The National Football League, explained.

The recent years of the National Football League, aka NFL, aka No Fun League, have been marred by incidents of every kind, and an umprecedented crackdown on players for a myriad of reasons. These are all, "in the best interest of the sport," if those in charge can be believed. According to the offices of the NFL, these incidents have not increased in frequency, the league has just finally decided to enforce the rules it's had in place for many years. Among those rules is apparently fining James Harrison because the glare off his shaved sweaty head made an opposing player on the other team's bench HAVE to look towards a cheerleader, and that was too tempting for the poor fellow to take, and he was FORCED to cheat on his wife. So sad. James, your fine is all the alimony the dude would have paid for his 6 children, all age 11, and curiously living under one roof with a woman who knows she's not their mother. But she felt cheated on, too.

The latest round of lunacy from the No Fun League proposes a 15-yard personal foul penalty for a player who: “leaves both feet before contact to spring forward and upward into an opponent and delivers a blow to the helmet with any part of his helmet.” (took this off my friend's blog www.moxiebird.com) But what about springing sideways and upward??? Oh, that's still good? OK then. It wasn't enough that they already had a rule about no helmet-to-helmet contact, noooooooo - now players REALLY can't do what they've been training to do since they were 12!!!!! Really?? Currently, there's a labor dispute over money and profit-sharing, and the NFL has nothing better to do than make idiotic rules??

But wait - I know what half of you are saying here: "Well, that does take player safety into account, and that's important." NO. Flat out, NO. The NFL is doing this so that they can guard their own backsides against the possibility of a lawsuit by some guy who, later in life, decides that his career was cut short and it was his employer's fault (aka, the NFL) for not putting a stop to it. That's what these "rules for player safety" are about. It's not about making the sport better, or safer. It's about protection from class-action lawsuits and (and this is my favorite part) making offensive players untouchable to increase the amount of touchdowns scored in each game.

YEP - that's the other half of the equation. If you can't hit the quarterbacks, the receivers, or the runners who are still on their feet (even though your job is to take said runner off his feet) the end result will be more scoring, and this is the best EVER. It will make the game more exciting. It will make sure people don't leave early. It will improve the sport. It will continue to support the bullshit we're spewing forth at an unbelievable rate! I hear it will also change the weather patterns in the Gulf Coast and the atomic weight of cobalt, but this has yet to be proven.

Mr Goodell: Your tenure as the head of the NFL has been marred with more scandal, more stupidity, and more asshattery than any other administration in the league, and now you are in a labor dispute that more than likely could have been avoided if you simply let the players play the game. You, Sir, are a complete and utter moron for taking a business which had been brilliantly laid out for you and ruining it. There is only one place this path can lead, and it is the ruination of a sport that used to be fun to watch, because teams won on talent, not on penalties or sob stories.

But how to fix all this mess??? Oddly enough, it's very easy. See, my second favorite lycra-wearing sport (football) can take a lesson from my first favorite lycra-wearing sport (cycling) - what, you didn't know that? This page is called "BIKING with the Fat Kid," not "Tackling with the Fat Kid." Deal with it. USACycling makes each and every rider in its races sign a form - it's called a waiver (legal term, for all those in the offices of the No Fun League - but you don't have to be afraid of it.) Now, this is a form that MUST be signed IN INK, for EACH event a rider participates in. Here is an excerpt from it - the MOST important excerpt, actually:
"I ACKNOWLEDGE THAT CYCLING IS AN INHERENTLY DANGEROUS
SPORT AND FULLY REALIZE THE DANGERS OF PARTICIPATING
IN THIS EVENT, whether as a rider, official, coach,
mechanic, volunteer, or otherwise, and FULLY ASSUME THE
RISKS ASSOCIATED WITH SUCH PARTICIPATION..."

See how easy this is?????? Full link to the waiver, should you want to read it: http://www.usacycling.org/forms/rider_release.pdf

So all you have to explain to players is that butting heads with one another can result in injury, and they need to sign this form that says they "get it." Since it can be illustrated in pictures, even those who fail the Wonderlic Test should be able to figure this out.

Now, as to the whole point of wanting every game to be decided by the last posession and whomever can get the final chance to score - THAT IS WHY YOU INVENTED ARENA FOOTBALL. It's "football light." Leave the real league alone!!! We want to watch grown men hit one another hard and press on anyway. It's fun. It's violent. It's dangerous...AND WE LOVE IT THAT WAY!!!

Thanks for reading,

The Fat Kid