RAGE

I had to give myself an eight day cooling period before I could even blog about this. I was so mad at the time that I could not have tried to make light of it at all. I'm still wrestling with the anger, trying to decide where to begin. Deep breath.

OK. Here goes. I love football season. I really really do. I like cold beer and hot wings and these are football staples. I also like to spend time with my husband sometimes and unless I watch football I don't get to see him on Sundays from September through February. I really love to gamble and you can gamble with football too. I am in three pools this year. One is a survivor pool where you pick one straight up winner each week. You can only pick each team once though for the year. If your pick does not win, you are out of the pool. Forever. Pretty simple. Well, I have been in this pool for several years. My record prior to this season was 2 weeks. Yep. Never made it past week 2. This frustrates me. But this year... This year I was in in to win it. As of last week, Week 9, I was still in! Football knowledgeable husband? OUT. Me? IN. YEEEEESSSSSS.

My other pool is a rank'em pool. There are 13 to 16 games per week. I pick the winners and then give them confidence points. For every game you pick correctly, you get the points you allotted to that game. The person with the most points wins. I have never won this. Marty has won this several times.

My last pool is a fantasy football league, which is fun. We had a live draft and everything. The other teams are family and friends and we get to talk nasty smack to each other, heckle, point and laugh, all kinds of fun stuff. I started 3 and 0 at the beginning of the season and haven't done much since.

So, this brings me to last week, or the week of DOOM as I like to call it. Now, I normally don't think about my picks at all during the week. I get up on Saturday, look at who's playing and make my survivor pick. I should have known something would go wrong when Marty asks me on Thursday "So. Have you thought about your survivor pick at all? San Diego is not a bad pick." Of course I had not thought about it. My pick was not due for two more days. And why is he helping me at week 9? I made it 8 weeks without any help from him, thankyouverymuch. But I ended up following his advice (I would have made this pick on my own anyway, but I like blaming him...). I went with San Diego over the Vikings. San Diego was favored by 9 points. Well they lost. They didn't just lose. They got embarrassed. NFL records broken and crap. And I hate them.

Next came my rank'em pool. I was winning. I was in first place after the early and late Sunday games. Only two games left. All I needed was for the Eagles to win on Sunday night and the Steelers to win on Monday. Nooooo problem. Well, the Eagles lost, the Steelers won and I finished in second place. F-ing Eagles. They are MY team. They lost AND they made me lose my pool? By two points? I hate them.

Lastly is my fantasy team. For the ladies, I will try to put this in terms that you can understand since the fantasy stuff is a little more involved. I was playing the team in my league with the worst record. My apologies to said team's owner, but she had only one win the whole season. So I was pretty confident that I would win. My team has really been sucking of late and I was excited for the sure win. I play Jay Cutler as my quarterback because my backup is Chad Pennington and well, of course I would not play Chad Pennington. (girls, Jay is the Steve Maddens, Chad is the Payless. Other girls in the league are rocking Christian Louboutin, which makes me green with envy and I sure as hell ain't wearing the Payless.) Well, Jay scored 0 points and was out of the game in the 2nd quarter with an injury. I know this sucks for him, but it totally sucks for me too. You need a quarterback! (ladies, a man let me down. I know, I know. I shouldn't be so surprised.) So there's a big goose egg for that department.

My kicker was on a bye week. He's usually good for a few point, but I didn't want to drop a player and try and pick one up. Especially since the available kickers in waivers don't even really play. So I didn't have a shot of getting points there, but figured I would be okay. (chicas: it's like I'm going to the club , but I forgot the going out purse, so I have the full size purse with me. I don't want to carry it around the club, so I grab the money and id, shove them in my pocket and leave the purse in the car. It's there, not doing anything for me. But when I leave the club and go to the diner later, I'll have the purse and all of its necessary tools.)

My running backs should get me some points though right? Well... Larry Johnson did alright, but Travis Henry must have been tired from all of the lie detector tests and building his web of lies for the NFL so they don't suspend him. (we've all had one: the bad boy. They are so tempting. Girls, Travis has gotten caught smokin' the doob for a third time. He's so bad ass he isn't even denying it. Yep, he did it, but he's trying to get off on a technicality. Oh. And he's got 9 kids from 9 different chicks. Too much baggage. I should've seen this from the get go. He's pretty good though and bad boys are exciting...)

Houshmandzadeh was there for me and got me some points and my reliable Steelers defense scored a whopping 28 points, but they could not make up for the total suckiness of Roy Williams, Dallas Clark and Dennis Northcutt (my female friends: Houshmandzadeh = chocolate, Steelers D= potato chips, Williams = cramps, Clark = bloating, Northcutt = back pain. The chocolate and chips are great, but the other jerks still ruined my day and I'm totally defeated.) And then I was totally defeated. Lost by 5 points. And I hate them. Now I'm mad all over again.