With the rise of another probably ill-advised football league, it got me thinking why don’t these things ever work or last? I could understand the mockery of the XFL but lets ignore them for a minute, why is there such a huge backlash everytime we get an upsart? NFL Europe was a punchline the Arena league too and even the older than NFL CFL is always a punchline, why?

One of the first explanations for this rationale is, “I only want to watch the best and the NFL has the best athletes”,  yet often that isn’t even true, as that same person will watch  countless hours of college ball where  the vast majority of the players will never be good enough to make anything other than some local flag football team. I understand if you are an alumni or have a pathological rooting interest but what’s the excuse for the rest of us? In the last couple weeks I’ve watched the perhaps the worst NFL game ever played, the Browns 6-3 so-called win  ( in reality both teams should have been awarded a loss) over the Bills. Also I watched the much ballyhooed Sooners/Longhorns game a couple weeks ago, a couple of college power houses going at it trying to match fumble for fumble for three hours. I’m sure any CFL game or the new upstart UFL games were better football than either of these. So what’s the difference? Hype, propaganda,&  the lemming syndrome

Lets face it for the most part we are lemmings, we like what we are told to like. In a world where everyone hates being told what to do, when it comes to football we just stand in line and take it from the sporting establishment and even end up embracing it.  If my wife asks me to take out he garbage I resent it because she’s telling me what to do but if Roger Goodell tells me to watch a game between the Rams & Redskins, I’ll gladly sit down and blow 3 plus hours that I’ll never get back. We like what we’re told to like, we watch what what we’re told to watch. We make fun of what others tell us to.  Its actually kind of embarrassing.

Its not that I’m trashing the NFL or NCAA, I love both and I’ll watch as many games as I can good or bad  but first and foremost I love football.  Not just what I’m told to love by the Networks, experts or the lemmings that hang on every propaganda laced word that these miopians use. Every league has brutal, unwatchable & ‘I’ll never get that time back’  games but all leagues will also have games that are all-time classics too. So I say bring on the UFL and its time for all of us fans of niche leagues to stop watching in secrecy fearful that someone may find out we love the CFL. Here is my advice the next time youre watching a CFL game and a friend comes into the room resist the temptation to change the channel in a panic as if they just caught you watching Oprah, and as the mockery begins provide them with a DVD you made of the Browns/Bills game from week 5, tell them to go watch it again and then come back for the beatdown of their life!

Long live the short lived UFL!

Necessary Roughness