Blue Carolina

First off, I’ll just get this out of the way: losing in the NFL playoffs sucks. It’s probably worse than anything else in sports. In every other sport, or in the case of teams that don’t make it to the playoffs, there’s some warning that things aren’t going well. In a football playoff game, an opponent can just roll into town, get a couple of flukey big plays, and shock you. And because injuries play such a major role in defining a football team from year to year, you can be absolutely certain that next year’s team isn’t going to be the same as this season’s edition, even in the rare cases where there aren’t any key free agents. A few things, however, made this one especially painful:

- At the playoff party I was at there were a couple of guys from St. Louis who were vehemently rooting for the Panthers, the excuse being that they were currently stationed in North Carolina. Even though most people have done it at some point, I absolutely hate that Guy Whose Team Isn’t in the Playoffs and is Rooting Against the Local Team out of Spite. Is it really so hard to pull for your friend’s favorite team, or at least remain neutral and just root for a good game? Anyway, despite the fact that I hang out with the other guys at this party on a somewhat regular basis, I had never met these people before and had no warning that such people were coming (if so I might have gone elsewhere). I am giving the organizers of this (otherwise solid) event the benefit of the doubt and assuming that these people were related to someone there. Also, are the Rams really a team that you could justify jumping ship on at this point? I mean, they’ve won a championship recently enough that most people still remember it, they were in the playoffs last year, and there’s at least some reasonable cause for optimism next season. They were talking as if the Rams were the Cardinals or something. The worst thing about these guys is that when the Panthers lose in the playoffs and you attempt to get back at them for it, they’ll act like they don’t even care. In my opinion people like this have no right to derive joy from anything that their old or new favorite team achieves. We need to petition the Sports Guy to add this to his rules for being a fan.

- Steve Smith is really, really, good, but he’s definitely one of those guys who apparently didn’t get enough attention as a kid and is trying to make up for it now by talking trash, inventing goofy celebrations, and otherwise attempting to make you forget that anyone else is on their team. I just hate it when people like this go out and back it up. Invariably they get what’s coming to them (that screen play is eventually going to get picked for a touchdown if they keep running in 6-8 times a game), but you always hope it will happen against your team.

- Another thing that I hate almost as much is when every credible expert winds up taking the same goofy stance, like backing a road team which got mangled by their opponent previously, and it actually winds up happening. It almost makes me feel like these people actually know more about football than I do. Then I remember that almost all of them picked Minnesota and Green Bay 1-2 in the NFC North.

- I still had that invincible sports fan feeling from the White Sox run, the one where you honestly believe that no team you root for can lose an important game, or at least not one that they’re favored in. Fun while it lasted.

- This game brought back bad memories of the Donovan McNabb game from 2001. The similarities were uncanny: home playoff game after the bye, the goofy rash of injuries (Mike Brown in both games, ugh), the offense looking rusty, the team abandoning the run way too early, the defense looking like a completely different unit then they did the rest of the season, and the feeling that the Bears were pretty much getting beat because of one guy having a career day.

- And finally, as mentioned above, the fact that the 2005 Bears season is over. Sure, there are tons of reasons they should be as good or better in the near future – the team is young, every key contributor is locked up long-term, Grossman looked like he's at least going to be the best Bears QB since Erik Kramer, and every other NFC North team looks at least two years away from being remotely competitive or even watchable. But after watching the 2001-04 White Sox, the 2002-04 Bears, the 2004-05 Cubs, and, to a lesser extent, this season’s Bulls, I’ve realized that good young teams don’t necessarily improve just because everyone thinks they should. If anything the tendency is to regress a little bit. At least we didn’t go to the Super Bowl and lose, which given recent NFL history, would have immediately slammed the door on the ’06 Bears chances of being competitive. Maybe this is the fate that awaits the Panthers. If so, I hope the guys from my first point are watching.