Jacked Up

You'd figure that I would learn my lesson by now. Every year, I schedule flag football games late on Sunday, and every year, I have trouble sleeping on Sunday night. This year, we play at 10. So, basically, I've got my blood flowing hard from about 9 until 11, and then I come home, and try to go to bed. Bad idea. The best part is that I'm actually going out to breakfast at 8 with some of the doctoral students and one of our job candidates. I'm not usually a morning person, but going on 4 hours of sleep (assuming I can hit the sack by 4 - it's 3:10 now) should be interesting. Nothing like representing your program and your school by being a zombie at breakfast. Let's just say that I'll be ordering coffee at breakfast. Happily after breakfast, I can just go back to bed until I have to teach at 3. Of course, it'll be fun to see how I can improvise on what the lecture slides have to say in class. Happily, we won't have any cameras rolling.

This flag football season has not been a memorable one. In retrospect, I shouldn't have tried to put together a team myself this year. I should've just rolled with The Judge and the psych folks, maybe bringing a couple guys over with me. I thought that we had enough manpower to put up a very strong version of 13th Tribe, but some of my regular receivers couldn't play this year. And our recruiting efforts have been down. We haven't had a sub at any of our 3 games, and one game we actually played a man down. Not good times. The sick part of it all is that I may be putting together my best season at QB this year. I'm making some money throws, I've figured out some good route combinations, and am doing a pretty decent job of moving the rock around the field.

So tonight's game was a tough 18-13 loss. We got a little shell shocked in the first half when they just marched down the field and scored on us. We opened up with me getting a little confused by the defense. They didn't really rush me all out, instead having two tall rushers just stand in the passing lanes and try to bat the ball down. I got a ball batted, and on the next play I got overaggressive and threw a pick. Quick slant route where I tried to force it in, and the linebacker jumped in there. A couple plays later, we were down 12-0. Not good. We put together a couple passes, but turned the ball over on downs and they scored again to make it 18-0. We did manage to put together a couple nice passes to close out the first half, which actually helped things out, got me some confidence.

We came out in the 2nd half, and completed a couple short ones, working the ball around to everyone. I also mixed up the rushers with a couple pump fakes and a couple rollout plays. We got a first down, and then, we took a shot deep. Boom. 45 yard bomb down to the 6. Funny story here. One of the refs actually saw that we were down a player, and asked if he could play with us, since he was done working for the night. He was a former player, so he was confident, begging for the deep ball. If there's one thing I can do it's launch that 40-40 ball. 40 yards deep, 40 feet high. He hauled it in, but couldn't stay on his feet, so we took over. They rushed a little harder and almost sacked me, so we switched it over to our fast QB. Incomplete on 3rd, but on 4th, he rolled out right. I stayed in the middle of the field, and saw that he wasn't finding space to run or an open receiver on the strong side, so I yelled, "weak side." He heard me and launched a ball back across the field in my direction. I actually adjusted to the ball and jumped up and took it away from my teammate (who I didn't realize was my teammate until after the play). This was my first TD catch since the year I played with an I-Life team that had Jared as the QB. Let's just say that this doesn't happen often. I throw for plenty. I'll punch one in there on the run everyone once in a while. But I hardly ever catch TD's. If I was thinking more, I would've had a better celebration planned out.

We came out on D, and their QB, maybe feeling a little frisky, decides to launch a deep bomb, as well. Bad idea for them. Great for us. We pick that guy off, and get the ball back pretty quickly. We get a couple short passes, and have the ball just inside our 30 or so. Once again, our new player is begging for that deep ball. So, I send him on that route. I was looking to my short routes first, but the blocking opened up a nice area for me to step up, and as I was stepping up, I saw that the safeties stayed sort of short. My guy was behind everyone. Boom. 50 yards in the air into the endzone. Pretty hot. We get the conversion on a little quick hitter, and were down 18-13 with a little over 2 minutes left to go, needing a stop. We didn't get it until too late. They actually got the ball down to our 2 yard line, but we managed to stop them on 4th down, but with only 15 seconds left. We got the ball out to the 25 with a quick completion, but couldn't get enough laterals together to get into the endzone on the last play of the game. This was the second week in a row where we had a bad first half, but adjusted and played a good 2nd half, and had the game come down to the very end. The sick part is that if we got the ball back with 1:15, instead of just 15 seconds, I really liked our chances with them in prevent.

