Posted on 09/04/2014 10:08:28 AM PDT by the scotsman
"Are you ready for some football?"
'It's the shouted rhetorical question that has started Monday night National Football League (NFL) broadcasts for decades.
For the millions of Americans who make the NFL by far the most popular US professional sport, the answer has long been yes. And it will be again on Thursday night, as NFL season kicks off with a matchup between the Green Bay Packers and the defending Super Bowl champions Seattle Seahawks.
Continue reading the main story “ Start Quote Fans need to recognise that the game isn't going to change until we force the issue by walking away” End Quote Steve Almond
Author
Every Sunday (and Monday, and some Saturdays and Thursdays) for the next five months, millions of Americans - and plenty of Brits, thanks to three regular-season games in London - will feast on a bacchanalia of gridiron pageantry.
Best-selling author Steve Almond, however, won't be watching.
The self-professed long-time American football fan writes in the Los Angeles Times that he feels guilty about watching a sport whose participants risk traumatic brain injury. More than that, however, he says he objects to "the cynical commercialisation of the sport, its cultish celebration of violence and the more subtle ways in which football warps our societal attitudes about race, gender and sexual orientation."
He says that he, like other spectators, are enabling the corruption of a game he used to love.
"Fans need to recognise that the game isn't going to change until we force the issue by walking away," he writes.'
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
Watch rugby instead.
Ive grown tired of it all but somewhow at playoff time I start tuning in and usually end up watching the Super(or not so super) Bowl
Aaron Hernandez, draft picks sucking face with their boyfriends... football used to be a decent game.
You can have it.
I don’t care about sports at all, especially football. I gave up in the 80S. However, I will give a rugby player his due.
The NFL lost me after their “pink month”, cowtowing to PC, their anti-gun rhetoric on Sunday night and lastly, Sam the homo...they’re very busy in the social engineering business as opposed to the football business.
So long NFL...
I stopped watching years ago, including the SB.
I urge others to do the same. The best way to send the over priced, overpaid PC panderers a message.
“the cynical commercialisation of the sport, its cultish celebration of violence and the more subtle ways in which football warps our societal attitudes about race, gender and sexual orientation.”
LOL. That is not a “football fan” (except the commercialization piece. That’s gotten out of hand.). The rest is just BS.
I’ve been watching the NFL since the 50’s no longer!
me too. Football is now typical PC Social engineering crap.
Stopped watching after Kurt Warner retired. I like Aaron Rodgers but with all the other garbage going on with the NFL, no more.
I rarely have time in the Autumn to watch Foolball, that’s crunch time around my place.
Geez, what crap.
I do hate seeing all of the pink crap for a month. I like any player that refuses to wear that garbage. The entirety of the NFL is being overly politicized.
When are they going to replace the American flag on the helmets with a ‘Rainbow Flag’(for ass-pirates and “diversity”) for a month?
I’ve mostly lost interest in it.
My biggest gripes are: (I’ll probably leave out a bunch)
There are so many commercials the game is damn near unwatchable.
Seems no one can block or tackle well anymore. You can have someone running with the ball, with five defenders trying to strip the ball instead of tackling them.
Many of the players act like spoiled brats, showboats, or thugs.
Seems these days, the pass sets up the run(the opposite of how it should be).
They’ve totally screwed up kickoff returns - one of the more exciting parts of a game.
When a player makes a perfectly good hit, the dammed refs will throw a flag for it!!!! WTF!
Feel free to add some more, as I’m SURE there’s more!!!
I have many political and philosophical reasons not to watch football, and I would love to say they are losing viewers due to degenerate personnel and leftist politics, but the main reason I dropped it is that it is boring. 18 minutes of actual play drawn out to 4 hours with time outs and TV breaks. If there is an NFL game on in my house it is generally background noise for whatever else is going on.
Sports, especially played at the professional level, do a lot of damage to players’ bodies. It’s the nature of always running at your highest physical level. They hold up baseball as preferred, have they ever bothered to see what happens to baseball players, especially pitchers and catchers, after their career? It ain’t pretty. The NFL is working on the injuries, concussions were down last year, of course one year is a small sample size so we don’t know if that’s a trend or clustering.
I will be honest: I really enjoy rugby, from what little I get to see online and on some of the more obscure cable channels. I played American football, but the game today barely resembles what I knew.
I stopped watching football when they fired Tom Landry.
Goodell is a corrupt fiend. He’s trying to turn the NFL into the XFL, which was a total flop. He hands out less punishment to his favored teams, encourages fraternization between referees and player, etc.
They unveiled a ray lewis statue in Baltimore today. Plead guilty to obstruction of a murder investigation. Testified as if he was in 2nd grade (so no convictions), and never produced the white suit he was wearing that night.
The nfl and espn are pretty much despicable.
Lack of HGH testing. Thus 300 lb behemoths that can run like cheetahs and heal like wolverine over the course of a NFL season.
Lack of the cool players willing or able to self police the jerkwads. Thus 300lb behemoths doing fruity celebratory dances and chest slapping after mundane plays. Penalty system, modern officiating, multiple camera angles, 16 regular season games preclude them from being policed by fellow players. Instead they have actual dorky rules about ‘excessive celebration’ suitable for 2nd graders.
Lowest common denominator factor of fandom. A sizable majority of football fans seem to love the garbage about the NFL I can’t stand, in fact they can’t get enough of it.
FReegards
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