This season is a dumpster fire at every level. I could start with the Giants, but I won’t. I am going to start with youth football, because that is the one that, apparently, intends to finish a season no matter what.
Our 11u team, heralded as a Florida bound juggernaut, scraped past a team that was entirely smaller, slower, and not as well coached with a 19-6 win. We were very bad. We didn’t run the ball well despite three running backs who were basically starters for their former teams. We didn’t throw the ball well despite two quarterbacks with the same sort of resume. The coaches argued openly on the sidelines, I was basically useless on the sideline, and none of the players have gotten to that ‘we are one’ vibe that makes the engine run. Instead they played timid, played hurt, or in the case of my kid, both.
We built a solid core of players last year and lost half of them. We embedded another entire team into our ranks and that was meant to strengthen us and strengthen the coaching, but instead we find ourselves completely out of step with an o-line that doesn’t stop anyone. Will we turn it around? Maybe. It all depends on time on task and on Covid, which is rising right now and I don’t see anyone at the youth level thinking about testing in any way. I mask up every game, which is a stop gap, because the kids are still playing and banging and we know the problem is out there somewhere, just like we know when we walk into a store that we are touching things that other people have touched and we have no idea where those people have been.
We are forgetting–I am forgetting–this is a pandemic.
Which brings me to the NFL and yet another week where a team is forced to postpone a game because of positive Covid results. The struggle here is this: In a highly competitive situation like this where there are not many make up opportunities, how do you hold a season that may hinge on one bad result? How do you do playoffs? No answers yet in this dumpster fire.
Instead I am content with watching it burn.