American Football (NFL)
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Yeah, it's one reason I'm slowly falling out of love with football @Jett129 . It just seems too arbitrary, has a shitty rulebook that is inconsistently applied and requires more human judgment calls than are necessary (the rules defining catches are dumb, a fumble through the end zone awarding possession to your opponent without them actually doing anything to secure the football is dumb, the replay system has strange exemptions from challenge, and I could go on), Goodell runs the league as his personal fiefdom and drops the axe on a player smoking a little weed while letting much more serious offenses like domestic abuse effectively run rampant, the very real TBI issues they somehow skated by on (honestly this should've been a death sentence–this is now almost gladiatorial combat knowing what happens to these players), their classification of the league as a tax-exempt organization that IMO is unearned, their owners' reliance on the public to subsidize stadiums so that we taxpayers can enjoy the privilege of paying $1 an ounce for shitty beer down the road, etc.... Why is the NFL on welfare?
Football is especially vulnerable to officiating nonsense because of the paucity of plays relative to most other major sports and the lack of continuous play that sports like soccer, hockey, and to a lesser extent basketball have. So bungling a single call can have an outsized impact, and it just keeps happening at the most consequential moments. So why be a fan if they can't consistently and fairly officiate and your blood, sweat, and tears are so easily overridden and everything seems, if not rigged, very vulnerable to rigging? How do Saints fans not believe that the officiating on that final drive was not a deliberate effort to get the old-new major market team in the Super Bowl?
If the game were more about strategy and athleticism and less about the zebras it would make it easier to be a fan. If feels like it used to be that way, but I could be misremembering.
Still love the game, but it has some very serious issues that are hard for me to get past.
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I agree 100% with everything you said and you said it quite eloquently,but at this point it's the only sport my wife and I enjoy. We both watch it and end up shaking our heads at times. I don't watch as much as I used to. There was an NBA ref who went to prison for fixing games and subsequently wrote a book about it. Surprised it's never happened in the NFL.
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My wife's first and really only sport she'll watch with me is baseball. While the strikezone is occasionally arbitrary, the rules are clear and more often than not there a solid.element of strategy involved (I'm a National league guy, boooo universal DH). I was real big on football until the eagles won the Superbowl (legit thought I'd never see it) and since then it's become.somethung of a slog to watch. Penalities and officiating are ruining the NBA and NFL for me.
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@mclaincausey your rant is bitter and angry in all the right places. I approve.
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hehe @Matt
@Joberwocky I love baseball and I always have. I'm sure you'll be shocked to learn that I have some controversial opinions about how THAT game is officiated as well:
At this point, we don't need umps to call balls and strikes or fairs and fouls. We have the technology to do that very easily in real time with the video images that are taken at every game, or other technology like RFID in the balls or photoelectric beams. Believe it or not, I am somewhat of a traditionalist (seeing intentional walks not have actual pitches makes me sick), and the way that I would reconcile modernizing the quality and consistency of calls with that reverence for the traditions of baseball would be having the up see a red or a green light in his mask and make the call the old fashioned way, only correctly.
I don't like the "game within a game" where certain pitchers and hitters will work umpires. Or sometimes, a pitcher's windup or the action he puts on the ball makes it much more difficult to assess balls and strikes. It's fair to trick the hitter, but it's not fair to trick the umpire, or for the umpire to make calls with prejudices. I remember when umps were afraid to call strikes on Barry Bonds or balls on Greg Maddux. Screw that. I get earning respect, but to me that's people being afraid to pitch you inside, not the ump bending over for you.
The common thing you'll see in these rants is I want fairness and for the athletes and coaches to determine the outcomes: not the officials, who should just sort of blend into the background.
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@mclaincausey I entirely agree
I love that certain pitchers have such crazy arm slots or deliveries that a hitter can't make heads or tails of what's coming down the chute. That is skill. I don't live an umpire arbitrarily deciding that for this inning everything 4" off the plate is a strike. I also think "framing" by catchers is bullshit. If there's a better system for balls and strikes, MLB owes it to the players and the fans to adopt. I don't care that an umpire might have a wide strike zone. What I care about is their ability to reliably enforce it ALL game and not start giving up in later innings.
Game within the game-wise, I think pitchers should hot and keeping your starter late into a game should be a calculated risk at the expense of offense. Small ball, suicide squeezes, being a terror on the base paths and bunting: sign me up. Some own coming in to get a single out, big NOPE (which is why I like the 3 batters rule now) -
I wisely (or not?) Stayed up for the whole thing, couldn't believe the fourth quarter and OT of that game
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How about those Steelers?
I can't believe how bad they stink. -
@Matt @Oaktavia , I'm here to start a friendly rivalry. Packers coming to town. How are you feeling ?
Like we have a crapton of players out including Jackson and Humphrey…but I'm excited to see what Huntley can do again. Packers are a team I respect and if we lose it won't hurt as bad compared to us losing our two last divisional games. But a W would be crucial and in true Ravens fashion to win against monster teams but lose to the fucking Dolphins.
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Right. Being a Ravens fan is equal parts pride and confusion. I’m grateful to have a consistently good team, much like the Packers, but having to win against the good teams because we can’t manage to beat the crappy ones is tough to deal with.
Anything can happen but I’ll be watching with my finger on the remote ready to abort if shit goes sideways.
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I watched (most of) the Colts beating the Patriots last night. Much of the Colts attacking play was one-dimensional but very effective. Jonathan Taylor is a phenomenal player.
but now the Bengals are right below my Ravens.
