“I got a lot of problems with you people and now you’re gonna hear about it!” It’s Festivus and there are so many grievances to air. Let’s get right to it.
My first grievance is with society. This pandemic has been handled so poorly by so many different levels of government and by individuals. I don’t know if there was a way to keep the virus from getting out of China (maybe there was, there have been other diseases that started in Asia or Africa in the last couple of decades that didn’t become pandemics like this, but I don’t know enough to say if this could have been contained), but once it got out of China, it was going to be bad. It didn’t have to be this bad though. So this was a very general grievance, but I should point out that I have no grievance with doctors, nurses, and scientists who are dealing with this virus. They’ve been doing heroic work over the last year and the vaccines that have been developed will bring this to an end. I also have no grievance with delivery drivers and people who work in grocery stores or pharmacies. They’re all awesome. What I don’t get is why we aren’t trying to limit the damage now. It’s not like it’s April and we have no idea how long this is going to last. There’s light at the end of the tunnel with the vaccines. We have Dr. Fauci saying that everybody who wants to get vaccinated should be able to by the spring. We’ve been dealing with this for over nine months now and we have just a few more months to go. The summer and early fall were not too bad in New York, but now things are getting really bad again (we just set a new record for most new cases in a single day and hospitals are filling up, but at least the death rate is much lower than the spring). In the spring, we did stuff to try to stop the spread. Now it’s like nobody cares anymore. I don’t get it. Several of my other grievances will be connected to the coronavirus.
Let’s start with Notre Dame. I have a grievance with the university for not accepting one of my former students. I taught him for three years and I’ve kept in touch with him since then. I was a really good student in high school, but he was a better student and much better person than I was. I was trying to think of how many students I’ve taught in my 13 years of teaching. My rough estimate was 400 (that’s probably a bit of an underestimate). Of the approximately 400 students, I have four that clearly stand out as the best students I’ve ever taught and he’s one of them. So yeah, he’s in the top 1% of students that I’ve taught. Notre Dame messed that up. But I was actually happy that he wasn’t there this semester because life must have been miserable for the students there.
Now let’s get into sports. The pandemic kept me from going to the Big East Tournament. It’s one of my favorite events of the year. I think I went every year last decade except for 2017 when I went to a couple of nights of the ACC Tournament in the Barclays Center instead of the Big East Tournament. And then, the NCAA Tournament was canceled. That first weekend of the tournament is probably my favorite weekend of the whole year. You get 48 meaningful college basketball games in four days. I always take that Friday off from work. It’s the best. I hope we get it back in 2021.
Speaking of Notre Dame and college basketball, I hate to do this, but I have to air a grievance with Mike Brey. I love Mike Brey (I know, this isn’t how you typically start a grievance). He’s had a great run at Notre Dame, but it’s fair to wonder if it’s coming to an end. The 2014-2015 team was the best Notre Dame basketball team of my lifetime and it’s a shame that we just ran out of gas at the end of the Kentucky game. If we had won that game, we had a real chance to win the National Championship (we were 3-1 that season against the other Final Four teams). We had another Elite Eight run in 2016 and we were back in the tournament in 2017. We haven’t been back since. We would have made it in 2018 if not for injuries. But the last two years haven’t been good and this year’s team isn’t going anywhere. I really hope Mike Brey can get the program moving in the right direction again because I do love him for everything he’s done over the course of two decades at Notre Dame, but I’m worried. The other thing that I’m worried about is that it could be much worse if we don’t make a good choice to replace him whenever that time comes.
I have some football grievances. I’ll start with the College Football Playoff committee. Ohio State should have been left out. They played six games. They beat two good teams (Indiana and Northwestern), but they weren’t overly impressive in either of those games. The Dodgers won the World Series after playing 60 games, but it’s not like they played 60 when all the other good teams played 100. Obviously Alabama and Clemson were making the playoff. The last two spots should have been two of Notre Dame, Texas A&M, and Cincinnati. I have a grievance with the coronavirus because it moved the Rose Bowl from the gorgeous setting of the Rose Bowl in Pasadena to Jerry World. Notre Dame is playing in just its second Rose Bowl ever and we have to play it in Jerry World. Lame. Of course, the only reason that we’re playing in the Rose Bowl is that it’s going to have more fans than the Sugar Bowl and that’s what Alabama wanted. If life was normal, Alabama would have preferred the Sugar Bowl over going to California, but whatever. This will be the second Rose Bowl played somewhere other than Pasadena (the other one was at Duke in 1942 after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor). Coincidentally, I’ve seen Notre Dame play at the other two locations.
