ball to no one is illegal and the cost for being caught intentionally grounding the ball is severe. Let’s go over the rule and then look at ways that football team’s skirt the rule so that they can throw the ball away without being penalized.

The intentional grounding rule reads as follows:

Intentional grounding will be called when a passer, facing an imminent loss of yardage due to pressure from the defense, throws a forward pass without a realistic chance of completion.
Intentional grounding will not be called when a passer, while out of the pocket and facing an imminent loss of yardage, throws a pass that lands at or beyond the line of scrimmage, even if no offensive player(s) have a realistic chance to catch the ball (including if the ball lands out of bounds over the sideline or end line).

So, what does all that mean? First of all, it establishes the rule as subjective. It’s up to the referees to decide whether or not a pass has a “realistic chance of completion.” This is a funny thing when you think about it, because football players make catches routinely that have fans leaping out of their chairs and screaming in disbelief. One of the reasons to watch football is to see great athletes doing things that seem unrealistic. The subjectivity is necessary because the intent of the rule is to penalize quarterbacks for intentionally throwing the ball where no one can get it. So, we assume that football refs are used to what players can and can’t do, and we move on. The second thing this rule does is that it carves out a scenario where it’s legal for a quarterback to throw the ball fifty yards up into the stands if they feel like it. If the quarterback is “out of the pocket” he’s allowed to do this. The pocket is defined as an area starting where the offensive line lines up for a play and extending back from the left tackle’s left butt cheek and the right tackle’s right butt cheek into infinity. All a quarterback needs to do to be within his legal rights to throw the ball away is to run outside of that area and make sure he throws it past where the ball was when the play started. This keeps him from throwing it straight into the ground but it’s not much of a safeguard because quarterbacks can almost always reach the sidelines with a throw, even if they are actively being mugged.

Nonetheless, you’ll hear commentators complementing quarterbacks who throw the ball away from the pocket or chiding those who don’t all the time. This is because it’s totally common and accepted for a quarterback to throw the ball far enough from a receiver that it’s going to be safely incomplete 99.5% of the time but near enough to a receiver to establish the plausible deniability needed to avoid a penalty. As you watch football, you’ll learn to identify these times. A common scenario is a screen pass where the offensive team pretends to block as if they were protecting the quarterback but do it poorly enough to invite the defenders to overextend towards him. Then the quarterback is supposed to flip the ball over to a running back lurking several yards to the side, hopefully unnoticed by the defense. If any defenders catch on to this or “sniff it out” in football talk, the quarterback is in a tough spot because he’s about to get smashed by defenders who have been intentionally allowed a clear path to him but he has nowhere to safely throw the ball. Quarterbacks in this situation routinely throw the ball hard into the ground near the running back’s feet. Everyone knows he meant to do this but everyone also accepts that he won’t be penalized for it because the running back, acting as a potential pass receiver, was in the area where the ball hit the ground.

There’s a sports cliche that suggests that “if you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying.” Throwing the ball away lives in that murky grey area between legal and illegal. It’s an area that leaves fans of a quarterback who throws the ball away feeling proud of him without qualms, even while fans of their opponents are righteously indignant. Or at least they would be if they even thought about it anymore. Most fans have long ago stopped worrying about this inherently unfair aspect of football.

If you enjoyed this post, you might find value in my Guide to Football for the Curious. Get a copy here!

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

 

How does NBA TV fan night work?

While I was recording yesterday’s sports forecast podcast (say that ten times fast) I remarked that, opposed to the NHL’s national television schedulers, who chose a bummer of a game between the San Jose Sharks and the Buffalo Sabres, the NBA schedulers had gotten it exactly right by choosing the game between the Sacramento Kings and New Orleans Pelicans. What a difference, I though, that the NBA somehow managed to figure out before the season that this would be a close game between two exciting young teams. And between two teams without much pedigree also. Man, those NBA schedulers are smart. I watched about ten minutes of the game last night and while I enjoyed the action, something was nagging me, tugging at the back of my mind. What was this addition to the NBA TV scoreboard graphic at the bottom of the screen? Why did it say “Fan Night” in big, bold letters? What about this made it more of a night for fans than any other night on NBA TV. So, I looked it up.

