Stuff and Shenanigans: Drought ended— wait what are we talking about again?

Oct 5, 2022 - 11:10 PM

Introductions are ridiculous. Absolute absurdity. Preposterous. A waste of all our brains. A waste of all our time. Et cetera.

Now that’s out of the way:

A 73% Sober and 100% Accurate Rundown on Absolutely Everything

Well sweet Christ did I ever pick a good weekend to accidentally have a conflict that prevented me watching more than a quarter of this game.

And sweet whatever did Cal Raleigh pick a good night to end The Drought and thus make me say — and I quote — “I have never cared less about one of my teams looking like poo.”

Thanks Cal. You da best.

Anyhoo, well, I guess we were gonna lose one eventually. I would feel like a real knob for being like “Yeah UCLA being undefeated is a mirage and they’re actually Not Great™” except even the UCLA fans I know were saying things like “Yeah UCLA being undefeated is a mirage and they’re actually Not Great™.”

Someone might feel the urge to come up to me and get all cocky-like about that, but I still feel this way. It’s UCLA. They lose to who they shouldn’t and beat teams that confound you. It’s whatever. Surely they’ll lose next week to Simon Fraser Technical College or some crap. Or, failing that, beat Alabama.

Obviously our main on-field takeaway is collectively “yikes, secondary” — or at least, I assume it is based on the one quarter of action I saw and then the real-time responses in the UWDP writers’ slack for the remaining seven hours of commercials interrupted on occasion by college football.

“But Gabey, you write this every week, why didn’t you go back and rewatch the game?”

Because, you weirdos, I’m happy* right now. Why on God’s sweet Earth would I ruin my Big Dumper-based contentedness just to deliver you a slightly-more-insightful-but-also-maybe-not column that I get paid next to nothing for? What would I catch on that watch that we haven’t already figured out? Some basic defensive backs’ soft scheme crap? El oh el, nice try Satan; not gonna blow up my day for that.

Although that does bring us to the one thing I learned from this game, which was less of a “learning” and more of a “re-hashing” since learning implies having a piece of first-time information go into your brain and stay there fresh and new.

Okay, so let’s rewind to a worse time in your life. I’m speaking, of course, about the eighties.

Wait, no, sorry, that’s not it. Let’s try this again... I’m speaking, of course, about exactly one year ago, which functioned for me like being punched in the face repeatedly by the suckage-ness of UW and the futility of trying to fight the inertia of The College Football Corporate Conglomeration-ification, which would be a fun band name but is a generally depressing concept.

That combo reminded me about how it’s not a bad call to detach your emotional wellbeing from the exploits of a bunch of 18-22 year old dudes, particularly if those dudes are coached by a bunch of professional idiots, and particularly if those dudes and professional idiots are within a giant organism made up of a media oligopoly run by executive dipshits teamed up with a Disney villain-ass organization.

I mean, truly I hadn’t cared less about college football in, like, a decade.

Then Kalen DeBoer and Michael Penix kicked down the wall Kool Aid man-style and everything was great again! Hell yeah baby, it’s time to live and die each Saturday of the fall based off of something I have no control over, wooooo!

Anyways, point being, the circumstances around Saturday couldn’t have been more perfect, personally. I mean, they could have, by Washington winning. But if they weren’t going to do that, it was ideal: a decent reminder to detach my wellbeing from college football, in that my wellbeing Saturday night was completely detached from college football and it ruled. (Granted, was it thrown upside down in a good way because of another group of dudes catching and/or hitting balls good, and doing other stuff good too? Yeah, whatever. Don’t think too hard about it.)

As it stands, I’m more or less in a pretty good mood. See? Who says college football isn’t educational? It’s teaching us all about our emotional health!

Now, the next time Washington loses, I’ll be kinda down with the whole thing. Like I’d prefer they not, but hey, ya know... in the words of Tina Fey... “some people work in coal mines.”

So... I guess that’s it this week?

*ish

Lines of the Week

That feeling of when you see undefeated Washington lose to a somehow undefeated UCLA:

Washington’s secondary Saturday against most things:

How I would’ve felt if I had actually put three+ American hours’ worth of my time and emotional energy into that game instead of making people laugh on stage and then promptly crying over the Mariners:

When I kept getting notification from the UWDP writers’ slack over DTR scoring at will after having spent the week confidently mocking UCLA for being shit:

Do good things, don’t do bad things, and bow down to Washington.