Post-Con, Or The Non-Dallas Dallas Week

Now With Removable Hat

It's Dallas Week for the football laundry, with first place in the NFC lEast on the line, and the Eagles trying to, yet again, walk into the no home field advantage Jerry Jones Pre-Emptive Mausoleum and come out with a win. So that means it's time to beat the drums about what it all means to DeMarco Murray to come to his former home, how Sam Bradford is going to react to the closest thing he'll ever get to a homecoming (he's from Oklahoma, which might be the most interesting thing about him, really), the return of Kiko Alonso (still not wearing a knee brace, that'll work out well) and so on.

Wait, what, actually... no one's talking about any of that.

Instead, what's hitting the air in town this week is how Chip "Nero" Kelly is going to go to Tennessee, now that Ken Whisenhunt has been handed a cardboard box, and the team is in the dreaded Interim stage, so he can be close to Marcus Mariota again. Or that Colin Kaepernick or Robert Griffin The Who Cares is going to come to town in the off-season, once the team hands Bradford his own cardboard box. Or that hey, the Sixers exist and have a rookie big man that looks a little bit fun, or, at least, more fun than anything the Eagles are doing right now. Temple Football! Whoops, they lost, but still -- that was fun! The Flyers do anything that make you not want to drink? Ah well. And so on, and so on.

The point is this. You get about two to three hours of actual Eagles football -- live plays, roughly 11 minutes of actual viewership spread over a game telecast -- per year. You've seen about the first half of it. And no one really wants to see the second.

This is, I think, the most savage and telling failure of Nero's era. We're a little over 40 games into it, and it's not just that the NFL has caught up to all of his innovations (well, the winning ones; the losing ones, they never had to catch up to). It's not just that his tempo isn't all that faster than what good teams do, when it makes sense, rather than all the time. It's not that his team is even all that more unwatchable than most of the other teams out there. The NFL, as a product, has been putting an increasing amount of bleach in the heroin in every game, what with committee meeting officiating, substandard QB play for over 2/3rds of the teams, and every play bordering on criminality (pass interference versus picks in the passing game, holding versus injury fakery, soccer player dives for calls, don't touch the QB without filing a memo while wearing extra Nerf on your shoulder pads, and so on, and so on).

It's not just that Nero has made me dislike watching this team. Hell, Cap'n Andy did that; every failed Eagle coach does that.

It's that the entire scam has made me lose hope for the games to *ever* be, well, fun to watch.

I can't be alone in this. That's got to be part of why everyone is looking for a new savior (Kaepernick! Griffin! Sanchez! New Coach!).

 That's the special gift in being conned.

You hate the con man.

But you also also hate yourself for being conned.

A lot more, actually.