Football in the Snow

Newsletter 2025-01-06

Last week, my local NFL team, the Indianapolis Colts, eliminated itself from playoff contention with a historically embarrassing performance against the New York Giants. It was the kind of unnecessary face-plant that makes me feel a personal connection to the team. Choking under pressure is sort of my thing. Besides reminding me that I’m not alone in the universe, the Colts offered me the opportunity of a lifetime. Their season might have been effectively over, but they still had one game left to play. Real fans wanted nothing to do with it. That left just me. With ticket prices plummeting, I decided now was the perfect time to take my daughters to their first ever NFL game. I’m always looking for new and exciting ways to disappoint them.

My kids don’t care about the team or the sport. They have only the vaguest idea of how football works. They get excited for the Super Bowl every year, but only because I take them to the dollar store beforehand to buy snacks. As for the game itself, they watch some of it if Taylor Swift is in the stands. They also like the commercials and the halftime show. All the other stuff with the ball on the field is an annoying interruption. It would seem like an especially bad idea, then, to spend money to take them to see professional football in person. That doesn’t take into account how truly awful the Colts are this season. The tickets to this game were basically free.

The actual price was twelve dollars each on the secondhand market. Of course, I didn’t pay that. StubHub kindly added an eleven dollar service fee to every ticket. Apparently an employee hand-bundled the electronic files with the utmost care. Counting taxes, fees, and criminal extortion, I paid $143 for tickets for the six of us, which seemed like a steal. I could have saved even more money if I waited or if I wasn’t adamant that we all had to sit together. If I had held off until the hour before the game and bought individual seats in six different parts of the stadium, we might have gotten tickets for two dollars each. Then again, I’m sure Stubhub would have added a special twenty-five dollar fee to each one because their employees accompanied them with extra love. I thank them for their attention to detail. Even if I didn’t save the maximum amount of money theoretically possible, I still got off pretty easy. My discount wasn’t just because of the ineptitude that was expected to happen on the field. It was because we might not even be able to see it. Our seats won’t be in the nosebleed section; they’ll be in the oxygen section, as in we’ll have to bring our own. To reach our seats, we’ll have to take three escalators and a blimp. There are Himalayan mountain tops that are lower.

I put all this in the future tense because I’m throwing together this newsletter on Saturday instead of the usual day at the end of the weekend. The NFL rudely refused to move around its games to accommodate my writing schedule. This game is in the not-so-distant future for me and the not-so-distant past for you. Literally any disaster could befall us between now and when we reach your current location on the timeline. Just the planning stages for this expedition have given me more than enough to write about. There are a lot of logistics to consider when transporting four children to a downtown sporting event that they don’t care about. I appreciate their apathy. It allowed me to book the worst seats in the stadium without a second thought. I can tell the kids we’re watching a polo match and they won’t know the difference. Neither will I. From our distance, it will be impossible to distinguish a human from a horse.

If we won’t be able to see anything, why take the kids to the stadium at all? For the same reason I took them to Mammoth Cave: It’s big, and it’s within driving distance. They might not understand the sport, but they can still experience the spectacle. We’ll be in a giant stadium surrounded by other people who get very excited and/or furious about whatever may or may not be happening far below. We say we live in Indianapolis, but really we’re far out in the suburbs. I seldom take my kids into the urban core, depriving them of whatever it is the city has to offer. We can’t experience a professional football game out in the boonies—except on our various large screen TVs, which would show us the action in high definition rather than giving us vague hints about what’s happening based on distant blurs and crowd noise. I managed not to take my kids to an NFL game for my prior fourteen years as a parent. It was time to break the streak and earn some good dad points, no matter how much my kids hated it.

Before they have a chance to complain about the game, I’ll have to get them there. That’s easier said than done. The city expects me to pay money to park my vehicle. That’s highly offensive to a dedicated suburbanite such as myself. Where I live, there’s no place I could pay to park, even if I wanted to. We have more free parking spaces than people, like God intended. Things are more congested in downtown Indianapolis. I thought I had a hack to get around that final upcharge. My former employer will let me park on their property for free as long as it’s outside normal work hours. The problem is the distance. Their parking lot is over a mile from the stadium. In good weather, or with only adults, that wouldn’t be a problem. I’ll hike for three days if it saves me a dollar. It’s a different story with small children in January, especially with a blizzard on the way. All things being equal, my wife would prefer that we not freeze to death. She’s such a buzzkill.

