2023 NFL Preview: Stairway to Seven
I'm excited for football season like I haven't been in a while. Everybody's gotta have a vice.
Been a rough summer for yours truly. The air conditioning in both my apartment and my car has been out. My main job at the sportsbook has been going through the slow season, meaning hours and tips are down, forcing me to scurry to make sure I can pay my bills. Oh, and a beloved uncle died.
Most days, my schedule went a little something like this:
Wake up, take my dog for the two-hour morning walk she grew accustomed to during the pandemic, and to make sure she doesn’t have excess energy for when I have to leave her for hours during the day.
Come home, throw together a quick meal for myself, feed my dog.
DoorDash for three to four hours.
Come home, walk dog again (only 30 min. this time), get dressed for work.
Go to work for seven or eight hours.
Come home, walk dog again, go to bed.
Exciting! Often, despite the 90-plus degree temperatures and lack of AC, I would wear black shirts while doing DoorDash. This clothing choice likely made the heat a slightly worse experience for me, though I sweat fairly easily in the humidity, and the black hides it better than other colors. I worry that some customers might see me all soaked in my shirt and think to themselves, “Ewww! Who is this sweaty guy delivering my stuff!?” then dock me a point or two on the review. I would also automatically reject any deliveries with ice cream or frozen treats. Can’t be arriving with melted food.
When we get inundated with the Burger King jingle once again during football season, I’ll have to think back to those times.
Football fans, cursed with the longest off-season of the major team sports, are used to impatiently ticking off the spring and summer days until the season begins anew. I think I went through an even more exaggerated version of that this year. After fleeing the hell of the junk removal job in April, I landed in my job at the sportsbook just in time to experience a flurry of activity with the NBA and NHL Playoffs. Once those ended, however, it’s been mostly sleepy at the sportsbook with an occasional busy day here and there.
There is a set of regulars that gamble on baseball each day, but it’s a laughably small crowd compared to the crush of customers that awaits during football season. The Spence/Crawford fight was a decent night. The Women’s World Cup has been an absolute dud. Doesn’t help that half the games come on at the three in the morning, yet still. More people have been betting on regular season WNBA than that, and that’s barely a trickle.
The DC area, like much of the country, is football obsessed. I remember back in 2018, I joined a couple friends at the victory festivities downtown when the Washington Capitals finally broke through and won their first Stanley Cup. Being an annoying Penguins fan, I can’t stand the Caps, though having gloried for years in the Pens’ domination of that one-sided rivalry, I felt like being a good sport and toasting their belated triumph. One friend, I remember, wondered aloud how the Caps’ victory party would compare to other teams in the area. Me and another friend agreed that, were it the ‘Skins winning a title, there would be at least three times as many people there. However much damage Dan Snyder did to some locals’ love for that franchise, and it’s really not as much as some outsiders might assume, the region’s zeal for football has never wavered. When I was in fifth grade in 1991, the last time the RedskinFootballTeamManders won the Super Bowl, my elementary school organized a building-wide assembly the week of the game which consisted of making the students chant “Hail to the Redskins” for an hour. Either an interesting bit of cultural indoctrination or a bunch of teachers with a creative way to kill some time, depending on how you look at it.
In the span of a month, my job will go from long stretches of inactivity to being slammed as a constant. In a way, that’s trading one set of problems for another, but I wouldn’t have taken this job were I not drawn to being part of the sports spectacle. I’ve been told by bosses that during NFL gamedays, I can wear a team jersey over my uniform, giving me an excuse to cycle through the seven Steelers jerseys I own over the course of working an NFL season at the sportsbook. I hadn’t gotten a jersey in almost a decade, then I picked up a T.J. Watt this summer after deciding I wanted a freshie. I’ll be interested to see what kind of reaction I get rocking my 25-year-old Kordell Stewart jersey.
This carries an element of risk, however. The clientele where I work is largely Ravens fans. Already, I have been wearing a Steelers lanyard to hold the state-mandated gambling license that all casino employees are required to display. The Ravens fans, including fellow ones that work in the casino, have been letting me have it after seeing it. Security guards talk shit to me. Customers half-jokingly threaten to rip it off my neck. One employee at the boba tea place in the food court initially refused to serve me.
