What a maroon!
Stupor Bowl Day is better tha Martin Luther King Ski Day for short lift lines...
Stupor Bowl Day is better than Martin Luther King Ski Day for short lift lines...
The only reason football is so popular can be summed up with one word:
GAMBLING
As a sport, it's ridiculously boring.
3 hours of standing around occasionally interrupted with 8 seconds of sports being played.
Not nearly as bleak as CNN’s.
What? Since last week? Since I was a kid (in the 1950's and 1960's), baseball has seen a drop in youth participation of about 90%. In those days, EVERYBODY played baseball, knew the top MLB teams and players, etc. Nowadays, most kids play soccer (Borrrrrrrring). And some MLB baseball teams play in mostly empty stadiums. If any big sport is dying, it's baseball.
Mass immigration will make soccer the number 1 sport.
Don't they mean The Big Game
It will be pantywaist corporations that refuse to advertise during such a "horrendous" display of "violence".
When the corporations decide to be "publicly spirited" and pull their ads, then the NFL is toast.
It will be the likes of Gloria Allred with pathetic lawsuits that trigger the collapse of corporate support for the NFL.
Surprise, surprise, football is under assault. Interesting. Part of the war on the manly man?
Maybe.
It’s played on a grid, and therefore is visually organized. Feelings play no role. The rules require the collective defense of territory, and allow the military-like seizure of same.
There are lines....straight lines all. Football involves precise measurements, sometimes down to mere inches. Rewards for crossing lines......hmmm.
Football has ground forces, and units dedicated to air power. Strategic and tactical planning is required, X’s and O’s......and arrows. Again, visually organized. Echoes of Gutenberg. The police here wear black and white.
There’s strategic retreat-the punt. There’s a place for the big, and a place for the small. No place for the weak, except the place-kicker, though he must possess a strong leg, and bear the ultimate in mental pressure.
There’s off-the-field leadership and planning, on-the field generalship for execution of the battle plan. There are secrets, coded messages, uniforms, interim plan adjustments, and on-the-battlefield meetings. There are physical sacrifices, and corporal danger.
It’s ritual war.
It’s just no place for women.
Maybe that’s why it’s got to go?
Football celebrates sheer physical power. Perhaps more than any other sport, women cannot contemplate equal participation. Interesting, instructive, and in a former world, fittingly wonderful that when females do participate it involves....lingerie.
Yes, because it is no longer about football. Just money and the haftime depravity.
I’m not a football fan, but I enjoy watching it far more than baseball or basketball. However, brain injury is a terrible thing. There is no way that glory days make up for dementia and Parkinson’s. There needs to be a way to change the padding or the game to not sacrifice the futures of these guys. A functioning brain is very important.
I agree that football at all levels will look much different in 20 years because of the concussion issue. I just wonder what it will look like? Rugby maybe?
Football, especially NFL football, has oversaturated the media for fifty years. While baseball has to be followed on the radio or in the newspaper (aside from special subscriptions on the Internet and on television), ever single freaking game of the NFL is on regular cable/satellite/network TV.
As the country has progressively secularized the Superbowl and "Super sunday" have become a national "holy day," superseding all others. Even the other networks assume that everyone's going to be watching "The Game" and schedule their shows in accordance with this, even creating special "halftime shows."
Furthermore, NFL football is not family fare and hasn't been for a very, very, very long time (and the Superbowl is the worst). It's an ugly, brutal, violent game highlighting the absolute worst in American life ("violence punctuated by committee meetings")--especially as played by the professionals. I've never seen the appeal . . . ever.
Plus of course the rules are so bizarre and esoteric. What kind of game is played in five second spurts? Or so thoroughly regulates simply passing the ball? Football players may be stereotyped as dunces, but as far as I'm concerned anyone who can follow the complicated rules of this game is a genius.
Compare this with baseball, the Great American Game, a mystical touchstone of all Americans regardless of race, religion, or political ideology. Look at its mythology, its history. See the beauty of a game that rivals chess with regard to strategy, that has no mandated violence, and that, played as it is without reference to a clock, could theoretically go on forever.
It's baseball that ought to have every game on television where we can all see them--provided they get rid of interleague play, the designated hitter, astroturf, and put the Brewers and Astros back in their correct leagues. Oh, and split MLB into two distinct organizations again.
The reason kids are burning out in their early teens is that they have been in sports since peewees at age four or five.
So they are remarkably good at age 13 or 14 and walk away within the year.
Their lives have been nothing but the sport.
Kids need these sports when in high school and late jr high. Not when little. If parents kept them out of the sports early and let them play later there would be a different attitude towards the game. They would be playing because they love it. Not because that is what they have been signed up for.
Is future bleak for Super Bowl?
It is for Denver.