I repeatedly checked the forecast before I booked my tickets. I was hoping the approaching winter storm was more hype than substance. As of Saturday afternoon, it looks like I guessed wrong. Meteorologists are now calling for three to five inches of snow, which will be our first major accumulation of the winter. In Minnesota, that would be considered beach weather, but around here, it’s treated like an approaching apocalypse. People are already talking about what they’re going to do when they’re snowed in. I’ll be venturing out with my entire family to the heart of the city. The snow is expected to start before kickoff, but it’s not projected to get heavy until later that night. I’m hoping that we can make it in and out without much trouble. Everyone else is more pessimistic, which no doubt helped suppress the ticket prices. Nobody wants to get trapped in the stadium. Not with this version of the team, anyway. If we still had Peyton Manning, it would be a different story.

Given the weather, hiking to my free parking spot with my family is out of the question. Instead, I could drop off my crew at the stadium, park far away, and hike back on my own. I checked Google Maps for an estimate. Given the traffic patterns, the app thought it would take me seven minutes to drive to my parking spot and half an hour to walk back. That’s a considerable chunk of time in twenty-five degree weather with light snow. Worse, I’d have to complete the hike in reverse at the end of the game when the temperature was colder and the snow was more intense. I wouldn’t actually be saving any money, at least not once you factor in how much it would cost to amputate my frozen toes. I don’t have a discount surgeon—yet. Hit me up if you have any recommendations.

That left me scrambling for a plan c. A friend of a friend came through. He has season tickets and tailgates before every home game. He parks in a land that the law forgot. It’s a chunk of grass too small to be a park but too large to be a median. More importantly, no one seems to own it. He and some other fans have been parking there for two years. Nobody has ever asked them for money or told them to move. If I was feeling risky, I could join him on his pirate parking adventure. With my luck, the one time I tried would be the day everyone gets towed. I’d be inclined to take a chance if the spot was more conveniently located. While it’s closer than my former employer’s lot, it would still be a fifteen-minute walk. That’s fine if you’ve had a half a dozen trunk beers and want to enjoy a leisurely stroll downtown. It’s less than ideal if you’re sober and shepherding your family through a pre-blizzard temperature drop. There had to be a better way.

There was, but it would cost me. I mentioned my predicament at a Pinewood Derby workshop Saturday morning. That’s where better dads with better tools carve my kids’ racers for me while I stand around and pretend not to be emasculated. A fellow scouting father clued me in on his favorite spot. He said he always goes to a parking garage for a hotel connected to the convention center. The price is thirty-five dollars, but it offers an indoor route via tunnels and skyways to reach the stadium without ever going outside. It sounds better than any of the other options. As of this moment, I’m planning to pay extra for comfort and convenience. It’s a slippery slope. The next thing you know, I’ll be flying first class and refusing to eat discount pizza. Behold my first step toward bankruptcy. Regardless, the high-price spot would also lead to the lowest amount of pre-game complaining and frostbite. The final price tag for the day keeps climbing.

As for what will happen when we finally make it to the stadium, that’s anyone’s guess. I expect Colts backups to lose an extremely winnable game while my kids barely pay attention. I imagine they’ll be more impressed by the crowd and the venue. At some point, we’ll get up to explore, taking in such epic sights as the concession stand, the other concession stand, and the other other concession stand. We won’t buy anything, of course. I maxed out my budget for this excursion on service fees and parking. All of that indoor meandering will be a bonus. The main thing I hope is that my kids make it to their seats without having a meltdown. Getting them on that final blimp will be dicey.

Photo by Ryan De Hamer on Unsplash

Years ago, my oldest two daughters went to a WNBA game with their summer daycare program. Their main memory from that day is how terrified they were to be sitting in the rafters. They’ve grown up a lot since then, but I’ve also added more kids. I’m not worried about Betsy. She gets on roller coasters with me all the time. She clearly doesn’t care if she lives or dies. I’m less confident about the other kids. They declined my last two offers to take them on a roller coaster trip. They seem to have inherited my wife’s fear of heights. At 5’ 1 ¾” (Don’t you dare let her claim to be 5’ 2”), she’s low to the ground and would prefer to stay there. When I told her about our seats, she immediately asked why I didn’t book a lower section. Then I told her the price difference. Now she plans to face her greatest fear. I’m not the only one who will do anything to save money.

Of course, this could all be moot. After my extensive scheming, it’s possible that the winter storm will roll in sooner than expected. Then we’ll face a tough choice. If the roads are covered by inches of snow, even I might be inclined to cut my losses and stay home. I’d love to give my kids the experience of cheering for a local team, but the Colts can lose just as well if we’re there as if we’re not. The looming blizzard adds a wildcard I could do without. That’s old news to all of you in the future. Perhaps you already know that the storm amounted to a nothingburger, or maybe it was twice as bad as expected and you can’t believe I ever considered going out in it. For once, I’m rooting for the less interesting outcome. I already have more than enough to write about.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.

James