Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. And buy Drew’s book, The Night The Lights Went Out, while you’re at it. Today, we're talking about football, football, football, and also sex.
Your letters:
Dennis:
Does it seem like NFL officiating crews aren’t bringing out the chains like they used to? Have they added enough precision with replay that they don’t think we need this anymore? Did they recognize the optics were bad, so there’s a secret mandate to move close spots forward or backwards six inches? Or am I off base?
It’s the first one. They have enough camera coverage of any given play to more easily judge the spot of the ball relative to the chains. New York also has an eye on the games, too, which means that replay assist can help out in the cause. All of this means that they don’t have to bring out the chains anymore for a spot that’s clearly a yard short of the sticks. That shit took forever, so the NFL did something about it. A rare case of something working the way it should.
In fact, the league may soon do away with the chains altogether, replacing them with an electronic down-and-distance system. In theory, this will make the process even more streamlined, except A) You and I both know that when a modern company wants to make something more efficient, the results are usually lousy, B) You and I will miss this old timey, human element of the contest, and C) I’m gonna be pissed when my team loses a game because Alexa gifted Green Bay a phantom, 15-yard “face marsk” penalty. They warned that AI was trained to be hateful, and soon I’ll have proof!
However, there is one current analog practice that I’d like surrendered over to The Machines, and it’s play-clock abuse. You know the deal with this by now: when the play clock hits zero, the line judge looks down to see if the ball has been snapped. If it hasn’t, they throw the flag. If the ball’s out, play goes on. That gives every offense a beat after the clock expires to still get a play off, and nearly every team exploits this loophole as frequently as they can. The number of uncalled delay penalties I’ve seen this year numbers well into the double digits. Aaron Rodgers is the pioneer of this strategy, and for that (among numerous other offenses) he must be lashed.
On the other side of it, play-clock abuse has led to a spate of teams who “go for it” on fourth only because they’re trying to get the defense to jump offsides. Then they fail, call a timeout, and kick the ball. Not only is this losing football (great offenses don’t get bogged down in Peyton Manning histrionics just as they’re about to run a play), it’s also BORING AS SHIT. There’s a reason that MLB outlawed pitchers throwing 500 straight pickoff attempts. They wanted to phase out a practice that had little strategic value and no entertainment value. So if Rob Manfred can get something right, I see no reason why the NFL can’t institute a play-clock buzzer. Quit fucking around, Roger.
Kyle:
What are the best weekends for a vasectomy vacation?
Any of them. One of the more played out bro themes of my lifetime has been, Bro, you gotta schedule your vasectomy right before March Madness, bro. First of all, you’re gonna watch sports that week anyway, no matter what condition your testicles are in. This is true of any good stretch of the sports calendar (like this one), because bros find a way. Secondly, your recovery will either be a breeze or, like mine, have some lingering complications that will hamper your enjoyment of any football or basketball game. I don’t remember when I scheduled my own vasectomy, but I DO remember one of my nuts doubling in size thanks to an unexpected scrotal clot. That second part tended to hog my attention.
So don’t bother trying to optimize getting your tubes tied. The important thing here is making sure that you’ve been sterilized, because THAT will allow you to watch way more sporting events, long-term, than strapping a frozen bag of corn to your jimmy ever will.
Paul:
Who do I complain to about how bad Amazon Prime is at covering football?
Me! You come to me. Now tell me your beef.
They rarely show replays, even when the plays are awesome, or close. They cut away from the referee when he's announcing the penalty. They don't display stats. FOX covered up their shitty production with Madden and Summerall. But they had like six to seven games a week, and got it fixed in a year or two. Amazon has one game a week and announcers who are sworn competitors to Ambien. And they've been covering NFL for how many years now?
We just finished Amazon’s third year of broadcasting TNF, so they’re running low on excuses. The odd thing is that they hired Fred Gaudelli—the dude who made SNF into the big TV event it is now—to run their production from the very start. And yet, games on Prime always look cheaper than they do on any of the big networks. Jeff Bezos could have done the easy thing and simply paid one of those networks to handle all of TNF’s production, but he clearly wants to wipe those networks off the face of the Earth and make Prime the only television outlet to exist in North America. But Bezos clearly knows dick about TV, and the TNF product has suffered as a result.
