The doldrums of the NFL season are upon us.
Slate and Deadspin have been doing an NFL roundtable discussion all season long. In today’s entry by Deadspin, Barry Petchesky absolutely kills it with regards to the boring stretch of the season that most fans (especially Bills’ fans like me) are experiencing right now.
Take it away, Barry:
For many teams, it’s time to just play out the string and try not to get crippled. So if you tune in for this week’s joyless Tampa Bay-Jacksonville showdown (tagline: “Because We Can’t Just Not Play It”), you might notice that, when divorced from big-picture relevance, the game play is relatively staid. They’re going to throw, they’re going to run, there will be blocking and kicking and flags. For all football’s violence and outward rowdiness, the game itself is remarkably predictable. The rules make it so, limiting just about any attempt at creativity or improvisation. You can’t put too many men on the line of scrimmage. You can’t get a running start. You can touch the guy guarding you after four yards, but not five. You can’t go downfield if your jersey number is between 50 and 79. If you want to have a lineman catch a pass, you need to announce it to the entire stadium beforehand. All these rules exist to enforce a certain orthodoxy of play. The NFL as McDonald’s—you know exactly what you’re going to get.
I couldn’t agree more. As “unpredictable” as the NFL claims to be there never seems to be all that much that changes from year to year. Sure, some teams eventually get better and others get worse but it takes a while for it to happen. The only time you tend to see things out of the ordinary, it’s usually more injury-related than anything. It’s no wonder that ESPN and everyone else is falling over themselves to hop aboard and hype the Tebow bandwagon. There’s not much else to talk about. Lets’ see: The Packers and Saints are really good, the Eagles are a disappointment and the Patriots will once again be the team to beat in the AFC. I guess with nothing else really going on you HAVE to sell those kinds of storylines even if no one really cares.
With the NFL you know exactly what you’re getting year in and year out. That’s a good thing and it’s also a bad thing. How come it only seems like a good thing year in and year out?
