Ok, I'm finally getting around to my geekery series, and I'm going to sports, mainly because it just happens to be the obsession that I'm satisfying at the moment. I had a crappy weekend this past weekend and it had nothing to do with anything that I actually did. Instead, it was because of several things that happened in other locales while I was actually having a rather good time.

First, I find out that Georgia Tech blew their game this weekend. The Falcons lost again and in a very frustrating manner. The All Blacks (New Zealand) got knocked out of the Rugby World Cup by France, a team that's looked like crap since their first June Tour match this summer. Australia was downed by a similarly tepid England squad. To top it all off, I lose the week's matchup in three of my four fantasy football leagues and have a crappy week (5 of 15) in my college picks league. The one league I won in was a lost cause anyway. It was my first win of the season in that league and we're far enough along in the season that I pretty much have no realistic chance at a win with a 1-4 start.

There was a really good quote from the season opener of King of the Hill a couple of weeks ago that I was going to use to open this article, but I can't remember the exact wording and can't seem to find it anywhere online. Bobby had finally taken an interest in football, much to Hank's delight and Hank had just taken him to his first Texas football game where Texas loses in teh final seconds to Nebraska. Bobby is devastated by the loss. To paraphrase: Is it okay to feel like I don't want to live anymore?

But really, that's kind of what a sports obsession feels like, espcially if you didn't have enough sense or too much of a living soul to choose the Yankees or USC as your team. I watch every Georgia Tech game with the rare exception of a Saturday road trip (I've missed the last two because of travel and have a real jonesing for college football of any sort, but especially for GT football.) I also watch pretty much every Atlanta Falcons game and after Christmas I'll start watching every Atlanta Thrasher game (and I've got them on my DVR to watch as many now as I have a time to watch.) I thumb through my ESPN College Football Encyclopedia while watching NCAA games from Noon to midnight on at least five Saturdays a season and often more. I spend a nice chunk of every Thursday afternoon researching my picks for that week's Yahoo league and surfy the waiver wires for upstart players to bolster my fantasy teams. I can discuss with a fairly high level of expertise which ranked teams are overrated and which one deserved more. And despite a slow start to this year's picks, I usually have a pick percentage of well over 50%.

Still, this is all a rather new obsession. As I kid I was indifferent to any sport that I wasn't playing that very second. I loved playing football, I didn't mind playing basketball, I loved playing tennis, and that was pretty much it. I hated baseball and there weren't any other options for sports where I grew up. There still aren't, actually. I just couldn't watch sports, though. In college, I never got into it either. My school didn't have a football team and was NAIA instead of NCAA. We had a good soccer team and the rest were pretty much average at best.

I have no idea what finally grabbed my interest. I'd started halfheartedly following tennis in high school because I played all four years, starting the last two and playing first doubles in the state semifinals my senior year. Still, I don't remember the first time after college where I sat down and said, "I think I'll watch a football game today." Honestly, I think it was because someone asked me to play fantasy football and college pick 'em on Yahoo. Suddenly having a very personal interest in the outcomes of the games, I started actually watching them and ended up addicted.

I will say that I'm not a stat head, though. I've never had a memory for numbers. Facts, vocabulary, stories, philosphies, and trivia all stick easily and remained lodged for lengthy stays. Numbers just drift off into the ether almost as soon as they're registere. It's not that I suck at math. I managed to pull an A in calculus with a minimum amount of effort, I just can't remember numbers. I only know my own phone number now because it's the exact same number my grandparents had when I was growing up. I still haven't a clue what my work number is, and it took me months to memorize my home phone number at my last place of residence. Because of that memory inequality, I couldn't really tell you the save percentage of Roberto Luongo (Vancouver Canucks' amazingly good goalie), the how many yards rushing the Atlanta Falcons put up in any of their three years as the top rushing team in the NFL before Vick's idiocy turned out to be criminal as well as making him a crappy quarterback.

I can tell you that the BCS Championship Bowl will feature LSU and Oklahoma and guarantee you that I'll be at least half right.