Birdsong · October 1, 2026

Big Red Boxes

It was the mid-’80s, 1984 or ’85, I’m not sure which. I’d been a football fan all my life. I was living in Miami as a young boy, and my dad and I followed the ’82 Killer B’s all the way to the Super Bowl. I mean that literally. We flew out to Pasadena and watched Super Bowl XVII live at the Rose Bowl, right up until John Riggins crushed my young dreams of Dolphin glory. Not long after, my dad picked up a board game, published by Sports Illustrated, called Paydirt. It simulated an actual game, based on real statistics.

I still remember the dinner table. Over the course of the real season, with a real schedule, we randomly picked which game we’d play that night. I can’t remember, and highly doubt, that we played every game on the schedule. But we did play every Dolphins and Bucs game, my two favorite NFL teams. Grape Kool-Aid in a glass, the sound of dice in a dice cup, Mom telling me to put the glass on a coaster.

In Paydirt, each coach picks a play in secret. Each one has a chart, and on every snap you reveal them together. It almost became a chess match, trying to weigh your team’s strengths against the other player’s tendencies. You roll the dice and look up the combined result: a green box means you go forward that many yards. A red box with black numbers means the offense lost yardage.

I was a gunslinger. I fell in love with those red boxes on defense. I blitzed heavily. Sure, there were lots of empty white boxes where the offense got to go as far as it could. But those red boxes, with those big numbers. Man, that was the best.

I don’t remember who won the Super Bowl between me and my dad. I know we played every game of the playoffs. We had our bracket posted on the fridge, playing every night and penciling in the scores. The boxed game is probably gone now. Maybe it’s somewhere in my dad’s house, more likely the victim of a garage sale.

We moved to Gainesville, and I transferred my love of the NFL to the college game. I live and die with my team now, still watch them every week, still text my dad after big plays.

I spent 25 years of my career in software testing, and now I’m building a college football game. The core of it is at that dinner table. Each side picks their plays, and a real chart under the hood decides what happens. The coach across from you watches you the way my dad did. He can’t see your pick.

But if you blitz every down, he’ll notice.