As a kid, I remembered my mom's birthday because it's three days after Charlie Joiner's birthday. Friends, lovers and relatives know better than to try to converse with me when the game is on. Yes, I'm that much of a football fanwhore.
But the last few years have tried my patience, and not just because my favorite team blows. I was more enthusiastic about the team and the game when they went 1-15. It just appears that bit by bit, Roger Goodell is killing the goose that has laid so many golden eggs. They've basically banned defense to the point where a 4000 yard passing season is nothing special (if the Broncos and Panthers pick up where they left off last year, there will be a rash of new rules). Blocking and tackling are lost arts, and the referees keep getting worse at their jobs -and that's just counting their blunders. For the last few seasons there are at least four or five games where the officiating is so bad and so one-sided that the league might as well change its name to NFLE.
Quite frankly, the Deadspin "Why Your Team Sucks" columns at the beginning of the season and the speculation on which coaches/GM will end up on Tower Hill come Black Monday have been more interesting to me than the game itself. It takes a series of colossal fuck-ups to dampen my interest in the NFL but sure enough Goodell and Co. have done it.
But that's not what has killed my interest in football. The latest stadium extortion scams by the Chargers, Raiders, Falcons and Redskins have finally broken the camel's back as far as I'm concerned. These welfare billionaires want the taxpayers to buy them stadiums that the team will, at best use TEN times a year. FUCK THAT! I'd like to see Congress and state legislatures would outlaw the use of taxpayers' money for these money pits.
So I'm sour on the game, told DirecTV I don't want Sunday Ticket (after 20 straight seasons) and was looking forward to finding new hobbies for my Sunday afternoons...
But then a bunch of homegrown fascist fuckwads got their dander up because a black man, disgusted with the way some police use the dark-skinned folk for target practice and walk free, refused to stand at attention for the shittiest national anthem written by a slave owner who took perverse pleasure in longing for the deaths of free black people*, robbed them (threatening to sell them as slaves if they complained) and used government power to harry abolitionists. So now I'm a Colin Kaepernick fan. Just when I thought I was free of the NFL, they draw me back in!
* From the third verse:
Honestly, I don't see how anyone would be enthusiastic about any part of this godawful song after reading the whole thing. So fuck the Freikorps-types who have attacked Kaepernick (the latest smear is that he just converted to be a Mooslum on the orders of his communist girlfriend).No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Oh, and the Panthers should kick the bitter dogshit out of the Donkeys.
Kansas City (their offense looked great last year without Charles, and now they are throwing him back in the mix, so I expect similarly impressive results. Their pass-rush will struggle, though.)
