Steve & Keith Suck at Football

Isn’t football at its best when played at a sub-pro level, like collegiate Division II, where the players and referees, in their imperfection and modest talent, embody what football is: a flawed, goofy novelty? Across the sports leagues, we see the basketball is utterly predictable, hockey is–to its credit–still a bit of an enigma, and football doesn’t have anything worth predicting. Baseball winter talks leave us craving the day-to-day performance of our favorite teams. You can’t say that about football, but we can say that it sucks!

Football is ungovernable! A late game drive by the Lions featuring 8 runs into the defensive line, three late-call penalties, a QB stuff touchdown, booth replay and a frustrated player on the Chiefs chucking a ref’s flag into the stands leaves the impression that this game is out of any official’s hands! Football’s zazz gets so dense and heavy, its rotten core can’t support this artificially puffed-up spectacle and causes the sport to degrade and lose viewership. Why? You know why–it sucks!!

Football co-opts common sayings and conventional wisdom as if the sport represents reality, like the way they say “he made it look easy,” but it’s a fallacy, because the play was actually easy! In baseball, no play is easy, but players achieve wonderful feats of apparent simplicity amid difficult circumstances. And, can you believe that NFL games feature a near 1:1 ratio of plays to commercials!? What a joke. It’s so unwatchable! Suck it football!

Football is so aesthetically deficient that it features a play known as a “fade pass,” in which a player’s feet determine a touchdown call at the back of the end zone, but at the front end, at the pylon, the ball is the determining object. Inconsistent much? And, as the NFL experiments with new video game-like camera angles, are they winning fans or just exposing their weaknesses? We’ll let you decide!

Football is boring these days–with its lower ratings and analytical color commentators–so this podcast cranks up the zany banter and tampers with its usual rambunctious format! Much fun is had with a random harkening of jingles, erasing the trauma incurred by mere mention of football’s absurd, calamitous underperformance. All you need to know is football gives us nothing, and is boring and pointless!!! Suck it football!

With numerous sports leagues promoting their playoffs as “the real season,” and players taking it easy during the regular season, why watch? Why play? The church doors open with an illustration of why, in football, “the end is near.” The end is near for players’ health, coaches’ jobs, and the season. That’s why NFL can constantly throw itself a party with streamers and fireworks as if it were going away! We wish it would go away! For good!

Hear why the frantic camerawork of World Series television directors is pulled from the bag of atrocious football gimmicks, and why its seeming effect of ‘excitement’ divulges football’s weakness. Find out why football is in love with itself (and hear a new jingle)! How desperate is football to prove itself big, bad, and important, that it has to implicate itself into the federal court system to solve its problems? Pretty desperate, and pretty sucky!

The boys are still roiling from the Nationals’ horrifically calamitous playoff exit, and they expel their upset feelings in today’s podcast. But, ‘upset,’ in football, means something different: it’s usually when a worse team beats a better team. How do you predict anything in an unpredictable sport? Doesn’t measuring football only glorify–and validate–the upper crust of the sport (commentators, officials, etc.)? And, despite all the talk of appreciating the art of baseball, it’s still incredibly difficult to take your focus off of winning. No matter what, you lose! Just like football! Arghh!

The playoffs are here and the boys reflect on their trip to Nationals Park for game 1 of the NLDS. The trusty ballpark programming, gags, and features that sustained us all summer have turned dim, or faded, as if the summer had sun-bleached them and are now too weak to power the new playoff atmosphere. Also, the ‘error’ in baseball describes a world where players execute the sport as it was intended, to the delight of fans, but football is often a game where the unexpectedly good and unexpectedly bad things happen–and that’s somehow a good thing!? It’s a sucky thing!

Why does the NFL think it can intrude into your life, showing commercials about moms delivering babies in the hospital while watching the game, but act like kneeling players are inappropriate cultural intrusions to the game? Also, instant replay robs both football and baseball of aesthetic unity because of its focus on ungovernable minutiae. And, replay, as a physical act–think of the players holding their hands to their ears in the “headphones” motion–doesn’t have an aesthetic movement or outcome. It messes everything up! Thanks football!!

The quickened pace doesnt abate in this fierce episode! The term football play stands for something magnificent and unreasonable, but also mundane and regular, but also, in an announcers verbal defeat, anything at all, because the game is so unintelligible and they need to fill dead air.  Speaking of which, inscrutable action leads football spectators to scream about what should have happened! Doesnt that indicate that viewers expect a certain outcome, but are betrayed? Baseball gives a satisfying, expected outcome, spiked with fun violations of expectations--like good art! Go figure! Suck it football!!!

Its our seventh season and were comin at ya! Our new format hustles through salient arguments rich with Sandamp;K dogmatic splendor, punctuated by high-demand jingles. We praise baseballs permanence, especially as we focus our attention toward seasons end. Like us, football is back for another season, and weve let simmer our withering disgust for this aesthetic atrocity for too long, so its time for cathartic release!! Oh, in case you couldnt tell, football sucks!

The democratized view of sports appreciation reveals, as we suspected, that seeing the sport how you want doesnt lead to knowing it on an aesthetic level, and ones engagement with a sport matters. It determines whether the sport is being seen for its own qualities instead of the qualities of the medium in which its delivered. Going to the game itself and watching it is the best way to appreciate it for itself. And when you go to a football game, you realize it sucks!

Whats your answer when someone asks you, Do you like sports? Being a sports fan is different than simply liking sports, and the loudest devotees--often known as the fans--control the understanding of sports, whereas those who like the game, and maybe even played as a kid, are tamer, but have an interest closer to an aesthetic appreciation. How do we persuade the casual viewer to disregard the loud fools? Tell them football sucks!!!

Points and counterpoints rebound off the walls of the balmy S andamp; K Studios as a discussion about being cool versus being authentic heats up! How do those concepts intersect sometimes in a quality rock tune, or maybe a sport? Authenticity seems to be something worth showing up for. And being cool...well, you can find that on any smartphone. Who can claim victory in this back-and-forth!? One thing you cant claim--football is worthwhile!