We all cheered the fun of parity back in the day. Any given year your team could climb to the top only to be swatted down by the New England Patriots, the league darlings. We’d shrug our shoulders and cough up the defeatist manifesto: “Yea, but we made it all the way to the (insert your preferred level of achievement here) before they killed us.” But, at what point does parity just become bad football?

Before Tony Romo’s injury one would have thought the Dallas Cowboys were headed for a deep run in the post season, unless you lived in Dallas and read the local rags. PacMan is at it again, TO plays the drama card (by now it’s in tatters) like a violin, and Coach Cupcake can’t cure the penalty infection spreading like Ebola through his team. And now you can add Felix Jones to the injury list, along with Terence Newman, Sam Hurd, Mat McBriar, Kyle Kosier and Roy Williams. The stars aren’t twinkling like they used to, and Jerry Jones says it’s okay. The record 4-2 is something he ‘likes’. Wonder what he would think about 4-6? It seems that those in Dallas never believed all the hype that ushered them into this season like knights on white horses.

Remember the Jaguars? The AFC sweet spot in light of Tom Brady’s injury? 3-3. Granted, they are toasted in the injury department, but so are most teams. (Wow, even injuries play to parity.) The Jets? Their record would suggest they are a solid team, but would anyone jump up and down on them like ice on a deep pond after the first freeze? We think not. The Seattle Seahawks, yet again, were expected to come out of the NFC near the top, and again, they won’t. (But rumor has it that Shaun Alexander will land with the Redskins, and we think Jim Zorn can make that work.) The Eagles are still looking for themselves on every milk carton, even though they pulled a W out of the hat, along with some sourdough and a Dungeness crab, against the 49ers.

Cute is the word that comes to mind. The game of football at the pro level is becoming a little too cute. It’s fun and all, for about two weeks, wondering who will emerge victorious in a league where it seems blowing a late lead is de rigueur. But then it looses it’s cuteness like a child deep in the awkward years. When there is no arc to follow it can become pretty easy to blow off a Sunday of watching football. The box scores tell tales that may not be worth the time to watch unfold. Excellence has drawing power, mediocrity leads to drinking games, and a bad economy leads to drinking games with bad beer, which all leads to an enormously painful hangover.

And poorly executed football leads to games that are more like one-night stands than rich seasons filled with passion, great moves and crescendos that rock the sports fan’s world. It’s time to clean up the play on the field after having had to focus so much on the nonsense that happened off it. What made for an exciting start to the season for the NFL is now close to becoming a sitcom, minus the laugh track.

Oh, and by the way, GO PHILS!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 14th, 2008 at 12:53 pm and is filed under Fantoo Blog Home. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.