NFL recap

Dear James, Daniel and Emily,

And so ends another NFL regular season, with my 2 favorite teams once again on the outside looking in (Rams & Broncos). And also the first season without playing Fantasy Football in 6 years. Lastly the first season with my renewed dedication to downplaying the significance football plays in my life.

Well the Rams season was just a sign of a lack of depth, poor drafts and bad luck. But they have figuratively thrown the rascals out, the GM and President who ran a once proud franchise into the ground are gone. And next year they will have a new coach, and GM. And I can only hope that whatever lightning the Falcons and Dolphins caught can be replicated by the Rams next year.

I think the Broncos season was actually a pretty stunning testament to the coaching prowess of Mike Shanahan. If you took any of the teams in this years playoffs and told them they had to lose their entire running back corps by week 6 I doubt any of them would have made the playoffs. The Broncos had 7 running backs on IR by the end of the season, that's astounding. That the Broncos were not only in contention but were in the playoffs this year until they ran out of gas, in those circumstances was truly amazing. I think if Hillis had not gotten hurt on that freak play they would have won one of those games they ended up losing, and made the playoffs (or if the Chiefs had played just 1 or 2 more minutes of defense). And everyone would have been talking about them as one of the 'teams no one wants to play'.

I really enjoyed this year without fantasy football. So much so that I doubt I will return to it next year. It just made Sundays so much more fun to watch, when I could just focus on the game and enjoy what was happening. It restored the fun of the game for me.

And last, because I stopped playing fantasy, I was able to be far more relaxed on Sundays and just blow off watching the games if I wanted to. There wasn't a pathological need to watch every minute of every game, and have it matter to me. And that was very important, I needed to find a way to reign in my fanaticism.