The case against February — by Chris Cichon
Welcome to February, the most brutal month of the year in sports.
Not only are we dealing with temperatures that will hover around the single digits this weekend, but even worse, football is over. It doesn’t start again until we start watching meaningless preseason games in August. AUGUST!
Now, you can make the argument that the Super Bowl is in February, but that’s one day out of the entire month, and it ends on a Sunday night close to 10 p.m. on the East Coast when most of America has to go to work the next day. Make that Monday a National Holiday and February might move up my power rankings.
But let’s analyze what else we’ve got going on this month, shall we? Regular season NHL. Regular season NBA. Regular season college basketball. Not to mention the absolutely dreaded All-Star Weekend in both hockey and basketball.
Who can honestly sit there and watch both teams put up over 300 points combined with zero defense in an exhibition? Is it really fun to watch a player attempt a dunk 7 times before actually landing it? I guess the three-point contest is cool, but I’d rather go down to DuPont Circle with my friends and play the Pop-A-Shot at Buffalo Billiards.
When it comes to the NBA, you have your teams that are fully in tank mode. The 2015-16 season features the Brooklyn Nets, Los Angeles Lakers (Save me from “Kobe Fairwell Tour” talk, please), the Phoenix Suns, and for the third year in a row, the woeful Philadelphia 76ers. Plus, you have teams like the San Antonio Spurs resting players in marquee match ups because the marathon of the season combined with the playoffs is too long, and they don’t need 39-year-old Tim Duncan to have no cartilage in his knees left come June.
The issue with college basketball in February is that an argument can be made for not all but a lot of teams, especially mid-majors, that regular season games don’t matter much. If you want a shot at the Big Dance in March and you’re a school meddling around the .500 mark like Richmond, you need to win your conference tournament or your season is over.
Spring Training is on the horizon, but besides pitchers and catchers reporting the teams aren’t playing the game of baseball yet, let alone exhibition games with college baseball teams.
So please February, end soon. I’m longing for the sound of a baseball hitting a mitt and office brackets getting collected. Oh yeah, and some warmer temperatures for those St. Patty’s Day bar crawls!
The case against August — by Noah Frank
With all due respect to my friend Chris, August is the worst sports month and it isn’t really that close. February still has the second half of the NHL and NBA seasons as they move toward the playoffs, plus conference college basketball play and the beginning of Spring Training.
That is not nothing, especially for a big college hoops fan like myself. Heck, just this weekend we have Maryland hosting Wisconsin, Virginia at Duke, Georgetown at Providence, and GW at St. Bonaventure, all in games that could help decide tournament seeding.
And sure, not every NBA game is scintillating entertainment, but we get to watch the transcendentally amazing Golden State Warriors play every few nights. If you’re not doing that, what are you even doing with your life?
Oh yeah, and the Caps are the best team in hockey, and maybe the best version of themselves in franchise history. We’ll see what happens come the playoffs, but you can’t act like they aren’t worth watching now, when they’re 17 points clear of the next closest team in the division.
But August, now that’s a sports graveyard. The only big four sport in season is baseball, as it slogs through the dog days, more than 100 games into the season, but still a month from the postseason. College football doesn’t begin until September. And I would rather watch bandwagon Cowboys fans talk about football than watch preseason NFL games.
There isn’t even a golf major or tennis grand slam in August, unless you count the first couple days of the U.S. Open (yes, the tennis one and no, you shouldn’t). I would argue that there is not a single crucial high school, college or professional sporting event in the month of August three out of every four years. We’ll get a reprieve this summer with the Olympics, but that’s the exception, not the rule.
As a youth athlete, August is the month of football two-a-days in the sweltering heat, or long training runs for cross country. Play a winter sport? You’re just grinding through training, without any of the fun of actually playing the game.
Seriously, if you have a story to pitch me, do it in August. It’s almost certainly the most likely month of the year that I’ll have time to cover it.
