Friday the 13th. Do you believe in the curse of superstitions? ? A Lot Of Athletes Do!

I was listening to the radio today, Thursday, January 12, 2012, when someone mentioned that the next day would be Friday the 13th. The idea of superstitions was discussed, and it gave me the idea for this post. Actually, a couple of them, but I'll start with this one.

Since I've got sports on the brain pretty much most of the time, (especially during football season) I thought it would be fun to do a post talking about superstitions in the sports world. I intended to do strictly the NFL, but somewhere along the line I found some interesting and amusing sites on google and decided to deviate slightly.

Goodness, I almost don't know where to start! Well, I suppose I'll begin with the obvious. Sports players have many, many superstitions. I personally found some of them silly, amusing, disgusting and just plain weird.

I should probably insert at this moment that I don't really believe in superstitions. Frankly speaking, Friday the 13th has never been more of a lucky or unlucky day for me. Of course I've had bad days in my life that fell on Friday the 13th. But I've also had okay days. I suppose I've never had a "great" day on the 13th, but I have certainly had more average days than bad days. I finally concluded that I didn't really need to worry about it.

(Now watch me say that and have something bad happen to me this first Friday the 13th of 2012!)

I want to also take a moment to say that while I find most of these superstitions completely ridiculous, like religion, etc, I'm not dissing it. No disrespect intended. This is just my humble opinion.

However, I digress....athletes and their superstitions. In the sites I browsed, they came in many ways. Everything from wearing a certain kind of clothes under a uniform, growing a playoff beard, eating chicken before a game, bouncing a ball a certain way, or, most disgustingly, drinking urine.

Dear reader of this blog, I thought about regurgitating the information already done by the authors of these articles, but I thought, perhaps you'd like to go and read them for yourself. Truthfully, I would only be repeating what's already given and it seems almost pointless.

Let's start with a subject that you may or may not have heard about. I certainly didn't. Well, I find this superstition the most...er, uninteresting, but apparently it has a long history. I'm referring to the "Playoff beard". I need not explain more, correct? I think it sounds explanatory enough. (Lol)

I read one or two articles that said the playoff beard was started by a hockey player. I didn't read enough, I confess, to find out if other sites reference this hockey player.

In any event, I found a Wikipedia page (yes, I know, Wikipedia, but it's useful for some things, right?) that talks about the infamous playoff beard, and you can check it out for yourself. Sorry folks, I didn't read it. I did skim it a bit and saw many, many athlete names. So if you're a beard man or beard woman, knock yourself out! :)

Playoff beard - Wikipedia

While googling for sport superstitions, I did by accident happen upon the Snopes page that talked about the "Madden Curse". I confess, I've heard of the Madden Curse, but never really looked into it.

For those who aren't aware, the Madden Curse is simple. An NFL athlete who's been doing quite well, will sign a deal to be on the cover of John Madden's video game. Then they wind up getting hurt and missing a bunch of games. Famous players "cursed" include Michael Vick, Donovan McNabb, Marshall Faulk, just to name a few.

I find Snopes has compiled an interesting (albeit outdated) documentation of athletes supposedly affected by the Madden Curse.

Also, while reading about the Madden Curse, look at the "Sports Illustrated Curse" and the "Campbell's Chunky Soup curse" while you're at it.

Snopes.com: The Madden Curse

Okay, if you didn't go for the Wikipedia thing on the Playoff Beard, I found another funny article that has a top 10 list of athletes and their superstitions. This is a good one folks, and I would highly recommend reading it.

I won't spoil things for you, but take a gander. See which athlete...ahem...wore a golden thong as they believed it brought them luck.

Or, read about why one athlete drank urine, believing it helped cleanse the body. *Yuck!*

10 Most Superstitious Athletes - Men's Fitness

Keeping along the line of athletes, how about the number 13? I found another article listing players from all sports that either started out wearing or wore for their careers the number 13. As the writer of this article says, be the judge for yourself. Lucky or unlucky?

Sports Superstitions: The Number 13 — Infoplease.com

Last, but certainly not least, here is a forum I stumbled upon where a member asked the question, what superstitions/rituals as a fan do you follow? Something definitely worth reading. Some of the things people did...I think they're crazier than the athletes! :) For example, watching TV from the same TV every time. Standing up while watching or needing your hair clean. I won't say more. There aren't that many on this site and I'd rather you read them for yourself.

