Last (Hopefully) Points On Aaron Rodgers

This week, America’s favorite football/public health expert, Green Bay (For The Moment) QB Aaron Rodgers, gave his post-mortem on the season. The only real point of which that anyone will remember was how all of the pro-vax people were rooting against his team, because he’s not vaccinated. (Something something, free thinker sheep I tune out people of bad faith when they talk because that’s what you should do when people of bad faith talk.)

Now folks, I am strongly of the opinion that athletes should be watched, in games, and not heard. But since that’s not how the world works, we get to reply to such nonsense.

1) Um, what does it matter? I don’t think the karmic wishes of the majority of the country (because the majority of the country are not, in fact, Packers or Rodgers fans) had much to do with you spitting the bit against the Niners. Especially since you were at home. Were you only good before because, like Tinker Bell, we all clapped?

 2)     If true, wouldn’t this have been (yet another) reason to get vaccinated? We’re still waiting to see what exactly all of you brave non-conformers / active members of Team Virus are winning for all of this pain and sacrifice. Besides, you know, attention.

 3)     I know you like to keep changing the subject away from how you’ve lost yet another home playoff game, let alone after a bye week, but… isn’t the whole reason why you became Public Health Enemy #1 isn’t just that you are idiotically unvaccinated, but that you also lied your ass off about it? Plenty of Chokey QBs (Hello, Carson Wentz! Take a fat load off from a socially responsible distance) have been unvaccinated and hurt their teams. You seemed to have been the only one to lie (and lie, and lie) about it.

 4)     Isn’t Packer Fan ready to move on from this? You had the whole ugly end of the Brett Favre era to live with, what with the Viking sojourn and the Jets dick pix. It’s not like Rodgers, as he enters the Bloated Ego Supernova stage of his career, is going to get better, more humble, less exasperating in anything that isn’t Game, or develop the ability to actually come through when it matters. (And no, you probably aren’t, because there’s nothing about Jordan Love right now that screams can’t wait to get to see more of him, but still. Trust me. As someone who no longer has to root for Carson Wentz, there are advantages to getting a Covid Queen QB out of town.)

 5)     State Farm, why do you want your brand associated with this? Insurance is enough of a commodity / similar product that I sure as hell do not want any part of a premium to go into the pocket of this asshat – or that this sentiment is completely unique to me.

 Or the, um, vast majority of football fans that aren’t Packer or Rodgers fans. As the man himself said, very few of them these days!

Please Do Not Watch The Winter Olympics

This next week, the Winter Olympics will start in China, and I’m here to tell you that, following the decades-long tradition of this blog…

We are not going to watch any of it, nor write about it either.

Why?

Well, I don’t care about the sports. You don’t either, unless you follow them outside of the Olympics.

And you don’t.

I don’t care about the athletes. If you know one of them and are rooting for them, great. But you don’t, and the only real reason you are watching them is because they have flags for laundry.

The country you are from is, well, where your parents banged. Not exactly a reason to care about someone more than someone else. It’s all just laundry. Feel free to care for your country when it comes to politics or trade or policy or whatever, but when it comes to which athletes are wearing which flags while they play a sport that I could not care about? Hard pass.

So I *never* care about the Olympics… and then we add on to the fact that they are being held in a place where\

1) an active genocide may be happening (Uyghurs)

2)  the free press is getting silenced (Hong Kong)

3)  the environment is getting degraded (coal plants)

4) land is being made to infringe on the ocean rights of neighboring countries, regardless of the environmental impact (South China Sea)

5) the environment is getting degraded even more for this event (fake snow in a region that, um, does not get snow)

6) the freedom to point out any of this does not exist (great firewall)

7) Team Virus will win (because Team Virus has won at every Olympics)

Now, I get that everyone in the United States lives in a glass house, stone-wise. There’s nothing being done to the Uyghurs that this country did not do (possibly with multipliers) to the indigenous and African Americans. The free press is taking it on the chin around the globe. If a country had the ability to make more land, they would.

But none of that gets tied to having to watch people play sports on various forms of frozen water, just because you have a flag on your chest.

Stop the Olympics! We’ll all be glad you did.

Peak Football Means Non-Peak Football Soon

Full Marks

This NFL playoff season has been unreal. Every game in the last two weekends has been insanely close, there is a crop of great young quarterbacks, the ratings are up from last year, and no one is talking about concussions anymore. There are, of course, still concussions, but when the world goes on stop-start hold for two years due to a once in a century (we hope) pandemic, some non-working heads are going to get ignored.

And on some level, I can’t help but wonder if we will look back on this as the high-water mark.

College football, which is the feeder system to the NFL, has become something that’s mostly an afterthought in much of the country. Parents of well-to-do children routinely turn down football for their kids, steering them to sports with a far lower chance of permanent injury. Soccer and basketball get the kids with skills, and MMA gets the kids with bloodlust. High schools, already hard-hit by the pandemic, match that same regional pattern.

For the most part, this does not matter so long as there is good quarterbacking. But despite decades of more and more throwing at every level, good quarterbacking is still pretty hard to find. Most guys who tear it up at lower levels do so from system work, or rely on legs that don’t last very long in this league. If you aren't watching good quarterbacking, you need the games to be close if your team isn't in it, and after an absurd stretch of close games, we have to regress to the mean at some point.

Finally, there’s the game itself. Officiating is a constant source of annoyance. The rules change on a yearly basis, always in the direction of less of what older viewers recognize as the game. People under 25 are the least likely age group in the U.S. to be fans. The people who televise the game (especially ESPN) continue to dilute it to make it more palatable to a less interested audience.

