What with watching the NBA, NHL, NFL, CFL, MLB, college hoops, soccer, Olympics, tennis, golf, competitive eating and darts — not to mention a few minutes each day spent raising my kid — I just don’t have time to spend a Saturday watching college football.
I have about as much time for college football as I have for dentist appointments — once a year maximum, and that much only because of the national championship game in football and because of the chance that a cute dental hygienist will brush her business against the back of my head while cleaning my teeth.
Anyway, on Monday my baby rolled over from his back to his belly and back again. It was the first time he put that sequence together. Yay.
That same night the University of Auburn football team celebrated a rollover of its own. No, not a rollover like the Los Angeles Lakers in game 6 of the 2008 NBA finals (skip to 3:15 of the video to re-live the moment NBA championship celebrations jumped the shark).
For Auburn it was an actual person literally rolling over during a pivotal moment to help the Tigers claim the NCAA football national title with a 22-19 win over the University of Oregon Ducks. Here's the play.
You can see Auburn running back Michael Dyer get tackled, get back up and run for a big gain. The play set up the game-winning field goal kicked on the final play of the game. The key is that the ballcarrier’s knees never touch the ground as he rolls over his tackler. I don’t like it.
I suppose if a similar play helped my beloved Saskatchewan Roughriders defeat the Godless Edmonton Eskimos, then I’d be OK with it.
But in this case it just seems like a weird way to win a national title — and a slapshot-to-the-nuts way to lose one. I figure that if a defensive player goes to all the trouble of wrapping up a player, stopping all of his forward momentum and throwing him down, he should be rewarded with a tackle even if he has the misfortune of acting as a human landing pad (also known as a “Paris Hilton”). I know the rules say different, but aren’t rules made to be changed when enough bloggers complain about them?
I also hate those moments in sports when all of the players kind of stop, agreeing that the play is over, and then there’s that awkward instant when someone realizes that it isn’t over and starts playing by themselves.
It’s like when I’m doing my thing in my coed floor hockey league and one of the girls on the opposite teams trips over her own stick and falls down. At first my animal instinct always kicks in and my mind says, “Ha ha, sweet, two on one.” But then everyone kind of stops playing and waits to see if the girl is OK. If I keep going on the play and score one of my patented one-timer lifters from my off-wing wall, everyone will think I’m a big D-bag.
Well Auburn, I don’t blame you, but now you are that D-bag. Enjoy the two years that you’ll get with the national title before the NCAA strips it from you because, hypothetically, your Heisman-trophy winning quarterback’s father, a Pentacostal church bishop, is found to have taken a Hummer full of cash (in the name of the lord, of course) in exchange for getting his son to play at Auburn. Hypothetically.
That would make you sad, wouldn’t it Auburn.
In case you’re wondering, my son will not be displaying any of his already obvious rolling over skills on a football field. He won’t be allowed to play the sport due to the risk of suffering the equivalent of a seatbelt-less car crash several times a day during football season. Nothing so avoidable is going to scramble my baby’s brains unless it’s heading home a World Cup winning goal. For Canada. I think he’ll be safe.
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