The Deflating NFL

With the Super Bowl coming up, let me write something about the National Football League.  I really don't like it as much as I used to.

It started to change with me when the NFL got really full of themselves and insisted no one could use the name of the title game, the Super Bowl.  If you are making any money off of anything, you can't use the term.  You have to pay an obscene amount of money just to say Super Bowl, or you have to refer to "The Big Game," something the NFL will likely try to trademark as well before too long.  What an arrogant bunch of twits.  Colbert mocked them best when he referred to the Superb Owl.

Then came the cracking down on non-profits and church groups who would get a big TV and have a community watching party for the Super Bowl, raising funds for their organization at the same time.  The NFL wants people at sports bars, not in community centers.  Lame.

The whole fight for a new stadium and a Super Bowl in Minneapolis really drove me away from the sport.  With roads crumbling in the state, with schools having to tighten budgets, with infrastructure in desperate need of repair, and with hunger, insufficient medical care, homelessness and addiction issues all being un-adressed, we're going to spend billions of tax payer dollars building a arena for a sports team to play 10 games a year in, a team whose owner could build one themselves, and most likely would if they made any profit.  NFL stadiums are the biggest taxpayer boondoggle in the United States today.

I'm preparing for the mandate of first born children to be delivered to the NFL as a first payment to the NFL executives and team owners for the "privilege" of hosting the Super Bowl in a few years.  Nice to know our tax dollars are going to be wasted on some billionaire's kid guzzling down the mini bar in their Presidential Suite.  I just hope when the citizens of the Twin Cities are called to lie down on the roadways to prevent the NFL big wig's cars from getting mud on them, I'm not required to be where they park.

This years Super Bowl has been abuzz with talk of Deflate-Gate, the discovery that the New England Patriots were using incorrectly inflated balls in their beat down of Indianapolis in the AFC Championship Game.  I think the Patriots did deflate the balls, and that's coming from a Patriots fan, but the NFL would never punish a team appropriately for such a flagrant violation.  What they should do is strip a team caught doing something so outrageous of the ability to play any home playoff games for five years, regardless of what their record is.  I guarantee a punishment like that would make it unlikely something so egregious and petty would happen again.

Here's one thing I don't understand about the under inflated balls.  Of course the Patriots are being accused of never having won any games with properly inflated footballs, but if that was the case, how could no one else never have noticed?  When the Indianapolis Colt player intercepted the ball, he immediately knew there was something wrong with the football and took it to his equipment manager.  Not one referee, an individual who will touch the footballs a hundred times in a game, noticed the infraction?  No other player from the other team noticed it when they picked up a dropped ball?  No one else, when the Patriots were intercepted and fumbled in the past, ever picked up the ball  and noticed it wasn't right?  Something doesn't add up in the argument of this being a long term problem, rather than a one time advantage.

As far as Sunday's game, Seattle 21 New England 20.  I'll watch the Puppy Bowl and some of the commercials, eat a reuben and some nachos and be glad when I don't have every sport person in the country, all of whom have been clearly bought and paid for by the NFL, tell me why something so unimportant as a football game is the most important thing, EVER!!!