I Love Fuppaw

This will be a change-of-pace post.  As football keeps looking increasingly like not only the national sport but the national religion, I’m becoming more and more bemused by its foibles and clichés.  I mean, the vast majority of announcers remind me of those people who measure the effectiveness of their prayers by the number of times they say “Lord,” when those announcers seemingly feel obligated to use the word “football”—usually pronounced “fuppaw”—at least once in every sentence.  I’ve heard Cris Collinsworth use it unnecessarily three times in a single sentence.

Here’s what you might hear:  “This fuppaw team has to learn to throw the fuppaw down the fuppaw field.”  Shoot!  If he hadn’t put it that way I might have thought I was watching a debate team learning to throw a whiffle ball down a cotton field.  Of course, it’s altogether possible that the average viewer has so many beers in him that he’s not all that sure which sport he’s watching, so he needs to be constantly reminded.

Not that it would matter at that stage of inebriation.

Then there’s my perennial favorite, on the subject of whether a play has resulted in a first down:  “It all depends on where they spot the ball.”  Naw, ya think?  What else does the announcer feel might influence the decision, the relative positions of the moons of Jupiter at the winter solstice?  Or maybe Boolean math figures in there somehow.

I also marvel at the way the fans of a team that’s unranked, and that with good reason, react when someone makes a good play:  “We’re number one!”  What, number one on your campus?  Hey, count your points, people.

Oh, and how about those body-language clichés?  When was the last time a quarterback lined up behind a center without licking his fingers?  I have a couple of questions here.  What advantage do they gain from doing that?  Also, how many have died of infection from doing it?  Maybe that stickum wide receivers used to use until Fred Biletnikoff had a ball stick to his jersey without his getting his hands on it was really a disinfectant so they wouldn’t die of whatever the quarterback was suffering from.

But then, watching football still might be better than watching baseball, which develops so slowly that the predominant image is that of players spitting on the floor of the dugout.