Holy shit folks, it seems that when I’m stumped for an idea for this column the sports gods (the old and the new) look down upon me and smile. The Lord of Light shows me the way and protects me from the night which is dark and full of terrors…Also, “Winter is Coming.” Anyways, what the sports gods (old and new) did for me was convince Roger Goodell to hand down maybe one of the most ridiculous punishments I have ever seen in sports and that got me thinking (a dangerous thing, I know) that pretty much since he’s been commissioner I have downright loathed the NFL. I still love football and kind of like watching my team suck every year (the watching part, not the sucking, I’ve just gotten used to that), but my enjoyment for the NFL as a whole has just gone down the tube.
Some of this is Goodell’s fault and some of it is just a happy coincidence of his tenure. When I started making this list, it was fucking long, like two parter long that I trimmed down, to 13 reasons, this is how bad it’s gotten folks. I hate soccer, not in a tongue and cheek way for this column but for realsies! And I only mustered 8 reasons, four or five which are legit. Not the NFL though, no, I had to trim it to 13, that’s the kind of bullshit we’re dealing with in 2015 with the NFL, I have more reasons to hate it than an actual sport I hate. So without further ado, in the words of ESPN’s Keith Olbermann, “don’t take this completely seriously, I don’t mean it completely literally” but here are the 13 reasons (and counting) on why I hate the NFL.
The Commissioner: As stated above, Roger Goodell is just the worst. When he was first elected/chosen/selected to rule on high, I was kind of for it, and I don’t think I’ve ever been more wrong in my life (and this includes my first marriage). The players at the time seemed to be running wild, or at least that’s how the media was selling it, then the new sheriff walks in, and I think most of us breathed a sigh of relief thinking that he was going to bring law and order (cue theme music), and he did…kind of.
Some punishments seemed too harsh, others not enough, there was no consistency (more on that later), he just seemed to be making shit up as he went along and most of us were scratching our collective heads. Quickly we learned that the owners had basically selected Grape Ape to rule over the NFL and do their bidding, sicking him on whomever they deemed unworthy (sometimes even their own, right John Mara, you piece of shit, fuck you straight to hell).
Every now and then we get fire side chats with the Commish and every time he opens his mouth I realize just what a haunting dip shit he really is. He talks down to everyone and constantly uses double speak, but unlike some slick big city lawyer he stutters and stammers his way through his bullshit and we know instantly he’s full of it. If you’re going to lie to my face at least make it somewhat believable, I’ve seen better acting in porn (as recently as last night).
Punishments: Going back to punishments, there is no standard for anything until Goodell’s made up rules are broken several times. We now have a standard for drugs (performance enhancing and illicit) but at one time there wasn’t, the Commish would just hand out arbitrary punishments.
Then we had the Saint’s Bounty scandal (side note, I will never refer to anything as insert “gate” here, fuck Watergate for that, PS, Watergate is the name of a hotel here in DC, all of you who use “gate” as some sort of scandal please go just off the top of the Watergate hotel, I fucking hate all of you), and even though it seemed like a dick thing for Greg Williams to do, there wasn’t anything too terribly wrong with it, but the punishments were handed down for two reasons, one, the league was being killed in the media for them just straight up ignoring concussion results and test because, FUCK IT THESE ARE MEN WHO CARES ABOUT THEIR BRAINS!
Also, the bounties were technically a violation of the salary cap (which is the real reason for the suspension, because the NFL doesn’t give two shits about player safety if they’re not being chastised for it). Greg Williams got the brunt of it because he was the ring leader and then poor Sean Payton got bent over and fucked because he was the head coach and his only crime was ignorance, and before you can say “but how could he not know, he’s the head coach…” to you I say, “you’re a fucking moron, do you even know how the modern NFL works?” There is a coach for fucking everything and as long as your coach isn’t a megalomaniac like Mike Shanahan you’re generally given autonomy to run your side of the ball. Greg Williams is an accomplished defensive coordinator (shitty head coach) so Sean Payton let him be, and why wouldn’t he, at the time the Saints had one of the fiercest defenses in the NFL.
And if you don’t think the bounty scandal was all about the salary cap (it was called bounty after all) but fast forward to a couple of years in an un-capped year, a year in which there was no salary cap so in theory a team could go out a pay any free agent any sum of money they wanted for that year. Now no one did this because the owners colluded not to (yeah the NFL isn’t a Monopoly), however, many teams (and I stress many, 15 to be exact) decided to dump salaries of their grossly overpaid and shitty players, two of these teams being the Washington Redskins and Dallas Cowboys, and it just so happened that these two teams were the only two punished.
Why though? Why should they be punished for making a smart move in an uncapped year, especially when half the league was doing the same thing, well dear reader, the answer is John Mara, principle owner of the New York Giants (the rival of Dallas and Washington) is butt buddies with Goodell. So the Ginger Hammer helping out one of his buddies (the other being Bob Kraft) stripped the Redskins and Cowboys of cap space for the next two years.
