Real Football

     There’s a lot of serious stuff going on in today’s world:  Last week’s tragic shootings in Arizona, the struggling American economy, the ongoing war in Afghanistan, the quixotic quest for peace in the Middle East, and on and on and on.  So naturally, it’s time to talk some football.

     As a sports fan, the Holidays are a bittersweet time, marking, as they do, the end of the high school and college football seasons and the beginning of the end of the NFL’s campaign.  Millions of football fans around the country hustle to pack up the Christmas decorations so they have time to plunk themselves down in front of their TVs to watch the BCS title game, which allegedly crowns college football’s still-mythical national champion.

Then begins a football fan’s favorite 3-week stretch of the year: a 4-game Wildcard Weekend, a 4-game Divisional playoff weekend, and then the 2-game conference championship weekend.  After that comes the hiccup that is Pro Bowl weekend and, of course, the Super Bowl, which isn’t really football unless you have a rooting interest in one of the teams.

We’ve been particularly blessed this playoff season, not because the teams involved are especially exceptional, (7-9 Seattle, this means you), not because the games have been especially memorable barnburners, but because nearly all of the playoff games so far have been played outside.  On grass.

I’m a big-time traditionalist when it comes to sports, and I curse the days that both artificial turf and especially domed stadiums were invented.  I suppose you can get away with these affronts to humanity in baseball, and I understand the economic reasons for turf in multi-use high school and college stadiums, but football is different.

Football is meant to be played outside and on a grass field.  Just as the dimensional quirks and idiosyncrasies of individual baseball stadiums add to that game, the vagaries of the weather add a welcome variable to the game of football.

This is true, not only in how it affects the teams and the play on the field, but more importantly, how it looks on TV.  Watch a game in a dome?  Boring and generic.  Watch a game that’s being played in a driving rainstorm on a muddy field or in a blinding blizzard?  Now that’s football.

The sports gods are finally realizing this, and are fighting back.  The best part about the collapse of Minneapolis’ appallingly awful Metrodome, after all, other than that nobody got hurt, was that the Minnesota Vikings and the Chicago Bears played a December football game outside in Minnesota for the first time since 1981.

And now, both the AFC and NFC Championship Games will be played in outdoor, cold weather stadiums, and I hope it snows like crazy.  I hope this not only so that it slows down Aaron Rogers and the Green Bay Packers’ scary-good passing game, thus improving the odds of Da Bears making the Super Bowl, but because that Super Bowl will be played indoors, on the Jerry-World turf.

In other words, the football season really comes to an end next week.