If your sporting life revolves around the NFL, then you must be more excited than the fat kid who just found out the McRib is back. This upcoming weekend of football deliciousness has been eighteen long weeks in the making and I hope you appreciate it because weekends like this one only come around once a year. Here’s a breakdown of what are historically the best weekends in American sports.
- NFL Divisional Playoff Weekend (mid-January) … You can forget about that pansy-ass Wildcard weekend crap. Wildcard weekend is full of pretenders and one-hit wonders (we’re looking at you Buffalo, you too Rams). This weekend features NFL playoff doubleheaders Saturday and Sunday involving the four best teams in the league joined by the wildcard survivors. Most of the epic sports weekends on the American calendar involve multiple sports, but this weekend is all about the power and the fury of the NFL. Again, you should be sure to soak it all up because the next thing you know it will be February and that means just one thing – meaningless basketball (barf).
- Hallo-Weekend (late October) … Hallo-Weekend, clever right? I made that up. It’s the weekend before or after Halloween and it’s a scary-good weekend for sports. College and NFL football are at the top of the bill, but the World Series should also be happening which adds a little extra texture unless it’s the Padres vs. Angels in which case who could possibly give a shit. You can even throw in early0-season NHL hockey and you can wash it all down with Halloween candy, making this one of the sweetest weekends in American sports.
- Labor Day and the late-summer extravaganza (early September) … Labor Day weekend, it can be argued, is about as good as it gets when it comes to sports-watching. You get the opening weekend of the college football season which means a hundred contests between teams that end in Tech and A&M, baseball pennant races are coming down to the wire, there’s NFL hype with the last painful preseason games on display (if you watch closely you may see your starting quarterback play three snaps) and, for good measure, U.S. Open Tennis provides non-stop grunting and Russian women in shorts skirts. A sunny three-day weekend and sports, money.
- Kentucky Derby Weekend (early May) … Super-fun weekend as the NHL playoffs loom, most baseball teams are already out of the playoff hunt and your little garden probably has some flowers, but the big news is the Run for the Roses at Churchill Downs. Invite people over to the house and pretend you know what a quinella is. Seriously, make sure you get a bet down and drink some bourbon and have a cigar because Derby Day is what made this country great.
- Masters Weekend (early April) … Baseball’s back with Opening Day in the MLB and you should celebrate after the long, hard winter of basketball. On top of that, you get The Masters golf tournament which tends to be lovely theater and it’s twice as groovy because it’s only April and after this tournament, you can be relieved that you don’t have to watch golf again for an entire year.
- Final Four week one (last weekend in March) … Everybody does a bracket and a school with an enrollment of 327 dudes in Vermont almost beats one of the professional teams from the Big Ten. The first weekend of the NCAA basketball tournament is the best because of sheer volume, with games starting every three minutes beginning at 7AM and ending after midnight. Some sponsor offers to give someone title to the Virgin Islands if he picks every game correctly, but no one ever does. No one really cares about these games but sometimes a guy hits a shot from halfcourt at the buzzer and then players and their families cry and I like that.