Steve & Keith Suck at Football

After thrilling international travel, all Keith wants to do is rant about our nations great shame! Football is more a conversation than a sport. Theres so much dead time (between plays, between games) that talk is footballs dominant feature and lousy contribution to American culture. Also, why do spectators prefer to divide their attention among a dozen games? Theyre sports tourists! Baseball gives us a wonderful sequence of events, entirely contained in one game! Abomination: Inter-league play in MLB.

The boys celebrate their 50th episode with old favorites: Lime-A-Rita vs. whiskey...by coin flip! They have a rollicking good time in a boisterous bender of bitching about sports. How did the podcast come about? Why do football fans need to eliminate baseball as the national pastime to feel secure about their sports dominance? How does a pitch clock restrict the pitchers art? An ump can watch the pitcher just fine--a human! Keith takes a 3-0 lead in the baseball card contest. Grab a Lime-A-Rita and join us!

Another day, another article about sports being boring. Apparently, college basketball has a low scoring problem. But, doesnt more scoring prolong games? Isnt a long game too slow and therefore boring? In deft whirls of logic Steve andamp; Keith discuss this truly puzzling sports mind-f*ck. We posit that people are used to digesting sports in replay tidbits and therefore ask that an actual GAME mimic the highlight reels we incessantly watch (while bored with sports), and are disappointed when its not. A Yankee appears in the baseball cards, and is the NFL really considering replay for flags? Abominable!

Steve andamp; Keith try to get to the bottom of the pace of play issue: MLB games are longer, but why accept the football fans complaint about the games so-called slowness? Oh what a shame it is that baseball requires more attention and interest than the three times that a football fan needs to direct his attention away from the chips and toward the interminable replay of someone breaking their femur! Football bursts and lulls, but baseball is a sustained, cogent expression of sports competition. Abomination? What does it mean in basketball to swallow the whistle?

Season 3! New Gimmicks! New Jingles! In this new season, on our first step into the batters box, we wonder, will we be afraid of the ball? Regardless, we cant step out--much like big leaguers under new rules--and will take swings at pressing sports questions. The boys discuss why baseball is a better model for life, in this case by following the course of the natural seasons, from the rebirth of Spring Training to the World Series where we reap the bountiful harvest of a great year. Abomination? Pace of play rules, duh!

What better on this wintry Sunday than to elevate the basest destructive practices of our culture to the highest of esteem? Its the Superbowl! The boys discuss how rapacious advertising and gluttonous over-feeding on both bean-dip and the most banal of sports--football--could possibly achieve holiday stature. We also feature periodic check-ins from the big game and lots of Lime-a-Rita for this season-ending episodes sole devotion to everyones favorite segment: the Abomination of the Week! Its the Superbowl!

After 4000 years of effort, the human race finally has the epic it deserves--the highest expression of human emotion, dignity, and heroism--in the NFLs playoff match-up last week between the Seahawks and Packers! So Epic!! In that spirit, we extend our podcast a little to discuss zany plays, disbelief, and magic. How can a team win in 5 minutes? Magic! But really we should consider fatigue and desperation. Shameful. Abomination: player eligibility rules are a sign of how NFLs rules have mutated and multiplied to compensate for footballs inherent aesthetic failure.

The boys find themselves comfortable with the 15-minute podcast, and a new word to bleep. This weeks topic is the cheap play: think of Techmobowl when you discovered the one play that could beat the opposition every time. The Patriots marches downfield left us unsatisfied--as if the plays that came before their 3rd down 14-yard gains didnt matter. Abomination: why does forward progress count by just waving the ball out in space? So, all of the athleticism, crushing hits, and running results in a feeble gesture of sticking your hand out in space?

Its time for the 15-minute lightning round on the Suck It podcast! Steve andamp; Keith have just enough time to describe how the NFL is like a ramshackle vessel of extraneous crap, pushed to the speed of light, only to collapse under its own overgrown mass. Also, how the NCAAs playoff and bowl system is an attempt to compare the incomparable, and will only leave us less able to name the best team. Abomination of the week: the position of Safety--will he ever win!?

The boys invite their friend whiskeys cousin, gin, to enliven the podcast. The mfn quarter defeated ESPNs experts by predicting 12 NFL outcomes correctly, to their 11. Basketball fuels the ranting this week: why are free-throws so boring until the end of the game? Replay challenges beget more replay challenges. But also back to football, where we wonder about the Byzantine set of rules governing the clock. Why does an incomplete pass stop it, but a fumble does not?

Baseball is often knocked for its old fans, but they act with dignity and sagacity, whereas footballs old fans regress to a more immature, aggressive, and foolish state. Scoring in NFL is not rewarded for any uniform achievement of distance and effort like it is in baseball (basketball, soccer, hockey, etc.), so we are left feeling like many points are not really earned. Abomination of the week: out-of-bounds. In baseball, the ball leaves the field of play and is either an afterthought, or a transcendent hit (home run), but in football, out of bounds is a harsh reality that is controlled at every stage.

The boys put a bookend on the poetry discussion from last week. NFL is like Mad Libs (the great childhood linguistic game) where the viewer can insert himself to complete the games construction. A Skins journalist tweets a perfect sentiment of the podcasts theme, and Johnny Manziel aint s***. Abomination: why does it take one man to conclude an out in baseball, but up to 8 guys to tackle a player in NFL? Everyone gather round! This defensive scheme ends in a staff meeting!

The boys rush for the elusive 20-minute podcast, much as the NFL rushes for an elusive relevance. The opening rant pursues the analogy of how a baseball consumer is like the poetry consumer--working from a demonstrable, constrained, and artful undertaking, but allowed ones own style and accentuation of favorite parts. But the NFL fan, well, he/she(?) is left as a poor repeater of a radio pop song: out of key, deficient, but united with others in believing that they should be repeating what theyve heard elsewhere. Atrocity: The mid-field leaping catch. Why should spinal injury regulate how offenses are run? Suck it football.

Curse words a-flying! 8 Geese a-laying! 5 Golden F***s! We want Jack Daniels to sponsor our podcast. Yeah, its desperate, but so is a hail mary pass, as is NFL journalism/fans analysis, which probably wont play out, but if it does, then youre a hero! We talk blowouts: half of the games in NFL are blowouts, which creates futile aggression by the loser, but they cause calculated growth in MLB. Atrocity: the sidelines. WTF are all those people doing out there? Isnt there a game going on?

Its the Keith Birthday Podcast. The boys relate how a campfire aesthetic-stealing band singing Christmas songs reminds them of how football tries to steal the aesthetic of sports that baseball displays so beautifully. Is the NFL giving away Super Bowl tickets to people to appropriate compassionate feelings for its brand? Plus, football distracts people from Thanksgiving. Atrocity: Fade Pass Play.