By MATT ROSENFELD
SPORTS EDITOR
We have finally reached the end of the 2013-2014 football season. What started over four months ago, on an August night that saw Fordham football start a historic run and an Ole Miss/Vanderbilt game that ended with two scores in 90 seconds, comes to an end on Sunday with Super Bowl XLVIII. I’m going to miss it.
Football is without a doubt my favorite sport, and this season only made the love that much deeper.
It feels like only yesterday that fantasy football owners either rejoiced or cried when Peyton Manning threw seven (!) touchdown passes against the defending-champion Ravens on the NFL’s opening night. Who knew at that moment that Manning would be 60 minutes away from tying his brother in Super Bowl rings?
How could it be 137 days ago that Fordham beat FBS opponent Temple on essentially a Hail Mary in Philadelphia? That game happened to come in at number 64 on SBNation’s list of the top 100 college football games of the year. All this came just a week after defeating top-10 Villanova. It put Fordham football on the map in 2013, and now they are here to stay.
Can’t we go back to September, when Johnny Football was running around at Kyle Field in Texas, trying to do the impossible and beat Alabama two years in a row? Can we see AJ McCarron calmly lead a comeback in one of the loudest stadiums in America to again preserve Alabama’s chance at a three-peat?
I swear, just last week I convinced myself that the Giants had a chance to win the NFC East, that a 38-0 drubbing at the hands of the Panthers was nothing to be worried about and that Eli would figure it out and the Giants would be a playoff team. Boy, was I wrong.
Is it bad that I wish it was a weekend in the fall, where I woke up at 10 a.m. on Saturday with Kirk Herbstreit and Lee Corso on “College Gameday” and didn’t stop consuming football until Monday nights with Jon Gruden and Mike Tirico?
How long until I get the excitement of the NFL’s Week 14 again? The week had a Lions-Eagles game that took place in what looked like a foot of snow to go along with a Steelers-Dolphins game that was one Antonio Brown misstep from being the craziest play of the year. And, don’t think I forgot that epic Ravens-Vikings game, in which 36 points were scored in the final two minutes. Let me repeat that: 36 points in the final two minutes. It was the first game in the history of the NFL with six lead changes in the fourth quarter. It was pure madness, I loved it.
That type of excitement is no outlier in football, either. Just a week earlier, in the final week of college football’s regular season, we had a Michigan team that was thought to have no chance to come one two-point conversion away from ending Ohio State’s national title dreams (don’t worry, Michigan State did that the following week). But, that wasn’t all. We also had perhaps the wildest finish in college football since Stanford’s band ran on the field against Cal in 1982. Undefeated Alabama, in a game for the ages, on the verge of coming out of hated rival Auburn’s place with another undefeated regular season, sees Auburn’s Chris Davis run 100 yards to the endzone with a missed field goal and put Crimson Tide fans on suicide watch.
Do you know what I’d do to be able to relive the thrill that the BCS Championship gave us all? Jameis Winston and Tre Mason playing “anything you can do I can do better” with the entire nation watching and a national championship on the line. Does it get any better than that?
On paper, Super Bowl XLVIII looks to be a fitting end to what has been an incredible football season. We have the top offense against the top defense, Peyton on a quest for ring number two, Russell Wilson looking to cement his name in history and Richard Sherman keeping all of us on our toes. We can only hope the game comes through to give us a Super Bowl that leaves everybody satisfied with another year of football.
All I know is, after Sunday, there are only 206 days until football is back.