Because I currently live on the West Coast but mainly follow East Coast teams, I don't often run into conflicts between live and televised sporting events; usually, I can make time to watch one of my teams play on TV in the afternoon and head to a game in person at night. Yesterday, however, I had a surprisingly difficult choice to make: Go to a sports bar to watch my Giants battle the previously undefeated Green Bay Packers on TV, or make the short drive to campus to watch an intriguing non-conference college basketball match-up between Stanford and the NC State Wolfpack. Both games started at 1 PM PST. I'll take you through my decision-making process, and you can tell me which way you would have leaned:
Reason to watch Stanford: It's a live sporting event. Televised games can be DVR'd and watched later in the day (although admittedly it's not the same), but there's nothing like watching sports live. There aren't that many Stanford basketball home games that I'm realistically able to attend - many of them are during the month that I'll be away for Winter Break - so I feel like I should take advantage of the opportunity to go to free college basketball games when I can, particularly when they feature interesting battles such as this one.
Reason to watch the Giants: I've been a Giants fan for way longer than I've been a Stanford fan, so picking the Cardinal over the G-men seems wrong. It would be like ditching your childhood best friend to go hang out with a guy you just met through work - something about it just rubs me the wrong way. I've invested so much time in the Giants in my life and received so much joy from them - highlighted, of course, by the Superbowl victory over New England in 2007 - that I feel like I owe it to them to watch their games whenever possible.
Reason to watch Stanford: Unlike the Giants, Stanford had a good chance to win their game (and they did, 76-72, in a hard fought battle). Although the Giants did put together an impressive performance (particularly offensively) in a narrow 38-35 defeat, I was pretty confident that the inconsistent Giants weren't going to take down the NFL's top team. While I'm certainly not a front-runner - I root for my teams no matter how awful they are - it is undoubtedly more fun to see a victory than a loss.
Reason to watch the Giants: The Giants' match-up with Green Bay was clearly more critical than Stanford's non-conference game versus NC State. At 6-5 entering Sunday and desperately needing a victory to save their seemingly sinking ship, the Giants would have received a major boost to their potentially crumbling playoff hopes had they been able to knock off the Packers. While Stanford's win over NC State might help them beat out another bubble team when Selection Sunday rolls around (but probably not), there's no doubt that a Week 13 NFL game is more significant than a December college basketball one.
There were some other factors that went into my decision-making process, but those were the main ones. In the end, I decided to go to Maples to watch the basketball game (it was the live versus televised factor that swayed me) and I'm glad that I did - the crowd was excellent by Stanford basketball standards, the team showed resiliency in coming back from a double-digit deficit in the second half and the Cardinal earned a valuable victory over a solid ACC opponent. I even made it out in time to "watch" the fourth quarter of the Giants game on my computer and, considering the way it ended, it's probably better for my sanity that I wasn't at the sports bar watching it.
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