This is an awful time to be a Los Angeles-area sports fan. It has been mostly dreary since I left the region to live and work in Abu Dhabi, in 2009, but it seems to be bottoming out, the past four or five months. Aside from hockey, which has no significant hold on Southern California […]

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Back in December, I confessed to my deep and only semi-rational need to see Adrian Peterson fall short of Eric Dickerson’s single-season NFL rushing record. (And he did, in part because I willed it; that’s how fans think.) Here’s one I probably care about more: The Lakers’ NBA record of 33 consecutive victories.

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  We at The National have been writing stories about American football, here in the UAE, almost from the time the newspaper was founded, in April of 2008. Plans were laid by this or that guy who had started an academy, visions outlined, success assured … None of it ever amounted to anything. Until the […]

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So, you live in Abu Dhabi and want to see the Super Bowl? Have to be prepared to go all night long. With a couple of Americans new to town living just one floor away, at the new digs, we invited them over and watched the game (or I did, anyway) — which ran from […]

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I generally have loathed the San Francisco Giants, but I have rarely felt the same way about the San Francisco 49ers. It probably has to do with the 49ers generally being bad when I was young and a fan of the Los Angeles Rams. The Niners did me no harm. If I think about it […]

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I find this John and Jim Harbaugh thing fascinating. The odds of brothers meeting as coaches of opposing teams in a Super Bowl … have to be extreme. (But then, it’s happened in the 47th Super Bowl, so perhaps we would have to concede that the odds look like 1-in-47.) I like this on several […]

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I spent far too much of the night watching the NFL playoffs. Like, I have a day job, and the games began at 10 p.m. here in Abu Dhabi and ended at about 5 a.m. But I came to a couple of conclusions — or arrived at old conclusions anew — on two prominent NFL […]

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Speaking of hare-brained travel schemes, as we did in the entry yesterday, the two NFL games today brought back more memories of bad ideas that somehow usually worked out. More or less. After great angst. And one that turned into a fairly spectacular (and perhaps life-threatening) disaster. San Francisco home to the Packers, Denver at […]

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So, woke in the middle of the night here — Sunday afternoon in California — and decided to watch some NFL. I didn’t know which game would be on (only insomniacs plan their NFL viewing, in the UAE), but found it on the local Fox Sports network … and there were the Seahawks and Redskins […]

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It’s been a long time since I felt remotely connected to the Los Angeles Rams. Certainly not since 1994, their last season in Southern California before the deliciously evil Georgia Frontiere hustled them off to St. Louis for buckets of cash. The St. Louis Rams never did a thing for me. Some other team. From […]

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