They've created a monster!

So I've never been a big football fan.  One of my brothers played Pop Warner and kept playing until his sophmore year in high school.  At one point I was even a cheerleader for his Pop Warner team.  But I had no stinkin clue about the in's and out's of football, didn't know the rules, didn't even know what the heck first and ten meant.  My boys play now and I am finally figuring out how this game is played.  Our oldest is in high school and our youngest in 5th grade.  They both play.  Being in a small town means our oldest, who is a freshman, gets to play a lot of football.  He's on the 9th and 10th grade team, the JV team and sometimes even gets to play varsity.  Our kid in 5th grade plays on the 5th/6th grade Optimist team.  This means we go to a lot of practices and a lot of games.  It's not unusual to travel more than an hour one way to watch a game.  Last Sunday we sat in 90 degrees, getting sun burned, sweating.  Today we will sit with blankets covering our legs and umbrellas covering our heads.  It's not just my kids that I enjoy watching now, though.  It's not unusual for me to be the one to check nfl.com to find out who is playing whom and when.  We aren't huge college football fans, even being here in Nebraska.  And the boys have a definite favorite nfl team.  I don't have a preference but I have started making wild predictions.  My husband just laughs at me, thinks I'm crazy for predicting that the Cowboys will do better than everyone thinks.  I don't think they will win big this year, just that they will do "not bad".  Anyway, gotta get a move on, get ready to drive an hour and 20 minutes one way to watch a game in the misty rain.  Go Raiders!!  (Optimists Raiders, not Oakland - no crazy predictions for them this year, I'm afraid!)