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Wire Taps Is Open, and My Weekend Is a Logistical Crime Scene

Thu, Sep 17

Let me tell you what the next 48 hours look like in the Burgundy Wire household, because I want you to understand the state of mind in which I am asking you for a favor. The favor is at the top of this post instead of buried at the bottom, because I would rather you actually see it than scroll past it.

Saturday, early, I get on a train in Charlottesville and go to Washington to see Garth Brooks. Saturday night, that happens, and I make a series of decisions whose consequences are Sunday's problem. Sunday, early, painfully early, I get on another train back to Charlottesville, running on fumes and pure enthusiasm. Sunday at 4:25, Commanders at Dallas, which is the load-bearing event of the entire weekend and the only reason the train home is early instead of sensible. Sunday night, immediately after, Mumford and Sons here in Charlottesville.

Garth Brooks on Saturday and Mumford and Sons on Sunday is a genuinely deranged 24 hours of music. One night I am in an arena screaming about thunder rolling, the next I am watching men in waistcoats assault a banjo. Two trains, two concerts, one division game, and roughly one night of sleep to cover all of it. I am going to do every bit of it and I am going to feel it on Monday.

A sincere apology to Högwaller Brewing: I am not making it in this weekend, and I am not making it next weekend either. The excuse for next weekend is a good one, though. I will be at Northwest Stadium, in person, for the Seahawks game. So it is not you, it is the calendar, and I will make it up in wings.

I will also be sending UVA good vibes from somewhere in DC as they play West Virginia down in Charlotte. Splitting my attention across this many teams in this many states is not a skill, it is a condition.

And unprompted: I am still watching the Tyler Owens special teams clip. Repeatedly. Voluntarily. Our safety stiff-armed two separate blockers out of his way on the way down the field and then erased the returner from the face of the earth. A message has been delivered to the descendants of all three. A punt coverage snap has no business being the best thing about a Week 1 loss, and yet here we are.

Now the actual football

I was pleased, in the way you are pleased when the weather cooperates, to watch the Giants beat the Cowboys 28-20. That is a given. Dallas losing is the baseline setting of a good week and I refuse to be sophisticated about it.

That result also tells me something useful. The Cowboys defense is marginally better than it was last year, which is a real sentence and not a compliment, and they still gave up 28 points at home. I think we can put up points on them. Their offense genuinely still scares me and I am not going to pretend otherwise, but this is a winnable road game.

The problem is not Dallas. The problem is us, specifically the self-inflicted part. Last week we lost by two, and we gave away more than two.

Diggs caught the touchdown that made it a game and then took an unsportsmanlike penalty for using the goalpost as a prop on the celebration. That penalty wiped out the two-point attempt. Jayden said afterward they probably would have gone for two right there. We lost by two.

Sainristil got beaten on the Wicks touchdown, and Dan Quinn said flatly that it is something he has to get corrected. John Keim had it as a miscommunication with Nick Cross. Either way, points we handed over.

Stevens went 1 for 2 on field goals, and the one he made was from 55 yards. Here I owe him a correction, because I had him down for the blocked extra point too and that one was not his. The snap from Tyler Ott came in high and inside, which both Nicki Jhabvala and Keim flagged in real time. So our kicker owes us one field goal, not the entire special teams catastrophe.

Cut that stuff out and we win this one. That is not optimism, that is arithmetic.

Wire Taps is open

I built a mailbag. It is called Wire Taps, it has been sitting quietly at the bottom of this website, and it currently contains zero questions, which is a lonely condition for a mailbag to be in.

Ask me anything. Commanders or otherwise. The offensive line, the Owens clip, whether Jayden takes another step this year, what to order at Högwaller, how to survive Garth Brooks and Mumford and Sons on either side of a road game, or how one person ends up rooting for this many football teams at once. There is a name field if you want the credit, and you can leave it blank, because anonymous is completely fine.

I will answer them in a post. If nobody sends anything, I will answer questions I invented myself, and we will both have to live with that.

Two trains, two concerts, one road game. See you on the other side.

Hail.

Direct link, no scrolling required: theburgundywire.com/wiretaps.