Blog
A Case of the Mondays: Much Too Young to Feel This Damn Old
I took the day off work. Not for a funeral, not for a holiday, but because I am in my forties and I went to two concerts in two days, and it turns out the body keeps a ledger. Garth Brooks in DC on Saturday, Mumford and Sons here in Charlottesville on Sunday. I knew better. I knew better the entire time I was buying the tickets. I did it anyway, and now I'm filing this dispatch from a robe, at 11am on a Monday, in what I can only describe as a medically significant amount of fatigue.
To be fair to Sunday, we earned it. We came back from Washington running on fumes, and I took not one but two separate naps in the span of a single afternoon, which is a thing I used to make fun of my dad for. My brother and his wife were at Mumford, and so were a pile of our friends, and standing in that crowd with people I love was genuinely worth every bit of the wreckage. But I keep coming back to a Garth lyric from the night before, which I am now convinced he wrote specifically about me, this weekend, in advance: much too young to feel this damn old.
And then, the football. I don't know what part of my brain looked at this matchup and thought we'd win. Both teams were 0-1, Dallas had given up more points than anybody in the league in Week 1, and some optimistic little gremlin in my skull said "this is the one." Reader, it was not the one. Final was 37-20 and we are 0-2, and 0-2 in the division, which is the kind of hole you don't climb out of so much as get pulled out of by a passing stranger.
But the score is not the story and everybody knows it. Jayden Daniels went down on the final play of the first half with a left elbow injury and got carted off. I watched the first half at home and followed the rest on my phone at the concert, which meant I found out standing in a crowd of ten thousand happy people, holding a beer, staring at a six-inch screen, making a face I'm told was visible from the back of the venue. Tom Brady, on live television, said a word he is not supposed to say, and when Tom Brady swears on air about your quarterback, you already know. It wasn't only him, either: Sam Cosmi is in concussion protocol, Brandon Coleman hurt a finger, Javon Kinlaw hurt a shoulder. We did not lose a football game on Sunday so much as file an insurance claim.
Here's where I'm supposed to say RG3, and I'm going to mostly not. It's the first place my brain went and I suspect it's the first place yours went too, and I want to be careful, because Jayden isn't that guy and this isn't that situation. That was a knee, this is an elbow, and the circumstances aren't the same. What is the same, and what I can't shake, is the luck. It is just some really, really awful luck. A quarterback this good should get to play a full season and find out what he actually is, and twice now he hasn't, and there's no lesson in that. Just the sourness of it.
The subreddit, bless it, made it through all five stages of grief before the fourth quarter ended. One post was titled, in full, "This man deserves a better team and a glass of milk." Someone else observed with the weary precision of a person who has watched this franchise for decades that "this fanbase deserves a qb who knows how to fall properly." The draft talk started immediately, as it does, and the best rebuttal to the Arch Manning crowd was a single line: "Arch Manning is not saving this team, he would die behind our Oline." Somebody proposed Jayden simply play out his career in a Gronk bionic arm brace. But my favorite thing anyone said all night, and the sentence I would like engraved somewhere permanent, arrived in the middle of an argument about the coaching staff: "it just sucks that everything sucks." The saddest take was also the truest, though. He was absolutely cooking right before it happened. That was 2024 Jayden out there. That was the guy.
So it's Marcus Mariota now, and honestly, I'm not mad about it. The man walked into a burning building at halftime and immediately led a game-tying touchdown drive, which is not nothing. He's 32 and has been the guy, then not the guy, then the guy again, in about four cities. Asked about Daniels afterward, he said, "It sucks." Two words. No spin, no cliché about the next man up. I've decided I like him.
As for college football, Virginia lost 27-38 to West Virginia, and the single mercy of this entire weekend is that we didn't go. It was at one of those strange neutral sites in Charlotte, and by all accounts the building was about two-thirds Mountaineer fans, which means the alternate version of my weekend involves a long drive to stand in a sea of gold while people scream at me and my team loses. No box, no catered anything, no thank you. I took a nap instead and I regret nothing.
So that's the ledger: two concerts, two naps, two losses, one elbow, and a personal day I have earned several times over. Next Sunday the defending Super Bowl champion Seahawks come to Northwest Stadium at one o'clock, which on paper is the least appealing possible follow-up to the week we just had. I'll be there anyway, with my brother and my dad. My dad is the reason I care about this team at all, and there is no version of me that skips a game with him because the quarterback is hurt and the record is bad. That was never the arrangement. It just sucks that everything sucks, and I'll see you Sunday. Hail.