Steve & Keith Suck at Football

Sports operate best when you remove the cool. At least, thats the outcome of this weeks discussion, which examines how rebellion has migrated from rock to hip hip and whether a similar transference has taken place from baseball to football. This analogy isnt an apt one, so the discussion, while interesting and revealing of new truths, such as footballs cheap stick-on cool factor, swirls around its subjects like a disoriented secondary. But our orientation doesnt falter--football sucks!

It rains jingles while topics of suburbs, cities, sports and modernism flutter over the broadcast. The suburbs conditions easily map to football and the citys to baseball, but what does that mean for the Cardinals, a team that portrays itself as Americas team, but plays an urban sport to a mass of fans with a suburban mentality? It leads to football solutions in a whirlwind of post-post-modern zaniness and filler zazz! Jingles rain! Football sucks!

The aesthetics of how individuals move between or within communities, one of the most important considerations in human history, sheds light on sports aesthetics. Football too easily equates to suburban disaster and baseball to urban efficiency, despite creative efforts to find a different comparison. And then the conversation evolves to point out how the two sports resemble either a rattled consumer desperation or a settled community participant. Look, were not blind to the fact that these topics are abstract, but how else do we find more things to talk about when football so plainly sucks?

After the thrilling demarcation of baseballs changes as being either immediate or immortal, the next question is who should drive change in baseball? And then, the much-awaited conclusion of the couch chat flashbacks of the last couple of weeks leads to a climactic synthesis of multiple seasons of this podcast, and asks, how is sports aesthetics, and more importantly baseball, an intersection of transcendent longings of human cultures, specifically in the areas of leisure, physical competition, and drama? And how does football suck?

Heres our next installment in the parallel evolution of baseball and the novel! This week the boys determine that sports, as an aesthetic expression, much like the novel or other art, can be characterized by two features: the immediate and the eternal. How do some of the bigger changes in baseball reflect this idea? How many jingles make an appearance? And how much does football suck? A lot!

Its time for fresh content! Baseball has been underway for about two weeks--what has been happening? The boys open up a new line of thinking that compares the parallel emergence of baseball and the novel and what their co-evolution can teach about their forms and how they change. But first, the boys examine the historical antecedents to these forms and what it means to have an educated observer. Who is the best judge of the standard of baseball? Listen to find out! Listen to reinstate the belief that football sucks!

Heres the thrilling conclusion to a three-part series! More wonderful parallels are drawn, in artful terms, between music and baseball (and the loathed football). Most poignantly, footballs helter-skelter toggling between sport plays and palliative announcer babble mimics todays confusing experience in music clubs where DJs play 30-45 seconds of songs and talk in between. Why go out to hear music if you only hear an unfulfilling portion? Because youre a football fan, of course! A new jingle debuts! A timeless adage persists! F*** football!

This week continues last weeks conversation about popular attention on sports/music and how art forms diverge and others take over. We learn all sorts of great things about how crappy football is: its in danger of flaming out because its a cheap re-re-re-re-packaging of a genuine article (i.e. honest sports), its construction is totally unsustainable because its just cut-up zazz with filler zazz, and dont look now but that guys ankle is broken. Interestingly enough, baseball has somehow both diverted into the province of the analyst nerd fan and passed into permanent relevance as timeless leisure. All this talk of timelessness reminds us--football forever sucks!

What becomes of a treasured art form? To answer this, the boys trace broad trends in baseball and music, using jazz as a historical parallel. A group-based art form, with internal dynamism, mutual reliance, and also experimentation, but always within a resilient structure, is more enjoyable. An art form practiced under the pretense of a group, but that actually highlights the individual, strains--and breaks--the so-called form and obscures the fun, even if the individual achieves a lot. In other words, what happens when players push their art form, and what happens when they break it? A broken form?--in so many ways that points to football!!

Until baseball begins, we examine our analytical framework and ask: is aesthetics a two-way street? Do timeless aesthetics tell us about players actions, or have the players actions told us what the aesthetics are? This episode took three weeks of conversation to create, but its distilled to around 20 minutes! Check out the seamless linking of different periods of time, and the unbroken tradition--of late--to debut a new jingle! But all you need to know is the phrase a priori knowledge is uttered! Who could want anything more? We could: and that is, to say, suck it, football!!

Let there be no woe in this time between footballs wretched grip on our attention and the liberating thrust of freedom that baseball bestows upon America--Steve and Keith preview this years baseball season! Thats to say, they rehash last years theme of pace of play because an interesting article points out how this issue is mostly in the minds of the league and not a pox on the game. Like weve said all along: baseball takes care of itself; its much more the portrayal of the sport when the crowd feels its boring, than the truth of the game itself. But dont lose focus on the true message: football sucks!!

In honor of the zany unpredictability of the Super Bowl, the boys hilariously flip their format by asking their future selves questions--from the past! Ironically enough, however, the Super Bowl turns out to be entirely predictable! Hilarious! Listen as Steve and Keith, who admittedly suck at football, foil the so-called edge-of-your-seat suspenseful action of this aesthetically decrepit sport by nearly predicting the exact outcome of this dull and unsurprising game. Does this mean they dont suck at football?? One things for sure: they dont suck at jingles. A new classic debuts at the end, and dont forget football sucks!

Weve spent over five seasons on this podcast ranting in florid detail about the aesthetic atrocities of football, but how do you communicate these ideas to a football fan? Its difficult to bridge the gap, and perhaps that difficulty stems from the mixed identity of the NFL, portrayed in its contradictory areas of market outreach: from fitness to fast food, family to violence, primal to science. This sport is stupid says Keith, and we couldnt say it better ourselves, unless we say suck it, football!

Skip the dry bar because season sixs opening episode will blow your hair back! Updated format! Flashbacks! New jingles! Whats not to love? This podcast gives America more of what it craves: concrete reasons to turn away from football--as this nation seems to be doing by the hundreds of thousands of viewers per week. And we experiment with brevity, in case you--the listener--are busy and want more pithy assaults on this nations great abomination. All the gimmicks and revelations of truth youve grown to love...are back! Hook in your ear buds and press play! Suck it football!

Its the final episode of season five, and weve saved some great rants for the end! First, we praise the World Series, which featured a wonderful Game 7 that reminded us why we love baseball. Looking forward, the boys express their utter disbelief and dismay at the crappy, dismantled football game between the Packers and Colts. Two separate penalty calls featured the referee asking the audience to excuse the flag that was thrown! Whats happening!? Whats to be made of the lower ratings for football? There are lots of explanations, but lets not ignore the obvious! Football sucks!!!