Castrodale: Diary of a mad Rams fan … the NFL is back!

It’s been 214 days. Seven months. Thirty weeks. That’s how long we’ve gone without NFL football, the amount of time that has elapsed since a shower of confetti turned Miami’s Sun Life Stadium into a sweat-scented snow globe; since the New Orleans Saints changed into Super Bowl Champions t-shirts that were fresher than the concession stand pretzels; since losing quarterback Peyton Manning slumped off the field wearing a dejected facial expression that you could make with a colon and a right-facing parenthesis.
Tonight, NBC will scrape the Law & Order reruns off their schedule to bring us the first game of a shiny new season, a rematch of the NFC Championship between the Saints and the Vikings. As soon as the kicking team launches the first Wilson F1100 from one side of the Superdome to the other, football is finally back. We have sixteen glorious weeks of the regular season, sixty-four reasons to spend Thursday through Monday nights sprawled on the sofa, leaving Cheeto-colored fingerprints across our favorite t-shirts. My problem is that — for the first time ever — I’m not sure which officially
licensed logo I’ll be wearing this year.

I grew up in a landlocked semi-southern state that didn’t (and still doesn’t) have any professional sports teams. My fan choices seemed limited to the squads that played in the states next door, the ones whose borders were visible on the free interstate maps you could get at the Exxon station. Sometime before my second grade Christmas, I thumbed through the Sears Wishbook and fell for the then-Los Angeles Rams, carefully adding a #29 Eric Dickerson jersey to my hand-lettered Christmas list. I’m not sure what the attraction was, whether it was because I dug the horns on their logo, whether I really liked prime numbers, or whether southern California was just as far from our ice-encrusted front yard as I could get.
My parents dropped $13.99 (plus shipping and handling) to ensure I’d unwrap some blue and gold polyester at the end of December and from then on I was a Rams fan. Over the next few years, I learned that disappointment lived at Candlestick Park, that Flipper was an appropriate name for a grown man and that gynecology professors could use a picture of Jim Everett as a teaching aid.
After Everett had his gold-clad a** repeatedly handed to him in the ’89 NFC Championship game, the team started to unravel like a dollar store dishtowel. Their records for the next five seasons were less attractive than my homemade haircuts. They swapped Los Angeles for St. Louis in 1995. That same year, I started getting blue and gold rubber bands on my braces. Neither one of us scored very often.
Fast forward to 1999, which proved to be a much better year than Prince predicted it would be. The Rams were coming off a 4-12 season but, for some reason, they started winning, going undefeated at home and making the most unexpected Super Bowl appearance this side of Janet Jackson’s areola. Their quarterback was a 28-year-old nobody who stopped arranging Bagel Bites in an Iowa Hy-Vee’s freezer section long enough to become the NFL MVP. Kurt Warner rang in the year 2000 by shattering Super Bowl passing records, snagging another MVP trophy and leading the Rams to a heart-stoppingly good win over the Tennessee Titans.
The Rams — my Rams — were Super Bowl Champions. They got their own Sports Illustrated commemorative issue. I got insanely wrecked on 3-for-$5 bottles of Boone’s Farm. It felt unbelievably good. Well, it did after I stopped throwing up and regained feeling in my face.
Two seasons later, the Super Bowl was played entirely in the cleft of Tom Brady’s chin and the Rams were on the wrong side of the scoreboard. A few months later, Warner started collecting concussions the way some people save seashells or scraps of human hair. He only played two games in a Rams uniform in 2003 before being airmailed to the Giants for a season. It didn’t take. He re-packed his copies of A Purpose Driven Life and moved to Arizona in 2005. I decided to go with him, ordering a bright red “13″ jersey and assuming I’d see almost as much game time as he did.
I was wrong. Warner swapped starting duties with both Josh McCown and Matt Leinart, who was drafted after a Heisman winning stint at USC.
Leinart was supposed to be the future of the franchise; unfortunately, he sucked harder than anything Stephen Hawking ever wrote about.
Warner ended up leading the Cards to their first Super Bowl appearance. Leinart stood on the sidelines writing Pete Carroll fan fiction. Now both of them are gone, one by choice, the other by force.
Warner retired in January to spend more time with his seventy-four children and to try to out-foxtrot Florence Henderson on Dancing With the Stars. Leinart was signed by Houston on Monday, putting him somewhere behind Matt Schaub, Dan Orlovsky and Toro the Texans Mascot on the depth chart.
On Sunday, the Cardinals will roll into St. Louis to play the Rams, in a matchup that feels like my first love taking on my most-recent ex.
It’s a scenario out of every Renee Zellweger movie ever, just swapping their offsides penalties for her perpetually squinty eyes.
Arizona has the league’s easiest schedule this year, which is probably for the best since their offensive situation is more tangled than Larry Fitzgerald’s dreadlocks. With Leinart’s release, the passing game rests on the unpredictable arm of Derek Anderson, who showed flashes of potential with Cleveland before spending last season playing an endless game of Starting Quarterback Roulette against Brady Quinn.
As for St. Louis — which has the second easiest schedule — they unceremoniously dumped quarterback Marc Bulger and his undersized biceps in April, handing all of the X’s and O’s of their offense to #1 draft pick Sam Bradford. The rookie spent last season evading eighteen-year-olds while playing for Oklahoma. Trying to sidestep Shawne Merriman won’t be as easy, especially when he’s playing behind an O-line with more holes than the Lost finale.
Regardless of what happens on Sunday, I’m still not sure what side of the NFC West I’ll be on this season. Both teams feel equally comfortable and equally unfamiliar, like sleeping on the wrong side of your own bed. But I have sixteen weeks to figure it out. Until then, who knows how to get cheese stains out of a throw pillow?
***
Jelisa Castrodale is a writer and comedian who has learned a lot about life by making a mess of her own. She chronicles her failures at The Typing Makes Me Sound Busy, and twitters while she waits at stoplights. Castrodale was featured in the book Twitter Wit and was named one of Mashable’s 10 Funniest Twitterers. Contact her at jacastrodale@gmail.com.
Also by Jelisa Castrodale …