NBA TV Fan Night works like this. Each week, fans can vote on which game they want to see next week. The NBA provides three choices and the one that gets the most votes by Saturday of the previous week, is shown nationally on NBA TV that Tuesday. Yesterday’s game between the Pelicans and Kings beat out two other games: the New York Knicks at the Milwaukee Bucks and the Los Angeles Lakers at the Atlanta Hawks. This week, the race is between these three games: the Atlanta Hawks at Washington Wizards, the Golden State Warriors at the Miami Heat, and the Detroit Pistons at the Milwaukee Bucks. Right now the voting stands at 84% for the game between the Warriors and Heat, 10% for the Hawks and the Wizards, and only 6% for the Bucks and the Knicks.

This, for a few reasons, is pretty cool. First of all, I love the idea of allowing fans to control which games get nationally televised. After all, why shouldn’t the fans have a say? For big-time national television channels like ESPN, TNT, Fox, CBS, NBC, CBS, etc. they are always showing games televised with their own team of announcers, camera people, and producers. For them, it makes sense that you’d need to plan ahead for logistical reasons. But NBA TV, like similar networks for other leagues, often simply carries regional televised games on a national platform. It’s awesome that the NBA decided to let fans choose which games to see, at least one night a week. It’s also smart — the alternative is that more people will cut the cable cord and go full-time to watching games on the internet through services like NBA League Pass, NHL Game Center, etc. The leagues benefit from these sales but television is still far more lucrative. NBA TV Fan Night is also really great for two non-commercial reasons. One, I love seeing how the voting is going for next week. What a fun little game-without-the-game! Fans of the Hawks, Wizards, Bucks, and Kings should feel a little depressed that so few unaffiliated fans want to see their games. It’s kind of a diss, isn’t it? And fans of the Pelicans, Kings, Warriors, and Heat should feel great that people are catching on to how much fun their teams are to watch. I also particularly find it interesting, at least for these two weeks, how closely my instincts about what games would be interested are shared by the majority. What does that mean? Are we all a product of the sports-media hive mind? Or do we just know good basketball?

I’m going to keep my eye on this for the next few weeks and see if there are any close races or interesting conclusions to be drawn.

Sports Forecast for Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Sports is no fun if you don’t know what’s going on. Here’s what’s going on:

In today’s segment, I covered:

  • NHL Hockey – Philadelphia Flyers at New York Rangers, 8 p.m. ET on NBC Sports Network.
  • NBA Basketball – San Antonio Spurs at Cleveland Cavaliers, 7 p.m. ET on ESPN.
  • NBA Basketball – Los Angeles Lakers at Houston Rockets, 9:30 p.m. ET on ESPN.
  • NCAA Basketball – Oklahoma at Creighton, 8 p.m. ET on Fox Sports 1.
  • NCAA Football – Bowling Green at Toledo, 9 p.m. ET on ESPN.
  • And more!

For email subscribers, click here to get the audio.

You can subscribe to all Dear Sports Fan podcasts by following this link.

Music by Jesse Fischer.

What happened on Tuesday, November 18?

