Spikes and Circuses

This is ok now, right?

So the No Fun League has decided that, after talking to ex-players who can still form sentences, that perhaps crapping all over post-touchdown emotions was, um, a poor idea. So now you get to use the ball as a prop, roll around on the ground, and celebrate with your teammates! Almost as if you were grown men with free will!

I hate to tell the powers that be how to do their gig, because some part of me would rather spend that time on acts of endlessly satisfying petty vandalism to their suits and cars... but, um, in the grand scheme of all that's wrong with pro football, the fact that you've been tightasses about spikes is about 50th on the list.

Here's a thought for matters of higher precedence: figure out what a catch actually is. Then explain it to the rest of us in ways that don't take an engineering degree or a background in interpretive dance. Then figure out what pass interference is, both on the offense and the defense. Then, miracle of miracles, call it consistently, whether it's on the road team, the home team, or the teams from New England and Dallas.

Got that taken care of? Great, now let's move on to the fact that you so underserve the market with an absurd amount of commercials, horrible games on nights that should never have football or or continents that don't have teams, and you don't relegate / promote to stagger games over the course of the year and create Real Drama at both the top and bottom of the standings. (The reason why you don't do this, of course, is that you are robber baron anti-capitalist thugs who secretly hate the free market, because the free market would take the utter and complete fish away from your table, and you wouldn't have a decade and a half of beating up on the Jets and Racial Slurs to prop up other franchises. You cowardly, cowardly tools. But I digress.)

Gotten rid of Terrible Night Football and the worst thing in the UK since Trump's last visit? Great, now let's move on to your broadcast crews, most of whom make decent people spit. I don't know anyone on the Earth who wants to hear a damned thing that Phil Simms says, and he might not even be the worst people working. (He probably is, but let's just avoid the wallow.) You routinely treat the audience as if it were as brain-dead as the ex-players, when in reality there's an enormous bucket of nerds who would happily stat out to all of the things they think about, especially if they've got a wager or six on the games.

Fixed all of that? Wow, you've had a busy day! Now you might want to move on to the rampant sexism and homophobia that permeates the place, the still-present racism that makes it unlikely for blacks to coach and spectacularly unlikely that they'd ever get the chance to own, the continuing thumb in the eye of decency that is the DC Team Name, the naked theft of teams from their markets...

Oh, but you don't actually want to fix any of that, do you, Roger? Because fixing any of that would take effort, and possibly money, and you are just looking for, well, empty gestures.

So by all means, spike the ball and dance, folks. It's the farthest the NFL is going to go to "fix" anything.

Because to them, nothing is really broken, or will ever be.

Must be nice to live in cocoon of money and privilege, right?