Football's State of the Union: Is America's Favorite Sport Becoming un-American?

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With both the NFL and college football seasons a quarter of the way done (or more), there are some interesting and inverted trends developing in 2009.

In the college game, anybody can beat anyone else anywhere at any given time. BYU beat Oklahoma, who lost to Miami, who beat Florida State, who beat BYU badly in Provo. That’s parity.

In the NFL, there are about a half-dozen teams who’re clearly better than the rest, and the players on the league’s lesser teams have a better chance of beating their wives after a 38-14 loss than beating any of the division leaders. There are five undefeateds and an astonishing six winless teams in the NFL right now, and half of last year’s playoff teams are a combined 6-16 at the NFL quarter pole. The Bengals should be undefeated, while the Patriots should be 1-3. That’s disparity.

The typical American autumn usually sees those competitive gaps reversed. Most NCAA seasons have four to eight teams running ahead of the pack from Labor Day to Christmas, while the NFL sees a few of its worst teams beat some of its best in week 8, and half the league is still in the playoff race heading into December.

A football season where up is down and left is right will help spread the sport to new popularity in new populations, but a foul odor ascends as we lift up the rug and switch subjects from parity to a parody. Football has become America’s favorite sport over the last decade and a half, but just as America became very un-American during the Cheney administration’s war of terrorism, football has become very un-football-like as it falls further beneath a kinder, gentler directive that would make the first President Bush proud.

The NFL’s off-season rule changes regarding blows to the head and knees and defenseless receivers and such are going to skew the essence of the game and the fortunes of NFL teams if they’re not rescinded … and that right soon. Teams will lose games and coaches and players will lose jobs as seasons come to an end because of these cowardly, politically correct, chicken-shit, knee-jerk reactions by the NFL rules committee.

Mark my words. Write that down, date it and I’ll sign it. We will witness an onfield devolution at a crucial moment in a critical game this year where a sissy-ass, please-don’t-hurt-me call will send one team home and the other team on. It might be your favorite team that suffers this tragedy, or it could be your favorite team’s hated rival who prospers from it.

Violence, athletic aggression and the rest of football’s physical wickedness is what draws rough-and-tumble American boys and men to the game, and it has been doing so for over a century. When I was a little boy growing up in a football town near the middle of the Midwest, I had my parents subscribe to Sports Illustrated just so I could get the NFL Films’ free “Crunch Course” video with our subscription. I couldn’t even read the SI articles yet, but I’d already learned the multiples of 7 from watching my older brother’s high school football team rack up touchdowns every Friday night. Soul-smashing hits and butt-busting tackles were what I loved most about the game, and I could pop that Crunch Course video in everyday after school and set my parents furniture up to look like the NFC East while I pretended to be Lawrence Taylor in the living room.

I know Carson Palmer missed an entire season because of an unnecessary blow to the knee in the 2005 playoffs, and who could forget Tom Brady taking a similar low blow that ended his 2008 season before it started? I also know Carson Palmer and Tom Brady make a lot of money for themselves, their teams and their league, but they are still football players, and football players are still supposed to play football.
Quarterbacks wear helmets and pads during the game, but suddenly a blow to the head or a stiff breeze across the QB’s knees will cost the defense 15 yards and an automatic first down. How ‘bout that Patriots-Ravens game last Sunday?

Hitting a defenseless receiver will also keep the drive alive, but a defenseless receiver left upright can catch a deflected pass and score the game-winning TD like Denver’s Brandon Stokley did at Cincinnati in week 1.

The NFL is taking all the balls out of football, but maybe we shouldn’t be surprised, because they’ve already taken all the fun. Anyone not wearing league-approved Gestapo SS gear on game day is fined, and anything entertaining, amusing or otherwise invigorating in the end zone is punishable by death after a touchdown. Meanwhile, defensive linemen or special-teamers who make a routine tackle can do the Macarena at midfield afterwards.

Tom Brady gets a tuck-rule and a lifetime ACL insurance policy whenever he needs it, and like trickle-down economics, the NFL’s un-American fascism seeps down to the rest of the football world slowly but surely. I consider football in the fall to be one cosmic, continuous cultural experience, beginning with the occasional Thursday night high school or college game and progressing through the full amateur docket Friday and Saturday to the NFL on Sunday and ending gloriously with Monday Night Football. I find myself explaining to my girlfriend(s) every September not to expect anything from me or schedule anything with me on the weekends for the next four months, and just as I don’t like when the democratic liberties of my country are compromised by a tyrannical government, I don’t like when the metaphysics of my yearly football journey are likewise disrupted by totalitarian policies and 1950’s philosophy.

When the NFL erroneously oversteps its bounds and overexerts its authority, so too will the NCAA and the high school powers that be. Did anyone see the Georgia-LSU game on CBS last Saturday?

Georgia wide receiver A.J. Green was penalized after the go-ahead touchdown in the final minutes for absolutely nothing. According to ESPN’s College Gameday Final show, the SEC originally backed its incompetent, Third-Reich official by saying “Green made a gesture to attract attention to himself.”

Yeah, he scored a fuckin’ touchdown to put his team ahead late in the fourth quarter of a huge conference game between nationally-ranked rivals! Have you ever seen what soccer players do after they score a go-ahead goal in the 85th minute of an international friendly for Christ’s sake?!

The SEC has since softened its support of the referee who should be doing something else for a side-job, and the officiating crew that day gave Georgia a make-up call, flagging LSU’s Charles Scott for an identical celebration penalty after he scored the game-winning TD moments later and heinously set the ball on the ground while blasphemously pointing to the sky.

Scott found the end zone from 33 yards out after LSU got the ball near midfield thanks to the unsportsmanlike call on Green at the other end. Georgia didn’t have enough time to capitalize on the make-up call that went against Scott, however, and the Bulldogs fell 20-13.

Two wrongs didn’t make a right, and neither the NFL nor the NCAA not anyone else can expect elite athletes in the heat of battle to control a chaos and equalize an emotional energy more intense than anything the average human will ever experience. It’s not realistic, it’s not fair, and it’s ruining one of America’s greatest industries one penalty flag at a time. When you have bad laws, you get bad law enforcement, and these officials at the pro and college level are more like motorcycle cops on a four-lane road handing out speeding tickets to drivers going 41 in a 40.

We, the people … the fans, the customers … are not only entitled but obligated to speak up and speak out when we become discontent with – and disillusioned by – a product we came to know and love under a different packaging. I, for one, will continue to lead those cries and amplify the arguments.

As sure as the players on each team are human and will always make mistakes, so too will the officials, but that’s not the point. The point is, football’s governing bodies have more time to get it right than the players and officials on the field, yet they’re consistently getting it wrong. The powers that be in the NFL and NCAA have months to make their calls and the benefit of hindsight when making their rules, so they owe us a better body of legislation.

America is not perfect and neither is its favorite sport, and while college and pro football do have bigger problems lurking in the weeds (the BCS, the potential for an NFL season with no salary cap, etc.), I, for one, will not sit quietly by as poor policy ruins the game I love most every week on national television.