Whither football

I'm a professional football fan. I grew up not far from Rich Stadium watching The Bills. My dad took me to a Bills game when I was a boy. I watched the team train at Erie Community College. I went up the street and knocked on the door of Dennis Shaw, a backup quarterback, to get his autograph.

Football, to me, is like a giant, physical chess match where creativity is judged by action and intelligence within the rules.

But I'm starting to lose faith in the game.

I've always had the internal contradiction of being a believer in nonviolence but enjoying a physically tough game. I've always hated that players are commodities in the NFL, not people, and that loyalty to a team is only as good as the next paycheck. All that, though, I can live with.

What is shaking my foundation in the sport is not the greedy owners or fickle cities, but the players themselves. It's the T.O.s, the Chad Johnsons, the onfield brawls, the overtly dirty hits.

And instant replay.

The players

The players, well, their bravado sometime in the last 20 years turned to shameless showboating. The endzone celebrations turned from group hugs to orchestrated stage shows. All I can say is that I miss Barry Sanders. Watching him was like watching art in motion, and when his run was over, and if he scored a touchdown (remember, he was a Lion), he calmly handed the ball to the referee and went back to the sidelines. He was class. And he was good. Very good.

And off the field? The antics of players are just frightening. They play to the spotlight, and this is the result of ESPN.

The all-sports network has given egocentric, undereducated, overpaid puppets called players a 24/7 stage to spout off.

Another look

And instant replay?

Every football game has a rhythm, like the beating of a heart. When that flow is broken unnaturally (not by quarter breaks, but by penalties and instant replay), the magic of the game dies.

And the humanity of the game suffers with the instant replay. The referees and umpires are human and make mistakes -- that's part of the game and makes the NFL experience whole.

I have always said this: If your team must win by a technical call made by "the people upstairs," then maybe you didn't deserve the win. You might as well have flipped a coin to claim victory.

Monday Night Football

It is with mixed feelings that I read yesterday that ESPN's Monday Night Football ratings are the lowest in Monday Night Football history.

I had blogged earlier about how I hated the announcers who talked over the game and didn't focus on the action. Seems I'm not alone.

I lamented when ESPN picked up the Mondays games. Not everyone has access to ESPN and the shared community spirit of watching the game on a major network vanished to the fractured world of cable TV.

Thought: Look out hockey!