No More Football

This is the year.  I'm finally doing it.  I am not watching football.  I'm sick and tired of it.  It's not just the Lions' perennial ineptitude.  It's not the overbearing sense of commercialism or skyrocketing ticket prices or any of that.  I'm just tired of the product.  I've been disillusioned by playoffs and that stupid "any given Sunday" gobbledygook.  No longer does the best team win, but the team who decided to get hot at the right time.  And most of all I'm turned off by the games themselves.

It used to be, not too long ago, that what happened on the field stayed on the field.  By that, I mean that if a player scored a touchdown, it was a touchdown.  If he caught a pass or sacked the quarterback, it was considered a catch or a sack.  We knew when to cheer and when to jeer.  It was, once upon a time, so simple.  But then came instant replay.  "We have the technology, so why not use it?!" they said, thinking they were improving the sport.  Little did they know that they were turning it into a shell of itself.  Now when I watch a game, I don't know what to do.  Every play is dissected by the talking heads and shown at six different angles.  We're all left guessing as to the "real" result of the play, as if having the ability to catch a sideline pass with one toe on the out of bounds line shows any less skill than being a quarter of an inch in bounds.  But we have the technology, so now we can see it!  But at what cost?  Games are being stretched out to interminable lengths and are being decided by judgement calls based on what the cameras pick up.  Everybody has turned into a referee, analyzing every situation and making decisions.  It seems like the games have become a surgical science.  The human element has been completely stripped away, to be replaced by computers that know everything.  I'm to the point of thinking that next the players are going to no longer be on the field.  Rather, we'll just simulate everything and come up with our answers.  I mean, since players can no longer hit each other for fear of another judgement penalty or stifling fine, what else is there?  It's just a bunch of standing around and flinging the ball around the field, occassionally interrupeted by another referee whistle.

I don't know when I became so bitter.  Maybe it was the referee fiasco.  Maybe it was when every single play became reviewable, and the number of challenge flags didn't matter anymore because all replays started coming from the booth.  Perhaps it was the day of the Calvin Johnson non-catch, when everything I thought I knew about football was tossed out.  It could have been the day that I realized that I couldn't cheer a play anymore because I never knew if it was coming back.  Nothing in football is final.  I hate it.  It's such a tease.  I'm out this year.  The games are too slow, with no rhyme or reason for certain rules or other penalties.  It's just not exciting anymore.  I'm out.