The Other Kind Of Annoying Chargers

Traffic. NFL only plays a handful of times a year in any given city, but god help you if you need to go shopping near the stadium on game day. You know who really could use an exacerbation of their nightmare traffic problems? That’s right, it’s not Los Angeles. Have fun with that!

Irrational taxes for these ridiculous welfare queens. Let’s say I wanted to start a business making machine tools or helicopters or whatever, and I went to city hall and told them so. They’d say great, go for it. But if I said, first I need you to build a half billion dollar factory for my business using taxpayer money, they’d laugh me out the door. For some reason, this is not what happens with the NFL. Here’s the LA Times on the topic: "And in coming days, don’t listen to all these NFL experts moan that because of stadium issues, the Chargers couldn’t make it work there. Sure they could. According to a recent Forbes ranking, the Spanos family is worth $2.1 billion. They could have made it work there if they weren’t insistent on using public money that the people of San Diego smartly refused to give them." To have LA people describe San Diegans as smart, well, let’s just say this is unusual. But, again, bravo San Diego.

American football is stupidly unhealthy. There is even a Will Smith movie on the topic with all you need to know but of course intelligent people were always able to intuit that smashing one’s head repeatedly was probably bad for you.

Glorification of the big, the violent, and the anti-intellectual. You may think that because I’m a medium sized, pacifist nerd that I’m just gloating with Schadenfreude at the misfortunes of big, dumb jocks and their fans. I can’t rule that out but more pragmatically, their cultural imposition was, and remains, pretty oppressive. The NFL is just the tip of the cultural iceberg of high school sports which has a huge and, I believe, negative impact on our society. This article covers a lot of my misgivings about high school sports.

Anti-athleticism. Lest you think I would rob America of high levels of physical fitness by advocating for the abolition of sports connected with educational institutions, my strong opinions actually run the exact opposite. I believe that typical American high school sports rob the country of potential physical fitness. I think that football in particular is extremely damaging to the ideal of life long physical fitness. It creates a culture of passive observers in the majority, and in the minority lucky enough to play it ultimately creates injuries and excuses. Who plays high school style football at my age? I’m sure there are leagues, but I’ve never heard of them. To get an idea of the correct approach, check out how Spelman College decided to convert their pointless athletics program into a very enriching fitness initiative. Let’s not even talk about where a kid from Plano Texas might have first learned about PEDs.

Football is just a bad game. I’m sorry, but it’s just kind of dumber than other sports I know about. I know the game. I watched the Houston Oilers for years. I know the rules (pretty much) and wow, what a bizarre and awkward game. That’s just my opinion of course, but American football seems to be quite constrained by weird and unnatural elements. For example, the center to quarterback relationship — I just never thought, gosh, I sure would like to be that guy (either of them). The penalty situation is more frustrating and, you must admit, strategic than even soccer (a sport ruined by bad penalty rules). Add to this choppy play the strategic "time outs" and this game becomes very difficult to watch. But then there’s the "TV time outs" which confirm for me that the NFL’s fans are really its victims sold for brainwashing to its sponsors. I can tolerate watching about 12 minutes of football highlights but no more. Amazingly, that’s enough to watch every second of actual play! Which is pretty sorry for a game that takes 190 minutes to slog through.