On Inconsequential Things That Matter To Me (Premium Edition)

1. What Are You Waiting For?

 In the interest of testing the Internet's ability to coddle reactionary extremists, I was watching North Carolina bumble its way to a third straight defeat last night, and I thought to myself, "I wonder if anyone's started up a campaign to Fire Roy Williams yet?" Surprisingly enough, the movement has not picked up much momentum, though I am encouraged by this potentially ironic Facebook page (Population: Four). Mostly, I came across a bunch of disgruntled Cowboys fans with nowhere else to go.
On a related note, this site appears to have lost its moorings, proving that Joe Paterno will even outlive the Internet.

2. Jeff Jarvis, King of the (Free) World

 Here is Mr. Internet Journalism Visionary's reaction to the notion that The New York Times will take the radical step of charging its readers a small amount of money for a product that costs millions of dollars to produce:
So why charge your best customers?
Yes, he said that. Because charging customers, especially loyal customers, has proven the bane of capitalism for millions of years. Nobu thrives on the notion of providing its best customers black cod gratis; Citibank would not imagine charging the investment accounts of millionaires. And as usual, Jarvis buoys his argument by somehow setting Internet journalism into its own special category, by falling into the usual mumbo-jumbo about the link economy and about "content" being a "magnet" that can create "relationships of value," proving once again that he knows far more than I ever could about Internet metrics, which allows him, and only him, to defy common sense, and makes me the idiot for alienating people who want everything digital to be free.
Now I'll walk to my favorite bodega to steal a six pack of Coca-Cola.

3. Quarterback Angst

Say what you will about Fountains of Wayne--and certainly, the sheer ubiquity of Stacy's Mom was worthy of a lengthy ostracism from society--but you cannot deny that this is the best song ever written about the inner monologue of a quarterback. Just as Friday Night Lights has the ability to emotionally manipulate certain people I know to the verge of tears, this song does the same for me. Seriously: I heard it on the subway this afternoon, and I immediately thought of Mark Sanchez, and in that instant I became a Jets fan. I cannot explain what it is, except that it captures a moment of physical and spiritual enlightenment in a deceptively simple way. It makes me yearn to witness the manifestation of greatness.
Also, I love football far too much.

On the Comfort of Low Expectations

I've mentioned this before, and it will come up quite often again as the months progress, but there is only one entity of which I still consider myself a true and unabashed and vigorously biased fan, and that is my alma mater, Penn State. This is no doubt based in some kind of Freudian yearning for a return to my childhood, but hey, that's how it is to be a modern dude, and that's how it shall always be, and that's why I find myself, precisely two days into the start of football practice, already worried about the way things are going. This is because the preseason critical consensus for my alma mater is alarmingly positive (see above left), and overwhelming positivity tends to scare the hell out of me.

I feel this way, in part, because I have a genetic tendency toward pessimism. My father taught me early on that a sunny disposition gets you nowhere in life. But there is more to it than that; this is about the fundamental nature of what it means to be a sports fan. There are two types of us, really: There are those people who return every year with the same relentlessly optimistic outlook, who dismiss bad news and ugly results as an aberration, who refuse to whine or complain or concern themselves with the sudden and inevitable complications of losing, who attribute any unflattering reports about their particular team to either A.) Media bias in general, or B.) ESPN in particular. These people revel in high expectations. These are people I generally do not trust. The large majority of them are not serious about the entities they portend to support. They are the spiritual equivalent of Stepford wives. They are the reasons The Secret became a bestseller.

For the rest of us, our fandom is couched in wariness and distrust. We would rather our teams not be discussed at all (at least until that moment when they are actively not included in a discussion in which we feel they should be included, which arouses a peculiar maelstrom of jealousy and confusion). We would rather not read things like this--"Can you say 12-0?"--because what immediately comes to mind are unfulfilled expectations, years of ignominy and defeat and hopelessness, the inevitable memories of 1999 (see above), of 1997 (the other year that Sports Illustrated, given its penchant for making championship picks by assigning intoxicated three-year-olds to throw darts, chose Penn State as the preseason No. 1), of 1988 (the first losing season for Joe Paterno since advent of the New Deal), of all the great disasters that have befallen us in years past. When they say--as they have, early and often--that our team has "the easiest schedule in the country," this does not ease our minds, either, because what immediately comes to mind is the fact that our particular team is capable of losing to anyone, at anytime. (Remember this? Yeah, me neither.)

So here's what I sometimes wish, when I am feeling especially dour and skeptical and concerned about overhype, as I am heading into this season: That my alma mater could enter every year with absolutely no expectations. That there was somehow an embargo on preseason polls, that preseason "watch lists" would be considered a violation of federal law, that the very notion of prognostication did not apply to my alma mater; that the games themselves could somehow be vacuum-packed and left untampered until the first Saturday in September. At these moments, I wish that fandom remained spectral and irrational, and consisted of nothing but nostalgia and a vague cloud of hope. That way, we could always expect the worst. And if something good happened, we could just say we knew it all along.