Dealing with the obvious

I know there are enough football fans out there that are struggling each day to find some sort of realistic meaning to what they do since football came to a very abrupt end a couple of weeks ago.

There once was the Pro Bowl to watch the following week to at least see a well-timed patty cake hit to a wide receiver to fondly remember the season gone by.

But the ratings were low when the NFL’s version of an All-Star game was held a week later they figured people would at least tune in the week before the Super Bowl was being played.

Not sure if that is true either.

The Super Bowl is sometimes a lot of hype unless your team happens to be playing for the Lombardi Trophy. When it’s not then we pretend that the game means a whole lot while hoping the commercials are going to hold us glued to the sets during timeouts. Even those weren’t that great this year.

I look at it this way, when the Northern Quest local commercials are the best ones to see then the big companies are spending way too much for the ads both in production and to the networks for their 30 seconds to one minute of glory.

So to recap the Super Bowl, you have to be a fan of the team in Massachusetts to be very happy about how the game turned out.

So when it was over I didn’t need to watch the postgame extravaganza. So I didn’t!

I know these days we are stuck watching college basketball or the NBA which is fine by me but not everyone is a basketball fan.

Gone are the days of Northwest Wrestling that followed a Sunday football broadcast. And the show continued on after the season ended.

We could count on Dr. David Cowen and the Peerless Dentists to sponsor this madness. They must have hoped that people living in and around Spokane would practice throwing each other around the house pretending to be Andre the Giant would somehow damage someone’s front teeth.

If you are going to advertise you are certainly looking for walk in business.

So we are now in that part of the season where we are just waiting for NCAA conference basketball tournaments to start which will lead us into March Madness.

Remember when we couldn’t wait for the basketball season to begin and now all we want is to see who will go to the Big Dance.

Three weekends of the NCAA tournament and guess what? College basketball will be done too and we will be stuck wondering what to do again. We have all of these channels to watch and we are never satisfied.

This weekend is the start of the new format 3.0 WIAA state basketball tournament. A new four-day tournament begins a week from Wednesday.

To better understand how it works you will need to go to the WIAA website (http://www.wiaa.com) and read up on it.

I think I have an idea how it works but I’m basically going to attend some games and figure it out later. After all I just go to see the teams compete and hope to see some good games.

Spring training is underway and soon real exhibition games will be played in Arizona and Florida.

The hopes of all baseball fans will rely on the ace on the mound and the power hitting infielder to knock in a few runs.

Just believe in the old baseball mantra ‘Hope springs eternal’. Remember when we said wait until next year? Well next year begins in a little more than a month.

As a Mariner fan hope is all I have. It is too late in life to start rooting for another team.

I can only look back on a few games played last year and think if they played like that every day we would win the division by 10 games.

And then I look back on a few games last year and think we are lucky we didn’t lose a hundred games.

As you can see by reading this column I’m a bit bored and need a little excitement in my sports viewing now that football is over.

I’ll be fine and I hope you will be too!