Free Friday: The tab is due

Broncos 33 at Saints 10

I don’t think I have a lot to add to this that the score didn’t. There are takeaways for the Broncos, I guess. Bo Nix managed to flirt with disaster in a game the Broncos were never really threatened in. He had some nice runs. All the Broncos had some nice runs against a defense that uh, feels like it’s on fumes at this point. Not great news for a team that (checking notes) is managed by a defense-first head coach that has been fairly uninspiring for his entire, playoffless, tenure.

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One of my priors that looked pretty bad after two weeks was that the Saints would finally combust. I don’t think we are quite at the point where they’re the worst team in the NFC South, and when they get Derek Carr and Chris Olave back they should be better than this dogshit effort. The Broncos also have a pretty good defense! But uh, yeah, nothing I’ve seen the last five weeks has really disabused me of the idea that this team is falling apart. The defense feels unsalvageable, and the offense is just not going to be strong enough to play outside of positive game scripts. Here’s a Bo Nix run because I like to put at least one video out per post:

Boy, I would suggest not letting the quarterback run untouched for 25 yards.

The Broncos detonated Spencer Rattler, sacking him six times and pressuring him on nearly half his dropbacks per NFL Pro. They got 14 of these pressures in under 2.5 seconds. Vance Joseph has been a defensive coordinator for a long time, and I never think of him as a particularly great one, but he is on an absolute heater right now.

The main conversation about this game on X: The Everything App during the game that hit my eyes was something along the lines of the Saints salary cap situation. The problem with the Saints isn’t their salary cap situation, it’s that they have run out of great players. I’m pretty sure Chris Olave is great. I think Bryan Bresee and Taliese Fuaga could be great. But other than that we have good vets who have aged out of stardom, role players, and unproven guys. It’s not an easy watch.

The Dodgers are beating up the Mets and my will to exist

One of the main differences between me and my father-in-law is that he doesn’t care for sports at all. He has to listen to other people talk about them enough that he knows some things, can keep a conversation going or ask a question about it, but there’s zero investment in it. And one of the things he points out when he’s asked about it is something along the logic line of (paraphrasing): Why would you care? You get good feelings when the team does well, but the entire city has to pay for a stadium, the players aren’t from here, and everything is expensive to go to or buy.

I’m not unsympathetic to the view. I simply grew up differently. The lack of logic is pre-baked into my life. And so here I am, in the middle of football season, watching games I have to make time for that have brought me great misery.

Every year of being a sports fan ends the same way for every team but one. And I have largely learned to remember the good times along the journey because, well, this would be an entirely joyless enterprise if I didn’t start approaching it like that. The Mets were red hot for 10 days that I will always remember, and now they have run into a team that will simply not swing at balls. Their starting pitching edge has evaporated in the face of that patience and brought the bottom part of their bullpen into full, ugly view. The clutch bats have gone cold. It feels like a bad matchup for them.

That’s not to say they can’t win three games in a row — baseball’s playoffs are very stupid and swingy — but a rational view of the situation suggests it’s pretty dire and it’s time to start counting the blessings along the way. Not many teams get their asses kicked in three of four games and come back.

Having a year off of writing while I was raising my infant son gave me a little more connection to fandom again. I’m nominally a Texans fan, right? I certainly still consider myself one. But you write so many words about a team and you try to be objective about it and … people decide you aren’t really a fan. And I suffered the slings for the late O’Brien/Culley/Lovie Smith Era. And I won’t lie — I am fairly malleable and it does make me question what kind of fan I really am, or maybe if I’ve aged beyond fandom, or something like that. Being able to leave that exhausting dichotomy behind for a year and just cheer at a screen was nice.

I think what appeals to fandom for me, still, is the camaraderie. This is a very lonely world we live in now. Rarely do you get to share anything with anybody. I know most of you aren’t Mets fans, and that’s okay. (Honestly, good for you.) But there is both a bond with my fellow team fans and a more overarching familiarity with being a fan of a sports team that we all live with.

I don’t know that I’ll ever get to experience what it means to root for a team that wins a championship. I certainly have not rooted for a team that I would call a “favorite” to win a championship since — maybe — 2006. But that is really just a full embracing of the human condition: We all want things we don’t have. And the things that we do have become things we take for granted as we stare into More. My son is fully healthy and wonderful, and I am here wanting More. My team is in the NLCS and I am here wanting More.

I like to think that if I saw a team win a title that would be Enough. But would it not just become More, then? Experience says it would.

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