February: The Longest Month

(This post was written completely by Kev, lamenting the state of the sports world during the month of February. In my personal opinion, the only thing worthy of interest during February is the Fulmer Cup, which is covered by Orson Swindle at Every Day Should Be Saturday. Here's to hoping someone can break Enrique Robinson's current season high of 11 points. Now, Kevin's opinion on February.)

Rogers Hornsby once said on the subject of baseball’s off-season, “What do I do during the winter? I’ll tell you what I do! I sit at the window and wait for it to be Spring!”

Note that “The Rajah” was compiling one of the most kick-ass careers ever in the 1920’s, a simpler time, when, from October through April, there really wasn’t much to do. Oh sure, maybe you could get into bootlegging, open your own speakeasy, drive drunk (no DUI laws back then!), write some subtle, feminist advertising, or speculate wildly on the stock market. Maybe, if you were really up on the politics of the day, you could follow a pre-cursor to the Halliburton contracts in Iraq. But the sports calendar was basically blank.

Baseball ended in early October. During the fall, there was football, but not really. People still cared when Army played Notre Dame, and they liked watching Red Grange, but college football wasn’t the game we love today. Think about it: the best conference in the country, the SEC, celebrated its 75^th Anniversary this year; it didn’t exist in the 1920’s! As for the NFL, it was viewed as a curiosity, the kind of thing that ruffians were supposed to do. The best college players viewed it as vulgar to play pro ball (Grange bucked that trend as the decade ended of course, but it took the NFL awhile to really get going). The NBA was 20 years from being founded, college basketball didn’t really exist outside of a few major cities, and the NHL was still basically a Canadian curiosity. Essentially, once baseball ended, you were looking at 6 months of suck. Oh, and it was really fucking cold outside. In short, Rogers’ plan was a totally logical thing for the sports fan to do; sit at the window, drink some bootlegged Canadian whiskey, wait for baseball season to start.

Thankfully, the rise of football means we don’t have it that bad anymore. We go through the fall and part of the winter with college football and the NFL to feed our insatiable sports appetites. Then, the day after the Super Bowl, it’s brutally and quickly over. We wake up one Monday morning in early February and we’re in the same position as “The Rajah” was in, waiting for it to be Spring.

But wait, there’s still the NBA, the NHL, and college basketball. NBA and NHL regular season games are meaningless, even the players don’t care (witness Ricky Davis). Watching an NBA or NHL regular season game is like watching a Jason Statham movie without the fight scenes; what the hell’s the point? College basketball is a little bit better (the Duke-Carolina game last night was fun), but the cool part about college basketball is the tournament and that doesn’t get going until mid-March. That’s about the time baseball finally starts playing exhibition games too, and also about the time the weather shows signs of ceasing to suck. So there it is, February 4-March 20, when the sports world regresses to 1925. Now, if you’ll excuse me I have a date with a plastic bottle of cheap whiskey and a window. Bottoms Up!