This pisses me off for two reasons, one fuck Mara, he’s a complete conniving piece of shit who has done nothing with his wealth (that he didn’t ear, he suckled from the teet of his daddy, like a Kardashian, but he’s not in the least attractive) and two, he made me sympathize with the Dallas Fucking Cowboys. You know how much it hurts my soul (if I had one) to feel bad for Cowboys fans, they’re the fucking worst, Mara you put me on their side. I hope you get ass and ball cancer and burn in hell for that shit.
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And now I come to the present with the punishment of the Patriots and Tom Brady (it sucks doesn’t it Kraft and your big ginger Ape turns on you). First off fuck Tom Brady and the Patriots, yes what the league is doing to you is unfair, but still, fuck you. Secondly, four game suspension for deflating balls!? Really, four games? Let’s take this into perspective, a slightly deflated ball, and it was slightly .6 psi, might give Brady a better grip and control but not that much, also we all damn know for sure he’s not the only one doing it.
This isn’t like he paid off officials (I’m not saying he hasn’t though) or you know punched Giselle in an elevator, which as long as no tape gets released by TMZ only gets you two games (though I bet you Giselle likes it rough). No, he slightly deflated balls and he was given four games, but let’s be real here, it wasn’t the deflation, that would have maybe gotten him a fine, maybe, the real transgression was that Tom basically told the league to go fuck themselves when they wanted to seize his phone. How dare he defy the Overlord that is Goodell.
What Goodell demands he gets, and he probably didn’t care about alleged texts between Brady and the ball boy, Good was hoping to find some sweet sweet nudes of Giselle that you know she probably sends to Brady daily. He probably as the 64 GB iPhone just to store all those naughty pics. That’s what Goodell was really after and when he was denied, well the Patriots got fucked. Also, fuck you Goodell for making me side with the Patriots and pretty boy Tom.
The Rule Book: The NFL rule book in general is just one complicated legal document that the officials on the field who are supposed to enforce it don’t understand it. For example, Dez Bryant’s drop against the Packers in the playoffs. To anyone with eyes, that’s a catch, he caught that ball, but in the NFL that’s not a catch, and here is why;
“If a player goes to the ground in the act of catching a pass (with or without contact by an opponent), he must maintain control of the ball after he touches the ground, whether in the field of play or the end zone. If he loses control of the ball, and the ball touches the ground before he regains control, the pass is incomplete. If he regains control prior to the ball touching the ground, the pass is complete.”
Basically that means if you catch the ball either diving or off balance, let’s say you’re stumbling and hit the ground, even if you’ve tucked the ball into your chest but somehow the impact of hitting the ground dislodges the ball then if it touches the ground it’s incomplete. This is fucking insane. It’s insane to the point that it was adjusted once (and probably will be again) that when Calvin Johnson made a diving catch in the endzone against the Bears and set it on the ground before getting back to his feet it was declared an incomplete pass. If a player secures the ball it’s a catch. All of us, in every form of sport know if you secure a ball it’s a catch, not the NFL, they make that art of catching a ball so damn complicated that it takes 5-10 minutes to figure this shit out. I’m glad this stupid rule screwed the Cowboys because fuck them, but still it’s a stupid rule and it’s one of This is just one paragraph of a 120 page rule book, and no, I’m not going to look through this thing for more examples, I feel it would drive me insane, but if you’d like just go to NFL.com.
Thursday Night Games: The players hate Thursday Night Games, the fans are kind of indifferent to them so why do we have them? The answer is simple, so the League can juice more money out of the Networks, that’s it. Also, it’s another example of why the Bounty Scandal was about the money paid and not about player safety. Football is a brutal game and players kind of a need a whole week to recuperate from each game (actually they need more), but fuck their safety, the League needs money!
Thursday games are annoying (also Monday but that’s never going away and probably neither are Thursday games) mostly because they’re played on a work night and we have to wait for the West Coast to get off of work so the games can start, which is 8:30 here on the East Coast, which means if we’re lucky and the refs don’t fuck up too much the game won’t end until 11:30 at the earliest. FUCK THAT! I need my sleep, I have to get up early and get a 7 year old ready for school before I head off to work, going to bed that late just means my morning is going to be fucking miserable. Also, half the time I forget the games are even on and I think just about everyone Thursday game last year was a terrible blow-out that no one enjoyed. Scrap this shit, it’s fine on Thanksgiving, but no more of that shit during the year, not for the whole year, not for half of it. You have enough money NFL, go fuck yourself and your Thursday Night Games.
