WHAT IN MY description of the glacial pace of an American football game wasn't an actual description of how it is played? Leaving aside, for a second, the violence, there is the interminable delays as a bunch of referees decide what just happened (often with screaming fits by players and coaches which figure into the lengths of such delays), the players huddling to talk about what they're going to do, which takes time, both sides lining up and waiting for the bashing into each other to start, the twenty to thirty seconds that they actually "play" the game, often a false start as a referee notes someone broke the rules even before they resumed, etc.
I understand that in a typical game of three or more hours less than a twenty minutes of it is actually playing the game. Here's a description I found online in less than twenty seconds:
The NFL’s popularity is all the more remarkable when you inspect the fare it has to offer each week on television. An average professional football game lasts 3 hours and 12 minutes, but if you tally up the time when the ball is actually in play, the action amounts to a mere 11 minutes.
It's a sport for the attention deficient, the TV addled, the drunk, the not too bright, etc. And that's before you get to the murder and mayhem and intentional brain injury. I will, for this post at least, not go far into the clear homoerotic elements of American football and the fact that many if not most of those straight guys who get all warm and obsessed with it are in denial that that's what they're watching. I remember about two decades ago pointing that out on one of the liberalish blogs I frequented and one of the guys there said that I had to stop because he was about to puke, clearly realizing that I'd just forced him to face what he watched it for.
AND I'M ENTIRELY JUSTIFIED TO CALL THAT BRAIN INJURY INTENTIONAL BECAUSE ANYTHING YOU DO KNOWING THE CONSEQUENCES OF DOING IT INCLUDE SERIOUS BRAIN INJURY IN ALMOST ALL OF THE PLAYERS MEANS THAT THAT BRAIN INJURY IS INTENTIONALLY CAUSED. It's exactly the same case with the epidemic of school shootings in relation to the American Supreme Court, the Congress, the president, state governments, local governments DOING NOT A SINGLE THING TO ACTUALLY PREVENT THOSE SCHOOL SHOOTING BY BANNING THE GUNS AND THE GUN OWNERSHIP THAT IS THE INTRINSIC ASPECT OF THAT SHOOTING THAT CAN BE CONTROLLED AS MOST MORE CIVILIZED COUNTRIES HAVE PROVEN BY THEIR OWN LAWS AND THE RESULTANT RELATIVE RARITY OF SUCH MASS MURDERS IN THOSE COUNTRIES. THEY APPROVE OF SCHOOL SHOOTINGS. IF THEY DIDN'T THEY'D DO WHAT WOULD STOP THEM AND THEY WON'T. And you do, too.
I don't know if anyone has speculated or researched the possibility that Little Bobby Kennedy may have suffered early head trauma from his families' famous football games but, along with his history of drug use and the general debility that being a life long liar-lawyer causes, it might help explain not only his derangement but, also, why he's such a total asshole now.
I mention that because you might want to copy this paper The First Concussion Crisis: Head Injury and Evidence in Early American Football to see not only has the deadly effects of American football been known of since the early years when the rich boys at the elite universities and colleges were inventing the putrid game, but that it has been being covered up by the American elite for that entire time, too. You might want to copy it, as I have, before Little Bobby takes down the NIH because its publications may impact his future earning potential when he goes back to ambulance chasing at his ambulance chasing law firm. Knowing most people don't follow up on links to papers, I'll give you the abstract:
In the early 21st century, sports concussion has become a prominent public health problem, popularly labeled “The Concussion Crisis.” Football-related concussion contributes much of the epidemiological burden and inspires much of the public awareness. Though often cast as a recent phenomenon, the crisis in fact began more than a century ago, as concussions were identified among footballers in the game’s first decades. This early concussion crisis subsided—allowing the problem to proliferate—because work was done by football’s supporters to reshape public acceptance of risk. They appealed to an American culture that permitted violence, shifted attention to reforms addressing more visible injuries, and legitimized football within morally reputable institutions. Meanwhile, changing demands on the medical profession made practitioners reluctant to take a definitive stance. Drawing on scientific journals, public newspapers, and personal letters of players and coaches, this history of the early crisis raises critical questions about solutions being negotiated at present.
Of that note these sentences:
This early concussion crisis subsided—allowing the problem to proliferate—because work was done by football’s supporters to reshape public acceptance of risk. They appealed to an American culture that permitted violence, shifted attention to reforms addressing more visible injuries, and legitimized football within morally reputable institutions.
I have frequently commented on the emetic character of the pure, 100% high fructose corn syrup sentimentalism and pseudo-morality that surrounds American football. It's one of the foremost monuments of complete PR bullshit that we have. he role that a sales job was behind that denial of the actual character and consequences of American football, appealing to the worst of American's and, human beings, actually, character flaws was a big part in peddling the violent, vulgar, corrupt game as something of transcendent moral value. It's 100% a PR con job. I will state that the fact that America's Catholic colleges and universities adopted it and made it one of the foremost public faces of some of its most eminent schools speaks to the moral corruption that was endemic in the institutional Church during that period and persisting until today. That such institutions as Notre Dame University wouldn't dare drop football because they know there would be a revolt by the paying alumni that would seriously impact their endowment is an exposure of that continued moral corruption right there in the very heart of the institutional Church.
And I have not commented much on the actual character of many if not most players of American football, their rates of involvement in crimes, rape among the most obvious of those, but also violence, intimidation, threatening, violent tantrums, property destruction, . . . It seemed to me even back when I was in high school that the 100% white-male football team were about the only organized gang of thugs in town. While some of them were OK, most of them were complete assholes. Assholes who in many of the cases I know from living in the same town I grew up in, became sleazy businessmen and not infrequently spouse battering assholes who frequently became quite obese. That's the kind of "character" that football builds in a majority of the cases I've observed.
So, "V," as you can see, I do understand American football. Just not what you saps who bought the PR and deny why you want to watch big-ass guys in spandex grappling and slamming each other to the ground, crouching in unmistakable gay-porn poses - and that's not to mention the explicitly and unacknowledged sexual vocabulary of football commentary - would claim as "an understanding" of the game. I seem to understand it a lot better than you do, or, indeed, most of its fans other than some gay men who are honest as to why they watch it. I think they're morally depraved, too, by the way, but because of the violence, not because they acknowledge the sexual content of it. I generally don't much talk to them, at least not during the football season. Football is bad for gay men's character.
