Short answer: no. The NFL’s annual meat market doesn’t begin until Leap Day, the most unholy day of the calendar (other than January 2). Somehow fitting.

So instead we are in The Other Desert of the year for football. The UFL, bastard child of the forced marriage between the New USFL and the New New XFL, doesn’t start until late March. The CFL can’t be bothered to get out of bed until Regina thaws out, so none of that until May.

Technically today kicks off the Franchise Tag period, but apparently no one is in a rush to alienate a star player. As of this writing, no one has been slapped with the Tag of Doom.

Frankly, no one wants to make any news right now. The Hot Take Industrial Complex is starving, and anyone who feeds it right now is looking to lose a couple of fingers. We have retirements (Patriots special teamer Matthew Slater) and low-stakes re-signings (Nelson Agholor back to the Ravens for a year).

Hell, even the scandals are banal and safe. “Jimmy Garoppolo suspended for PEDs!” Big collective shrug. Call me when he’s arrested for breaking the legs of the dude who sold him what were obviously sugar pills.

Tonight’s sports televesion offers little relief. Some boring-part-of-the-season hockey. A few JV basketball games as teams try to burnish their resumes for what I assume is now a 128-team NCAA tournament.

I make that assumption based on the other JV Sports Assholes voting to expand the Football “Bowl” Subdivision playoffs to 12 teams. I put sarcastiquotes around Bowl because apparently four of the six bowl games anyone gives a shit about will now be reduced to quarterfinal games, putting them one step below Toyotathon in terms of holiday-season significance.

Not that this degradation in bowl importance is all on expansion of the playoffs to nearly 10 percent of FBS schools. There were 43 Division 1 bowl games last year.

43.

That means there were roughly 80 teams who hauled their players, coaches, fans and band (the Marching Mulefuckers) to Shitkicker’s Bend, Nebraska to sacrifice their brains for the right to tell their grandchildren that they won the 2023 Bob’s Discount Boner Pill Bowl.

Similarly, bowls are less important with the spate of potential NFL draftees opting out of playing in some asshole’s meaningless cash grab. There’s a lot of gnashing of teeth over this, of course, from the GRIT AN’ GUTS AN’ GAWD contingent of college football fans, and it does have a negative effect on the overall quality of play. However, schools should be at least a little proud that the “student-athletes” they claim to have educated have at least learned some basic economics. I expect future NIL deals will come with some sort of requirement that you play in the post-season unless missing a major organ.