Not trying to be trendy, but until your thread, I didn't even remotely think that the superbowl was soon.
I stopped watching whatever season it was that they instituted a rule that it could be a penalty if you hit the quarterback 'too hard'. Never watched a game again and I couldn't name 4 current NFL players if my life depended on it.
Right there with you on all accounts.
I left watching football around the same time as well. The morphing of the game's rules killed my interest in it, just as all the changes to NASCAR did the same soon thereafter. Add in the showboating, the criminal arrests that get swept under the rug, the insane levels of glamorization, and the continuous marketing surrounding it where they make it sound like you are an incomplete person if you're not watching the super bowl, I turned my back on them and haven't felt a shred of guilt or nostalgia for it. It's the same as people giving me a weird look when I tell them I'm not on Facebook or Twitter because I'm not a lemming, you can see the glimmer in their eye fade away as they realize I just slammed them for being a Silicon Valley minion.
I remember thinking it was a shitty deal I was doing an insert at 29 Palms on SB night during the game back in 2001, only our platoon and Recon had to go out early and miss the game. Until that time, while I wasn't an overly dedicated watcher of the game, I did follow it pretty closely and you'd find a game on my TV every Sunday I wasn't deployed until that point. I spent the game in '02 on patrol outside of Kandahar city, '03 I was pulling security in jungle of Puerto Rico so three carrier groups could get qual'd and roll over to the Gulf, and many of the following years were similar. Add in a war starting in there, another war added to it and I had two kids as well, I found more than enough duties calling for my time than some game.
I seriously have not "missed" it one year since that first one.
Here's a couple tidbits from last year for the NFL fans to dwell on... An estimated $4.6 billion is bet on the game (only $158 million of which legally), and we all know damn good and well there's thousands upon thousands of those bets that end up being severely detrimental to a household. Employers are estimated to have lost $3 billion from the Monday sick out, a serious detriment to our economy as well as those employees who don't have paid sick days but lacked the self control to resist the party hardy pressure to make sure they could make it into work the next day. Add in the billions of taxpayer dollars given to already billionaire teams for their stadiums at the cost of the government actually doing their fucking job, well, you get the picture.
Seems to be a few more who lose from the game than just the non-winning team on a field. But fuck me, it's somehow "Un-American" to blast the NFL and their follies. I suggest anyone who takes issue with this to go back to Facebook where they belong, otherwise, open your fucking eyes and your mind to what is really happening in our country.
