Typos happen all the time.
Some are amusing, like the time I was doing temp work for the state Public Health Association and sat down to assemble a mailing going out to six hundred people, then saw that whoever had printed the return address labels had left out a pretty crucial “L” in the organization’s name.
And some are totally mortifying.
And some get all up in my face when I’m supposed to be doing other things. Like yesterday, for example, when the WFA updated their homepage with the following Conference Championship matchups:
Huh.
So all of a sudden, a whole bunch of people from a number of different teams all collectively freaked the fuck out. I like to think it drew us all closer, really. A little bonding moment of abject disbelief in the middle of the work day. Was this real? Had the bracket been changed? Was this part of a larger agenda? Where is Kansas City, anyway? And hadn’t teams already booked travel? Was San Diego expected to get their whole team up to Seattle and then out to Chicago and then potentially out to Chicago again, all within a few weeks? It’s the one that you’d think should be in Kansas but it’s not, right?
Oddly enough, I found myself being the one giving the league the benefit of the doubt. (I know – weird, right?) Not that we haven’t seen the WFA make bizarre and influential rules (and changes to rules) a number of times before, but in this case, I was going with “typo” over “we restructured the entire Conference system two games before the end of the season.”
Backseat Coach was with me on Team Typo, and he confirmed with the league that it was a design error and not a unilateral earth-shattering revamping of the final rounds of the playoffs.
So now this is up there:
Much better! Although the absence of any text in Chicago’s logo kind of makes it look like someone’s gonna light a bunch of footballs on fire and chuck ‘em at the Militia. (Whatever – you know The Ten would catch that shit anyway. And you know what else fears no flame as long as boiling water isn’t involved? Lobster claws. They’d be all over that.)
Which brings me to my next point. All the freaking out that people did here in Boston – that wasn’t because they didn’t want to play Chicago in the championship game. I think that would have been amazing. And when you play the same three or so teams all season, every season, new opponents are a very welcome thing so I think it would have been awesome to play Kansas City too.
The problem was the perceived last-minute change to something that people had already been mentally and physically preparing for in a major way. Like if your friend was all, come over tonight and we’ll watch The Avengers! And you get psyched for that and now you’re totally in the mood for some Marvel superhero awesomeness and you get to your friend’s house and they’re like OK! Here’s Finding Nemo! And you’re like WHAT THE SHIT WHERE IS SAM JACKSON IN AN EYEPATCH. It’s not that you don’t like Finding Nemo (turtles! Willem Dafoe as a fish!), it’s just that you were all set for something else and it’s jarring to have that changed.
There’s one more thing here that bears mentioning. I think it says something about your management of a league when people see something patently absurd and actually find it plausible. This should have been in the Amusing Sports Typos category, like this one. Instead, it became more of a virtual vote of no confidence.
