Whereas the conventional sports media is getting ready to boost the nitro and accelerate into the NFL season, the #realfans at [DFO] are not so quick to forget the value of the preseason. Oh sure, they’re glorified practices with the bulk of the snaps taken by players who will spend October, at best, buried on the depth chart or tearing it up on the practice squad. But the relief from not-football that fans receive from the Hall of Fame Game kickoff to the final half-hearted play of Chargers at 49ers should not be taken for granted.

It’s atrocious but it’s football. And below are some highlights that could only come from preseason action.

Been only to one game in 2010 in the preseason.  It was  a very positive experience.  My best story is that my first date with my girlfriend at the NFC Championship game this year at a bar in Milwaukee.  We were both wearing Clay Matthews jerseys and hit it off immediately.

The only preseason game I’ve been to was [*Redacted] s@Bears during RG3’s rookie season.  As far as preseason games go, it was actually pretty exciting.  It’s the game that gave Alfred Morris the starting job, starters (Orakpo and Meriweather) got injured, Alshon Jeffrey got a lot of playing time, Cutler played well, and the idea of trading Kirk Cousins for a first round pick some day was born.  There was a full half of rookie, not-yet-a-shell-of-his-former-self RG3!  Super exciting!  It seems most of the Bears fans were in attendance for the sole purpose of seeing Sexy Rexy play, which he never actually did.  It’s probably for the best, we don’t need a bunch of pregnant, pre-season attending Bears fans running around.

When I went to a preseason Dolphins game, I thought that my friend was just driving me out to murder me in a swamp.  It is REMOTE.

Two Games:

1st – Houston Texans vs the Vikings in like ’03 *SPOILER* I thought I might have gotten on tv because I fell asleep in the standswhile reliant stadium was being touted as “the loudest venue” – this is going into my Houston write up

2nd – My friend from college was a [*Redacted] s fan so we watched Skins vs Tampa Bay in ’08 for like total of $20 per ticket because no one wanted to go to the game. Hell, I will say nosebleed seats in modern arenas are sometimes better than the lower seats cause we were able to see everything going on perfectly.

This has inspired me to look into something. I’ve been keeping every ticket stub from every sporting event and concert I’ve been to for over a decade. Somehow, I’ve been to five of the last nine final preseason games of the Steelers. All five have been against the Panthers. This includes when we were living in West Virginia, East Virginia, and Philadelphia. Through some strange coincidence, it seems I’m predestined to watch 14th stringers bounce into each other in incredibly DERPy fashion. What the fuck is wrong with me? Am I a masochist? Who willingly subjects themselves to this kind of crap? I cannot recall any of these games, except last year, when I won tickets to see Bill Burr’s stand-up show.

I have never gone to an NFL game, preseason or otherwise.  My best story is all the money I saved by not going so I could buy high quality beer while watching football at home.

Now — a little behind the scenes for our new visitors — because no [DFO] gang members  receive compensation for their contributions, the conversation somehow degraded into a discussion about live pro wrestling match experiences. As the unpaid moderator, I, admittedly, did very little to get things back on track. So, uhhh, with that….here ya go:

I saw one Raw event live in like 98. It was actually Edges debut in Austin where he nearly killed someone. There was a cage floating above the arena so everyone was excited. It was only used for a mankind promo. My friend made an ‘Unleash the Beast’ poster cause Dan the Beast Sevren was wrestling and got that on tv. Nothing takes the mystique away like watching Degeneration X (minus huh)  trying to leave in a beat up rusty two door car with three people. Still remember Road Dawg yelling at people to let him leave.

I went to a regional wrestling event when I was a really little kid in the early 80’s.  It was at the local community college.  I only remember that Sgt. Slaughter was there and that it was the first time that I ate cotton candy.

The only wrestling event I have ever attended was the Raw the night after Owen Hart died.  I had seats along the walkway, and holy shit, those guys are HUGE.  There’s no sense of scale when they’re wrestling each other, but walking alone?  Jebus.  We also saw Edge at a bar afterwards.  We bought him a beer.  Nice guy.

Back when it was a viable and crazy indie promotion trying to go bigger, I went to any ECW show that came to the midwest area. I caught shows in Minneapolis, Chicago, Peoria, and LaCrosse–some house shows, some TV tapings, and one PPV where Jerry Lynn won the championship for the first time. I even ran into Rob Van Dam in a restaurant before a show, and he was really cool. My absolute favorite memory was the house show in Chicago. There was a guy sitting in the front row that was doing a Hulk Hogan impression. The Dudley Boys came out and were doing their usual rile up the crowd pre-match stuff and noticed him. Bubba Ray (as he was properly known then) absolutely went off on this guy, even telling him to get a towel because he was going to give Hulk dude’s girlfriend a facial. And he just kept going and going with him and the crowd until people were throwing things and waving chairs in the air and the place was going fucking nuts. He kept egging them on, daring them to throw in chairs and riot, but they stayed right on the edge of chaos and it was the most spectacular live theater I’ve ever seen.

My wife’s name is Randi and since moving to Boston, every time she says her name, people think she says “Brandi” because we live in the white trash capital of the northeast.

As for me, Blaxabbath, I’m not going to any got-damn preseason game and my only pro wrestling experience was when my buddy got us tickets in like 2001 and about halfway through I heard the security guard identify my buddy’s sign as a ‘bogey’ on his radio before taking it away (I don’t know if it ever made it on the air). Walking out of the arena, I spotted it laying on top of the huge pile of really offensive signs (I don’t know which of those words to emphasize more) that had been confiscated at the door. Sitting there in all it’s neon posterboard glory was an arrow pointing down with the capitalized single word announcement informing the world’s viewers that the sign holder was — Uncircumcised.