I hate football...

[The Legend]

So I've come to a shocking and totally disheartening realization this afternoon. I've come to hate football. Particularly NFL football. Now this is a hard epiphany to have seeing as how for most of my life I've viewed football as my favorite thing in the world. I used to anticipate and love when fall would come around for football season. Now I dread football season because I know that every Sunday is going to piss me off and put me into a horrible mood to start my week. It's completely unavoidable.

Now, the Browns have always been bad since coming back or almost always, but I've always been able to bring myself to enjoy football in other ways. I could enjoy watching most of the other NFL teams play, but I can't any more enjoy that. I haven't watched a 4 pm game all season because I'm always so pissed after the Browns' 1 pm game that I can't stomach any more football. I've watched less prime time games as well.

Watching today's Browns/Steelers game with my father, a tradition of ours, I came to the hardest truth of all. While he'd yell or cuss at the TV over something Pittsburgh would do or get away with, I realized I couldn't muster the ability to hate my team's greatest rival. I'd look at the same play and see 5 things the Browns did wrong, not the Steelers. 2 decades of mismanagement and outright abuse of fan's loyalty and I realized something. The team I hate the most in the NFL has changed. It isn't the Steelers, it isn't even the Ravens like it used to be. The team that fills me with rage and disdain better than any other team is the Cleveland Browns. Now don't get me wrong, I love the city of Cleveland and the fan's fervent pride and care for their sports teams and I love the idea of the Browns. It's just that after two decades, I despise every single person working for the Browns in a football position. Be it players, coaches, management everybody. They are all the same, just further representation of an inability to do a job at the most fundamental level even remotely adequately and getting paid ridiculous salaries to fail, while people in Cleveland bust their asses to do jobs to the best of their ability and just scrape by. Furthermore, above the people in the organization is federally plea bargained, criminally fraudulent snake oil salesman of an owner who wouldn't know a good employee if he stepped up and smacked him in the face and will never hire an employee that can fix this organization.

I've never looked forward to a Browns' bye week more and in a total honest moment, I wish in the bye week someone would take a wrecking ball to 76 Lou Groza Blvd and wipe everything out so completely different people could start over completely new as another expansion franchise that has at least a decent shot at getting it right somewhere down the line. Because this team is eternally linked to failure.

[UTK]

...Now I dread football season because I know that every Sunday is going to piss me off and put me into a horrible mood to start my week. It's completely unavoidable.

Now, the Browns have always been bad since coming back or almost always, but I've always been able to bring myself to enjoy football in other ways. I could enjoy watching most of the other NFL teams play, but I can't any more enjoy that. I haven't watched a 4 pm game all season because I'm always so pissed after the Browns' 1 pm game that I can't stomach any more football. I've watched less prime time games as well.

I definitely understand this feeling. I'm not trying to compare being a Cleveland fan to being a Giants fan, but just from my perspective; the Giants are horribly infuriating to watch because they're just so damn inconsistent. For nearly a decade now, the Giants may be one of the most surprising teams in the NFL. They could walk on the field and wipe the floor, or they could shit the bed. Regardless of what team they're facing. Recently, in the past two seasons specifically, they haven't even been able to wipe the floor. They look good, then collapse. A second half meltdown is the norm, and every week I think they might be able to avoid it, and every week I'm disappointed. It yields so many fucking questions...the primary of which is, very simply, "Why?" I have an intense love/hate relationship with Eli and Coughlin. On one hand, they've brought the franchise to two Super Bowls, both of which they were the underdogs. On the other hand, Coughlin doesn't seem to be making the smartest decisions (see: the end of the Giants/Cowboys game from Week 1) and Eli is more likely to throw multiple interceptions than more than one touchdown. But...they've been around for so long and have been such a crucial part of the team's success that it's hard to think of a world without them. So everyone puts up with them. But I don't know how much longer we can do that.

Giants are holding their own against New England as I'm writing this, but...that doesn't mean shit for the Giants in the second half. They still have time to blow it.

[The Legend]

Coughlin will be retiring soon enough for you...