free variable

Football season is blissfully close — and, with it, the only time of the year that I actually watch television. As always, I feel compelled to revisit the perennial question: have those NHTSA advertisements really cut back on the number of people driving around in vehicles shoulder-full of booze?

I’d appreciate any hard data on this question.

The Green Bay Packers, no longer able to keep newly-unretired quarterback Brett Favre from reporting for training camp, have issued a statement about Favre and their intentions for him. The release is not kind to the quarterback and looks to me like a transparently craven attempt to maintain some trade value for a disgruntled player, but one image stands out in a morass of clumsy public-relations cant:

As a result of his decision, we invested considerably in a new and different future without Brett and we were obviously moving in that direction. That’s why this wasn’t easy. Having crossed the Rubicon once when Brett decided to retire, it’s very difficult to reorient our plans and cross it again in the opposite direction - but we’ll put this to our advantage.

One wonders where Packers president Mark Murphy acquired his cultural literacy. The entire point of crossing the Rubicon is that one can’t cross back. (Perhaps, after Murphy is done playing in the Rubicon, he will re-tie the Gordian knot.)

Whether or not the management team of an American football franchise were aware of the provenance and implications of the Rubicon idiom, it seems unlikely that comparing themselves to Caesar is rhetorically wise. Very few press releases imply that the writers will be hailed as victors in the near-term but establish a dictatorship and then be brutally murdered by former allies.

In recent news of the absurd, I don’t know what’s less likely, that tampering happened, or that anyone can prove it happened. (RIYL: Favre, King, and Moss.)

My father and I went to see the Madison Mustangs host the West Allis Predators this weekend. Both teams are members of the IFL, a Milwaukee-based semipro league; admission was $6 and included a meet-and-greet with Ron Dayne. (I saw Mr. Dayne but did not chat with him.) You can see some of my photos from the event if you’d like; a brief review follows.

The game wasn’t particularly competitive — West Allis got shellacked, with their only score coming on an interception return — and the technical quality of play didn’t compare favorably with well-known synthetic football substitutes like Arena League ball (indeed, one might see more technical acumen in the occasional nationally-televised DIII college game). Some series were thick with penalties, to the point where the drive time was overwhelmingly dominated by officials congregating and re-spotting the ball rather than by huddling and play execution; some special-teams plays in particular saw the FieldTurf transformed into a silk tulip patch. Finally, the stadium’s use of incidental music seemed more accidental — too-long silences followed by pastiche-like, sub-phrase snippets of pop song hooks, with the end result being that it was never clear that the sound board was operated deliberately.

These are quite minor complaints, though, and almost irrelevant. The important question is: is it worth going? I can’t really say “yes” emphatically enough. The game was a whole lot of fun. The players approach the game with the sort of palpable zeal you can only rarely detect in pro sports; I didn’t see anyone taking plays off. The playcalling schemes are in general rather less complex than in pro or college ball, but the coaches seem far more willing to resort to trickery. In Saturday’s game, for example, I saw a fake extra point pass successfully converted and — even more impressively — a fake punt run attempted with about 22 yards to go. (The latter wasn’t successful, but the punter came close enough to make it exciting.) The crowd (over 1,000, I’d guess) was enthusiastic and the overall experience seemed kid-friendly (if your kid has a later bedtime than mine); there were a lot of kids in attendance. I’ll definitely go to another Mustangs home game.