So rest assured - if you hate the Steelers, or me, or both - take solace in knowing that whenever Pittsburgh loses, I will getting savaged by probably damn near everyone in that sportsbook. Taunting Ravens fans will come to my station looking to be paid out by a sad sack Steelers supporter. “Come on, pay me out, Pissburgh!” I can already hear it. And that’s fine; obviously within limits I am asking for this type of abuse by wearing the jerseys - don’t tell women about this line of reasoning ;) - and I enjoy mixing it up and trash talking with rival fans. Don’cha worry, I can give as good as I can get. Ravens fans love to conceive of themselves as the big bad bullies on the block, but get them around the Steelers and they can’t stop melting down and throwing tantrums. Little Brother Syndrome shines through. Thankfully I will have some backup. After all, there are a fair amount of Steelers fans anywhere you go in this world. So far this summer I have taken four or five futures bets on the Steelers to win the Super Bowl. I’m not quite that bullish on their prospects for this season, though I respect the passion.
Team allegiance is, of course, only one element of this dynamic. Remove the tension of football team rivalries, and guess what? The vast majority of the customers that come in there are still rude, entitled, lazy, and irritating as all get out. Such is the struggle of the customer service professions, and I have had to learn the hard way the effect that being in a casino has on people. Part of it is the alcohol, to be sure, but that isn’t quite it, either. For whatever reason, patrons believe they can treat us any kind of way and we simply have to take it in stride. I could already put together a highlight reel of the insane ratchet shit I’ve had to deal with. Getting in a casino turns a regular dickhead into a “who the fuck raised you?” feral beast of entitlement and id-driven behavior.
A few public figures have visited the book to make bets since I’ve been there, including Bruno Mars, Bret Baier of Fox News, and Clinton Portis. Thankfully the celebs know how to behave themselves. The worst offenders at the book are usually the biggest cheapskates. I take more grief from bums who only ever place $5 parlays at the book than the actual high rollers. I suspect it’s just bitter loser angry at their life taking it out on anyone they can, and in this case it’s the staff at a casino. The payout is always a sensitive subject as well, and I can’t tell you how irritating it is for a patron to walk up to my station and ask me about betting on an overwhelming favorite in some sporting event, only to express outrage or disbelief that placing the easiest bet ever doesn’t win them a fortune. Yes, for sure, we would all like easy money, but you have to be God’s simplest child to assume the casino will lavish you with big winnings for assuming the smallest risk possible. But that’s the retardation I deal with on a daily basis over there.
Football season will remedy some of the issues. During the slow season, we have to waive some of the rules for customer conduct that we would normally enforce in busier times. Take any business you can get to keep the lights on, etc. This means that the usual demands of the customer not to have their cell phones out at the counter or to have their bets ready falls by the wayside. Often these days in the summer doldrums, I have to stand there while a customer conducts an inane 10-minute phone conversation directly in my face. Cool champ, thanks for making me listen to your entire exchange with your best bruh. A fair amount of the regulars will take up to a half hour to place their bets. Sometimes they will stand there being indecisive for 20 or 30 minutes in front of my station. As an employee entrusted with giving these animals everything they desire, I can’t just leave because the indecisive customer could be ready for that transaction at any moment and often they want to sit there asking me trifling questions. I am at this inconsiderate, entitled bum’s beck and call and believe me they are glad to let me know. And these customers really believe we are all a one-man Elias Sports Bureau behind the counter. They somehow think we know everything. Motherfucker, they ain’t payin’ me enough for me to know everything. One time, a guy came up and demanded me tell him when an ongoing rain delay in a Cubs game would be over. The fuck I look like, a meteorologist?
My uncle Angie passed a few weeks ago. He and his family lived less than two miles from mine when I was growing up, so this wasn’t some relative I only saw once a year at the holidays. He was a huge ‘Skins fan, and while he made it long enough to see Snyder unload the franchise, I’m sad he won’t get to see what comes next. Angie did get to savor the glory years of the ‘80s and early ‘90s. While I worked at the junk removal job late last year and early in 2023, I came upon some artifacts from that era that people were tossing, including the Sports Illustrated from the week after the ‘Skins won Super Bowl XXVI, and a bumper sticker issued right before Super Bowl XXII, site of Doug Williams’ “Perfect Quarter”.
It seemed a shame to toss this stuff. I hung on to them for months, never sure what I intended to do with them. I thought about bringing some of these items to his viewing at St. Sophia Greek Orthodox in DC. I didn’t, because I suspected some of the Greek relatives would have thought it strange. Growing up, I only had women in my family in my age cohort. My immediate family: older sister, older half-sister. The extended families that lived near enough to visit: all girl cousins.
To bond with my uncle and my father, working class men who married slightly above their station in life, I didn’t have many options other than talking football. How else as a kid could I relate to grown-ass men with families, one of whom had served in a war?
