Nurse the Hate: NFL Week 17, Pop The Champagne

I have amassed what I would call “an irresponsible amount” of champagne and sparkling wine.  I have one final sparkling wine unit to pass to finally finish my quest for this WSET Diploma.  The word “quest” sounds a bit overdramatic.  I understand that.  However, I find that word to be much preferable to the word “journey”.  The word “journey” is used so often in today’s polite society that it really gets in my craw, and I don’t like to have things in my craw.  I don’t even like to say “craw” much less have something stuck in there.  I'm not even positive where my craw is, so getting what is stuck in it out isn't going to be easy.  

Here's the thing with "journey"...  It used to be that you took a job.  Now people are referring to their series of crappy jobs as their “career journey” with a straight face.  Someone takes a class that lasts for eight weeks.  At the end of the class the instructor might say “When we began this journey…” and no one laughs out loud.  If you were taught rudimentary French while sitting in a conference room, you did not take a journey.  If you loaded a sailboat with Vikings, ale, hard tack, and axes to attack villagers across the sea?  Yes, you made a journey.  The differences are tangible.  Text book and quizzes= No Journey.  Decapitated villagers and plunder= Journey.

I believe my pursuit of a laughably useless wine certification is a quest and not a journey.  The rationale is quite simple.  There are no decapitated villagers or drunk Vikings, therefore I did not make a journey.  At one point, I did go to Bordeaux for ten days, so I did tick a box or two for “journey” as I crossed the ocean and at one point argued with an Air France clerk unsuccessfully.  I will admit that I might have decapitated her had I been given the opportunity.  I was, as they say in Francois, "en colère".  I think it is evident that if I would have attacked a French citizen with an axe at any point there taking WSET crap, it would have swung this over to “journey”.   Yet since there was no axe attack, this is a quest.  No doubt about it.

A quest is a long arduous search for something which I believe ends with a tangible goal.  This WSET Diploma has certainly been a long arduous search and while I think I only get a lapel pin at the end of it, it is still a tangible item.  Granted, the Quest for the Holy Grail might have been more high profile.  The payoff of the Grail is without question more impressive than a lapel pin.  I don’t think anyone would have sent thousands of men to their deaths for Jesus’s lapel pin.  Frankly, I have never seen compelling evidence that Jesus was much of a dresser.  Regardless, both the Knights of the Holy Grail and myself are involved in comparable quests.  Unlike them, I will succeed.

The bottom line is I need to immerse myself in sparkling wine.  This means I will be opening an absurd number of bottles of low dosage, grower and vintage champagne this Sunday while watching football with friends that have almost no interest in the quality or even characteristics of any of the wines.  This is a foolish and expensive endeavor.  Ideally, I should be sitting in a room with good lighting debating mousse levels with someone that can participate in such a frivolous conversation and then ride a tandem bike to the store to buy more.  Life doesn't always work like you want it to work.  Now, I am forced by circumstance to dig in on Sunday and try to win the cost of these wines back with good old fashioned elbow grease.  By “elbow grease”, I mean “gambling on football”.

The last weekend of the year is a wilderness of mirrors.  It is almost impossible to figure out if teams have packed their bags for Barbados or are mentally invested in getting one more win.  I am going to completely avoid games like “Giants v Redskins” where every player is a potential rogue agent.  Why roll the dice on the Texans v Colts game where a third string Texan QB will assumedly hand the ball off all day against an awful Colt run defense? 

I cannot figure out why the Panthers are getting 4.5 points against the Falcons.   They need a win to get the NFC South title and host a playoff game.  They are 7-1 straight up in their last eight.  Frankly, they look like a hard out in the Playoffs.  More than a field goal seems crazy to me.  This seems like a “last possession wins”, so give me the points and the hot team.   I am going to get aggressively on the Panthers and hope the points carry the day.  Carolina +4.5

The Raiders are getting 9.5 points against the Chargers.  As I bravely stated at the beginning of the year, the Raiders were due to regress.  (http://nursethehate.blogspot.com/search?q=2017+win+total) You’re welcome for the two out of three winners by the way.  However, I don’t think anyone was expecting 6-10.  A team slides to 7-9 and team management can explain that away.  Ten losses and the coaches are looking for new jobs.  I will bet that the coaches like living in the San Francisco Bay area making a ton of money.  I know I would.  I would also like to make the move to Vegas with the team making a ton of money next year.  This is a big game for the Raiders.  I think they play hard.  Let’s also note that the Chargers don’t crush anyone (except the Cowboys).  I could see a Raider straight up win, but I’m just taking the points.  Raiders +9.5      

