Seattle cartoonist Eric Devericks and a colleague from Virginia, one Clay Jones, have apparently settled on a wager for Saturday's NFC wildcard playoff game between the Seattle Seahawks and Washington Redskins: A Redskins t-shirt, Eric? Would that mean, "... and nothing more"? Okay, okay. Jones, for his part, had this to say: The Seahawks and Redskins have only faced off fourteen times before, and the Washington club holds the advantage at 9-5. Their last meeting, though, was in January, 2006, a 20-10 win for the Seahawks, who would go on to defeat the Carolina Panthers and then lose in the Super Bowl, an event from which local fans have never fully recovered. (Four words: "Offensive interference? F@ck you!") Prior to the playoff meeting, a 2005 regular-season matchup saw Washington win 20-17. Here's the thing, though: the 'Skins won at FedEx Field in Washington, and the Seahawks won at Qwest Field in Seattle. Saturday's game is at Qwest Field. It's easy to say your hometown team is gong to win. But this one's in our house, and 36 year-old Todd Collins racked up approximately one-sixth of his stats (over a 13 year career) this season. Over four games. The book on the game says Seattle +3.5. On the one hand, it occurs to me to wonder if anyone cares. To the other, the YouTube payoff should be ... um ... er, yeah. Anyway, I hope to bring you footage of Clay Jones finding passion over yogurt sometime soon.
Seattle, by twenty-one. That's right, twenty-one, baby. Nobody's waxing poetic about that, now, are they?
I can only watch basketball for so long. Okay, that doesn't help, but it's a pretty short "so". To the other, it's not baseball season, and I get a hundred sixty two games to pick from, so I don't get nearly as rabid about it until, I suppose, playoff time. My dad was a football coach, though, so I can watch the game for freakishly long periods. And it's the first choice. Like yesterday. Before the 'Hawks game we were flipping around, looking for something to watch, and we passed a pretty good basketball game in order to catch a futile stretch of the International Bowl. The game was already out of reach and kept getting worse. But it was better than ... um ... whatever else was on. It's all habit.
The High Road At least everyone's being grown-up about it, right? I mean, it's not like anyone's stooping to ridicule, right? Right. Eric Devericks notes: And, for the record, that is a fairly gentle nudge. You'll notice that, unlike me, Mr. Devericks didn't say a word about the twenty-one point margin.
In every sport the games are rigged in order for those rigging the games to be the big winners. I haven't met anyone that has made a great deal of money gambling on any sporting event in their entire lifetime. One man I met actually kept a daily diary as to how much he bet and won or lost, he broke even after over 35 years of betting. Seems like a waste of time and money to me. Oh well my IBM investments just paid me a nice dividend. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Paid in full Clay Jones has paid up, posting a song on YouTube. Mr. Devericks notes, "I consider his debt paid in full." Thanks, Clay, for being such a good sport on this one. Onward ... the countdown is on, and no big wagers that I know of for today's showdown at Lambeau Field. Let's hope Nate Robinson's cartoon has it right: Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! (Unfortunately, the line on this game is Packers +7.5.)
