It's Time To Talk About Football
This is going to be a long read, and mostly about me. Proceed with caution.
Note: This article was almost entirely written last year, when, as you might have noticed, I dropped the Substack for several months. It’s sort of a memoir focused solely on a sports fandom, and perhaps you don’t care about that, but if someone ever finds themselves in a sports argument with me (why though?), they could get some important underlying context here.
Having found this piece again as a nearly-complete version, the only major change—besides this note—is the very final paragraph. This will unlikely be the last article on which the work was begun in a previous year.
December 27, 1994 is the date my dad printed out a copy of the NFL standings in the Washington Post and gave it to me as a late Christmas gift. Football had a new fan.
I know the exact date because, on this photocopy, the previous night’s Monday Night Football score was not yet reported. And I know that because I still remember the San Francisco 49ers were listed with the best record in the league at 13–2. They had lost to the Minnesota Vikings, but back in the day when newspapers dominated a nascent internet, sometimes scores didn’t get to print on time.
Being seven years old, finding the team with the most wins was good enough for me. I had a favorite football team.
San Francisco–Washington
The problem was I was growing up in the Washington, DC area. This wasn’t a problem for seven-year-old me’s best friend, who had become a Dallas Cowboys fan after they won the Super Bowl in January 1994. So, following his example, here came another bandwagoning kid.1
But here’s the funny part: I have pretty much no memory of watching the 49ers play during the 1990s and early 2000s. I did get to watch the beginning of Super Bowl 29 before being put to bed, but that’s close to about it. A play called “The Catch II” happened for the 49ers in January 1999; I was too busy throwing a real football around the front yard. They made a huge comeback in a January 2003 playoff game; I turned the game off at halftime.
Instead, almost all my memories pertain to the Washington then-Redskins, including:
Going to my first and only game at RFK Stadium, a 14–7 loss to the Philadelphia Eagles on November 26, 1995.
Begging my mom to buy the 1996 Redskins video yearbook at the Sports Authority in Gaithersburg, Maryland.2
Gus Frerotte ramming his head into a lightly-padded cement wall after scoring a touchdown on November 23, 1997 (or at least hearing about it).
Bawling my eyes out when they blew a 35–14 fourth quarter lead to the Cowboys on opening day of the 1999 season. Why that game in particular? No idea.
The 1999 season also ending in disappointment when they failed to even attempt a game-winning field goal against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, botching the snap.
Going outside to tell my dad about their 7–6 loss to the New York Giants (his team) on December 3, 2000, and them firing head coach Norv Turner soon after.
The hype around the hiring of Steve Spurrier, which came to a fever pitch after his first game—his first preseason game, on August 3, 2002.
Going to my first game at FedEx Field for my birthday and watching them get plastered 43–27 by the New Orleans Saints on October 13, 2002.
Watching them beat the Cowboys 20–14 in the last game of Hall of Fame player Darrell Green’s career on December 29, 2002, on the TV at a friend’s house.
What I did retain from my time with the Niners was a partiality toward the 49ers’ quarterback at the time, Steve Young. I made a newspaper clipping out of the story when he retired, but I seriously can’t name a single play I watched him live in my life after his Super Bowl.
By the time I started on AOL Instant Messenger (it was 2005!) my screen name was “skinsninersfan.” Allegiances were already split.
But the break officially happened in college. My greatest football memory ever, or at least top three, is still the Monday Night game from September 19, 2005. Probably 20 or so of us gathered around the television at the campus hangout and exploded into cheers on Santana Moss’s second touchdown.3
By the time the Redskins played the 49ers on October 23, 2005, I resorted to asking one of my friends, Richard, who I should root for. To him, the answer was obvious: Washington. So I did, and later I managed to complete the breakup by blaming San Francisco’s head coach Mike Nolan for ruining QB Alex Smith some time around the 2007 season.
By then, a lot else had happened to shape my football life.
Brady–Manning
Also at college in 2005, I began participating on the ESPN.com message boards, after lurking there for about a year. I came away with a general dislike, absent other information, for people I only knew as New England Patriots fans. They had developed an aggressive pack mentality after three Super Bowl wins in four years that never quite went away.
I actually started out liking the Patriots, though. I was rooting for them in Super Bowl 36—still being enough of a 49ers fan to despise their rival St. Louis Rams, New England’s opponents in that game. I even wrote an article for myself, in single-spaced Times New Roman, predicting the Patriots would win the game.
Knowing what I know now, though, the Tuck Rule still makes my blood boil, and forget Taylor Swift conspiracies—I would not be shocked if we ever learned the NFL decided in advance that the New England Patriots should win the Super Bowl after 9/11.
