by Arnaldo
So about 4 years ago I came home to my mom handwriting a full NFL schedule on a giant piece of paper, charting lines with a ruler and coloring the team names and boxes with markers from our childhood. I argued with her that she's just wasting her time. There are thousands of ways to use our smartphones and laptops to find the same schedule in seconds. . . didn't phase her. She wanted something tangible that she could post on the refrigerator and mark on. She's old-school like that. I let her do it and even worse, she spent another couple hours making one for me.
I didn't really appreciate it until the following year when I walked in on her doing it again. I didn't have the heart to let her waste so many hours again on what looked like a fifth grade project, so I showed her how to use Excel. That season we made it a tradition to watch every game every weekend and mark down who won and kept up with the standings. When time came to make the following year's schedule, I took it upon myself to dress it up and make it look more professional, using better fonts and logos and such. We had such a good time working on it together that we made similar SEC schedules, a Tampa Bay Rays monthly schedule, and a bowl game schedule. I still don't completely understand why having a refrigerator full of these gets her so excited, but I definitely see the draw. Probably most importantly, this has somehow become a bonding experience between the two of us, which is why I'm proud to share this year's edition with you guys.
Click on the picture to enlarge and right click to save the high resolution copy. Keep it on your computer or print it out at home or at a Kinko's on a 11x17 like I do. The resolution is intended for an 11x17 so any bigger and it'll be blurry. Remind me in future years to make it higher resolution.