NFL Forum: Superstitions in football

That's pretty much it folks. I'm sure there are more, but you know what they say about too much of a good thing. (wink)

Journal Entry from a NFL Fantasy Football Newbie Part 2

Blog Journal Entry from a Fantasy Football Newbie Part 2

I left off my last journal entry from a fantasy football newbie by saying I'd discovered how to pre-rank players without using the drag-and-drop feature. From there I refused to say what kind of team I drafted.

With that nice little recap done, I will continue. I was doing this late at night alongside my friend. Online, of course. My friend, I will admit, knows very little about football, thus, I wasn't surprised that she knew even less than I did about the whole fantasy football process. (If my friend should read this, I offer forgiveness. But you know it's the truth!)

Eventually my friend called it a night and said she would complete the rankings later. I, on the other hand, kept plodding on, determined to get at least something done. I think I must have put about fifty or sixty players in a list before I finally pushed back my keyboard and said "enough!"

To speed things along, since I'm sure this is all so very entertaining, (note friendly sarcasm) I never went back to my pre-ranked players list to fix or tweak it. Our league drafted the next week, and I had the fifth pick. My friend, as it turns out, never did complete her pre-ranked players list, therefore she was unfortunately excluded from participating in this year's fantasy football league.

Well, in my opinion, I think it's probably for the best that my friend made that crucial mistake. I know football, having sat beside my family for years watching the 49ers play back in the 1990s. Even to me, who knows football, had a doozy of a time getting in synch with all the rules and...other things.

Once our league drafted, I went home and sort of pushed it to the back of my mind. I told myself, wait till the Thursday when the Green Bay Packers and New Orleans Saints play. Yes, I realized that I made a mistake doing it. Fantasy football is about keeping on your toes. About having your ear constantly to the ground to hear all the latest news, gossip, rumors, injury reports and so on.

Fortunately, when opening weekend came, I scrambled to drop deadwood from my starting line-up and bench. Luckily, there were still a few second-stringers available for me to pick up. I waved good-bye to the back-up to the back-up quarterback who was sitting on my bench and I said hello to Alex Smith. Yes, I will say that much. At the time, it wasn't a hot choice, but there wasn't much left to choose from.

I will conclude this part two of a Journal Entry from a Fantasy Football Newbie. Look for part three soon. If you've stuck with me this far, I will say that the next entry or two...or three...should prove far more entertaining. Now I'm going to get into explicit details of my first weekend of fantasy football. And what happened when I discovered that just because the season started, doesn't mean you couldn't still join a Yahoo fantasy football public league...

I will end with a Youtube video. I'd hoped to save it for another blog post, but if you've kept reading this far, you deserve a reward. This is an old Snickers commercial. My brother reminded me about it one day when we were reminiscing about old, funny commercials. Personally, I think it's one of the damn funniest commercials I've ever seen. Definitely in my top ten, that's for sure!

Batman snickers ad - YouTube

A funny Youtube video for NFL fantasy football fans

I know I have a part two coming of my adventures into fantasy football-land, but today I'm rather busy. And since I'd like to keep the attention of the one or two people visiting my blog, here's a youtube video I found that I hope will bring you some laughs.

I Suck At Fantasy Football - YouTube
(Clicking link will open it in a new window.)

Note: If you're like me and always suspicious of clicking links, go to google and type in "youtube" and "funny fantasy football". It's entitled "I Suck at Fantasy Football".

Being that I simply googled this, if you're a fantasy football as well as a youtube fan, there's a strong possibility that you've already seen it. However, bear with me. :)

Naturally, since I am blind, I can't see anything going on in the video. I do hope if there's anything inappropriate, someone will kindly let me know. In the meantime, enjoy the song and the dialogue, because if you're a fantasy football newb like myself, you can totally appreciate it! Then again, if you're not a newb, you can get a good chuckle from it.

P.S. Take note of the first two lines of the man's song. Let's just say I know exactly what he's talking about and leave it at that...

Journal Entry from a NFL Fantasy Football Newb Part 1

Recently I have discovered the world of fantasy football. Yes, I am female. Yes, I do like football. Yes, I am somewhat of a computer junkie. So it comes to a surprise to even me that I've taken this long to get into the game.

Since this is my soap box, I'll start from my beginning. A friend came to me and asked if I wanted to join a local league. I was intrigued. I'd wondered about fantasy football for a while. I'd tossed the idea around to see if it was something I could do to entertain myself. However, I never did anything about my desire for the simple fact that I knew it was played mostly online. And to a blind person, it's always a concern. Would I be able to use the website? Will my screen reader be able to access all the functions? Would it wind up being more pain than pleasure to play?

