Replay ruins everything

At some point during almost every football game Noel and I watched this season, he had to endure the same rant from me. It's the replay rant. There are ancillary rants, but they are all related to the replay rant. I can sum it up with the title of this post, although of course there are so many nuances.

Here are some of the things replay has ruined:

1. Pace. It's very possible that replay is what prevented Oregon from competing in the national championship on Monday.
2. Refereeing. All calls are provisional now. I even heard the color announcer Monday night praising the referees for making a call precisely to provoke a review so they could see what really happened.
3. The rulebook. The infamous Calvin Johnson rule is only one example. Verities on which I have built my life -- the ground cannot cause a fumble, for instance -- are now subordinate to bizarre standards that stretch the definitions of "catch," "fumble," "possession," and even "move" into absurdity.
4. Touchdowns. Even though the new rules require players to "control the ball" all the way through their fall to the ground and beyond, the "break the plane" standard for touchdowns means that as soon as the ball pierces that barrier, nothing that happens thereafter matters. Players shove the ball toward the plane knowing that even if it leaves their hands, they still score.
5. Consequences. Coaches have challenges, which was supposed to keep the play moving on the field so that every incident wasn't litigated in replay. But now referees call for reviews much more often than coaches, and certain plays are automatically reviewed, so the coaches don't have to make those calculations about whether it's worth it to challenge.

Tennis is the only sport I know where replay -- in the form of the Cyclops -- has actually improved the game, helping the officials "get it right" without destroying the athletes' pacing and provoking an infinite regress of arguments. Baseball is moving in football's direction, even after only one season; the idea that a replay of a close play at first is more likely to yield the truth than the ump watching the foot and listening for the ball to hit the glove is a fantasy. And it's a dangerous one -- a fantasy that insists that higher frame rates and better definition and more detailed rules will result in more justice, when what it actually does is disintegrate the event under examination until it is completely lost.

If I ever teach that class on philosophy of sports again, I'm going to hold a class full of students hostage with that rant. I hope somebody in the league offices is wise and powerful enough to ski off this slippery slope before then.

Woo pig sooie

A dozen years living a a place will change a person. I've been an SEC partisan since my childhood days listening to John Majors call Tennessee games on the radio while working outside on fall days with my dad. But I never thought I would become one of the crimson-clad masses in this state calling the Hogs.

At some point the pride and fervor become irresistible, I suppose. I would never consider failing to tune into the Cotton Bowl tonight, along with all my neighbors, to support the flagship institution and the old-school tradition of Arkansas football.  All season I've been making the same arguments as I read in the boosterish local sports section for the quality of this team, who lost only two games this year -- to the two teams who are contending for the national championship.

Twelve years ago, I would have looked at the person I am now with bemusement. Now I'm enjoying being caught up in the statewide hysteria.  Wooooooooo pig!  Sooie!

Throw another chocolate bar on the grill

This Hershey's commercial has been running during college football this season.  It shows people in slow motion passing around s'mores, digging into s'mores, tossing the ingredients for s'mores to grillmasters who are assembling s'mores.  These people are wearing football jerseys and are in a crowded, energetic parking lot.  They're tailgating.

When I saw this commercial for the first time, I was waiting for the ironic payoff.  I thought it was going to be like those commercials for ranch dressing that show people in idyllic settings completely dominated by ranch dressing -- bowls of it, mugs of it, stockpots of it.  The joke is both that the item is out of place, and that people are being inordinately delighted by it.

But the Hershey's commercial is apparently playing it straight.  Tailgating and s'mores, it says, are an All-American pairing, one we all grew up with.  When you go tailgating, instead of meat grilling and beer being poured, all you see are graham cracker sandwiches with gooey marshmallow and chocolate filling.

Is this true?  Do people make s'mores at tailgates?  It's been a long time since I spent a lot of time in parking lots before ball games, I admit, but surely things haven't changed that much.  Or is this a bid to get s'mores out of the scouting and camping ghetto and into the mainstream with barbecue, Mom, and apple pie?

