The League has problems way beyond anthem kneeling. To ad-lib Hal Holbrook from The Star Chamber: Someone has stolen football and hidden it in the NFL. There’s more real football going on between the neighborhood kids out in a vacant lot than the League’s coliseums.
The game has become more distraction than game. Every play abruptly punctuated by some silly celebratory dance, mind-numbing booth analysis and a flag. And cannot resume again without a huddle by the zebras, the marching off of penalty yards and a commercial.
Football was never meant to be perfect. Or fair. The game is a battle of wills and brute force. It was meant to be played. And it was meant to hurt.
But in an effort to make the game perfect, the League has made it intolerable. Mistakes in play and errors in judgment ought to be essential ingredients to an imperfect game played by imperfect men. Any call that requires slow motion and freeze-frame to get right is too close to fret over. The refs should have one job: To halt the brawling long enough to spot the ball and haul off the mangled, then mock and ridicule. So, the call went against you – so what? Any game lost on a blown call was a game never won.
Winning is just a way of keeping score. What matters is the game. Or the next game. Victories should be celebrated then forgotten.
And there are no individual victories. A player must lose himself in double-digit numerical anonymity. Sure, it’s demeaning – that’s the point. But unlike in days of yore, rosters are larded with celebrities consumed more by the name on the back of the jersey than the front. And worse, they whine.
Team fails when self is elevated above team — the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. And it’s that pursuit of self that destroys even the best team and the game itself. And ultimately self.
So, kick out the navel gazers, the cameras, the causes, and burn the rulebook. To get back to football, the National Hm-hmm League must rid itself of everything that is not football.
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