Random Thought of the Moment: Control Your Own Destiny Edition

It's late December and that means two things:

(Actually, it means a lot of things, but for the purpose of this blog posting, it means two things, ok?)

1.) The holidays — whichever one(s) you celebrate — are upon us and 2.) the NFL season is coming to a close.

Fortunately, with the help of increasingly unimaginative and cliché-loving NFL announcers you can combine these two facts into a fun and potentially-dangerous drinking game.

See, with the final week of the NFL season upon us and a few playoff spots still up for grabs, more than a few teams (Miami, Dallas) "control their own destiny." There's an even greater number of teams (Tampa Bay, New England, N.Y. Jets, Philadelphia, Chicago) who don't "control their own destiny." I know this because (I swear I'm not exaggerating) Boomer Esiason (pictured, far right with the rest of the CBS studio team) used the phrase "control their own destiny" 15 times in one minute during this past Sunday's Subway postgame show. Even my girlfriend Erica got annoyed to the point that she was ready to throw something at our TV.

So whether you're depressed around this time of year or you just want to get a good buzz going, turn to ESPN, Fox Sports or your preferred sports network and take a shot of eggnog (or your preferred adult beverage) every time an announcer talks about a team "controlling their own destiny."

(Then again, I don't want any of my readers to spend this week in the hospital due to alcohol poisoning, so maybe you should just ignore this post. Don't drink and drive — control your own destiny.)