For the past few weeks it has been hard to be an NFL Fan. Ray Rice beating his wife, Adrian Peterson whooping his kids, and the media demanding explanations from Roger Goodell as if he was the President of the United States, rather than merely the Commissioner of a pro sports league. It almost got to the point where you felt, as a fan, that you had to owe some type of explanation to gathering storm of media pundits and football critics as to why we remained as fans f despite the recent problems.
I have several reasons why I never have wavered from my love for the game and never will. First off, if you take Ray Rice, Greg Hardy, Adrian Peterson and Jonathan Dwyer (The NFL's most recent and serious miscreants) that's 4 players. Four players out of a league of 1696. That is one quarter of one per cent of the players in the NFL. One quarter of one percent.
In the rest of the world, if 99.75 % of your workforce obeys the law, does there job well, and is among the 1696 best in the world at what they do, you don't hear anything but praise. But the public holds the NFL to a higher standard than the rest of the business world, and any standard that they would ever allow for themselves. Would you expect to be fired from your job for just being accused of a crime unrelated to your job? I didn't think so.
But I digress. Today was Sunday, and to a pro football fan it was spectacular. And if you are a Seahawk Fan like myself, it was glorious. When Marshawn Lynch launched himself across the goal line in overtime to give the Seahawks a 26-20 overtime victory over the Broncos in a classic rematch of last years Super Bowl it reminded all fans of why we love the game; because it has the ability to make us explode with emotion, to jump in the air and scream at the television as if the players can hear us.
Today was full of these moments; the Eagles besting the Redskins in a shootout in Philly, the Browns and Ravens battling each other to the final seconds, and Dallas proving the naysayers wrong by mounting a huge comeback to bring their record to 2-1.
Today, for about six hours; I didn't have a mortgage, all of my bills were paid, I wasn't pining for a raise, and any problems that I woke up with this morning disappeared for the day.
The cynical ones out there will come back that now all of things are back, that football was only a brief distraction from reality, it cannot fix our everyday problems.
I agree. I'm the one that will pay that mortgage, settle my bills, and get that raise, but if I can get a brief vacation from the world, if only for one afternoon a week for about five months a year, I am a happy guy. I am more than that, I am thrilled. Name another activity that you can do as an adult that makes you jump up and scream for joy like a child. Football is an escape from society, and people need to stop expecting it's players to be better than the average citizen. Because I have news for you, as wonderful as life is, there are bad people and horrible crimes that occur every day, get used to it.
The game isn't perfect, but neither is society, and neither are you or I. We need to stop expecting football, or any sport or mode of entertainment, to meet higher standards than we would ever place on ourselves.
Because well over 99.75 % of the time, football is everything it needs to be, a wonderful distraction to our everyday lives. And that is why it is here to stay.
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