I have no good explanation for this. Either Gaudelli hasn’t been given enough resources, or people above him have impeded his efforts to make this thing look professional. Either way, it’s not working. The studio crew is a bunch of replaceable meat puppets. The booth is capable (I’ll always love Al Michaels, and Kirk Herbstreit doesn’t bother me as much as he bothers a lot of other people), but hampered by shitty graphics and midlevel camerawork. The opening title sequence is something your kid could have made on their Chromebook. And the theme music is forgettable, which is both irritating and predictable. I don’t know when these streamers and networks stopped trying with their theme music, but all of them are doing a half-assed job. I want a game presentation that makes me want to mount a horse and charge into battle, not one that looks like a fucking Microsoft ad. I shouldn’t be on my knees, begging for “Roundball Rock” to come back. That song is decades old, man. We’ve had plenty of time to come up with more cool shit in the interim.
Alas, the people who have the most are often inspired to do the absolute least, so I get the stock image equivalent of TV production almost everywhere now, especially at Amazon. This is an ominous portent, given that Prime is about to start doing NBA games. I need Bezos to start caring about this shit more than he presently does. Maybe that’ll happen when he buys the Seahawks, but for now he’s about as motivated as a dead rat.
Also, fix your fucking controls, Prime. When I fast forward through a saved telecast, I want to see where I’m fast forwarding too. How did Google figure this shit out and not you?
Alex:
I’ve never seen anyone outside the NFL using a Microsoft Surface. Have you?
Not in a casual setting, no. You don’t use a Surface for pleasure. You use it because it’s the only choice you’ve been given. This is how BIG TECH makes a lot of its money. Their consumer divisions represent a mere fraction of their gross revenue. They make a shitload more by selling their wares to other companies, to schools, and to government agencies. These are entities that buy in bulk and do not care if the tablet they buy would get them laughed out of study hall. We are mere side players in this economy, sifting through lousy products as global conglomerates trade widgets with one another. This is why the fast forward function on Prime is so shitty.
Chris:
Are college bowls destined to die? The bowl games included in the playoff’s second round felt cheap (minus the Rose Bowl). The non-playoff bowl games were more competitive, and part of what makes bowl season great is stupid gimmicks (i.e the Pop Tart Bowl trophy and PJ Fleck getting a Duke’s Mayo bath…..yummmm).
They’re kind of dying off as we speak, almost entirely due to player empowerment. I’m very happy that college players can move about freely from school to school, and I don’t blame them at all when they decide to skip a bowl to preserve their draft status. But that leaves the postseason with teams that have suffered from mass roster attrition (Marshall had to beg out of their bowl game because so many of their players had entered the portal), and often forced to play without their best players for either part of the game or for all of it.
So what are we watching when we watch the Esso Dingleberry Bowl? Chances are, it’s gonna be a game that lives inside a strange purgatory between exhibition and Big Game. Bowls have always had this odd sheen to them, but now that sheen has become even more glaring. I don’t fault Cam Ward for bailing on the second half of Miami’s bowl game, but I also would have liked to watch him play in it. And, though I dislike Ohio State, I’d prefer that the Buckeyes’ receiving corps not opt out of Monday night’s national title game en masse. I’m just a simple man who wants to see some good football. The major conferences and talent agencies are gonna have to start looking into some quality player insurance policies if they don’t want every bowl game, even the ones in the playoff, stripped for parts.
Since Chris brought it up, I’d also like all of these bowl games to have recognizable sponsors. The Pop-Tarts Bowl? Now that’s what I’m talking about. I’ve heard of Pop-Tarts. They kick major ass. Gimme all those Pop-Tarts. The 68 Ventures Bowl? No. Fuck off. Don’t test me with your Color Star-ass game sponsor. I want Pop-Tarts, Tostitos, Tony the Tiger, Chick-Fil-A, and cotton. