I love professional American football, but a number of new trends this year have been disturbing my calm since the season started. Now that the regular season is winding down, here are some suggestions on how to improve for next season:
- The four-man comments before the game, at halftime and after the game is a formula that mostly works, but there is no need whatsoever to fly them all to the game and setup the desk on the field. The only purpose this seems to serve is to make it harder to hear anything anyone is saying, and force the hosts to wail like Olympic swimming commentators.
- To Bryant Gumbel: learn what the phrase “take over on downs” means before uttering it again. Ask your brother.
- To Dick Vermeil: please refrain from lending your image to any company for promotional purposes ever again. Also, have some of the beefier members of your team hunt down and kill everyone responsible for your beer commercials.
- Chris Collinsworth wins for suggesting he get work with Court TV as it is the “only way to cover the Browns”.
- To the NFL: since you have set up your broadcast rules to force me to watch nothing but the New York Jets, the least you could do is force the CBS network to broadcast the game in hi-def. Buy the cameras if you have to.
- To CBS Sports: high definition is no longer optional. Catch up.
- An occasional Thursday game is fun. Every week is overkill.
- Stop giving a shit about Terrell Owens.
- To advertisers: When you repeat the same commercial over and over, it makes me actively hate both you and your products. Stop it.
- To Chevrolet: When you insist on running the same honky-intensive commercial over and over and over containing the phrase “this is our philosophy”, you might not want to put a picture under it depicting someone from a homophobic organization that illegally uses federal funds.
- To the NFL network: Give up on the idea of the NFL network. Unless you are intentionally trying to destroy the NFL, in which case: soldier on.
- Light beer in sweaty green bottles is not my girlfriend and, even if it was, I’m pretty sure I would want it to be neither “hot” nor “a freak like you”. I don’t know what either of those mean.