Matthew Fabian
Mfabian1@uwyo.edu
In an earlier article, Nate Forest claimed that football is nothing more than people standing around with people slightly below them also standing around.
That statement was so erroneous, that Roger Goodell actually spat out his steak and martini while thinking about his $44 million salary.
To start, I’m going to make a couple concessions. 1) Football players suck. Ray Rice, Ray Lewis, Greg Hardy are all examples of why football players are not always upstanding members of their community. They certainly can be (Peyton Manning buying a bunch of pizza stores right before pot was legalized in Colorado comes to mind), but these scumbags are usually brought up in an argument against football. My response: that’s an ad hominem attack on the sport. Just because John Wilkes Booth was an actor does not mean acting is a bad profession. 2) Football sucks for your brain. It just does. Getting 500 concussions and then becoming addicted to pain medication to combat the concussions is not good for you. Fortunately, Roger is already back to his New York strip steak and missed that last part. Football lives!
Football brings up feelings of instant pride among fans of the sport, which happens to be extraordinarily large. When I think of football, I think of the autumn wind. Images of Odell Beckham Jr.’s insane catch pop into my mind. Seeing performances like Brett Favre setting records only days after his father died, on Monday Night Football. That’s what makes football great, and inherently an extraordinary sport.
My point being, I think the argument against football missed the point. It did not take in account of the emotional aspect of the game. The aspect where fans sit outside in frigid, bad weather during the mid-winter months to support their team, and bond with complete strangers across 6 inches of aluminum metal benches. The aspect where communities connect every Sunday for four months with no questions asked. A personal aside, I remember growing up in Denver, and grocery stores were completely empty while the Broncos were on T.V. Then other communities, like Green Bay, take their fandom to an entirely different level. This is what makes football a great sport.
I enjoyed Nate’s argument against the sport. It raised good points. There is a lot of inaction throughout the course of a game. Commercial breaks are obscenely long, and I get damn tired watching the same eight commercials all Sunday. It isn’t perfect, just look at the concessions I made earlier. Those are not light accusations against the sport, those are life threatening to the game. All things a competent Commissioner would address and squash, immediately.
Football is not a terrible sport, it is just heading towards life support.
