Los Angeles Is A Football Town, With Diana Moskovitz

While The Distraction is allowed to get as heavy as we want, the idea is mostly to do something goofy or stupid. I reminded myself of that while listening to this week’s episode, in which our own Diana Moskovitz breaks down the first weekend of the NFL playoff slate from her home in Los Angeles. We recorded it Tuesday morning, in what turned out to be the last remotely normal-seeming moments of the week in that region. It’s a fun episode, but because things have gotten very bad in Los Angeles in the days since we recorded, and because of the extent to which that reality is absent from the episode … well, this was a good opportunity for me to remind myself that the name of the podcast is The Distraction, and then to say it until I believed it.

Diana’s overdue return to the pod was booked late last year, back when her beloved Pittsburgh Steelers were 10-3 and arguably the most surprising good team in the NFL. They are now 10-7, and undeniably a team that backed into the playoffs with all the grace and command of a suburbanite fitfully combat-parking an Escalade full of yowling kids at Whole Foods. But if the Steelers are not quite as good as they looked earlier in the season, they remain a decently interesting team and fandom, and Diana really let her Steelers Brain Disorder sing over the first third of the pod. It is strange to hear someone whose work and discernment you so respect lay out her preferred three-year plan for making Justin Fields into a proper franchise quarterback, but it honestly wasn’t a bad plan. Detailed, if nothing else.

From there, we moved on to what otherwise seems like a decently promising first week of the NFL postseason. There are a number of fun, cool teams in the league this year, but there was a much greater number of wildly dispiriting and patently unwatchable ones, and the mere fact of those teams being removed from the mix is in itself a great kindness and something to celebrate. Not every team that’s playing this week is a blast—we mostly just cited a previous episode where the grim n’ thwarted Texans are concerned and kept it moving—but there’s plenty to talk about where teams like the Eagles, Commanders, Steelers, and (yes) Vikings are concerned. We also assessed Los Angeles’s viability as a football town, the secret political calculations of Cris Collinsworth gassing up coordinators on Sunday Night Football, and, thanks to the Funbag, introduced Diana to the powerful uncanniness of the Rob Lowe Wearing The NFL Hat image. I got to tell my story about being followed around the internet by Ben McAdoo’s stupid short-sleeved windbreaker after writing a blog about his distinctive look years ago. There is virtually nothing of the actual world and its goings-on to find in this episode, but damned if it isn’t distracting. In that sense, I guess you’d have to call it a triumph.

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