The Top 5 Reasons Why I’m Not Ready For Football

I’ve made this opening paragraph a million times before. You can taste it in the air. You can smell the rubbery scent of freshly picked backpacks. Blah blah fuckity blah. Fall is coming. Football is coming. Blah. But this time around, things are entirely different. I’m not embracing the season change at all. Usually by the beginning of July, I’m watching classic games just to get my fix. Now, in late-August, I haven’t even watched a full preseason game. This comes to great concern. For the past 4 years, my NFL roundups have been the staple holding BFD together. It’s been the main showcase, the bulk of our content. Suddenly, I’m ready to turn in my throne of resident NFL nerd. I’m…just not ready for football to happen…here’s the Top 5 reasons why:

5) Monday Nights are reserved exclusively for Breaking Bad

I’m just as much of an advocate of managing stress as the next person, but sometimes you have to inflict it on yourself in order to be prepared for real situations. This is why we choose to watch entertainments that make us feel terrible and paranoid. One would argue that these kind of thrills can be found in any game of Monday Night Football, but that’s no longer my source of kicks. Nothing beats the experience of writhing and moaning on the couch for 45 straight minutes and nothing does this better than Breaking Bad. Given that my football viewing options will be limited due to my work schedule, there will be some weeks that I’ll only be able to watch the night games. As long as the last season of BB is going on, I might just not watch any football at all. And it frightens me that I’m “okay” with this.

4) Brandon Moore retired

For those that don’t remember/know the Jets exist, Brandon Moore was the infamous “butt” in the “buttfumble” play. It’s obvious that Brandon’s posterior has some sort of magnetic force that attracts Mark Sanchez’s face if placed too closely. Now with the absence of that ass, what can Mark Sanchez do this season to impress me? Probably nothing. He’ll just be a mediocre QB or he might just get traded to the Bills retire altogether. We ARE dealing with Mark Sanchez, though. He probably will find a new gimmick to amuse us. There’ll probably be some cornerback that uses his crotch to catch a Sanchez pass. The play will be called the Dick Pick or something more clever than that. Ingenuity like that is going to be the only thing keeping Mr Sanchez off the bench.

3) Now that we know more, it’s just not as fun

It’s a total sign of the times and it’s nobodies’ fault except our own. With the transparency and knowledge that comes with living in 2013, the sport of football just doesn’t seem the same. Due to the media’s perpetual hard-on for sensationalizing the personal lives of athletes, we no longer see men and warriors battling it out for their livelihoods. Instead, we see murderers, rapists, alcoholics, toe suckers and the clinically depressed battling it out in order to show the world and themselves that they have some sort of a sense of normalcy. The sport didn’t change at all and neither did the culture, but its transparency is starting to turn people off. Unless you dropped out of High School on the first day, you should know that most athletes are inherently scumbags or scumbags by association. When you get to the professional level, we all turn the blind eye to that, which is why the atypical personality of an athlete is sufficient. It’s only recently that we are being constantly bombarded with reminders that these guys never change.

The same can be said about doctors and researchers sensationalizing the injuries that football players are prone to. The sport has remained the same, but now that we know more about the consequences of head injuries, it appears to have become more violent. Of course, action has been taken to soften the game and further prevent those things from happening. But last week, a brick got thrown through that idea. That brick’s name was Kevin Kolb:

This is a normal play. Totally routine. Nothing happens in it that raises any red flags. But somehow, Kevin Kolb got a concussion. And somehow, Kevin Kolb will never play football again. The Buffalo Bills immediately dropped him and scrambled to find a “suitable” replacement. And that’s how it goes sometimes. At 29 years old, one man’s chances of achieving all of his life goals have vanished. He has been deemed worthless to American society. We have to ask ourselves, why does it have to be this way? And what can we do to prevent it from happening again? The answer is to abolish football altogether. We are at the point of knowing too much and nothing can be done to the sport to make it satisfy our moral concerns.

2) I have not been paying attention at all

Wait, so what happened in the offseason? Matt Hasselbeck is a Colt? Reggie Bush is a Lion? Jerry Jones has the brain of a 40 year old? Tim Tebow is a tight end? Or is he? Lawrence Tynes got traded to the Bucs and now has a staph infection that may or may not be fatal? What in the hell happened in the last 6 months?!?

This horrible realization came to me last week while I was talking to some people about fantasy football. I raised the question of who a solid first round pick would be and the unanimous answer was Adrian Peterson. I laughed whole-heartedly, but they didn’t laugh back. It wasn’t a joke. THAT’S HOW OUT-OF-TUNE I AM! I don’t know who any of the rookies are, nor do I know which player trades could benefit their overall performance for the season, nor do I know who can be even deemed as “good” these days. And I have 80 hours to prepare for the draft. I’ve got to hit the books!

But I…ummm…really don’t want to…I’ve got baseball to watch…

1) B.A.S.E.B.A.L.L.

It started as a cruel experiment. Back in April, I decided to buy MLB.tv for a month, just to see how much I used it. I was never really much of a baseball fan. I would pay attention whenever the Tigers were winning, but that’s about it. The results of my experiment were shocking. It turned me into an ugly beast of a man. It became the only thing I wanted to do. Social opportunities were easily thwarted by the thought of watching a Dodgers game. Instead of habitually checking out the babes on my smoke breaks, I’m checking my fantasy stats. Because of the fact that baseball is on every day, it is a terrible drug to be addicted to. I have essentially wasted the summer staying at home [or going to baseball games]. I wouldn’t call it a complete loss, but I’m at the point now that I’m ready to be social again. Being obsessed with another sport is not going to help that. In fact, it will be even more difficult, as there is 2 months of overlap when both sports are going on. What’s a Coze supposed to do? Just quit my job and dedicate my life to sitting on the couch and eating, sleeping, breathing SPORTS SPORTS SPORTS?!?!? I can’t. I just can’t. I need to pick one sport and stick with it. And that sport is baseball. Sayonara, suckers! It was fun while it lasted!

Oh wait…I’ve got tickets to the Lions season-opener against the Vikings…

FUCK BASEBALL! THAT SHIT IS BORING! FOOTBALL FOR LYYYYYYYFE!

-TeeCoZee