Dabo Swinney has become a villain this year. I never really had strong feelings about him (if anything, I liked him for the times he beat Alabama and Ohio State in the playoff). But it’s clear the ACC is letting him give orders now. He decided that pass interference on Clemson wasn’t pass interference when we played them in November. That call forced us to punt and gave Clemson a chance to run out the clock. Fortunately, they didn’t get the job done. He also decided that Clemson wasn’t playing Florida State and that meant that Notre Dame wasn’t going to play Wake Forest. So he cost me a fun Saturday of watching Notre Dame beating up on a mediocre ACC team.
I thought I was going to have a grievance with the Big 10 because I was totally cool with their season being canceled. I’m not happy about Ohio State making the playoff, but it was worth it to see Michigan and Penn State have terrible seasons. Notre Dame ever joining the Big 10 would be my worst college football nightmare, but being in any conference is just terrible for Notre Dame. We were in the ACC for this season and it was so stupid. Everybody wanted Notre Dame to join a conference because our schedule wasn’t hard enough. Now that wasn’t true to begin with, but it was proven demonstrably false by this year’s schedule. We replaced our games against USC, Wisconsin (which was supposed to be at Lambeau Field, I had a hotel room booked), Stanford, Arkansas, Navy, and Western Michigan with games against North Carolina, Boston College, Florida State, Syracuse, and South Florida as our one non-conference game. North Carolina turned out to be pretty good, but our schedule was clearly not as hard and clearly not as interesting as it was supposed to be as an independent. In hindsight, we should have stayed independent. We had no control over losing the games against USC, Wisconsin, and Stanford, but we could have kept the six ACC opponents we already had (which already included Clemson), kept Navy, and then added BYU and added a couple other teams like Army, Cincinnati or a Big 12 team (if we wanted a good opponent), or South Florida or whoever (if we wanted a cupcake). Playing in a conference is just stupid. Every game in college football is supposed to be meaningful, but even before playing Clemson in the regular season, we knew we’d just end up playing them again in the ACC Championship Game. Beating them in the regular season was great, but it was kind of undone by our terrible performance in the rematch. I was hoping that we’d win the game, spike the ACC Championship trophy, and then just have it melted to be made into something useful. But I have to admit, it would be pretty awesome if we had Game 3 because that would mean we beat Alabama.
I have more grievances with the College Football Playoff system. When it started, they had the New Year’s Six and that name made sense because they’d have three games on New Year’s Eve and three on New Year’s Day. As somebody who has always thought that New Year’s Eve is the stupidest celebration of the year (we’re celebrating the arbitrary start of the year and the last time we did that, we got 2020), I loved the idea. You had the six best bowls spread out over two days. But because people do care about New Year’s Eve for some reason and ratings weren’t good, they changed how the New Year’s Six games were scheduled. This year, we gave one on December 30, three on January 1, and two on January 2. Even under the original scheduling, it was silly when the Rose Bowl wasn’t a playoff game because you’d have the two playoff games on New Year’s Eve and then three other games the next day. But because the Rose Bowl needed to be played at 5:00 on New Year’s Day, they didn’t put the playoff games on New Year’s Day if it wasn’t a Rose Bowl playoff year. Here’s what I would do about that. The two playoff games are always on January 1. If the Rose Bowl isn’t a playoff game, then have the Rose Bowl in between the two playoff games. That would be a little weird, but it’s less weird than having the playoff games on December 29 (like they were when Notre Dame made it two years ago) and then several more bowl games after the playoff games.
But really, they messed up the bowls when they went to the BCS. The problem is that you had one bowl that really mattered and the rest didn’t (now with the playoff, you have two bowls that really matter and the rest don’t). In the 1977 season, you had four major bowl games all on the same day (January 2 because January 1 was a Sunday) and three of them had a hand in deciding the National Championship. And going into the day, you didn’t know which bowls would have had a hand in deciding the National Championship. If number 1 Texas had beaten number 5 Notre Dame, then the Orange Bowl wouldn’t have mattered. But since Notre Dame won, it mattered that number 2 Oklahoma lost in the Orange Bowl. So my answer is to start over. This is one of my favorite ideas that’s never going to happen. Here’s what I would do (I’ve written about this before, but I’ve been refining the idea). You play the bowl games and then pick the top two teams from the winners of the major bowls to play for the championship. You take the five Power 5 conference champions. The Rose Bowl is the traditional Big 10 vs. Pac 12 matchup. The SEC champion goes to the Sugar Bowl. The ACC champion goes to the Orange Bowl. The Big 12 champion goes to the Cotton Bowl. The highest ranked Group of 5 Champion goes to either the Peach or Fiesta Bowl. The rest of the spots are filled by the highest ranked at large teams. Of the at large teams and the Group of 5 team, the two lowest ranked of those teams play in either the Peach or the Fiesta Bowl. That eliminates one of those games as possibly having an impact on the National Championship, but those two have less history than the other games so they can deal with that. So here are the matchups we could have this year under my system:
