What the NFL Doesn't Get

Here we see a bunch of imagination-starved louts, their brain cells fried by the cotton candy of downloadable video and instant-gratification fantasy games, incapable of having fun with what looks to be a 1990s era, Atari-style football game. You can just see one of them muttering "huh? Wha' jus' happened? This sucks, man. Those dots don' look like people, so how can I tell they're supposta be people?"

"The NFL has never been a game of dots..." the narrator begins. And we know what's coming- fuck this dot shit guys, now you can go to NFL Fantasy Football.com and see actual video when you play your game.

By yourself.

When I was around 12 years old, me and my brothers played a really cool electronic football game- you'd pick offensive and defensive plays from a file and then put them on a piece of transparent plastic backlit by a light bulb. Then you'd slide an opaque piece of paper over your selected plays, revealing which side guessed correctly and whether yards were gained or lost. We'd play this game for HOURS. Know why? Because it required strategy, and it was AWESOME.

My nephew got married this past summer. When he was seven years old, in 1987, we'd spend hours playing an NFL computer game on my Tandy 1000 TX. The "players" were little blobs of color on a green screen representing the field. Every sack resulted in a loss of six yards, and for some reason the little blob labeled Art Monk would always make a big play when my nephew wanted him to, dammit. We'd play this game for HOURS. Know why? Because it was easy and FUN.

Now, NFL.com tells us that unless our games look exactly like television, they are really really lame and you'll die of boredom attempting to play them.

Well, fuck off, NFL. Not all football fans are brain-dead losers who need their fun spoon-fed to them. Why would I want to play a game that makes me think I'm just WATCHING a game?

Maybe I'd understand it better if I understood fantasy football to begin with- when I was a kid, we'd dash outside between commercials, at half time, and between games to throw a football around. We still play touch football on Holidays, when we can get enough of the family together. I guess the NFL wouldn't get this, since they think that when we aren't actually watching a game, we should be spending all our time checking stats, "conducting trades," playing some crap version of a real contest on our laptops, and above all gradually becoming part of our couches as our brains turn to jelly.

Facebook. Cell phones. Fantasy Football. Nope, this Obesity Epidemic has me stumped. What could possibly be the cause?

You could at least stop being part of the problem, NFL.