Pam Oliver Getting Hit By A Football Works On So Many Levels, And Fails On So Many More

Do More Of This, Pam

This is Fox sideline reporter Pam Oliver in a pre-game moment in tonight's Colts-Giants game, in a clearly viral experience.

Now, here's the problem with this.

I hate sideline reporters. They are, like many aspects of modern football telecasts, pointless wastes of time at best, and utterly pointless annoyances (see Siragusa, Tony, who is really best served as a diaper pitch man, but I digress) at worst. There is nothing that a sideline reporter does that could not be better executed by a faceless PR intern with a Twitter account for injury updates, and the less that we see and hear of athletes, the better. Keep, please, your in-game interviews and coach irritation. Forever.

I also, well, hate Fox. Just a little more than ESPN and NBC and CBS and NFLN, because they try harder, and really earn it. I feel just a little bit more stupid when I watch their games, and they just seem to hire as many ex-Cowboys as humanly possible, just to raise my blood pressure a few ticks more.

So I'd like to just enjoy, without racism or sexism or the inevitable -isms that accompany any viral moment, Oliver's moment of misfortune here. After all, Football In Face is nearly as good as Football In Groin, and that works on so many levels!



I'd also like for NFL players to see if they can work in Hitting The Sideline Reporter as part of their routine pre-game ritual, and for such a thing to become a meme. That would be, well, A Hoot, and the No Fun League needs more hoots.

But then there are the commenters, and... dammit, you people ruin everything. I won't share the worst, but it went to worst really, really quickly. Not to the point of making me feel sorry for Oliver, but to the point of taking away all of the joy of Football In Face.

The Internet: Where We Can Have Nice Things... so long as we don't let anyone comment on them. (Or, at least, moderate the hell out of said comments.)