I was never a sports guy, but through high school and college I managed to stay half-way informed about football and watched at least a few games a year. I could even hold my own for a few minutes of sports small talk. These days, I’m totally disconnected from that world. Here I will offer some reasons on why that might be and why I really just can’t get into football anymore.
The main reason is because I don’t play Madden anymore. Put another way, playing Madden was the only thing that ever truly got me interested in football.
Most people’s interest in football probably arises from some sense of community they have regarding their team — they grew up Cowboys fans or their alma mater is Auburn. I too have my loyalties based on geography and tribal affiliation — the Saints for NFL and Mississippi State for college — but it would have never been enough on its own to make me a sports guy who tunes in regularly. In my opinion, the tribal bonds are only fun when you’re going to the game, tailgating, etc., which I don’t get around to doing all that often.
Madden was what kept my brain thinking about football month after month on a regular basis, but I've been too disabled to play most video games for a long time now. It was the primary way I kept up with my favorite teams and who was on their roster. The interactive nature of it made it fun. I find it boring keeping up with this stuff in the news.
Watching it on TV is also not great. For one thing, I don’t even know how to operate my TV. It’s one of those situations where there’s two or three remotes. And we cancelled cable a long time ago and no one’s turned on the TV in the living room in ages. And I don’t want to pay for expensive subscriptions to watch online.
Because I don’t even like watching it. I liked playing it. On Madden. Watching other people do something for 3-4 hours is boring.
But I don’t think it’s just me. Football has done a lot on its own to make itsellf boring over the years. Mainly by adding more ways to stop the game time:
That was what was refreshing about soccer for the two months I once got into it — the clock just kept going most of the time. They should do that for football too. I say limit it to two timeouts per team, get rid of all challenges and two-minute warnings, and keep the clock running even for incomplete passes and out-of-bounds runs. Why should the clock stop because you missed a pass? That seems like a reward for failing.
A lot of people will defend challenges tooth-and-nail, because the instant-replay reveals so any bad calls. I say stop whining about a few bad calls. Often the challenge is over something ridiculous, like whether one molecule of the football went over the endzone. I’m sorry, but maybe you just don’t deserve that touchdown if it takes state-of-the-art, slow-motion cameras at three different angles to verify it. I believe old football rules used to be that you had to get your whole body into the endzone. We should go back to that.
Besides, if challenges are supposed to prevent people from complaining about bad calls by giving a space to correct them, it doesn’t seem to be working. I feel like anger over bad calls is all I hear about from football fans.
While I’m airing my football grievances, I would also like to call into question passing interference. Why should that be illegal? Isn’t the whole point of playing defense to interfere with the other team catching the ball or otherwise progressing down the field?
Sorry for the ranting nature of this post. Just trying to keep up my streak of blogging every month so far this year, and it seemed like the perfect opportunity to get this off my chest.