Yipes, stripes

It was a beautiful warm autumn day.  There happened to be a stadium a five minute walk from our house with a football game in it.  So we went.



We had general admission tickets, so it was up to the top of the home stands with us.




Here come your UCA Bears!




You may have noticed something strange about the field.  Yep, they replaced the grass with purple and gray striped turf before this season.  It's ... striking.





There were free bam-bam sticks.




Which were a big hit.




And there was a football field of real grass, for a change, to run across as we left, recreating the 98-yard fumble return for a touchdown that the Bears accomplished on their field.




"This has been a good day," Cady Gray proclaimed at dinner.  I have to agree.  Days don't get much better.

Bowl of cherries

'Tis the season to spudify on the couch and watch other people performing athletic feats.  Bowl season has begun, and there seem to be more of them than ever.  Or maybe it's just that they have perplexing new names.  Right now we're watching the uDrove Humanitarian Bowl, which raises the eternal question: uDrove?

You can't tell the players without a program.  And for bowl season, the essential guide is Noel's 2007 inventory "12 Defunct Bowl Games."  In the three years since, the pieces have reshuffled and the sponsors have turned over, but I know you've all been wondering what happened to the galleryfurniture.com Bowl and the Haka Bowl (the latter was actually cancelled before it took place).

And if you have free time on your hands before the meaningful BCS bowls start in January, you could provide a short history of your favorite frequently-renamed-or-relocated bowl in the comments.  This is one list that really needs a yearly update.

10th avenue freezeout

Today's post catching up on a WIP and a plan B is at Toxophily.

I'm home from Atlanta and happy to be back with the family. And I'm as giddy as a schoolgirl watching Bruce rock the halftime show. Tomorrow it's back to work, but for tonight, I'm gonna sit right back and laugh.

Of football and feminism fatale

Time once again for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Letter Of The Week! Today's installment: Let us learn the lessons of Tony Romo before it is too late for our country.

More than game at risk

The recent Cowboy loss is all the more fitting and ironic amid the Jessica Simpson controversy as America’s team falls victim to the distraction concept.
To whatever degree one believes this factored in their defeat, or did not, two things stand out. One is that while with her, Tony Romo’s mind was not on the game. Two, she put her career above his. Both these smack of the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and ’70s, now in its second generation.
All this comes as we prepare to elect the first woman president, born of the same era. We have since then elevated and promoted the influence of women. I saw in the Dallas-New York Giants game how that can affect events, and this has far more reach than the sports arena as alluded to earlier.
We are headed in the same direction and, in my view, with the same results, with social balance at stake instead of a playoff game.

JIMMIE DYER
Hope

Football nation

America is gearing up for football season in ways large and small. The NFL is back on TV, college and high school teams are looking forward to their first games, and the sports pages run glowing profiles of the star athletes who are going to lead their squads to victory.

So it's an appropriate time of year to be watching Friday Night Lights, the acclaimed NBC series based on the 2004 movie, which was itself based on H.G. Bissinger's nonfiction book about the Permian Panthers, perennial champs based out of Odessa, Texas. We had caught up with a few episodes of the series in reruns months back, but since it's a serial, it made a lot more sense once we starting watching the season DVD set from the beginning.

What's arresting -- and endlessly fascinating -- about the show is its rootedness in the rituals of football culture. The way the coach interprets his job to be as much about inspiration as technical skill -- a kind of highly concentrated vision of the complete leader. The influence of the depth chart on social position. The orbiting rings of support groups that encircle the team -- boosters buttonholing the coach in the diner, rally girls making homemade treats for their assigned players, parents putting up big signs in their front yards announcing their sons' numbers and positions.

And something about the quasi-documentary style serves the material well. Football may take place on identical measured grids, but it's outdoors, and the quality of light along with the frequent out-the-car-window establishing shots make the Texas location absolutely indelible. It's a whole nother country, as they say, and appropriately enough, this show doesn't look or feel like anything else on television.

The new fall schedule may look bleak right now, and some of us are still mourning favorites canceled in the last few years. But looking at Friday Night Lights, it's easy to believe that we're still in that new golden age of television.