I barely watched any football this past weekend.  Given that it’s the divisional round of the playoffs, this is a pretty drastic change for me from years past and totally out of line with what most of my male friends would find normal.  On its own, simply not watching football isn’t really enough to lose my man card… It was the way I didn’t watch; you can have other plans and miss the games out of necessity, but that was not my situation.

I first realized something was wrong around 6:15pm on Saturday at Wegmans, where we had packed up the kids and driven to for a quick meal and some grocery shopping.  This was our first real trip to Wegmans as we search for the best deals for our grocery budget.  With this high class night out started, I heard the sounds of a football game while picking up my dinner from one of the food stations.  A little surprised, I looked up at the TV to see the Ravens-Titans game several minutes into the third quarter.  “That’s odd,” I thought, trying to figure out what day it was.  Realizing that I had completely blanked about something that usually enjoy sitting on the couch and watching intently was pretty sad.

It only got worse later that evening (after even more ignoring of football).  I was looking on Facebook before bed when I saw a status update about Duke hanging on to win their game.  Again, confusion reigned for a moment as I thought they were slated to play Sunday night.  A quick check of Duke’s schedule/results showed me that my mind was a week behind and they had indeed held off a late run by FSU in a game that I missed completely.  This is rather foreign territory, as I probably only missed a couple Duke games all last season, and none of those were intra-ACC tilts.

Come Sunday, I have a chance to correct my errors from the previous day, and promptly watch even less sporting events than I managed to see on Saturday.  In fact, I’m pretty sure that I saw more Food Network and Style Network programming than anything “manly.”  Anyway, it’s not like I don’t see this day coming, but one more weekend like this and my man card may all but disappear.