Come On, It's Fun!

Several days ago, the NFL and the NFLPA concluded a collective bargaining agreement to ensure that the football season will go on unimpeded this year, and I may be the only person (one friend excluded) who is not happy about it. My reasons make sense to me, but I concede that they will probably convince few people if any. Those that it does persuade I consider to be of the very highest caliber, and would be glad to know.

I was really excited about the possibility of a work stoppage, and I'll tell you why. It's not because I dislike the game. I like football. It's a fun game to play and watch, but sometimes you get bored with a good thing and you want to shake things up by wrecking it. That's how it was with Lincoln Logs, Legos and Sim City and that's how I feel for the moment about pro football. I wouldn't want it to go away- I just wanted to see it different for a while. Now, my thinking is that the owners eventually would become desperate enough to turn to scab players as they did in the last work stoppage of 1987.

Back then, the business of sports was a little different. Mainly people just paid to watch it, it seems to me. Videogames were not as developed as they are now, the off-season really was an idle period, and there certainly was no such thing as fantasy football, or at least it did not exist in any mainstream sense. What if all that had to soldier on with no-named slobs? It probably would be a mess, and when a league like the NFL is as successful as it has been for as long as it has been, there's an increasingly irresistible urge to see it taken down a peg.

I would love to see anonymous scrubs play clumsy, inept football. I would love to see the massive sports media apparatus try to make something of that. I would love to see video games built on picket line crossers. I would love to play in a fantasy football league with players who enter into no one's football fantasies except their own. Now that won't happen for at least ten years. It's a sad day for me, and for nihilists everywhere.