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NFL Gets Cranking and … Zzzz

September 12th, 2009 · 1 Comment · College football, NFL

Have I been over this before? How the National Football League leaves me, oh, sleepy with non-anticipation?

And here we go, with the rest of the season — after that thrilling (yes, sarcasm) 13-10 overtime game in Pittsburgh on Thursday night. Wow. That was a thrill an hour.

I watched the end of that because … the Dodgers had the day off … “Survivor” doesn’t start until next Thursday … and the Angels game ended early.

It wasn’t always like this. I once cared about the NFL.

Actually, I had a few years where I practically lived the NFL. That would be the period from 1977-1980, when I covered the Los Angeles Rams home-and-road for my newspaper, and spent several days a week around the oafs, musing about all the usual NFL mind-numbing mumbo-jumbo — Cover 2 and the shotgun and escapability and all the other buzz words and pseudo-science the league likes to wrap around itself.

I also have covered at least 11 Super Bowls — I’d have to spend more time studying a few others to remember if I saw those, too — and most of them were in the past 15 years. Most recently the New York Giants’ upset of New England in the 2008 Super Bowl. (At least that was an interesting game, and a satisfying one, in that the Patriots and Belichick lost.)

So it’s not as if I’ve had no exposure to the league.

I’ve just wearied of it.

It tends to be a copy-cat game in which any tactical breakthrough is immediately replicated by the rest of the league, tending to make every team look rather the same.

Scores are too low too often, the game is excessively legaltistic (all those halts for replay checks, and the lawyerspeak that the referee then dispenses), nobody can run the ball and third-and-1 is a passing down. I mean, how many 5-yard slants can you watch in one game and expect your pulse to quicken?

The other factor? I have not been exposed to hometown NFL football for 15 years now. The Rams and Raiders abandoned Los Angeles after the 1995 season, and it was long, long ago that I realized (as did about 10 million other SoCal residents) that the college game and the high school game are far more interesting and entertaining.

Thus, I have been almost immune to the fantasy football phenomenon — though I have played fantasy baseball for 27 years, and have done hockey (a while back) and even the English Premier League this year, for the first time. Well, immune to all things NFL.

The League is just dull. That’s the short of it.

I will see parts of a a half-dozen college football games today. Tomorrow, I will see probably zero NFL games. And won’t mind.

I will catch up with the league, a little, sometime after Christmas. Till then, don’t wake me on Sundays.

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1 response so far ↓

  • 1 Char Ham // Sep 12, 2009 at 4:58 PM

    It’s funny, but my husband said the same thing. He used to fervently follow football but doesn’t have the same interesst as he used to and prefers baseball & basketball.

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