Weirdest game yet, power shift

So Cindy and I left the house around 6 for a very unusual Thursday night arena football game.  I suspected that the odd scheduling would result in even worse than normal attendance.  My suspicion was correct, it was the lightest attended game I recall ever in my 6 or 7 years of minor league arena football attendance.  There were multiple completely empty sections in the arena.  It was sort of sad.

Shortly after we got our food and sat down we noticed it was very quiet.  Normally pre-game they are playing loud music to get the energy level cranked.  As we got within 5 minutes of kickoff there was still no sound on the PA system.  Cindy and I wondered what the f was going on.  I didn’t know if the weeknight scheduling meant they didn’t have a PA announcer.

There was no player intro announcements, no cheerleaders, no pregame prayer or national anthem.  Instead the ref tee’d up the ball and the game just sort of started, it was bizarre.  Watching the game with no PA was quite odd as you can imagine.  We tried our best to keep track of the action.

Very early on a ball thrown by the Tarpons QB came sailing my way.  It was high, high enough I needed to jump to get a hand on it.  I knocked it down and was able to jump the rail to the stairway to grab it.  Considering there was no other fans within 75 feet of us there was no one else there to contest the ball.  It was an all white ball.  The other two balls we have at home are the red, white, and blue models.  I actually tracked down a second ball later in the game which I tossed to a female veteran in a wheel chair on the floor level.  She later told us she actually gave the ball to a young kid in a wheelchair as she already had a ball at home anyway which was cool.

So perhaps the lack of sound threw the Tarpons off early.  They were actually behind 8-0 early on.  I can’t say I had even the slightest concern that the Tarpons wouldn’t come back.  I knew the Savannah Steam just were not very good.  The Steam has a lot of ultra-fat players on the roster.  When I would isolate my attention on them during a play it was incredible just how little effort they exerted most of the time.  The ball would snap and they would stand up, put their hands on the opposing player, take a step or two and that was it.  They had a few good players but not enough to make up for the dead weight, pun intended.

Later in the first half we saw two of the 7 or 8 regular Tarpon cheerleaders were there albeit in street clothes.  With no PA system there was no goofy fan games during the first half. The halftime entertainment consisted of some guys on the field playing catch with the few fans in the seats.  By that time we had heard there was some sort of technical problem with the sound system that they had been working on for a few hours. Then just as the 3rd quarter began they got it working as music started blaring.  Better late than never.

The game quickly became the blow out I had expected from the start.  The final score was 71-20.  I felt embarrassed for the team management to have a playoff game so poorly attended combined with the lack of sound for half the game.  I am not sure if there will be any more home playoff games this season, I guess it depends on how the other teams in this half baked league work out in their playoff games.  I have said it again and again but I just don’t see how the Tarpons can continue to exist next season.

I have sung the praises of the new Tacoma repeatedly but I found a simple button press that makes my driving experience even better, ECT power.   If you throw the Tacoma in DRIVE with the default settings it is very conservative with it’s shifting.  The setting is meant to maximize MPG.  The downside is it makes the truck feel sort of unresponsive.  I noticed that in the default mode, the 6 speed automatic transmission sometimes actually starts in FOURTH gear from a dead stop. No wonder it feels sluggish.

With the ECT button pressed the truck once again uses all of the gears and feels dramatically more powerful.  I assume there is a degree of MPG penalty I will pay but it is a trade off I am more than willing to make.

This weekend we have an open and flexible schedule that we can hopefully balance between must, should, and want to do’s.  Getting the Rachio online during the week knocked one to do off my list.  It is very easy to come up with a replacement task to take it’s place.