I don’t doubt that football will continue to be the biggest thing on television and a massive commerce point. It’s the only live event we all still do appointment television for, and the people who have always watched it will always watch it. 

Bad NFL games get watched. 

Good ones get watched more.

And it's really hard to see games get any better, or even stay as good, as the last six...

Let's Get Wasted

Screamin' A Wasting Decibels?

Here in the greater Philadelphia area, we are witnessing one of the greatest stretches by a single basketball player in the history of the team, and likely the league. Joel Hans Embiid has been playing every game and has 17 straight games with over 25 points, second only to Saint Allen Iverson for doing a thing like that for a whole bunch of games in a row. Philly is 13-4 in that stretch, rising in the Eastern Conference and Atlantic Division rankings, and it’s all, you see…

A tragic, tragic waste.

You see, we’re all omniscient here, and we all know that the Sixers don’t have enough to win a championship, and we’re just wasting Peak Embiid. (Full disclosure: I’d also bet that is probably true.) Unless and until they trade the softest NBA player to ever get a maximum contract for reinforcements (no need to say his name, the world is better when he is ignored), it’s all so, so tragic.

To which, um, the following question…

How long is Joel Embiid’s peak, anyway?

Seeing how all of these Tragic Folks are omniscient. (Could you have given me a heads up on the Bengals winning in Kansas City? Papa needs some winning bets from the omniscient.)

I’ve seen Joel fall down a few hundred times in my life, almost all of them more than a little bit alarming. We’ve seen the man get a very serious case of Covid just this year. We’ve seen him sit out two entire years at the start of his career, and many of us were probably thinking Sam Bowie vibes at some point during that not very pleasant Process.

Also, um, how long do you have left in your life, anyway?

We had a big old blizzard this weekend, which meant I had to shovel a lot. My chest has been hurting ever since. It’s nothing serious, but I never had anything like that happen after snow shoveling before, and once you get on the wrong side of (not saying), your social media and news feed is just going to start filling up with more and more people who are your age, and now are not.

Or, shorter: nothing is permanent. Everything is on loan.

No one’s life is more important than yours to you.

So yes, it would be wonderful if Joel gets great teammates and wins a championship at the time when he might be the best player in the world. It would also be wonderful, as a Sixers fan, if Tyrese Maxey is a very big part of a championship team early in his career. It would also be fine to see that Doc Rivers can do more than have good regular seasons and add a second championship. He certainly seems to have the ego for it. It would be lovely to see Tobias Harris shake off the doubters and his own Covid case to spend the rest of this year playing like the last week, where he has been a fine third banana and decisive with the ball. It would be adorable to see this slow and dough team get as fit as their leader and learn to like crushing opponents as much as they seem to like each other. 

(Left unsaid: how utterly delightful it would be to see the Sixers win with no contribution from the Soft Boy, and *then* trade him. Without a parting ring. Especially since the team seems to be doing just *fine* on the chemistry front without him.)

There’s never a bad time for the fans of a team to win a championship. Joel Embiid’s legacy as a basketball player should not be defined by things, like the rest of his roster, that he can not control or influence. Basketball players are not general managers (well, LeBron James might be), and if you already know how Embiid’s career is going to end…

Well, why are you watching the games, anyway? Me, I watch sports because I *don’t * know what will happen and I’m emotionally invested in the outcome. You? You seem to just be here to say I told you so, for the incredible prognostication power of saying that a team won’t win a championship. (Fun fact: most teams don’t win championships. And yet, many of them are still worth watching, and fun for their fans to watch.)

Personally, I’m going to try to live in the moment when I watch Joel, because he provides an absurdly large number of good ones.

You omniscient people might want to as well.

Because you’re wasting a hell of a career by not really appreciating what’s in front of you.

Blood Taboos

Um, Ew

Confession time: when I can’t find something more compelling to watch, I watch pro wrestling. When it’s good, if a particular performer is involved (Bryan Danielson and CM Punk, mostly because the former is a genius physically, and the latter is a genius verbally), it’s fun. It’s more fun knowing that you are not putting money in the pocket of people who were Trump donators and officials (that’d be the WWE). Now that AEW is in ascendance, I watch that promotion.

Which led to the recent experience of cringe-watching a tag team match between four women, where the stipulation was “street fight”. That means it is a car crash match where the performers will beat on each other with weapons, and probably bleed, because there is only so much one can do to not make matches like this, well, a car crash.

I’m not a fan of this sort of thing. Blood is a taboo for a reason, and we are still in a pandemic, for heaven’s sake. (Yes, not a blood-based one, but still.)

But when guys do this, it does not provoke the same reaction. Guys, I mostly just shrug and go, well, garbage wrestlers are going to garbage wrestle. If it’s not a garbage match and there is still blood, it’s queasy but mostly something I can ignore.

But these four women, all of them in the prime of their lives, all of them athletically and esthetically appealing?

I just don’t want to see it. It takes me out of the sense of where is this going (um, to the place where the tables break and someone is picking thumb tacks out of their butt), and into the place of why does anyone want to see this, let alone me. It goes from wow, these performers can really “go” to wow, these are desperate human beings that are doing a degrading thing for money. And equating the reaction of those at ringside as caring anything about them as individual performers, and everything to the reaction of hey lookie that somebody almost really got hurt for serious.

Whether that’s patriarchal, patronizing, infantilizing, chivalrous or chauvinistic is entirely in the eyes of the beholder.

Mostly, I just think I’m old and squeamish.

And unapologetic about either condition.