Monday, October 6, 2014

Cincy Hate Week

This was supposed to be Cincinatti hate week.

Instead, this is all I can muster:

Cincinnati is a slightly-below-mediocre football team coached by a once-almost-great mind, Tommy Tuberville, that the game may have passed by.

They are playing without their record setting quarterback and are coming off a thrashing at the hands of Memphis. Wait, that can’t be right. Memphis?

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Yep, they got blown out by Memphis.

Cincinnati is, and I may be wrong here, from the  Italian for “Crack Den”. This is a city with a major identity crisis…they have all the Midwestern provincialism combined with all the Southern racism. Border states, y’all.

Also, it is impossible to spell Cincinnati.

And while we are here, super F Skyline chili. Looks like cholera, tastes like cholera, is served on spaghetti. Mmmmmmmm.

Annnnnnd that’s all I got.

-- --
Know what I really want to write about?

I hate watching our games these days.

I hate that our coaching staff can’t figure out how to stop a team from running the same god damned 3 plays for the entire game.

I hate that we take one step forward, 8 steps back.

I hate that we are trying our ass off to become 1980s Penn State because that’s when our coaching staff was getting mad drunk at frat parties and playing slightly above average football and jammin’ out to Motley C rue on the Shore.

Let me tell you something about 1980s Penn State. They played in a shit conference and got real lucky one time and stole a national championship from a team that paper-cutted itself to death. Other than that it was a bunch of slow, mediocre white dudes running around spouting the gospel of Joe Paterno, who in hindsight was just another sleaze ball head football coach who also dabbled in covering up child molestation within his program so that he could get just one more 10-2 record under his belt.

I honestly never thought I would see it come to this. We play cared football, and our coaching staff refuses to change, and meanwhile we fans are stupid enough to let it effect our lives.
We have literally become hostages on this train ride in to nothing.

And let’s be clear, the fans are the ones who lose the most here.

The fans don’t have a choice in anything. We can fly banners or not purchase tickets or whatever, but ultimately we don’t have a choice at all. We have no say at all, even though we care more than anyone.

So we sit here and continue to support this team, accepting whatever shit they choose to shovel down our throats, listening to shitty press conferences that insult our intelligence, hoping that next week will be the week that this team finally clicks.

Newsflash: it isn’t happening.

We will continue to suck on defense because our leadership has installed a culture in which making a mistake is only ok if it is within a certain structure, because making the mistake within the structure allows the coaches to scapegoat the player.

We will continue to waste the talents of Duke Johnson, who is on pace to break the school’s all time yardage record in roughly 2.5 seasons, which is the kind of crazy that you never even think is possible.

We will eventually fire Al Golden, and because our administration was stupid enough to give him a massive extension, we will have no choice when they cry poor and hire another unproven coach because that is all they can afford after paying a $10 million buyout.

Our administration talks a lot about wanting to win and yet has done nothing to support it. We talk about competing with FSU and UiF yet refuse to go up to the level which is necessary to actually do it.

And it is us, the fans, who suffer. I feel bad for the players, but right now I feel worse for myself, and my girlfriend, and my dad, and my friends Frank and Trent and Steve and everyone else who watches this team every weekend. We put so much of ourselves in to this freakin’ team, planning our weekends around watching the games, planning our bathroom breaks around the play of the team, wasting money one ever-increasing amounts of beer in order to cope with the performances we are watching, and get nothing back.

I am defeated. I will continue to hate other teams, and love ours, and write about it because I enjoy the exercise every week. But after 10 years of mediocrity, this past Saturday night has broken me. 

The specific moment was early in the 4th quarter. Down one score, we had them in 3rd and 16. A triple option team was going to be forced to pass, and everyone knew it. There was even a TV timeout before the play. EVERYONE knew what was coming. And what happened? 

Exactly what you think. Their Pop Warner quarterback floated a shitty pass to a 5'7" running back 17 yards down the field, and we had a slow linebacker covering him, and of course that didn't work, and they got the first down, and eventually scored, and we all knew it was over.

The worst part? I expected every ounce of it.

I have become a cynic about college football.


Thanks, Al.

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