Sleeping with the NFL

I wish the NFL would schedule football games around midnight, every night. I do not sleep well anymore, last night, or better, this morning, I was up until 5AM, working on a couple of important projects and watching a documentary on a wasteful society and the wasteful people who don’t care that they are eating and damaging the world that they live on to such an extent that their children will probably die off, stupid Marsians.

Still, yesterday I was blessed to find myself in front of our hefty new flat screen high definition television, watching the Pittsburgh Steelers (Americas Oafish Team) playing some high school girls team from Cleveland, which is apparently a city somewhere near Canada. Here’s the thing, the high fashion model in the zebra pin stripes started the game by blowing his whistle and I was sleeping like a methadone addicted baby.

Which is why, if elected, I would demand an NFL game begin approximately at midnight every night of the week. Those games are boring. Plus, and this may just be my faulty memory, but when did the players get so obese? When I was awake I was shocked at the guts on the offensive line. Maybe that’s why they call them offensive, but still, that has to hurt their collective self esteem.

Here is an interesting factoid. While I was once attending the University of South Dakota a few years ago, I spent a wild weekend in Minneapolis, which is a city in Minnesota, which is a forgotten state in America. While sleeping in a NBC news van (don’t ask, you really don’t want to know the details) I happened upon the credentials for that Sundays game that had the super powerful Vikings playing the incredibly tanned Tampa Bay Buccaneers. I figured the credentials were the least I should expect for the injustice and humiliation I suffered in that NBC news van.

I spent that Sunday afternoon roaming the sidelines and eating cold cuts in the press box. If I were a fan of the NFL it would have been heaven, but I did not know any of the players, the game was boring and the cold cuts were, well, cold. My goal about half way through the game became trying to steal a Minnesota Viking official jacket. I flashed my official credential all over the place, from press box to parking lot, from field to locker room and at the end of the game I followed the Buccaneers team into their locker room, because at that point, any souvenir was going to suffice.

If you have never been in an NFL locker room, you should count yourself as a lucky human being. First, while there certainly are athletes around, and some of them are in remarkable shape, like the defensive backs, who all seem sleek and cut and perfect examples of what a finely tuned athlete should be, the vast majority have put on weight, lots and lots of weight. Especially the lineman. These are huge men, not large, not big, they are huge. If you go to the zoo, break into the elephant enclosure, stand next to one of them and ask them if you could have their t-shirt, see how cooperative they are.

Lineman are angry people, they have to be. Fat men do not like bending over, this is a lesson I have learned many times in my life, but at the end of an NFL game, these fat men are sore, tired and even more angry and the very last things the behemoths want to do is see some preppy wimp waddling around their scummy locker room, eying clothing that he could later sell on Ebay. At some point, even a losing coach on an inadequate team is bound to notice and have you removed, credentials or not, and that is exactly what happened to me.

I was asked to wait outside of the teams locker room if I had questions, because they foolishly thought I was part of the working press that covered these athletes, when in all actuality all I wanted was a team jersey, t-shirt or some other recognizable memorabilia that I could show my friends to prove I had been in a real NFL locker room. Instead, I was frozen out of the Tampa Bay locker room and the Vikings had locked their doors too. The real press had all gathered in some sort of official press conference room, but I was not interested in that and at some point, the NBC people were probably going to be scouring the entire area looking for their errant press pass. I grabed a diet Coke and walked out.

That was the last NFL game that I actually awake for its entirety. I am sure there are couch surfing slobs somewhere in the hinterlands who watch these boring over produced homosexual themed fat fests, but I have never managed to watch an entire game. Which is why I am sending a copy of this blog to the high and mighty commissioner of the NFL begging and pleading that he change the schedule to one NFL game per night, because at this point, I could use the sleep.