London Games/Team: The only nice thing about the London games are that it starts before I wake up on Sunday and so that means when I get up there is football already on television, but again, this game like Thursday, is a sham. It’s a novelty that wore off long ago and the players and teams hate it. Also, I have it on good authority from my British friends, the stadium is maybe 15% European, it’s mostly Americans at that game, so fuck your attendance.
England doesn’t care about our football, they’re perfectly happy with soccer and cricket. This is also why moving the Bucs or Jags (because it’s going to be one of them) to London would be a disaster. Attendance there would plummet after a few games because whichever team moved there would be terrible (because both the Jags and Bucs suck) and they would never get better because no one would want to play for them because A. it’s across the damn Atlantic, and B. the British taxes are so criminally insane it forced the Beatles’ George Harrison (the quiet one mind you) to write a song about it and has caused many British celebs to move over here.
This would be a disaster a complete and utter failure… Wait, you know what move a team over there, this season in fact, there is nothing I’d love to see more than the NFL with egg on its face. Or in this case tea and crumpet.
LA: This has been looming for some time, a team moving back to LA. I hate this. First off it gives every disgruntle owner a threat for a new, city funded, stadium. The second any kind of elected official speaks out against a city, county, or state from funding a billion dollar stadium these dickless owners threaten to move to LA. First off, LA doesn’t give a shit about football that isn’t UCLA or USC, hence the Rams and Raiders no longer being there.
Professional sports wise they only care about the Dodgers (kind of) and whichever basketball team is winning, right now that would be the Clippers (side note, LA stole both their teams respectively, the Lakers from Minneapolis and the Clippers from San Diego who were stolen from Buffalo). I get it, LA is a huge market and makes more sense than London, but look LA has survived without the NFL and vice versa. What will happen is a team will move there and play in a giant and expensive publicly funded stadium and within two season the polish will wear off and no one will care again and in a decade that team will leave siting attendance as a reason and then we’re back to the threats of a team moving to LA to a brand new publically funded stadium.
Non-Profit: Up until this year the NFL maintained a non-profit standing with the federal government, which means they didn’t have to pay taxes. In 2014 the NFL earned an estimated nine billion dollars, nine billion dollars that went untaxed. Fuck them!
Charging the Troops: This is one of the more alarming things I’ve heard involving sports in a long time. I was watching my boy Keith Olberman the other night when he talked about something disturbing. You know all those moments before a football game when a troop or troops are “honored” by the NFL, chances are those being honored at the game were bought and paid for with tax dollars.
Meaning, the armed forces paid the NFL for the time like a commercial for recruiting. I am not shitting you on this. I’m all for patriotism but fuck, what are we supposed to do with this, who should we hate more, the NFL for taking this money or the armed forces for using tax dollars on false patriotism? Granted we have sponsored NASCARs and Indy Cars but we know those are ads bought and paid for, this new revelation is sickening because of its deceit.
Blackouts: There was a time when blacking out non-sold-out games made sense. The NFL was a baby league and needed the money. They needed to get the fans out there or else it wouldn’t survive. Now with their nine billion dollars the NFL isn’t going anywhere (unless the Lord of Light sees fit) but yet games still get blacked out all over the country if they don’t sell-out the Thursday before the game.
This is fucking ridiculous. I used to love going to games, it was one of my favorite things as a kid, but as an adult, who has to pay for the ticket, the food, the drinks, and the parking, going to the game isn’t as appealing, especially with my 70 inch big screen, and the fact I can buy a six pack of good beer for the price of one watered down Miller Lite at the stadium. Listen NFL, I get it, you’re a super villain, you want all the monies, but much like Doctor Doom of Latveria, you can cut us peasants some slack and stop blacking out games. If you do this you might not get all the monies but you’ll still have most of it, and isn’t that enough to build your giant death laser on the moon?
Prices: While we’re on the subject, the prices of everything involving the NFL are just insane. As covered, nine dollars for a shitty beer is crazy, not to mention fifty bucks for parking, at least fifty bucks a ticket, food (no matter what you get) will be over ten dollars, and I haven’t even touched on the merchandise. Granted this is an American sports problem and not just an NFL problem, but the NFL has always been the “blue-collar” game.
It was for the everyman but with these prices the everyman has to take out a loan if he wants to take his family to a game, and what does he get for his say $500? Well he probably gets a shitty upper bowl seat surrounded by drunks who will curse and yell in front of his kids and if he dares ask them to calm down then he’s liable to get into a fight. He’s also probably going to have to sit in gridlock going to and from the game, which means a this is an all-day affair. I have done this, all of this, and it’s just the worse. In fact the last time I did this, I had the pleasure of sitting in the cold drizzle at Fed Ex field watching my Skins make the Bucs look like the god damn Seahawks.