Season Record (including win totals):  23-19-1

Nurse the Hate: 2017 NFL Win Total Bets

It’s time to get the old gambling machine running with the NFL season ready to start on Thursday.  This leads to one of my favorite bets of the year, the NFL annual win totals.  This bet is all about trying to figure out not necessarily what team is going to perform well/poorly.  It is really about trying to figure out who The Public has too much/too little faith in.  There is a large part of this country that thinks mainstream country music is kick ass, Outback Steakhouse is good food, and America Is being Made Great Again.  These same people also bet on football and move betting lines.  Let’s take advantage of this situation and Make America Great Again in our own little way, shall we?  Every time you win one of these bets, just think that you are probably getting paid directly from that guy in the Chevy ad in the man bun that refers to some display model as “a bad mama jamma”.  Fuck that guy.  Let’s take his money.

 

The Buffalo Bills are a team that gets about 46 seconds of national media coverage each season.  Most members of the NFL media probably have no idea how to get to Buffalo, so rely on wild rumors and popular opinion about the team.  The current line of thinking about the Bills is that they are tanking the season because they traded Sammie Watkins, their first round receiver pick a few years ago.  Sammie Watkins, who might have just hurt his foot stepping on a Lego and will be out 6-8 weeks, is one of those players that fans nationally think is really good but turns out is pretty average.  The Bills also have a very unsexy QB in Tyrod Taylor, who they thought about cutting loose but then kept because it turns out only 24 guys on the planet are good at playing QB in the NFL.  This has resulted in The Public believing that the Bills are fucking awful.  They aren’t.  They are OK.  They’re not good.  They’re OK.  And OK means you win more than six games.  Bills OVER SIX.

I picked the Bills over six in part because they get to play the New York Jets twice a year.  The Jets should be awe inspiringly bad this year.  McCown is going to start this year as the “Poor Man’s Ryan Fitzpatrick” because, as usual, the Jets blew their draft picks on terrible QBs.  McCown has no one to throw to, and no one will be blocking for him to give him time anyway.  He should be in traction by October.  That means Christian Hackenberg will show the entire world how badly he sucks.  By mid-November all the late night TV shows will have the word “Jets” as a substitute for “loser”.  I would imagine New York sports talk radio will be discussing cutting people’s heads off and putting them on stakes.  I already put money on the Browns over the Jets as a pick ‘em in week 5.  Old Chinese proverb:  If you can’t beat the Browns, who do you beat?  Jets UNDER 4.5 wins.

The Raiders were a team that was poised to make a run at the Super Bowl until Carr broke his leg at the end of the year.  They just seemed to always pull games out of their ass.  I looked it up, and it turns out they went 8-1 in one possession games.  The NFL is very cruel in this regard.  Things regress back to the mean with bone chilling regularity.  If a team gets really lucky one year, the worm will turn on them the next.  Toss in the fun of playing a lame duck season prior to moving to Vegas in front of angry people dressed like skeletons, and that is a big distraction.  The Vegas line has these guys at 10 wins.  I am strongly advising Raiders UNDER 10 wins. 

Nurse the Hate: March Madness Round One

I will be gambling wildly on the NCAA college basketball tournament.  One of the factors that might impede my success in this endeavor is my total lack of knowledge regarding college basketball in 2017.  I have not watched one (1) college basketball game in 2016-2017.  I cannot name one (1) college basketball player.  Not only is that not going to stop me, I am going to feed on this complete lack of knowledge.  I am going to go into this thing with a childlike purity that I think will protect me from harm.  I am like a little lamb walking through the forest.  It’s why some people call me “Lamby”.  I think it is also important to note that I am not alone in this position.  A simple fact is that almost no one knows anything about college basketball.  Each city has two or three old men that watch an inhuman amount of games across a dizzying array of conferences.  In their cases college basketball has filled the void of a loving family or any other interests.  They exist to criticize mid major conference guard play while scarfing down lukewarm concession stand hot dogs.  That is their life.  It is not mine.