  1. Sloppy end for the U.S. in Dublin: The United States Men’s National Soccer team played its last game of the season yesterday vs. Ireland in Dublin. It did not go well. The team looked sloppy and disorganized and lost 4-1 to an Ireland team that wasn’t even playing its best players. In the American team’s defense, not only were we missing a bunch of our best players but even among the 23 players we had, we decided to not play four or five of the best because they have Major League Soccer playoff games this weekend. Still, losing to Colombia and then Ireland is not a happy way of ending a good year for U.S. Soccer.
    Line: U.S. soccer still has a long way to go.
  2. Uh… Crisis time in Toronto: The story of the night in the National Hockey League was the 9-2 loss of the Toronto Maple Leafs at the hands and skates and sticks of the Nashville Predators. Toronto is perhaps the hockey craziest city in the world and they do not react well to embarrassing defeats from their hockey team, especially not to teams like Nashville, which, while good, does not exalt have a long hockey history like Toronto does.
    Line: [If you live in Toronto] The sky is falling!! [If you live basically anywhere else] Did you see Toronto last night… oh boy, someone’s gonna get fired. [evil chuckle]
  3. The new rich in the National Basketball Association: The classically great franchises of the NBA are almost all having down years. The Celtics and Lakers are a combined 5-14 (five wins, fourteen losses) and that’s not a surprise. The Knicks are 3-9 themselves and only newsworthy because some crazy person lost his job and is following them around. The flip side of this is that there are some really exciting new teams rising to the top of the league. Two of those played last night: the New Orleans Pelicans and Sacramento Kings. The Pelicans beat the Kings 106-100.
    Line: Whoever thought we’d be excited about  the Pelicans and the Kings? But we are! 
  4. Well that was easy: The two big match-ups in college basketball last night both turned out to be easier for the higher ranked team than expected. The Duke Blue Devils coasted past the Michigan State Spartans 81 – 71 and the Kentucky Wildcats routed the Kansas Jayhawks 72 to 40. It’s a long season, so things could easily turn around, but for now it looks like Duke and Kentucky are head and shoulders above almost everyone else.
    Line: Tons of exciting games in college basketball yesterday, just not the biggest ones.

An Adrian Peterson Update

I’m often hesitant to write about controversial sports stories on Dear Sports Fan. This is for a few reasons. The core goal of this site is to close the gap between sports fans and non-sports fans, and controversial sports stories are often divisive and insular. They’re most interesting to people already invested in sports and explaining them won’t often make anyone be more open to sports culture. I’m also just not that into them. I would much rather spend an hour watching two junior high-school teams play lacrosse than an hour reading or talking about most sports controversies. Sometimes a story is big enough that ignoring would not be being honest with myself or with you.

The story of Adrian Peterson is one of those controversies big enough that it should be thought about. This September, Adrian Peterson, a star NFL running back, was indicted by a Texas Grand Jury for “reckless or negligent injury to a child.” He had beaten his four-year-old son badly enough that the son was brought to the hospital. TMZ found and printed images of the child’s injury. The NFL, already awash in the Ray Rice domestic abuse story, found a loophole in their rules and bylaws that allowed them to effectively remove Peterson  from public view without having to suspend him and therefore initiate a potential appeals process with the NFL Players Association. About a week ago, Peterson struck a deal with Texas prosecutors that allowed him to avoid jail time and any felony charges, pleading guilty only to a misdemeanor. Just today, the NFL announced that Peterson would be suspended without pay for the rest of the 2014 season and possibly beyond that. Peterson plans to appeal.

Action on the part of the legal system forced the NFL’s hand and the NFL’s action has brought this story back into the public eye. Now that some time has passed from the initial story, especially TMZ’s coverage, I hear more and more arguments creeping back into the sports opinion-o-sphere contending that Peterson’s actions are being misunderstood because physically disciplining children is a “cultural thing” that Southern/Black (I’ve heard both arguments) people do commonly but the Northern/White people in charge of the NFL/Media do not understand. Let’s be clear about this.

This isn’t a cultural thing.

I’ll be the first to admit that there is and should be a cultural debate about the acceptability of physically disciplining children. I’m interested in that conversation. I was raised to believe that physically disciplining children was wrong but that there was some truth to the principle of “spare the rod, spoil the child.” It’s a curious dichotomy. Let’s, by all means, have that conversation in our communities and on parenting blogs. But please, please, please, let’s leave Adrian Peterson out of it. You see, what Peterson did to his son cannot reasonably be included in any conversation about discipline. Just because banks lend money to people doesn’t mean robbing a bank is okay. Just because lots of consenting adults enjoy sex doesn’t mean rape is okay. Just because people spank their children doesn’t mean whipping a four-year old so severely that he’s hospitalized is okay. It’s not. Robbery is not a form of borrowing. Rape is not a form of sex. Adrian Peterson’s abuse of his son is not a form of discipline.

