Anyone familiar enough with me or anyone who has read my older work already knows what I think about football. In case this is your first time reading my shit though, Ill recap: fuck football and every knuckle-dragging dipshit who pays more than cursory attention to it.
It’s bad enough that you buy jerseys and memorabilia to support a bunch of millionaire rapists, drug dealers, and murderers. It’s bad enough that you riot, set shit on fire, and throw rocks at cops whenever your team wins or loses a Super Bowl. It’s bad enough that you crowd bars and living rooms and parking lots shouting to high Heaven about your stupid fucking home team scoring points when the rest of us normal people are trying to do anything but associate with you apes. It’s bad enough that the TV in my office break room is ALWAYS on ESPN. I hate ESPN so much I write it on my shoe before I kick puppies with it. One thing that pisses me off to endless extremes however is the stunning hypocrisy that both NFL fans and the league itself exhibit. Take for example, the popular passtime that is Fantasy Football.
I can’t count the amount of times I have seen some fuckwit football slob who couldn’t spell his own name lord over a group of losers who dare to be in to something other than brainless ball chasing. You know the type. The guy who “almost made it big” in school and pounds down Bud Light and Brats at every tailgate at every home game, obsessing as if his life depended on it over every play and every stat. Instead of doing something with his life, he makes fun of “nerds” and constantly tinkers with his Fantasy Football team picks, never aware that he is a practitioner of the very thing he despises others for.
And speaking of tailgating, it’s the dumbest thing in the world. Tailgating has more homoerotic undertones and self-indulgence than a Baldwin Family Reunion. Buncha drunk sweaty nobodies in a parking lot giving each other chest bumps and painting letters on each others bare skin. Hubba hubba.
Now here’s a disclaimer: I don’t play Dungeons and Dragons. It’s stupid too. But can someone who pines over the imaginary stats of professional athletes really have any basis to mock people who pine over the imaginary stats of elvish adventurers? On what moral authority is it OK to break down and analyze every movement RG3 made over the course of a season to determine his point value for a fictional football leave, but not okay to roll for initiative? I’d say the same hypocritical rant about Ray Rice punching his wife in the face, but I’m pretty sure a lot of football fans do that too.
Fantasy Football has websites, apps, algorithms, commentary, and message boards dedicated to it. I’m pretty sure that if you bound a rule book for Fantasy Football in leather, the unaware may mistake it for an Earthdawn playbook instead. Do you gather with your buddies at the city park and throw the ol’ pigskin round the field for a few hours? If you do, you can’t look down on LARPers without being an astonishing hypocrite. People get into fistfights just for liking rival football teams, and we wonder why the country is so polarized and Congress can’t pass any laws.
The NFL itself banks of its own hypocrisy to make money as well. The NFL, as a whole, makes 9 BILLION dollars a year. Yet whenever a new team stadium needs to be built, they take it out of the tax payer’s money. Sure the state gets a chunk of that 9 billion dollars whenever someone plays at their new stadium, but as a report by The Atlantic states:
“Taxpayers in Hamilton County, Ohio, which includes Cincinnati, were hit with a bill for $26 million in debt service for the stadiums where the NFL’s Bengals and Major League Baseball’s Reds play, plus another $7 million to cover the direct operating costs for the Bengals’ field. Pro-sports subsidies exceeded the $23.6 million that the county cut from health-and-human-services spending in the current two-year budget (and represent a sizable chunk of the $119 million cut from Hamilton County schools). Press materials distributed by the Bengals declare that the team gives back about $1 million annually to Ohio community groups. Sound generous? That’s about 4 percent of the public subsidy the Bengals receive annually from Ohio taxpayers.”
The article forgets to mention that Paul Brown Stadium, the place the Bengals call home, cost over $450 million dollars to build, the funds for which were raised primarily by a local increase in sales tax and state subsidies. It was not until 2010 that Hamilton Country began to charge the Bengals rent for the stadium.
How about my hometown University of Phoenix stadium? According to Wikipedia:
“The cost of the project was $455 million. That total included $395.4 million for the stadium, $41.7 million for site improvements, and $17.8 million for the land. Contributors to the stadium included the Arizona Sports and Tourism Authority ($302.3 million), the Arizona Cardinals ($143.2 million), and the City of Glendale ($9.5 million).”
In other words, approximately 68.5% of the total cost of the stadium came from the Arizona tax payers. The Cardinals themselves paid for the rest. The NFL didn’t do shit for it, yet they benefit millions of dollars every time a game is played there. The Super Bowl is going to be in my hometown this year. I simply can’t wait for the overflow of shitheads to come from all over the country and consume every Bud Light and bratwurst in Arizona before settings things on fire because one overpaid felon throws a ball farther than another. I wonder what will stink more, their armpits or their hypocrisy?