Football: Evidence of Devolution

We're halfway through professional baseball season. That means that sportswriters are now writing about the upcoming football season. The latest issue of The Sporting News dedicated about a third of its pages to a "Football Preview." It was a sad thing to see. It was tantamount to seeing the coverage of a thoroughbred race being interrupted to speculate on the outcome of the novelty daschund race.

The popularity of American football in the United States has always been a mystery to me. The game has no flow. It reminds me of an old lawnmower I once owned that would run for thirty seconds and then stop, run for thirty seconds and stop, run for thirty seconds and stop. Some people like to say that football is a form of bloodless warfare and is thus the most noble of sports. If football is a form of warfare, it's the most primitive form. It is a game for men who have neither learned to use tools nor the fact that a ball, once caught,can actually be thrown again. In the latter respect, the game of rugby shows more intelligence.

The football players, in the field, are hardly recognizable as human. The average NHL goalie wears less padding. Football players on the field look more like Battlebots being controlled by ten year old boys with joysticks than humans. I've always found it interesting that football fans like to brag about how tough their heroes are while ignoring the fact that rugby players are regularly tackled and yet wear no padding.

Also, consider the behavior of football fans. Take the Oakland Raiders' Black Hole, for example. The Black Hole is a group of fans who buy seats in a bloc. They often paint their faces like skulls, wave scythes, try to intimidate opposing teams by acting like their idea of drunken pirates. Each football team has it's version of the Black Hole and the behavior of such fans really doesn't say much good about the average football fan. Football fans are cultic in a way that baseball fans aren't.

Football is a thuggish game and this is reflected by the criminal records one finds when perusing the rosters of NFL teams. Every year we're entertained by stories of player X of team Y being arrested for robbery, drugs or rape. And while the same things sometime happen in MLB and the NBA, such occurrences are much more rare than they are in the NFL.

Football is an urban game and has all the art and charm of a pair of cattle cars slamming together in a stockyard. It is a game that appeals to people who want to see intermeshed gears trying to turn and waiting to see which gear is torn apart.

But if football is your game I can only say that I hope you enjoy it. I don't begrudge you watching your game of stalls and grinds. But you really might want to consider buying an ant farm and watching that instead.