I know these thoughts of mine would undoubtedly send my blind friends and acquaintances into a tizzy. But hey, that's me! Anyone who knows me in real life understands I suffer from way too much stress. Not only that, but I have a bad habit of letting anything difficult stress the heck out of me, thus giving me massive migraines. If something seems more trouble than it's worth, I'd much rather take the high road.

Ahem. However, I digress. Despite having only marginal knowledge of how fantasy football works, I decided to go online and see if I could educate myself on the subject. Boy, did I get more than I'd bargained for! There are boatloads and boatloads of sites bursting with so much information regarding fantasy football, I became dizzy!

The one thing I can say I latched on to right away was reading about the history of fantasy football. I don’t' know about anyone else, but learning when fantasy football actually started was quite a surprise to me. I'd thought it had only been around for 15-20 years. In actuality, fantasy football was created back in 1962 and worked its way up into what it is today.

Well, I'd rather not turn this blog entry into a history lesson, so I'll finish this section by saying I came across many sites talking about the history. For anyone interested, wikipedia's entry is the easiest to get through. I know it's wikipedia, and even I'm not too hot on using it as a reference, however, I did click on some of the reference articles where the material was taken, and it appears legit. So if anyone feels like reading more about it, here you go.

Fantasy football (American) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Getting back to the present... My friend approached me asking if I wanted to join a local fantasy football league. Since this friend was also blind, I thought, well, there's strength in numbers, so any bumps can be weathered together.

Not having any clue about where to go or what to do, I had to ask my friend for many details about the first steps in getting into the local league. It was a bit of a concern for me when I was told that the league would be played on Yahoo Sports. I used Yahoo mail and chat years ago. But that was a long...time...ago. And I do not have fond memories of using yahoo. Despite my reservations, I went ahead and agreed to join the fantasy league. What do you know? To my utter amazement and pleasure, I found that Yahoo had finally taken measures to make things on their site more accessible to us blind folk.

Getting the league information and password from my friend was probably the easiest part, as I soon discovered. From there it was figuring out settings and understanding what needed to be done first.

Naturally, picking a name and choosing your settings came first. *Yawn* Yes, I know boring. So moving along, I went to the section that I figured was where I pick a line-up of players I wanted to draft.

At first I was a bit frustrated, as I read that the way to select and exclude players was done by dragging and dropping. Not something a blind person can do! But, much to my great relief and pleasure, I noticed at the bottom of the pre-ranking players page an option that said if you were having trouble with this page, click this version. Yes! Exactly the kind of thing I was looking for. Immediately the drag-and-drop features were replaced with drop-down boxes and links.

* SIDENOTE: For any blind folk—or heck, any person who has trouble with drag-and-drop—reading this, I want to insert a note here to say that my brother and I found out the very hard way that the "click this version" option is only available if you're creating your own league or are attempting to join a league created by someone else. Apparently, the publicly assigned Yahoo leagues don't offer the option. I will just end this note by saying that thankfully, my brother and I found a relatively easy way to continue pre-ranking your own players. I will explain our method in future posts. *

Anyway, thanks to the alternate version, instead of drag and drop, I was presented with drop-down menus, links and buttons. The kind of thing that every blind person wants to see on a site known for using flash.

Here's where, dear people, I confess that I showed my female genes and complete ineptness. What did I do you ask? I didn't do the basics. Which meant that I went and started ranking players by the names I recognized rather than taking the time to understand who's hot and who's not.

At this point I would use the words "epic fail", but unfortunately, my siblings have banned me from using that term. *LOL* Therefore, I will imitate the infamous Homer Simpson. *DOH!*

I need not describe the type of team that I drafted, because it would embarrass me too much. Let's just say it was bad and take it from there. Thankfully, I think I've picked myself up pretty good since then. I'm currently second to last in the league rankings, but it could have been worse. Much worse. *LOL*

I will end part one of this journal entry from a fantasy football newbie by saying that after week 1 of the NFL, I did some looking and learned that it wasn't too late to still create more fantasy teams on public leagues. It might come as a "duh!" to most people, but I didn't realize until I started listening to the local ESPN radio station and paid more attention to the fantasy football talk that it wasn't uncommon for people to have more than one team.

To be continued...