Day of Football...I mean Thanks
It’s that time of year again, to overeat, overdrink, and watch sports! No, not Memorial Day, 4th of July, Labor Day, New Years Day, Christmas Day (thanks NFL)…but Thanksgiving! Geez, we do this a lot…Yay America!
TOB has been out on the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade for years. This used to be due to nursing a “night before Thanksgiving night out” hangover. However, with two young kids it seemed like a perfect time to hop back in. Unfortunately, this may as well be called the “Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Broadway Show.” While the occasional Minion or Bluey character float by, Hoda and Al slurp random 30 year old men dancing around pretending to be high school students. NFL games now have 3-5 broadcasts going simultaneously. Can we get a simulcast with Spongebob and Patrick commenting on the actual parade. Feel free to throw in some dad jokes, TOB is here for it. Stream it on Disney+, or Paramount, I’m sure you can fleece some parents out of a few more bucks.
Becoming your parents commercials are starting to get alarming to TOB, primarily because TOB really likes the “Grills Just Want to Have Fun” apron in the most recent commercial. If that’s wrong, TOB does not want to be right:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IC_zu0y2Lso
On to more things that are recently annoying TOB. We finally made it past the commercials where a powerful white man torments a black woman born in a middle class family….wait, what’s that, another “Wicked” commercial?? It never ends! The marketing budgets for this movie has to be in line with political campaigns. After a quick Google, it turns out that number is actually $150,000,000. This would put their marketing budget at 177th on the global GDP scale just behind Kiribati. An island Nation in Oceana, Kiribati is the only country in the world in all four hemispheres. Recently achieving Independence from the UK, it appears to be a pretty sweet travel destination. TOB was hoping this would be much more impressive (as in, a county people have heard of, or that was connected to a continent - a small South American country perhaps), but since I already made the point, and have no editor, this is what you get. Full refunds are available for non-satisfied readers….
Alright, the reason both of you are here, College Football discourse!
TOB was (and may still be) against the massive College Football expansion. TOB will concede that it hasn’t really affected the regular season as much as I was expecting, but part of that could be all of the parity. Did the NCAA foresee all of this NIL and transfer portal chaos causing blue blood teams to lose depth, leading to traditional schools having 2 or (gasp) even 3 losses before Thanksgiving? Or, did they fall ass backwards into a dream scenario just in time to sell the 12 team playoff rights to ESPN for over $7,000,000,000,000 all the while allowing all of the players to get paid by boosters and various collectives. If you buy the former, I have some oceanfront property in Arizona waiting for you…NCAA is just below Togo (144) on the GDP list, FYI, take that “Wicked.”
All that said, TOB is simultaneously excited and dubious of what this could lead to. Some takeaways from this season thus far:
The big games are still a ton of fun to watch: Georgia / Texas, Georgia / Bama, Ohio State / Oregon
Conference road games are hard to win again. Top 5 teams are going into unranked or much lower ranked buildings and losing (particularly in the SEC). It’s not supposed to be easy to go into an opponents house and just walkover
Upsets have been wild week to week causing turmoil in the rankings, and teams that were once out are right back in it
In order to keep that the case, there needs to be some accountability in scheduling (Indiana has played one team in the top 50, even though they are in the Big 10, which until last Saturday had 4 of the top 5 teams)
So how do we keep the fun of the big games week to week (Indiana aside) without something bad happening? TOB, what could possibly go wrong with this system? Following this week, there will be two teams going to the SEC championship game with two or three losses. The loser of that game is likely out of the CFP., while other teams that did not participate will be in. The Big 10 will not have that problem this year (Ohio State and Oregon are in no matter the result), the Big 12 won’t (they will only get one winner regardless, ACC is in the same boat, we no longer have a Pac 12). This will affect other conferences in the future, so something will need to be done. TOB has some thoughts, but that is for another day (i.e. after the games are played this weekend and we see the final conference championship match ups, rankings, etc.)
Happy eating / drinking / football watching!
-TOB
