By the time you read this the college bowl games will be history and the Super Bowl teams will be on their way to Miami. Football junkies everywhere will be looking for ways to fill those gaping chunks of time that they have spent in front of the TV or online monitoring the endless stream of information available about their teams, both real and fantasy. For me it signals the end of another season of juggling my two favorite addictions, football and music, as they overlap, intersect and compete for what little attention span I had in the first place.  It’s always been that way, but this year there seemed to be more concerts on game days that usual and more must-see games that bumped up against writing deadlines. Of course if you are a fantasy football geek even the most meaningless game can have personal significance. I learned that as I fried my hard-drive and lost all my data while watching a bootleg webcast of a Thursday night cable network game that had a virus attached.

This year it started in early August. A friend talked me into joining a fantasy football league with an online draft that gave you 10 hours to make each pick. This endurance event started the same night I was attending a Rippingtons reunion concert three hours from home and continued through a road trip for a Steve Oliver gig. Fortunately everyone didn’t feel obligated to use their whole 10 hour allotment or I would have been trying to find a wi-fi zone somewhere in Daytona during Spyro Gyra’s Labor Day weekend gig. On that first night I did the math and figured I could drive downstate, do the concert, drive home and get there just in time to make my pick. Fate and distraction proved otherwise. Some band members and fans decided to hit a local restaurant and hang out. While vivacious women and self-confident guys chatted up the musicians, I cowered in the corner watching a meaningless preseason game where a key player was injured. Realizing I needed to get to a computer before the clock ran out so I didn’t end up with that player on my team, I hit the interstate at 80mph and got pulled over by an overzealous cop. Fortunately he was just looking to score a late night DWI and Red Bull doesn’t count, so he sent me on my way. I got home just in time to go online and see that the injured player had indeed landed on my team 10 minutes earlier.

A week later University of Miami alumni Euge Groove faced a Jacksonville crowd of FSU Seminole and Florida Gator fans and threw down a little brash talk about his Hurricanes.  Hardcore ‘Nole that I am, that set up some after show trash talking two weeks in advance of the nationally televised season opener. We both had high hopes back then. Two weeks later in a gloat-mail after we beat them, I told him he should come back to play the national anthem when our teams faced off again at the Conference Championship game. As the season grinded on, it became obvious that neither team was going to be in Jacksonville in December or playing in any bowl game that mattered. Euge and the Rippingtons returned to Florida for an outdoor concert in October on the same day that FSU played Boston College. Hoping for a turnaround I trotted off to Tallahassee. I should have turned the car toward the music and spared myself the experience of watching my team get “taken to the woodshed” as our radio play-by-play guy says. I didn’t make the same mistake twice. I passed up another home game whipping to see Richard Smith and Freddie Ravel’s incredible band in Orlando. This concert wrapped up with a star-heavy jam session. I was standing in the setup area talking to friends while a group of musicians that everyone is in awe of were tuning up and trying to get a quick rehearsal in but instead of watching and listening I was trying to find out the score of my game. A musician within hearing distance dug out his BlackBerry, pulled up the scores, looked straight at me and said “I’m sorry.”  Season down the tubes, but Steve Lukather and Richard Smith dueling guitars was the most excellent consolation prize I could imagine!

With Thursday and Saturday night games being scheduled so often, critical games can fall on concert nights and the desire to know the score gets deeper as the evening goes on. Sometimes it works out fine. Sometimes it does not. Once I ended up sitting next to another fan who brought in a radio so he could check the score from time to time and he passed it along to me. Another time I ran out during intermission to check a score on my car radio and couldn’t get back in the building to hear the main act. I sat in the car watching it rain while I listened to the rest of our losing game and waited for my friends to come out.  “Serves you right!” was all they said.

A promoter I love once booked two emerging artists I really wanted to see for an early evening gig on the day of the NFL conference championship games. It was in a hotel with sports bar in the lobby area. Whenever the artist did a cover song I would run to the bar, watch the game for 10 minutes then run back to the concert. Fortunately for me, both games were set up to be blowouts early on so I didn’t have to do enough wandering to appear rude or look like someone who had to go to the bathroom too much.

A lot of musicians do have favorite teams. Sometimes they are misguided and they don’t have the same favorite teams that I do. Thus, they will not wear my team’s logo swag onstage. I tried to sneak a Jaguars hat onto a Ravens fan once as I walked off after introducing the band. He was having none of it though. I guess because the Denver area has quite a few high-profile artists I’ve had some front-row to stage trash talk bouts with overzealous Broncos fans, especially after we knocked them out of the playoffs during our second season. Because of the Philadelphia music scene there are lots of Eagles fans out there ready to prop up their team onstage. Fine, it gives us a chance to practice our booing during the off-season. One astute artist did hit the stage at the Jacksonville Jazz Festival with a shout-out to the Jaguars. I think it’s a major accomplishment when anyone who tours all the time remembers what city they are in, much less who their team is so I was completely dazzled. Of course there is a little prompting involved at the Jacksonville festival since it is across the street from the stadium and the logo is in plain view from the stage. That’s another trick I can pull out of my bag of taunts. The Jacksonville Jazz Festival is an awesome gig and no matter who your team is, if you are on that stage you’ll be lookin’ straight toward our logo over our house. Either that or at some geeky music writer sitting front row center with a camera, notepad, and plate of french fries. And a Jacksonville Jaguars t-shirt. Pick your poison. You can run, but you cannot hide!