Posted By:
warshawlawI hate football for many reasons:
1. I think people tend to like spectator sports that they enjoyed playing as children. I hated playing football; as a big slow white boy I was on the damn line every stinkin' time. I liked playing baseball.
2. Every sport has a fan culture to it. NASCAR has a very southern good ol' boy culture so many of us outside the south just don't get it (they drive in circles? For hours?). Football fever also tends to be centered in the south and midwest and in industrial cities.
3. Every sport also tends to have an athletic culture. To me, football's culture is rampant criminality and violence. You don't hear about baseball players murdering, dealing drugs, gang-raping coeds, etc., but there seems to be story after story about that sort of crap in football. Not exactly a turn-on as a fan.
4. Football hypocritically claims civic virtue when the whole system of player development is a fraud. The majority of the players who go to universities have no business and no interest in higher education; most of them would not be there if it wasn't the minor leagues of the NFL. And before the intelligentsia of the football set jump on me here, think about the shenanigans needed to qualify many football players for universities, the classes for jocks, and the low graduation rates. Not to mention the phony jobs from boosters, cash under the table, agents circling like sharks, etc. Yet through it all the folks all pretend that these guys aren't professional athletes. I don't blame the players for this, but the system stinks.
5. If you are an adult fan not in the south or southwest you can forget about ever seeing your football team at home in the Super Bowl. The championship game has become a corporate pig-fest totally detached from the fan base for the team unless you happen to be lucky enough to be in a city that is typically awarded a game and your team happens to win that year. I got to see the Rams-Steelers here in L.A. A Yankees-Red Sox or Dodgers-Giants home game in September is far more fan-frenzied than the Super Bowl was.
6. I think it also boils down to whether you like individual contests or mass movements. baseball is at its core a duel between pitcher and batter. Boxing (my other favorite sport) likewise is mano a mano.