On The Jersey Bowl

I'll admit it: I hate February in New York. It is a conglomeration of the worst elements of the city, everyone dressed up in mountaineering gear and cursing and shoving past each other on sidewalks narrowed to meager footpaths by 12-foot snowdrifts the color of bile. And if February in New York is bad, I have to imagine that February in New Jersey is worse, just by default.

That said, I'm pretty excited about the 2014 Super Bowl. I never thought this would happen...a cold weather Super Bowl...but now that it has, it seems like nothing but upside to me. The arguments against it--with the obvious exception of the safety hazards, which are dwarfed by the fact that football itself is a safety hazard--all seem kind of ridiculous and contrived. "Is it fair for teams to potentially alter their game plans dramatically in the face of wintry conditions?" asks SI's Jim Trotter, and my answer to that question is: Are you kidding me? Isn't this the very definition of football, the thing that sets it apart from climate-controlled pastimes like football and hockey? Maybe the game will be sloppy, and maybe it will be ugly, and maybe it will neutralize some of the modern elements of the game itself--maybe it will wind up 7-3--but why is that a terrible thing? Football fans who watch the Super Bowl would appreciate the change of pace; non-football fans who watch the Super Bowl are far more interested in the commercials. So why is it acceptable for Green Bay to potentially play an NFC Championship game in a wind-chill of minus-59, but the Super Bowl must be contested in a Disneyified greenhouse?

I sympathize with the notion that cold-weather games are never as fun for the players or the spectators as they are for the television viewers, but the NFL sold this game as the ultimate made-for-television product many years ago, then completely abandoned the very nature of the game itself for a bland rotation of domes and palm trees. On television, nothing looks cooler than a snow bowl. I hope it happens in February of 2014. I just hope I happen to be on vacation when it does.

ON REALLY, REALLY LOVING FOOTBALL

Will Tim Tebow succeed in the National Football League? I have no idea. Who am I, Jesus? Now, on the more pertinent question of whether I would prefer Tebow succeed in the National Football League,* I am equally torn: I enjoy watching him play, and I find the schematic possibilities of Tebow intriguing, and I find much of the criticism of him to be based in irrational hatred. That said, I have inexplicable moments of irrational hatred for Tebow myself; sometimes, he comes across more like an Oliver Stone caricature of a football player rather than an actual football player, and this bothers me, too. What kind of person actually refers to the "juice level" in a room? I'll tell you what kind of person: A football player, and by "footbal player," I mean, "the stereotypical notion of an ideal football player that NFL coaches carry in their head." This, apparently, is why the Broncos drafted Tebow in the first round: Because he LOVES FOOTBALL MORE THAN YOU DO. DO YOU LOVE FOOTBALL? NOT AS MUCH AS JOSH MCDANIELS DOES. NOT AS MUCH AS JON GRUDEN DOES. NOT AS MUCH AS TIM TEBOW DOES. NOW DROP AND GIVE ME TWENTY.

I'LL WAIT.

I'm not trying to pick on Tebow: If he really is this intense, then I wish him the best, and I hope he never gets so jacked up on one of those philanthropic tours of poor nations that he attempts to circumcise a tiger. But this is the funny thing about football: In an essential way, every coach is exactly the same. Josh McDaniels, the head coach of a professional franchise, is searching for the same attributes in his players as a high-school coach in McCook, Nebraska. They want absolute dedication. They want "football traits," whatever that means. And this means an almost cartoonish singlemindedness is a positive characteristic.

Over at Fanhouse, Clay Travis wrote an intriguing screed about Myron Rolle, the Rhodes Scholar who was drafted in the sixth round; Travis claims that teams shied away from Rolle because of his intelligence, because they worried that Rolle was "too smart." I think that's a little too simplistic; I think teams shied away from Rolle because he didn't seem singleminded enough. It's not about being smart; it's about presenting an image that makes you seem as dedicated to football as possible. Rolle slipped in the draft for the same reason Aaron Hernandez slipped to the Patriots in the fourth round: Neither one appeared to care, first and foremost, about football. The reasons for these perceptions are completely different, of course, but equally idiotic. In neither case is there any reason to believe that Hernandez or Rolle won't be as dedicated to their football career as Tim Tebow would be just because they have outside interests, be they in medicine or indoor horticulture. It's just that football people don't think that way. Football people think like Tim Tebow does, and this is why, even if he succeeds in the NFL, he will always be overrated. 

*If I repeat the phrase "National Football League" often enough, I'm told I can secure a job as an analyst on NFL LIve.

On Canadians and prolate spheroids

I spent a few days in Vancouver last month, doing what Canadians do, or at least what they do in Dave Thomas movies and Glass Tiger songs: I drank potent beer, browsed tourist shops for an astonishingly overpriced Winter Olympics tuque, waited in the streets where lovers meet, and pronounced "about" as if I were discussing footwear. Also, I watched a live televised football game in early July, which made me realize A.) How desperately I missed anything even resembling football, and B.) How strange and wonderful and nonsensical Canadian football actually is. Watching Canadian football is the cultural equivalent of listening to a version of Exile on Main Street sung entirely in Welsh*; it is still football, and there is still a prolate spheroid at the center of the action, but the field is stretched and the goalposts are in the wrong place and there are three downs and before the snap there are men scrambling about and receivers sprinting toward the line of scrimmage, and I kept thinking to myself, on every single play, "That dude must be offsides. How can that dude not be offsides? How is it physically possible that this dude is not offsides?"**

Still, it was football, in July, and the fact is, three downs instead of four just speeds up the whole process; it is like watching a game starring Jason Statham. For instance: In the contest I watched, the BC Lions were trailing by ten points with three minutes to play. They scored, held their opponents to a "two-and-out," and got the ball back approximately 24 seconds later. They had so much time to score again that even after their quarterback hurled a strike directly into the arms of an opposing linebacker, they still nearly got the ball back one more time. (The consolation, of course, was that the winners had to go back to Hamilton, Ontario, whose sister city is Flint, Michigan.)

Anyway, I am no longer naive enough to assign credibility to everything I read on these Internets; however, this caveat does not apply within Canada, Mexico and Bellefonte, Pennsylvania. Therefore, I have no reason not to believe this entirely unsourced report from a man in Toronto claiming that the Buffalo Bills are considering a move to the CFL, even if writer of said report seems to imply, at one point, that the National Football League discriminated against the provinces when it sent the Dolphins to play in Toronto last season, and even if writer of said report actually says, at one point, that the NFL "despises foreigners" (which totally justifies those Morten Andersen conspiracy theories I've been espousing since 1996).

If this were to happen, I would feel sorry for Buffalo, which is best-known for its proximity to Niagara Falls and its running backs who have been tried for mass murder. But I will not lie: If the CFL invaded America, I would probably watch. At this point, I am so hungry for the game I would pay at least $15 to watch a gang of wolverines set loose on an oversized electric football board. Even if they were offside on every single play.

*Preferably by the Super Furry Animals.
**The other great fascination of Canadian football is that you spend a considerable amount of time murmuring statements like, "So that's what happened to Ken-Yon Rambo."