The NFL Draft, in which NFL teams select college players to augment their rosters, occurs every year near the end of April or beginning of May.

Since we do have Martin’s though, it’s worth examining how his many NFL opinions and predictions have held up over the years, particularly his commentary surrounding the NFL Draft. Sadly, we do not have Tolkien’s football takes (apparently rugby was more his speed anyway). “Yes, Stanley Matthews is talented but I fear his training regimen too rigorous for him to maintain the proper energy for the Three Lions to overcome France this year.” Tolkien used to submit his sports takes to The Times in the 1940s.

And yet, here is the writer of A Feast For Crows’ genius “broken man” monologue just throwing it out there for public consumption. Grown men wishing to bear the child of their favorite professional athlete is the sort of thing usually left to fringe sports talk radio shows or drunk group text chats.

I mean, get a load of this (which is baseball-related, not football): But I’ve personally never been able to get over the novelty of one of pop culture’s most important, sagacious figures, jotting down his ill-conceived sports takes just like the rest of us weirdos. Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that Martin is using a blog the way blogs were intended to be used – providing professional updates with some informal sports observations sprinkled in. And over the past 15 years, he has marked 235 posts with the “NFL” tag. The Westeros story shepherd has been blogging steadily since pretty much the dawn of blogging in 2006. Martin is fond of expounding upon his fandom in interviews (including this one with ex-NFL defensive end Chris Long) and also documenting his sports pain on his LiveJournal blog, “Not a Blog”. When the “A Song of Ice and Fire” creator is not writing the most impactful bit of fantasy storytelling since The Lord of the Rings, he follows his two favorite football teams: the New York Giants and the New York Jets (yes, supporting two teams in the same city is highly unusual and yes, he’s apparently fine with it). Martin loves three things above all else: writing exhaustive descriptions of feasts, killing Starks, and watching NFL football.

George rr martin a dream of spring