I remember much better Super Bowl Sunday's in years past. I remember when I cared. It was fun when I actually cared which teams were present and who played well. In the last several years it has become more and more difficult. I am sure a lot of my Super Bowl apathy has to do with the sorriness of the Cowboys for the last 15 years or so. Go ahead with your cowgirls and prison jokes, I've heard them all. You can't affect me anymore. But I think there is more to my apathy than just the fact that the Cowboys will never be a winning organization again as long as members of the Jones family continue to be any part of the franchise.
You see, here's the deal.... I don't like what the league has become. I noticed this trend that I was on a year or two ago and tried to stop myself from continuing but I was not able to stop the downward spiral. It started out with a friend mentioning a football game that was going to be on and me saying that I didn't want to watch the game because I didn't want either team to win and the fact that one of them had to would only make me angry. Then I noticed over the years that I felt that way about an increasing number of games.
You see, if your fans think it is okay to throw objects from the stands at the players, I won't like your team. If your stadium requires a jail in it to house all of the people who are committing crimes in the stands during a game, I won't like your team. If any member of your team thinks it is okay to harm children or pets, and they remain or shockingly enough become a member of your team after their conviction, I won't like your team. If any member of your team so desperately wants to be a part of a group that he gives himself a nickname and then legally changes his name to that nickname and insists that everyone call him that, I won't like your team. If you team is so unoriginal that it can't come up with a nickname for itself on it's own, but has to steal one from a long standing traditional college team, I won't like your team. If the celebrations have gotten so out of hand that the league had to institute a rule that keeps all players from celebrating in any way on the field, I won't like your sport.
I'm not stupid, I realize that a lot of the precedents were set by the Cowboy's organization. I understand that Michael Irvin was nothing but a thug back in the 90's when the Cowboys' were winning Super Bowls. And when it was the Cowboys, I was willing to look the other way. I said on more than one occasion that I didn't care what he did off of the field as long as he continued to catch footballs on Sunday. Maybe it's because I am old now, but suddenly I see that that was the beginning of the part of the NFL that I really hate. I hate that it has become a league of thugs, cry-babies, liars, criminals, money hungry a-holes and just all around bad people. Then to make matters worse, the fans no longer cheer for their teams, instead they spend all of their time denigrating the other teams and their fans. That is the part that I really don't get about NFL fans. Why do you want to attack other fans? We're sort of all in this together. It's one thing to be a smug fan of a winning team. It's another to bully fans of other teams especially when your team isn't even winning.
I understand that baseball has the hole steroids issue and that the NHL has the embarrassment of it's commissioner Gary Bettman continually pushing the league out on strike, but I would still rather watch a MLB or NHL game over any NFL game including the Super Bowl. I can't comment on the NBA since I really don't enjoy basketball. But I see it from a distance as being very much like football. I understand that in all professional sports there is corruption. If there is money to be made, there will be criminals involved. But wouldn't it be nice to go back to a time when it was just a game and the athletes (and owners) weren't among the highest paid people in the world, if they just did it for the love of the game?
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