Luckily for me, there weren’t any belligerent fans around us. This was my first game back at Fed Ex in a long time because it’s just not a fun experience to go to Redskins games anymore, and honestly I don’t know when I’ll go back (thank god they’re sold out through whenever so I don’t have too).
24/7: The NFL wants us consuming them 24/7. This is why the draft starts on a Thursday now, this is why the league starts on a Thursday now, this is why we have Thursday games, this is why we get coverage of the combine and everything else. God forbid we think of anything else but the NFL and now they want 18 games. By week 17 I’m so sick of football I wish we only had 10 games.
The amount of coverage the NFL gets is exhausting and the two weeks leading up to the Super Bowl are the worst because we run out of things to talk about and so the Networks just create a bunch of fluff pieces. Fuck this, the Super Bowl needs to be played a week after the Conference games and just get rid of the damn Pro Bowl, I guarantee no one would notice.
Madden: No not the former coach/announcer John Madden, he quit annoying me years ago when he retired, though that opened the gates for Chris Collinsworth on Sunday Night Football, so I guess I can still hate Madden for that, no, I’m referring to the game that still bears his name though he’s been away from the NFL for years.
First off the worst part of this game is that it is the only NFL game there is, sure other companies can make their own football games and some are even better (like All-Pro Football 2K8) but it doesn’t have the NFL and NFLPA licenses so not enough people care about them to buy them, though seriously go buy All-Pro, it’s like 3 bucks used. So Electronic Arts has the monopoly on Football games, and it’s a fine game but it gets released every fucking year making the previous game obsolete and rarely are there any innovations to make it worth another 60 bucks.
In fact I would hate this game a lot less if the released a new version every two years and every year just release a patch online for the game to update the rosters and any other minor cosmetic thing, say uniforms or new stadiums for like ten or fifteen bucks. I could be down with that, but nope, we get the same game every year for 60 and little to no changes. This sucks. Back when 2K Games was making NFL games we had true competition for our dollars and I was actually torn sometimes on which to buy, though the last two or three 2K games were better, which is probably what lead EA to unload a ton of money on the NFL.
Though Madden was still outselling NFL 2K, 2K was cutting into their market share. And ever since then, Madden games hardly ever offer up any innovation. You can pretty much pick up any version of the game from the last 10 years and with the exception of graphics, it’s the same game.
The Announcers: With the exception of Fox’s Kenny Albert, Daryl Johnson, and Tony Siragusa team, all of the NFL announcers are fucking terrible. The absolute worst being Phil Simms (close second Chris Collinsworth). The vast majority of the play by play men are just dimwits and somehow no nothing of the sport they’re covering, it’s an amazing feat really. Joe Buck (who I love at baseball) has been doing NFL games for more than a decade now with Troy Aikman, and somehow he still doesn’t know shit about the game, granted that could be because his partner with all of his concussions has the brain power of a five year old, but come on Joe, buy a fuck “NFL for Dummies” book.
And the color commentators, holy shit are they dumb. Granted most of them are former players so it’s not like they’ve had any kind of formal education so I guess the fact that they can string together two or three words and form a sentence we should be proud of them, but I hate this unwritten rule that we have to have a former player calling sports games. Just because you played a sport doesn’t mean you know shit about it, in fact most players don’t. The know their one position and know how to do that. Most of their brains are jelly by the time the leave the league that when they speak on air it rarely makes sense. None of them are that insightful or entertaining. At least Siragusa is fucking entertaining as hell. If the game sucks then it’s Tony’s time to shine. Butting in on the broadcast and talking about whatever the fuck crosses his mind. He’s the best. The NFL is now, more than ever, about entertainment (it’s basically the WWE at this point) so why do we need former football players calling games, team the play by play guy up with someone entertaining and let the good times roll.
Or let’s whatever other sports league does and give us the local announcers on the broadcasts. It’s 2015 I’m pretty sure the local radio guys can call the game on TV and it be simulcast on radio (also, who the fuck still listens on radio, if you’re a true fan your ass should be at home or a bar watching). For the home town teams you get your home town radio announcers and for any game that’s broadcast nationally just give us whichever side, we really don’t care.
For example, the DC area, we’d get the DC radio guys for our games and if we’re playing say Dallas, the Dallas market gets the Dallas radio guys and the rest of the country getting that game gets which ever radio guys Fox feels like broadcasting that game. National games like MNF and SNF (and even TNF, but fuck Phil Simms) would still have those respective Network guys.
This was a long one dear reader, but a damn fine one if I may say so myself, and I just did. So there you have it, the whittled down 13 reasons on why I hate the NFL, you can disagree with me all you want but I you’re wrong and I hate you. However, if you’d like to know more about me, and why wouldn’t you, you can follow me on the Twitter @jomac006 or learn about my awesome writing career here https://www.facebook.com/fjoshuamccain?ref=hl , or if you’re a fine lady you should swipe right on Tinder.
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