Rose Bowl- Ohio State vs. Oregon
Sugar Bowl- Alabama vs. Notre Dame
Orange Bowl- Clemson vs. Florida
Cotton Bowl- Oklahoma vs. Texas A&M
Peach Bowl- Cincinnati vs. Georgia
Fiesta Bowl- Iowa State vs. Indiana
So we’d have teams 1-11 and 25 in the rankings (usually number 25 is not going to sneak in, but that’s the way it is this year). Iowa State and Indiana were the lowest ranked at large teams so they play each other. As for the other at large teams, I put Notre Dame in the Sugar Bowl because the rest of the at large teams were from the SEC and I didn’t want Alabama playing an SEC team. I used a random number generator to assign the three SEC at large teams and coincidentally it worked out nicely geographically. The way it would work out in my system for this year, the winner of the Sugar Bowl is getting to the National Championship Game. Clemson would be in with a win. But if Florida won, that would probably open the door for Texas A&M or maybe Cincinnati or Ohio State to get into the championship game. As for scheduling, I think I’d put the Peach Bowl and Fiesta Bowl in the afternoon/early evening on New Year’s Eve and the other four on New Year’s Day. New Year’s Day used to mean something in college football. Then it didn’t. The College Football Playoff was supposed to fix that and it did when the Rose Bowl and Sugar Bowl are playoff games, but not so much when the playoff games are on December 28 or whatever. One objection to my idea might be that you could have three undefeated teams playing in three different games. Like let’s say Alabama, Clemson, and Ohio State were all undefeated and they all won their bowl games. Somebody is getting left out of the championship game. I think that would be good because it would encourage good non-conference scheduling. If Ohio State gets left out because their schedule wasn’t good enough, too bad. I really hope that they don’t go to an eight-team playoff even though it would make it easier for Notre Dame to get in because it would discourage good non-conference games. If all the Power 5 conference champions would get in automatically, it wouldn’t matter what you did in your non-conference games. And if there were three spots left for other teams, you wouldn’t want to risk playing a good team out of your conference and losing.
Let’s move on to professional sports. My first grievance there is with the Jets for being the Jets. I think that’s all I need to say about them.
In the NBA, my first grievance is with the Clippers. Yes, the Celtics had a disappointing defeat against the Heat in the playoffs and the Heat lost to the Lakers, but neither of those teams were going to beat the Lakers. The Clippers were the team that should have beaten the Lakers, but they didn’t get past the Nuggets. I watched pretty much none of the NBA Finals this year (if I watched any, it was because the TV happened to be on ABC when the games were going on, not because I decided to put on ABC) and that’s the first time I can remember not watching any. Also, I’m mad at the coronavirus from taking away the opportunity to have Kyrie Irving play in Boston with fans there. I have a very clear order of my least favorite players right now:
LeBron James
Kyrie Irving
Kevin Durant
Anthony Davis
I think if the Lakers and Nets play in the Finals this season, I would hate it even more than when the Patriots and Seahawks played in the Super Bowl.
In baseball, I have absolutely no grievances with the Dodgers. Their season was awesome and Clayton Kershaw finally got the championship that he deserved (and he was excellent in the playoffs). I have many grievances with Rob Manfred (not doing more about the Astros, the DH in the NL, the magical runner that appears at second base in extra innings, 16 teams in the playoffs). And of course, I’m also mad at the coronavirus for taking away 100 Dodger games this season. I would have seen the Dodgers in person at least three times (the only sporting event I went to for the whole year was a Long Island Nets game in January) and I would have watched at least 75 more games on TV if it had been a normal season. I’m also mad at the coronavirus for Altuve, Springer, Bregman, Correa, Gurriel, and Reddick not having to face fans on the road. It would have been like Kyrie Irving facing fans in Boston, only it would have happened in every stadium.
I’ll finish with a baseball movie grievance since I just watched A League of Their Own with my eighth graders. We just finished the Great Depression and I wasn’t starting World War II the week before Christmas. So I showed them the movie and it’s an excellent movie, but there’s a plot hole. Dottie drives in the tying and go ahead runs in the top of the ninth in Game 7. There were two outs with runners on second and third when she came up. There’s no way they would pitch to Dottie in that situation. You definitely put her on with first base open.
I can’t think of a year where grievances needed to be aired more than this one. There are so many things I didn’t get to do this year and so many people that I didn’t get to see at all this year. If you’ve made it this far, you’re probably one of the people that I wish I had been able to see. As I’ve said, the start of the year is completely arbitrary. And the beginning of 2021 is going to be just as bad as this year has been. But at some point in 2021, things will be getting better. I hope to have nowhere near as many grievances to air a year from now.
Happy Festivus!
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