There are, of course, lots of other intriguing facets to this story. You can place it within the larger story of the NFL’s inconsistent, confusing, and generally out of control pattern of player discipline. You may point out the hypocrisy of the NFL’s new-found harshness in dealing with violent offenders compared to their past record of leniency. It would be altogether understandable to point out that there’s something problematic about the NFL’s power over football players who truly do not have any other reasonable recourse to make a living playing football. The NFL is a sanctioned monopoly and has special tax-exempt status which should and probably will be taken away from them in the next couple years but it is still a private organization and it shouldn’t be required to guarantee employment to anyone for any reason. What about the dynamic between the NFL and its teams? The NFL has taken the lead on this case but in recent years, it’s allowed the teams to be the main actors in terms of player fines and suspensions. Which is better for the players? Which is better for the league?

There are so many questions and interesting avenues to pursue in this horribly unsavory story. The cultural conversation around physical punishment is not one of those. Let’s all be annoyingly firm on that point if people try to pull that argument on us at work or at a bar or on the internet. It’s worth it to take a little flak for something that is right.

Take this job and shove it. Sports style.

Sometimes it all gets to be too much and you have no choice but to do what the characters in the classic movie Office Space do and find an alternative.

Whether you’re a corporate lawyer, an NFL football player, or a feline mascot, the lesson from the guys at Initech holds true. Here are their stories.

I love bad teams and I recently quit my job to experiment with building a career in sports, but even I think what this Knicks fan is doing is a little wacky. Fired from his job as a corporate lawyer, Dennis Doyle decided to go to every Knicks game this season.

Living Out Knicks Dream, Complete With Nightmares

by Scott Cacciola for The New York Times

Few Knicks fans (if any) have chosen to express their existential crises by committing to attend 82 straight games. During a rebuilding season. And paying for it, in more ways than one.

“I could kind of understand if someone had wanted to follow LeBron around in Miami for a year,” Doyle said. “That sounds kind of nice, actually.”

The Knicks, on the other hand — well, Doyle has prepared himself for a long season.

Former NFL player Jason Brown left his own job as an NFL player to start a farm… even though he didn’t know how to farm! Not to worry, he’s a smart guy and youtube exists. No problem. Now he lives happily and gracefully as a farmer.

Why a star football player traded NFL career for a tractor

by Steve Hartman for CBS News

Jason Brown quit football to be a plain, old farmer — even though he’d never farmed a day a in his life.

Asked how he learned to even know what to do, Brown said:

“Get on the Internet. Watch Youtube videos.”

His plan for this farm, which he calls “First Fruits Farm,” is to donate the first fruits of every harvest to food pantries. Today it’s all five acres–100,000 pounds–of sweet potatoes.

Even if you can’t actually speak, you can still go on a work stoppage. That’s what Mike the Tiger has done this season down in Louisiana. He’s simply refused to get into the trailer which brings him to LSU home football games and his trainers, to their credit, refuse to force him. Nice work!

The Mascot Will Sit This One Out, Thanks

by Jonathan Martin for The New York Times

When the No. 14 Tigers took the field Saturday night for a nationally televised game against No. 4 Alabama with playoff implications, their beloved mascot once again did not join them. For all seven home games this season, Mike has refused to leave his well-appointed residence for the mobile cage that would take him into the stadium.

[LSU public address announcer, Dan] Borne, however, said he could not blame Mike for staying home. After all, more than a few college football fans enjoy sitting outside stadiums alongside their vehicles, watching games on television while enjoying beverages and food fare far superior to the offerings inside.

“My vision of Mike,” Borne said, “is that he’s inside there, he’s got four or five high-def screens, a remote control the size of Vermont for that big paw, and he’s just watching all the great football going on on Saturdays.”