The offseason is indeed a dry, rocky place where the college football fan’s seed of obsession can find no purchase. But do not abandon hope; though you may be streaking one day closer to death with every tedious rotation of the earth, you do get one day closer to the next college football season, with only the pesky dangling ash of the rest of the year between you and the next tasty cigarette of meaning.
So how to kill it, exactly? Besides going Robo for the next five months until the preview season? (A classic high school term for chugging Robitussin and spending the next five hours in a drunken, horrifying netherworld blending paranoia and apathy without the giddy edge of pot-smoking. High one might find Widespread Panic enjoyable; gone Robo, you may be convinced the Devil’s violinstrings were playing your funeral dirge in the kitchen. To simulate the sensation, just stay up for 36 hours, drink an espresso, and wrap head in purple Saran wrap until you pass out.)
One terrible way to pass the time.
We’ve got help to pass the time, and we’re here to share. We present Offseason Coping Strategy #392: The Revenge Game. Our test case will be Alabama v. Florida, and it will not be pretty. The faint of heart need to look away, because getting to a final of “Florida 56, Alabama 3″ is uglier and harder than it looks.
Needs: One television, one XBox, one copy of NCAA 2006. Should be cheap as balls thanks to superior technology coming along, except for the television, of course. Unless you live with your parents, which considering the fact that you’re reading this blog is a very, very likely scenario. In that case, make sure you’re not taking up their valuable television watching time and preventing them from catching “King Of Queens.” I love that fat, blundering guy and his disproportionately attractive wife! Haven’t seen that before!
Methods: Choose the “Play Now” option at the start menu unless you care to take an entire season’s worth of revenge games to the bank (and once you’ve hit a hundred points in the early fourth quarter against Louisiana Tech, you’ve crossed the line from “revenge” to “abject cruelty.”) Pick a game your team lost in humiliating or otherwise painful fashion during the prior season and make sure you’re playing a home game, even if the real game took place on the road. You’ll need this advantage to put the proper stank on the upcoming carnage, since you not only want to behead the virtual opponent, but run tittering up to the gushing stump of their neck with a full spray can of Bactine at the ready.
Being at home will give you all the sting you need. Otherwise competent qbs throw Testaverdian picks; running back start dribbling the ball like it’s Aussie rules; offensive lineman hold and false start the offense into the shadows of their own goal posts (setting you up for the ultimate football facial moment, the full ten point safety/immediate long play-action passing TD with two point conversion combo.) The effect’s not just a negative one, though, since the home team feels it, too; alligator armed receivers become pigskin magnets, ladyboy qbs bust tackles like Earl Campbell, and fourth down conversions break at a better than sixty percent rate with even just adequate playcalling.
Finally, make sure you’re looking at a rigged match, but not too rigged. (more…)