Oh well. Basically, the story of the game was that our defense didn't wake up until the 2nd half, and our QB (me) was an idiot until the 3rd drive, at which point, we were already down 18-0. So, this puts me at 0-3 for the first time ever. But the thing is, playing w/out subs, and down a man, and keeping every game close has been a pretty satisfying feeling. Don't get me wrong. I hate losing, especially when I have a team that should win. But man, playing with a patchwork team, and doing some good things on the field is a neat feeling. The best part is that the legs are holding up just fine. I'm pretty sore after the games, but that's from being out of shape. The knees feel just fine once I've gotten warmed up. And I actually jumped like a foot in the air to catch that ball, so that's encouraging.

In any case, we have one more game. Hopefully, we can put together some offense and have our defense come out aggressive this time and get a W on the board to close out the career (unless they somehow talk me into coming back for one more season :-) ).

Anyway, I'm off to get a glass of water and try to get a couple hours of sleep before I have to wake up and do breakfast. Uggh.

-Chairman

Heroes

So, I have a new star crush. Who is it? Well, it's actually no longer Erin eSurance, though I will always treasure the great times we had. I've moved on emotionally. On to a much more refined fellow. He's a little quirky. He says some incredible things. And he seems to have a great time doing it. For that I admire him. Who is he? I'll give you three guesses. And the first two don't count.

Give up?

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran.

This dude is pretty much awesome. I think that every morning he wakes up and says, "Dammit. I'll believe whatever I want to believe, but I'll try to explain it all very rationally. And I'll come out looking a lot smarter than all of the folks who wanted to ask loaded questions." All I know is that I'm guessing that I'll never be asked to speak at Columbia. Especially if any from Columbia ever reads this blog entry.

I don't need to be complimented by the President of Columbia to know that I'm awesome. But it was still pretty awesome.

Brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated? Thank you. Either way, that makes me awesome. Basically, I'm just that darned compelling that all you intellectual elites simply have to listen to me, whether you like me or not. Sort of like Howard Stern. If only I could hire his agent to work out a better package for my next contract. $100 million a year for 5 years? Really? Man. He makes A-Rod look like a bargain. I should probably also start looking around for movie deals. Private Parts was pretty good, but I think that my life story could make half a billion, globally.

Executing criminals? Well, in the under-18 age group, we're #1 in the world. George W's from Texas. He knows what I'm talking about. Besides, I just don't really like kids. You know what I mean. Kids these days. Most of them are punks. I don't know how it's gotten this way. When I was a kid, we had respect for our elders. Now kids just run around listening to their rap music and watching TRL, oblivious to the world.

The Baha'i faith? Come on. Get real. Have you seen these guys? They're worse than the Mormons. They're not even a real religion. They don't believe in anything. It's just a bunch of people going around saying, "I'm OK, you're OK." It's like watching a bunch of hippies, only instead of being atheist, they believe that everything's holy. Lame. You can't really fault me on this one. Who wants to keep getting these damned invitations to their potlucks? Maybe if they had better food, you could get some people to show up. Now those Southern Baptists. Those ladies cook a mean potluck dinner.

Gays? Nope. Sorry. I don't know what's in the water here in the U.S., but we don't have any gays over in Iran. Allah wouldn't allow that to happen. Don't get me wrong. I love me some Queer Eye, but I watch it more for the grooming tips, not because I'm supporting gay people.

Women? I'm reminded of Method Man and Redman in the classic movie, "How High." When Redman saw that he had failed a Women's Studies course, he lamented, "How didI fail Women's Studies? I love bitches." Yes, in Iran, we love bitches, too. In fact, in the words of American hero Isiah Thomas, "Bitch, I don't give a fuck about these white people." Amen, my brother.

Holocaust? Sure, it happened. But we should check the numbers. Six million Jews dead sounds awfully high. I've seen some studies that suggest that 37 is actually a more accurate number. So, until we see some other research, I'll go with 37 Jews dead at the hands of Hitler. But it was still a tragic event.

Israel? Don't get me wrong. I love the Jews. We've got all sorts of Jews here in Iran. I also like the Palestinians. We've uprooted 5 million of those guys for this Israel. Which is a lot more than the 37 Jews that died in concentration camps. Shouldn't we just give the Jews some land in eastern Germany?

In conclusion, thank you for hosting me at your great university. Now if you excuse me, I'll be visiting Ground Zero to offer my sympathies.

Yep. My hero.

-Chairman