You don't really have a point, so shut the...

I love the numbers in football. I don't really like watching games, mostly due to the after-play shenanigans. I'd rather watch the rotating scoreboard on NFL Network than a live game. Only a few teams play good football. While parity gives most teams a shot at the beginning of the year and shortens the shittiness cycle, it makes for some pretty crappy football. Among other reasons, guys are not with teams long enough to form real cohesiveness on offense, which makes for some boring shit more often than not. The Colts, Saints, Chargers, and Bengals are the obvious exceptions to this. The Niner-Cards game on Monday night was excruciating. The Bears-Bolts game was so bad, I left to go for a ride even though I had LT on my fantasy roster. The Cowboy-Giant game was the Jesus of the weekend, but even that game wasn't played particularly well.

Football is boring these days. I never used to listen to announcers. I used to watch the game. Madden and Summerall on Niner/Cowboy games were like some ambient glow rather than an intrusion. Michaels and Gifford were amazing, so much so that Dan Dierdorf's buffoonery was nothing more than a mosquito buzzing around your ear. Today, every tit with a microphone tries to be John Madden. Announcers tell you what to think about plays rather than describing them. The nice thing about Michaels and Summerall was that they'd let the viewer decide what they thought about a play. They left the color to the color guys, and even the color guys told you what happened, not what to think. Is it that football is so tough to watch that I can't help hearing crummy commentary? Or is it that crummy commentary is so bad that it's making football tough to watch. I don't know. I do know the experience that is football on television is almost unbearable. Thank God Madden and Michaels are together on Sunday night.

I was driving home on Monday from Vail to NorCal, listening to the Bengals-Ravens game. Boomer Esiason was doing the color alongside some douche I'd never heard of. Over and over Boomer talked about momentum. The Bengals had the momentum, then it turned and the Ravens did, then the Bengals got it back after a fumble recovery, then the Ravens had the momentum. He kept talking about it. Boomer, I know you're a frequent MHR reader, so if you're reading this, let me tell you something everyone else already knows. Momentum in sports is not real. If momentum switches seemingly from play to play, there is none. Please stop talking about it. And if the point you're trying to make isn't really panning out, don't try to make it work. You just look, or sound, silly.

So the whole experience has become very ho-hum. DMo, Sondog, the Butler and myself were at Sondog's house Sunday morning, excited as all hell to watch the opening Sunday of football season. We were all pretty hung-over so it wasn't the most reliable case-study, but Sondog ended up asleep on the floor and the rest of us left before the second game was at the quarter. Elam's kick at the gun was nice, especially since it got me four points in our fantasy league, but the day was a tough watch.