NFL: National Fraud League

We’re going to interrupt my regularly scheduled Aggie post for “a giant ‘see I told you so.’”  I wrote a couple of hours before the NFC championship that Rush Limbaugh would be “regretting kissing and making up with the NFL.”  (That post will come up in a couple of days.)  I had no idea that it was going to be happening later in the evening.  I thought it was going to be because of the players being their usual racist, anti-American, jerkoff millionaire selves.  I had no idea that the entire sanctity of the league would be called into question.

Oh, ho!  The glory that showered down upon me as I heard a national radio personality finally saying in front of millions of listeners exactly what I’ve saying for years!  The NFL is a big F***ing fraud!  You idiot loser “fans” who worship at the pagan altar of your sports god, how did that taste going down your throats?  Have you puked it up yet?  Are you seeing the world a little more clearly now?  Remember, Rush is an actual NFL expert (for a fan).  If he’s questioning the legitimacy of the sport, that’s a really harsh indictment. 

You know, Colin Kaepernick just picked the wrong cause to get on his knees for: the utter joke of players killing themselves on the field for a game that they have no real control over.  I might have joined him.  There’s no beating that third team on the field, the refs.  They’re undefeated.  Unlike WWE “referees,” these NFE (National Football Entertainment, because you can’t sell it as an actual sport) referees are no joke.  They will control the outcome and scoring in a game as they are instructed to by the league.

Predictably, the sports media is circling the wagons around the teat they all suck at.  I didn’t actually see the major offending play in question in the Rams/Saints game.  It doesn’t matter.  I’ve seen the officials screw up or no-call enough plays to know what happened.  “If only the Saints had . . .” or “If only Drew Brees had audibled a . . .” Blah, blah, blah.  Shockingly, coaches and quarterbacks don’t call plays based on the possibility of the referees getting involved in determining their outcome. 

Or do they?  I saw a couple weeks ago in the playoffs, a coach inexplicably go for two in a situation where it wouldn’t make a difference, because they still needed to recover an onside kick and score to have a chance of winning.  Another point wasn’t going to affect what they needed to score.  Ahem, except those two points covered the spread in the game.  How deep this go?  The league?  The officials?  The coaches?  The players?  Who’s pulling the strings? 

Rush suggested that nationalized wagering may clean up the sport.  What irony that would be!  Millions of degenerate gamblers demanding that the NFL be transparent and accurate in enforcing their rules during their games.  There’s no point in betting if you think the whole sport is rigged.  If betting ever falls off in the NFL, it’s doomed.  It’s the sole reason for its popularity.  No, everything else you’re thinking of is insignificant compared to the power of office pools, spread betting, and the double F word, Fantasy Football. 

Fantasy Football was supposed to render all discussion of game fixing irrelevant.  Playing stats, rather than the score, would keep most of the dummy dedicated fans happy regardless of a few blown calls.  That works great right up until the playoffs, where betting on the spread and the results take precedence.  There’s nowhere to run and nowhere to hide during these spotlight games that display the full fraudulence of the league with everyone watching.       

How do you even clean this up?  They say, “NASCAR rules are written in pencil.”  Hey, what is a “catch?”  It’s apparently whatever the ref says it is.  Same goes for pass interference apparently.  There’s holding on every play of the game, you know.  It’s only called whenever a ref decides to throw a flag.  It’s arbitrary, or the exact opposite, on purpose.

I watched just enough of both games to get disgusted.  What I saw were games being decided on flags and reviews on every play near the end.  From the Patriots and Chiefs game, the most credit I can give is that the refs screwed both teams pretty equally on bad calls.  Perhaps there were two different agendas fighting over the outcome and using the refs to do it.  And these are the “best” of the crews working these games!

This should have been a crowning moment for the NFL, two conference championships going overtime.  They’d finally seemingly gotten over the whole “kneeling” thing and the fans had come back.  Instead, there are allegations that the Rams were “chosen” for the Superbowl to bolster their flagging fanbase in Los Angles before their new stadium opens.  Why not?  That’s as good a reason as any to fix these games.

So, have I really been proven right about the NFL?  Ultimately, the fans of this sport are going to have to decide that.  If they turn away from the sport again or demand changes for honesty in the sport, then that means everyone is seeing the NFL the way I see it, as a fraud.