Broken windshield special

The late Pete Axthelm used to dub late season NFL matchups between underperforming teams the "broken windshield special". Meaning if you were to leave two tickets to the game on the dashboard of your car, you'd come back you'll find that someone's broken the windshield and left two more.

Ax's broken windshield story was added to snopes a while ago as an unverified urban legend, but I thought of it because my brother and I have tickets to this weekend's brokend windshield special between the (1-8) St. Louis Rams and the (2-7) San Francisco 49ers. The two teams are a combined 3-17. It's my first NFL game in more than a dozen years, so I'm still looking forward to it (we might actually see the Niners WIN), but it's pretty much the opposite of a quality matchup. Baseball games between bad teams are usually entertaining, because bad teams have bad pitching and bad pitching means more offense, but bad football teams tend to play bad football games. A football field full of bad football players on both sides of the ball.

This has been a rough month for Bay Area sports. Since I came back from my trip to Europe on October 10th, the Raiders and 49ers haven't won a game, the local college teams (Cal, Stanford, SJSU) all went into a slide, the Warriors were winless until yesterday, the Sharks.. wow, the Sharks are in first place in the Pacific Division but even I don't pay attention to early season NHL hockey!

Then there's the whole Barry Bonds indictment thing. I'm really conflated about that development, so I'm trying not to write about it, but I need to come up with daily posts for the remaining two weeks of November, so my "Bonds gasket" is in danger of blowing anytime. I'm mostly annoyed that his trial is going to be bigger than O.J's, inescapable here in the SF Bay Area, and it all seems so pointless and silly. The story is only two days old and I've already had my fill many times over.

Tomorrow I get to watch two NFC West bottom feeders duke it out in the stadium where a skinny kid named Barry Bonds with a normal sized head used to play left field. I just have to move the tickets somewhere where they won't start spawning overnight. I sure don't want to wake up to two pairs of 49er-Ram tickets!