I am really no different than every other a-hole out there flapping their bracket around in a sports bar with one striking difference.  I believe that to truly embrace March Madness, one needs to put real money down on these games.  While some pussy is holding onto his Coors Light and white knuckling a late free throw in the Mt. Saint Mary’s game because he has a $10 bracket, I will be enjoying real anxiety over that as I have placed a couple hundo on the shoulders of a 19 year old kid that I didn’t know existed two hours earlier.  That’s what a March distraction is all about.  What do you want to do?  Dwell on reality?  Do you want to really assess your life?  Ye Gods man!  Open up an online sports betting account and get cracking.

I am going to take Xavier +2.  As I mentioned earlier, I have no idea about any of the key facts regarding this game.  What I do know is that college teams have characters.  Almost like a scotch, these institutions of learning have a distinct flavor profile to them that gets repeated year after year after year.  I fully expect Maryland to come out on this game expected to win with a squad full of blue chip recruits with untarnished pedigrees.  Meanwhile Xavier will have some players that can be diplomatically referred to as “colorful” or “rough around the edges”.  These are the guys that might have almost been good enough to play at Kentucky or Ohio State except they have sexual assault charges and/or battery misdemeanors on their record.  They are the guys that walk around Xavier campus 24/7 in warmups and headphones and no one has actually seen attend a class.  The only thing these guys do is play basketball for four years until re-embracing their fringe element past.  I love that kind of team against Maryland.  Maryland has reliably been upset in the tournament each year since 1977.  That steak will continue today.     

I don't like Notre Dame.  Most people don't.  Notre Dame is filled with thick fingered Catholic School boys named Sean that turn vocally racist the second after they have three beers.  They are guys that always wear khaki pants, listen exclusively to Top 40 records, and use the Greater South Bend IN area as a staging area for date rapes in bunk beds. It's not like I love Princeton though.  Princeton is a school filled with smug little fuckers that have been placed in school by their fathers.  They are all creeps too, but they are playing a long game there.  It's not about bullying weaker kids at Princeton.  It's about taking over companies and fleecing stockholders.  There is a kid that is sitting at the end of the Princeton team bench that will probably become my boss in about two years and will use terms like "paradigm shift", "low hanging fruit" and "right sourcing" in a meeting that I zone out in.  I will hate him with every fiber of my being.  I might as well start now.  I'm on Notre Dame -7.

In what is going to be a big mistake, I am going to buy into the national rhetoric in East Tennessee State being a Cinderella team.  For a team like East Tennessee to get good, they need to assemble a bunch of players that have no business being in college.  The coach needs to have very flexible morals, or perhaps none at all.  I looked up the coach of East Tennessee and discovered that he is a bald dude with a goatee that looks like Satan if Satan might eat at Shoney's on the weekend.  He also used to assistant coach at Wichita State, another program with flexible moral fiber.  He was cut loose at Tennessee after violations.  I love what I am hearing.  That's how you win college basketball games.  East Tennessee State +10.5 

I am also going to take a directional Tennessee school versus Purdue.  I never cared for Purdue because of my long malaise with the state of Indiana and an incident where a college roommate hitchhiked to Purdue to see his high school sweetheart.  As I recall, my buddy Jeff drunkenly decided at 230 am to go see his girlfriend.  Not having a car, he hitchhiked on the Ohio Turnpike.  He was picked up  by a truck driver who, after an hour of small talk, asked Jeff to give him a blowjob.  Jeff claims to have talked his way out of it and then been dropped off at the general area of West Lafayette IN near the Purdue campus without further incident.  I don't think Jeff did blow that guy, but I will bet some sort of very uncomfortable thing happened that Jeff has stored in a deep dark part of his brain that he hopes never to open.  I will tell you this, I don't want to know what happened.  I hope he never "unburdens himself" telling the story while crying late at night. I don't want to have to sit there looking at a crying man saying things like "it doesn't matter" when, of course, it does matter.  I would rather pretend that nothing happened that will change my perception of him forever.  Sorry.  Got off track.  Is this a basketball gambling blog?  Anyway, Jeff shows up at his girlfriend's dorm room to discover she was sleeping at some other guy's place.  She and her new college boyfriend wind up taking Jeff out for a very uncomfortable meal at the Purdue cafeteria.  I would call Jeff's roadtrip "bad" all the way around.  With that in mind, I am on Middle Tennessee State -1.