Can Ugly be a Roman numeral? That’s what the U stands for.<\/p>\n
I’m a pretty reserved dude for the most part. In the last 12 years, I’ve cried roughly 5-6 times that I really remember, and believe me, this last decade wasn’t too good to me. When my wife left me, that was one. When my grandmother died, that was 2. When my family’s golden retriever died, that was 3. I got into an argument with an ex once (or twice, can’t recall), that was 4. And when I watched the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and saw the destruction and pain it caused, I cried like crazy. It actually hit me as hard, or harder, than anything else that had happened to me, and I’d never even been there. I’ve always been really interested in the history and culture of the area, and always wanted to go but never could get the funds up for a real road trip there.<\/p>\n
That said, 4.5 years later, with New Orleans’s football team playing in the Super Bowl, and, at last check, ahead in the fourth quarter, I have hit my limit. <\/p>\n
I like sports. I like sportsmanship, and I understand the importance of rules to keep the game clean and entertaining. After all, that’s all it is. Entertainment. To keep it entertaining, we have rules that we follow that make sense. Like, for example, we fine players who decide to take cheap shots at the other team’s quarterback after the play is dead. Those are called late hits, and generally speaking, that’s playing extremely cheap. The fact that the NFL practically rewards a team like the Saints for basically crafting their game plan around late hits is pretty disgusting and disrespectful to every team that follows the rules and tries to play a clean, sportsmanlike game for their fans. I say that they “reward” a team for playing dirty because the punishment is primarily monetary. They get fined something like 15k-30k or so. Which is basically walking-around money for a player making 4 million a season. If your coach is basically telling the players to lay into the other team’s quarterback with cheap shots, one has to wonder if the organization isn’t secretly paying off those fines and keeping that off the books anyway.<\/p>\n
In hockey, they take a guy out of the game for playing dirty and he sits for awhile. When you only have 5 skaters on the ice and you lose one, it puts your team at a disadvantage of 4 against 5. I think that’s a pretty fair way to do it. In basketball, the other team gets a couple free shots. If you do the same dirty crap twice, the refs boot you out of the game. That’s very fair. Puts your team at a disadvantage because they’re down a player (though with roster sizes in football about 5 times what they are in basketball, it’s easier to just throw a few players to the sharks and let them sit). In baseball…well, you just don’t get that many opportunities. But in a game like football where you have loads of opportunities to literally put someone on a stretcher and\/or end their career, the NFL punishes dirty play with…a little monetary fine. What does that do for the fans of the team that lost because the other team played dirty? NOTHING. <\/p>\n
Oh, so New Orleans deserved a shot at winning a Super Bowl because they have never won one before? What about Arizona? Minnesota? Both teams haven’t won one either. Both teams have potentially Hall of Fame quarterbacks that are both fairly old that the Saints felt was fair game to take shots at their knees, lay into them after the play, and generally play like complete jackasses because the only punishment would be a little monetary slap on the hand. The fines they get would be pretty substantial deterrents to a player making 100k a year…but no one makes that little in the NFL anymore. <\/p>\n
I hate to take all that away from New Orleans, but after watching 4 years of them electing scumbags to political office that pumped all the reconstruction money into building up wealthy neighborhoods for their own investment purposes…and I could forgive them all that, as politics makes fools of us all…but to ignore how dirty their NFL team plays is just pathetic. They don’t need a Super Bowl any more than Arizona or Minnesota needed one. It’s not going to get any more funding for reconstruction of the ninth ward or any of the other areas that still look like war zones. If anything, politicians are going to say “hey, they won a Super Bowl!” and continue to look past them, figuring that the morale boost would let pols off the hook for another year or so. <\/p>\n
It wasn’t long ago that the Saints were pretty much my second favorite football team. I felt like they deserved a shot just like my Vikings did, and thought if the Vikes couldn’t make it, I’d hope the Saints could, right?<\/p>\n
If I had heard the Vikings defensive coordinator get on a local radio show and detail his game plan as “laying into the other team’s quarterback with late hits, and try to take the guy out of the game”, I’d be calling for his head as a fan. That shit is just uncalled for in any sport that tries to pass itself off as “professional”. That’s “professional” wrestling type shit. But apparently, that shit is good enough for Louisiana!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Can Ugly be a Roman numeral? That’s what the U stands for. I’m a pretty reserved dude for the most part. In the last 12 years, I’ve cried roughly 5-6 times that I really remember, and believe me, this last decade wasn’t too good to me. When my wife left me, that was one. When […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-all"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zullnero.com\/blah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zullnero.com\/blah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zullnero.com\/blah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zullnero.com\/blah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zullnero.com\/blah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.zullnero.com\/blah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":116,"href":"https:\/\/www.zullnero.com\/blah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115\/revisions\/116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zullnero.com\/blah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zullnero.com\/blah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zullnero.com\/blah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}