At a time like this, the slowest all year for major American sports, with only an exhibition baseball game on tap tonight and no games at all being played the next two days, it's worth reminding you, the fan, about football.
You know, football, the actual sport.
Amid all the fuss about supplemental drafts, offset language and franchise tag deadlines, it's actually a bit easy to lose sight of the fact that the game of football is played on a field, in a game, as Dave Campo once put it.
Some of those games, it turns out, can be really interesting.
Take last year's Week 2 matchup between the Cowboys and 49ers, which NFL.com this week ranked as the ninth-best contest in all of 2011.
That's the one when Tony Romo bounced back from a meltdown against the New York Jets. Fighting through a cracked rib and punctured lung he suffered in the first half, Romo led the Cowboys from 10 points back, to force overtime, eventually keying the victory with a 77-yard pass to the unlikeliest of heroes, former reality show contestant Jesse Holley.
The game also featured kicker Dan Bailey shanking a 19-yard field goal try in the first quarter, only to come back and nail a pressure-packed 48-yarder at the end of regulation, the first of 26 straight he would make.
Should this game have ranked even higher on the list?
