Dammit, We Were Promised A Trainwreck

So the word on the Internets is that an NFL labor deal is 80 to 85 percent done, and that progress has been going great... so good, really, that there's still hope for a normal training camp year and a full schedule of games.

And I suppose that I should be, along with everyone else in Blogfrica, happy to hear the news. We can all go back to caring too much about the games, ranking players for our fantasy leagues without wondering if it's even more of a timewaste than usual, planning road trips and buying jerseys and just forgetting the last 3+ months of hateful stupidity never happened... and well, isn't this just kind of a letdown, really?

I was, in some perverse way, really looking forward to this, kind of in the same way that you really look forward to seeing twisted metal by the side of the road after being trapped in a traffic jam. Dammit, we've *earned* some carnage for the years of threats and fear. If they walk this down in a safe and sane manner, it's going to be like the fall of the Berlin Wall all over again -- a stumbling half decade of wandering around, not having anyone or thing to hate. You know what we got the last time that happened? Grunge rock. The birth of reality television. Newt Gingrich. In other words, small cancerous growths that never, ever go away. Much like Roger Goodell, Jerruh Jones, Jerry Richardson and everyone else involved in this game of brinksmanship will just be grinning at you for decades.

But take hear, disaster lovers: 15 to 20 percent is still more than a fair chance of all of this going straight down the memory hole, and a thermonuclear wave of self-immolation happening on the most hubristic men on the planet. The cleansing fire of player leagues, contraction, declining ratings, social media and Flash mob uprisings, and maybe even the occasional Unfortunate Incidence of Violence And/Or Assassination. Stout heart!