It's Been Two Weeks, People—Chill Already

haowh

华尔街日报体育专栏作者 Jason Gay
几个月没看球,在赛季初不管是球评家还是球迷都表现的很兴奋,对各种数据评头论足,但不要忘了,16周的常规赛才刚刚开始, 真正的考验是在冬季,现在展望超级碗,太早了吧......

The not-so-secret secret appeal of the NFL is that it's a manageable habit. Or at least it can be manageable. You only have to pay attention for a few hours a week. Now of course I don't believe that NFL fans stop there. I know there are lots of people who watch their team, their team's rival, their rival's rival, their rival's rival's rival, plus Sunday night, Monday night, Thursday night, and if they had a game Wednesday at 3 a.m., they'd go for that, too. But the point is you don't have to go that crazy, and you can still feel involved, in the NFL mix, with just a little engagement. It's not like following baseball, which is like going to medical school.

But one of the problems with a small schedule is that it has a tendency to balloon every game into a Big Game, and in the extended breaks between contests, NFL fans are prone to getting carried away. One victory or loss or even a bad half is all it takes to inflate a handful of minutes into a sunken season or a Super Bowl. This is silly, because more often than not, a single game bears no connection to what is really going happen over the course of a full year. It's like sitting through the first five minutes of Thanksgiving and deciding that everyone in the family loves each other. You can't make that kind of declaration until dessert. And dessert is a long ways—and many cocktails—away.

Still, football fans can't help it. They panic. They celebrate prematurely. They pull ripcords, or check online for hotel rooms in New Orleans. In Week 1, New York was happily stunned by the debut of the Jets, who pummeled the Buffalo Bills after looking so miserable in the preseason. There was anxiety about the New York Giants, who fell to the Dallas Cowboys. The Cowboys, meanwhile, were pronounced as back, Re-Cowboy'd, whatever. New England roughed up Tennessee and I heard more than one person say that the reloaded Patriots had a real shot to cruise through the regular season 16-0. Other declarations included that the RGIII Redskins were awesome, the Dolphins were pathetic and the Pete Carroll Seahawks were not as good as presumed.

Even though this real-time extrapolation drives coaches and front offices bonkers, the league loves it. The NFL is increasingly a business that is less about the action on the field and more about the spaces in between—the Monday morning analysis; the fantasy dealing; the injury reports and scouting and pregame anticipation that inhales the end of the week. This is where the modern NFL has truly become a beast: in the buildup and overreaction, the argument and conjecture. The games themselves are straightforward affairs. What's there to argue about? They're keeping score.

Then another week passes and opinions that seemed so right seven days ago appear foolishly wrong. The Jets fall badly to the Pittsburgh Steelers; that Bills game may have been a mirage. The Giants recover and post a staggering comeback win against the Buccaneers, with Eli Manning throwing for 510 yards. New England loses to Arizona—despite Arizona's best efforts to hand the game back over—and now New England is declared lost, with uncomfortable questions about its offense. The Cowboys get sunk by the Seahawks. The Redskins are not as awesome.The Dolphins and Bills won. The Dolphins and Bills!

Whoa, whoa, whoa.

Is it crazy to suggest pulling back the lens and taking a longer view? What gets forgotten in these early season freak-outs is that if the past NFL seasons have taught us anything, it's that the first few weeks of the season aren't super meaningful. We're coming off of two consecutive Super Bowls won by teams (Green Bay 2010, New York Giants 2011) presumed to be going no place in the middle of the season. There's an emerging belief now that what matters in the NFL is not winning September or October but rallying the roster when the weather turns bleak over the holidays. Get healthy, make a run. Win some playoff games on the road. That's what happened with those Packers. That's what happened with the Giants. Wire to wire's for suckers.

Look: I get it. Everyone gets excited when football returns. But it's September. You're either 2-0 or 0-2 or 1-1. You're only that; nothing more. True NFL panic is for December. OK, November. Maybe October. But nothing earlier, OK?

泥巴

看得头大！！！{:soso_e127:}{:soso_e127:}

zambrano

很明显是安慰圣徒球迷的文章

小呆阿猪

似懂非懂的英语水平最苦B了