As I toil away on my ninth full-season APBA Football replay, I’ve come to a conclusion with regard to how I perceive the upcoming weekly schedule. Completing a football replay is a series of short-term goals such as completing all the scheduled games for each applicable week. My last action item to achieving that goal is to type out the games for the upcoming week in accordance with Pro-Football.com. Of course, I do a mental preview of the schedule to determine the following: Who does my Jets play and where? Key divisional matchups, games with playoff implications and of course, the DUDs. I always thought of these DUD games (between to subpar teams) to be the “dog days of a replay” and would literally dread playing them. But truth be told, I couldn’t have been more wrong. For example, a couple weeks ago I played a game between two “one-win” teams (Lions and Cardinals) and the game came down to the final play and had me on the end of my chair rolling it. After that game, I went down memory lane and it occurred to me that the majority of the time, these are the games that most entertaining.

If you are conducting a replay, no longer view these upcoming matchups as a necessary evil but enjoy how competitive these games usually are. If you are not conducting a replay, grab a couple of “losing teams” from a set and roll a game, I promise that you will really enjoy it.