WAS: What Adults are Saying about a desultory year.
As though things couldn't get worse--now our football sucks.
The social torment now in America suggests 2024 may be historically remembered as one of those years that’s best forgotten. The country has seen many circles around the sun like this of such dubious time in just about every decade. Somehow we survived to turn the calendar. This year again offers the same sobering reality.
Over the past 12 months recount the massive failures in our media, judiciary, electoral politics, environmental protection and other areas. The obsequious post-election Trump ass-kissing from corporate America has added another layer of public squeamishness—as though we all ate bad sushi. It makes easy an argument that 2024 has sucked bigly—and what’s worse—a possible intro for more immediate chaos as war theaters broaden, insurance companies rig the game (further) and Wall Street keep’s partying like its 1929! If individual calendar years are to be valued by the good they do then 2024 needs to fuel a rousing bonfire.
There’s also a little detail of a Presidential transition awaiting in the wings which promises to again make the Peter Principle more widespread than usual in Washington. Never has our country needed government to be so effective as now. As voters we have responded by installing conspiracy theorists, crackpots and cryptocurrency money grubbers—many of whom are avoiding jail because of the entwined history of an assassin’s poor aim and a stunningly compromised Supreme Court. America faces a time where things are tenuous while awaiting an infantry of ill-prepared, caustic nitwits to take the reins of governance. At the Civil War at least we had Lincoln. If a bottle is near one might grab it.
But even as challenging and difficult as these circumstances have made 2024 it is not the country’s most grave problem. Instead, it is something more fundamental and seemingly now hard-wired—12 months a year—into our daily zeitgeist. The brand of football being played, at various levels, simply sucks.
Few things are truly American. Jazz, baseball, Dylan and Springsteen, maybe the hamburger, a heavy desire for social self-immolation and perhaps the most well-known of them all, football. Yet in 2024 our elite athletes play the game as though it was learned only last year and to the trained eye, may be the only thing making one more ill than that ugly sushi.
The National Football League (NFL) continues down a path where the product revealed week-to-week is starting becoming a caricature of itself. A tightly controlled cartel managed by would-be gold hoarders, the NFL now concerns itself primarily with only two things:
How does it get the maximum number of games on some TV platform unopposed by other games, and
how does it ensure those games finish within a three-hour viewing block.
This narrow focus shows in product quality and timbre of play. At the professional level it is hard to recall times when the fundamentals of blocking and (especially tackling) were so abysmal. Far too many players, far too frequently commit obvious blunders (not mere mistakes) in pee-wee level execution and seem disinterested to maintain anything that looks like competitive composure. Those adjudicating the games may or may not be worse than before but because virtually any flagged infraction requires a mini Yalta, they often come off as bureaucratic dopes.
The consuming public allows itself to be hoodwinked by all of this largely because it to is overly focused on elements in the game, not the contest itself. Of course gambling (legal or not) and its insidious “proposition” bets has never been more prominent. Fantasy football players chart a second string running back with more verve than the halftime score, or post-punt field position. These are just two of several things where the ultimate team game has been shamelessly deconstructed. Unwittingly, it may also be something that provides a tacit feedback loop to facilitate the declining quality of play.
The college game has become even worse. Big time college sports and especially football has always been a sort of minor leagues for the pros. A changing landscape has moved much of it from broad exploitation of young people to employing them as one-year mercenaries at various pay grades. All that was required was to bring long-time “under the table” systems to the surface. That and more money in a system that ironically, is now legal and yet more chaotic, ensures universities in Alabama, Washington, Ohio, Texas and elsewhere can continue to serve their appointed missions on the gridiron. The players make not even the flimsiest efforts to be anything like a traditional student and because its common for them to rotate teams every year—most don’t even bother to learn the team fight song.
The sport’s allure is elite’s team records toward a new championship playoff system (something that smaller schools with real students have had for decades) so that mercenary players can simultaneously play big games and audition for next year’s employer. As you might expect the level of play is putrid and seldom have so many undersized, chicken-armed athletes in secondary positions donned football gear on national television. For this networks lavish colleges with heavy sums because as was previously stated here, something needs to distract folk as the world crumbles around them. It’s one thing that America is declining faster than a ride on the Big Slide at the local water park, but we have to take football with it?
Even more ironically there is one area of football performance that has become wildly advanced—the kicker. Never has that facet of the game been played at a higher level by players who are supposed to rock chicken-wing arms. Both scoring accuracy and lethality of punt placement are now startling events that punctuate regular play. Impact on game outcome has never been more prominent and in a dismal 2024 where our national team sports addiction is played at sophmoric levels, football, has returned to its namesake. When that’s the highlight of the year then one knows it has sucked bigly.