Spring Break
Football: The new national pastime
Ryan Flatley
No one watches baseball anymore. It’s slow, the athletes are overweight, the players are constantly grabbing their privates. The one advantage baseball had was that it was cheap entertainment, but take in a game at the new Pac Bell Park in San Francisco you’ll be in for an expensive day. Seriously, where the hell do they get off charging six bucks for a hotdog?
Baseball has made way for a sport that is more exciting, more brutal.
Football has blitzes, tackles, bombs, trap plays, nickel defenses, stunts, shotguns and three-hundred-pound linemen beating each other up sumo-style for 48 minutes. Baseball has pickles.
Football is a better expression of American values. In football you have to fight for every single yard. There is nothing that is given to you. If a football team doesn’t play together, if they don’t have team unity, then they end up like the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, knocked out in the first round of the playoffs. In football, if a player does not give everything they have, on every play, chances are they will be cut. Why? Because in football it comes down to desire, who wants to win more. In baseball, most players don’t run hard when they hit into a groundball out.
Baseball is a game of individuals who all carry weapons (bats) with them, all happen to occupy different areas of the field and happen to call themselves a team. So cold, so mean. Football players huddle together after every down which is much more social and friendly. Also, unlike football, the apathy on the part of baseball fans and the players is rampant. Why shouldn’t the Minnesota Twins close down? No one is coming to their games. Conversely, Terrell Owens instantly became the most hated man in Dallas when he spiked the football on the Cowboys logo in Texas Stadium.
This leads to one of the fundamental problems with baseball -- there are just too many games. In football, there are 16 but in baseball there are 162. No wonder the players aren’t legging out pop flies to the shortstop. If baseball cuts the schedule in half and makes every game mean something other than an excuse for people to eat sunflower seeds, then everyone might start getting into it a little more.
Football has become a large part of the lives of many Americans. During the wintertime Sundays are for football. The day is set aside so that American across the country can sit down in their favorite chair, crack open a beer and watch men run into one another at full speed. As a result, when FOX outbid NBC for the rights to broadcast the National Football League, it was a sign that FOX was finally becoming a major network.