Washington travels to Dallas on Thanksgiving again this year. I’ll doubtlessly get emotional recalling the 2012 coming out game that RGIII had in his one magical season before it all went to pot. The ‘Skins are a funny franchise in the sense that they have three modern era championships yet one could make the case the team has never really had a true franchise quarterback in the modern age. The closest they’ve come is, what? Joe Theismann? (As it happens, I’ve lived in Alexandria in for 16 years now and I’ve still yet to set foot in Theismann’s restaurant in Old Town. ) Go back to the pre-modern era, there were the likes of Sonny Jurgensen and Sammy Baugh. But since? Stopgaps, busts, brief flickers of promise, and a bunch of scrubs.
Watching that bravura first half of the 2012 Thanksgiving game, I saw my uncle beam with the promise of what might come. I was so happy for him, and he was thrilled for me that I was there to see Griffin get drafted months before. The result fizzled out shortly thereafter, but it’s still a tender memory.
The last Thanksgiving we spent together was 2019, before the pandemic made it more untenable, during a period when his health was declining for a number of other reasons. That year, prior to a Bills-Cowboys game, CBS aired a heart-wrenching intro detailing Jim Kelly’s struggle with cancer and his son’s terminal Krabbe’s disease diagnosis. In years since, I’ve periodically gone back to that intro when I’m in my feelings. Now it has taken on an even more emotional register.
This season, the Steelers open against the 49ers. Longtime readers of KSK might recall that the Niners are my dad’s team. Whereas I have no real connection to Pittsburgh and my time living in Pennsylvania was spent on the opposite side of the Commonwealth, he lived in San Francisco for 30 years. According to him, in his youth he tried out at wide receiver for the Niners (he peaked at 6’4” so at least he had the size), though he has also claimed to have punched his commanding officer in Vietnam. Perhaps some of dad’s stories require a grain of salt.
One of the few road trips me and my dad took was in 1996 to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. On the way from DC to Canton, we stopped off in Pittsburgh, and my dad was able to coax some stadium official at Three Rivers Stadium to let me briefly walk on the field. Me and my dad are very different people. We have different senses of humor, different politics, different outlooks on life, and many times football has served as the bridge to those gaps.
Dad is right at the age my uncle was when he passed, and my dad has been a smoker for at least 50 years. Not to be morbid, nothing pressing is wrong with him, but we know nothing lasts forever. When Angie died, my dad told me that he and my uncle, who held regular poker games together through the years, had planned to visit the poker room in the casino where I work, when it first opened in 2016. For one reason or another, they never made it.
The last few weeks, in the course of my regular duties I’ve had to visit the poker room at least one a day, and I can’t shake sinking into a downcast mood when I do. Angie never made it, and he never will.
I partially took this job to escape a worse job, and also because I yearn for the human element that is being drained from sports and increasingly many other facets of modern life. Betting on the apps has been a nice diversion for a bit but I don’t need yet another interest reduced to simply watching the numbers go up on a screen.
Before I know it, the connections that led me to the game will be gone forever, and the tawdry trappings will be all that remains.
My bets for 2023:
Division winners: Cowboys, Lions, Saints, 49ers, Bills, Bengals, Jaguars, Chiefs
Props:
Steelers to make the playoffs
Jets to make the playoffs and the Packers to miss the playoffs
T.J. Watt 15+ sacks
George Pickens over 775.5 receiving yards
(Not sure why FanDuel’s over/under for Pickens’ yardage was lower than his output in his rookie season, as barring serious injury, I don’t see how he doesn’t eclipse that)
Kenny Pickett over 3,150.5 passing yards
Kenny Pickett over 17.5 passing TDs
Najee Harris over 900.5 rushing yards
Najee Harris 8+ rushing touchdowns
Week 1:
Chiefs - 6.5 (vs Lions)
Steelers moneyline (vs 49ers)
Ravens moneyline (vs Texans)
Jaguars moneyline (vs Colts)
Commanders vs Cardinals under 40.5 pts
Broncos moneyline (vs Raiders)
Seahawks moneyline (vs Rams)
Buccaneers +6.5 (vs Vikings)
Falcons -3 (vs Panthers)
Saints -3 (vs Titans) [the league maybe could’ve announced the Alvin Kamara suspension before I made this pick 😡]
Browns moneyline (vs Bengals)
Dolphins vs Chargers over 49.5 pts
Two leg teaser: Eagles +3 (vs Patriots) and Cowboys +4 (vs Giants)
Bears -2.5 (vs Packers)
Bills -1.5 (vs Jets)