Even if you’re not a football fan, you should be able to understand from the mere length of the oncoming paragraph just how big a fluke that game was.
During a raging blizzard, the Oakland Raiders led 13–10 with the ball late in the game. It was third down with a yard to go and they ran the ball with one of their best short-yardage plays—except one of the guards misheard the call, missed his block, and the Raiders failed to convert. They then punted, which the Patriots fumbled but recovered. New England, out of timeouts, moved the ball 12 yards on their next 2 plays. The two-minute warning arrived, relieving them of the need to challenge a bad call—which, being out of timeouts, they could no longer have done—as instant replay reviews now originated with the officials.4 Not 10 seconds of gametime later, Brady fumbles and Oakland recovers, but a review is called. The referee, 50-year-old Walt Coleman of Little Rock, Arkansas, needs what the NFL then called “incontrovertible” but now calls “clear and obvious” evidence to overturn the initial ruling. Maybe Coleman’s vocabulary isn’t large enough for a word like “incontrovertible” because, despite the lack of such evidence, he cites a little-known rule—one that even Wikipedia, in an attempt to explain its legitimacy, can only find three other examples of it ever being called in its 14-year history as a rule—to declare the pass incomplete, keeping the ball with New England. They gain another 14 yards to set up a 45-yard field goal attempt in the blizzard. In 2018, kicker Adam Vinatieri estimated this kick was “maybe a 10 percent shot if you're lucky.” Of course, our universe is one of those rare times it was good. The Patriots received the ball from the overtime coin flip and, with Brady completing one pass of more than 6 yards, drive down for a 23-yard field goal and win.
But to those Pats fans on the ESPN forums—and to those on Twitter, including professional reporters, long after the ESPN forums had been discontinued—none of that mattered. Brady, even as he continued to benefit from the team around him, was a winner and his big rival at the time, Peyton Manning, a ringless loser. Unfortunately, neither guy’s reputation has changed that much since 2004.
If I say that Brady could easily have just one Super Bowl ring, and your counter is that he could also have 10, and some other guy could have none or 3 instead of one, etc., you’re missing the point: If a statistic is that dependent on factors outside your control, it shouldn’t count for that much when comparing individual players. This isn’t tennis or chess.
Snyder–Harris
The irony of me choosing to abandon the 49ers because of mismanagement is that I have never left the Washington team, when it spent nearly a quarter-century as one of the most mismanaged franchises in the history of professional sports under owner Daniel Snyder.
Nevertheless, my relationship with football was actually quite damaged for quite a while. Sure, I kept engaging with it, even heavily; in 2017, I published an ebook about quarterbacks, but even that was motivated by the Atlanta Falcons’ inexcusable loss in Super Bowl 51.5
The first game of the 2010 season was Sunday night against the hated Cowboys. It was Donovan McNabb’s first game with the Redskins. McNabb was a formerly excellent quarterback that the ’Skins had just traded for. I was opposed.
So, in the game, the Redskins are ahead 13–7 with time for one more play. Now, normally a fan is very nervous in this situation, but I was feeling nothing. Dallas scored the winning touchdown, I felt nothing. The touchdown was called back for holding, I felt nothing. Washington wins. Nothing.
But what did happen is this: By the time Brady finally won his fourth championship, the local team was officially in the sewer—any glimmers of optimism about the team ever competing long-term ended with the structural integrity of Robert Griffin’s knee on January 6, 2013.
And then, they both went away, almost simultaneously. Brady retired in February 2023 and Snyder sold the team in July that same year. I could breathe again.
Washington’s performance in the 2024 season was just icing on the cake, unbelievably fast progress for the entire fan base in recovering from the previous 25 years. Not every season will be like that, but from this seat, the possibilities seem endless for perhaps the first time since that newspaper cutout of the 1994 standings.
One of my younger brothers ending up being very different, not wanting to root for the boring local team—I’m convinced—and settling on the Baltimore Ravens soon after they moved there in 1996.
He still doesn’t like that I don’t consider myself a 49ers fan anymore. Sorry, Ben: But maybe this section will help you see the writing was on the wall well before I switched. Or maybe you’ll still comment that this whole thing is B.S. Surprise me!
A series of season recap videotapes the NFL used to release every year for every team.
By the end of my time at school, there wasn’t nearly this level of camaraderie. The Halo LAN parties died too.
And there was no automatic review of turnovers like there is now.
I could easily write a similar length paragraph about this game as I did about the tuck rule game, but one of those per piece is enough.
I never realized the Tuck Rule play was only 10 seconds after the two minute warning. It was *that* close to not being reviewed since NE was out of timeouts. Damn.