The Panel: RUN THE DAMN BALL

Weather is inclement. We are running the ball. We are down to 4 teams, the only good teams. Jared Goof has just thrown another interception. It’s the best time of the 4th week of January.

In case you didn’t learn the first time, that’s what The Panel is here for. Also, it’s the only thing we know how to do.

I was once so drunk at a playoff baseball game that I tried to fight an old woman wearing a Blue Jays jersey and a Cowboys hat because she was “a traitor.” I don’t even like the Cowboys. The Rangers lost and blew a 2-0 series lead.1

I got drunk tanked before the Notre Dame-Navy game sophomore year and then the rector2 of my dorm told me I was taking a spot from someone that actually deserved to be at ND.

Joke’s on him though, I graduated. 😤

It was 2015, I was living in Germany and the Seahawks were in the Super Bowl. Cue the German Super Bowl Party: lots of beer, apres music, and King’s Cup somehow. Well, turns out it was that Super Bowl… Got to watch Malcolm Butler do the football equivalent of killing my dog right in front of me. Then walked home alone in the driving snow at 3AM having just watched one of the worst losses imaginable.

Sitting in the Auburn student section for the Kick Six. Yelled “I would hate us too!” after the Amari Cooper 99 yard touchdown catch in the 4th quarter.

Knew Chris Davis was gone before he hit the 10 yard line. Karma remains undefeated.

I didn’t go to an NFL game growing up for whatever reason. Not really a thing I felt put out about, but you’re still excited for your first time seeing anything. Especially when it’s the playoffs. Especially when it’s against the Packers, a domestic terrorist movement that doesn’t even have a decent manifesto. Then I saw Jay Cutler tear his ACL, try to fight through it, and get called soft for an entire offseason. The peak of Bears fandom for me was either this bullshit or the minute or so of the Super Bowl against the Colts that Devin Hester gave us hope. I consider caring about this team to be an illness passed down in my family.

I was a student manager at Notre Dame in the Chuck Weis era, working practices or prepping the gold helmets that used to get spray painted before games, etc. The WET TROOPS rolled into town when I was assigned to pregame locker room logistics and rigging up the field goal nets.

Coach Weis, waking up the echoes, channeling Knute Rockne inside the very House He Built himself, told those young men, “We gotta respect them but we gotta kick their ass.”

The Naval Academy ran for 6.1 yards per carry on 348 yards to upset #22 Notre Dame 23-21 as I could do nothing but HOIST IT.3

I don’t know who’s going to win the Super Bowl. But, I know it will not be the Buffalo Bills.

I’m torn between trying to make a serious prediction and indulging a little bit of the Bills doomerism that the last few years have mostly taken out of me. I picked the Bills as a kid more or less arbitrarily, and the earliest season I can remember is the year Kyle Orton went 9 and 7 and deciding that was enough for his career. I didn’t sit through the truly awful years in the 2000s, I didn’t give Tyrod Taylor enough respect during his time here, and, except for one half of Nathan Peterman against the Chargers; the worst thing about being a Bills fan is that a) half the time I couldn’t see their games because I lived outside their TV market, and b) that they consistently lost the best game of the year. I don’t carry the baggage of the 1990s Super Bowl teams, but a thought struck me yesterday that the Eagles are the only NFC East team that the Bills haven’t lost a Super Bowl to, which is why it would be extremely funny if that ended up happening. I don’t even expect either of these teams to win their Conference Championship Games.

Also, if I’m right, it means that we’d beat Kansas City next week, which is all I really want anyway.

2010 Tulsa-Notre Dame. ND is down 1 on the Tulsa 19 with 36 seconds left. Dayne Crist is hurt and out for the season. The game rests on the shoulders of Tommy Rees, a true freshman who has never started a game. All we need is a field goal. Brian Kelly decides to call a pass, it gets picked in the end zone, we lose, this is only the second worst decision Brian Kelly made that week.4

2018 Nebraska-Troy. I’d been up until 7AM at a house party before the game, which of course was at noon. My friends and I stumbled across campus to the stadium, just barely making it through the gate before kickoff. We really shouldn’t have bothered to show up, because Neal Brown’s Trojans got out to a 17-0 lead and then sat on us the rest of the way. I got violently sick sometime during the fourth quarter, but at least that spared me from having to watch Scott Frost get bullied by a Sun Belt team for any longer. Good thing that never happened again.

Because rooting for the kansas city fucking chiefs is the only thing that gives these piggies in the town I live in a sense of purpose in life. Were they to be denied a Lombardi trophy that they view as their right for as long as Patty O’Mahomes plays in the league, the insufferability and indignity would wash over this state like Union troops in 1862. Please just let me live in peace.

2010 SCSU vs. ??? football. 18 year old me had a big crush on this girl from my dorm and decided, for what I’m positive were well-thought out reasons, that Saturday morning was the best time to ask her out (she did not say yes). I had totally forgotten that we had already made plans to go to the game that afternoon with someone else, so we sat in the bleachers for three hours pretending for our friend like nothing had happened while getting heavily snowed on. Not a drop of liquor was consumed.

2018, Kentucky at Missouri. After watching 9 consecutive punts in the second half of the game, bore witness to the worst OPI no call I’ve ever seen to decide the game. Walked back to my car and called my dad to complain about the ending, he was in the middle of trying to rescue part of our hay barn from a massive fire5 that was going on and couldn’t talk. We stopped doing hay after that year.

Death, taxes and Pat Mahomes in the playoffs.

As this publication’s foremost puck knower and Passion Haver, my worst in-person sports loss should come as no surprise. We’re talking, of course, about Toronto vs Boston in Game 7 of the first round of the 2013 NHL Playoffs. It was 4-1, until it wasn’t. I was in Maple Leaf Square, where the mood went from “we’re so fucking back” to “it’s so fucking over” within 10 agonizing, slow-motion minutes. You all know the story. It sucked. Fuck Boston, always and forever.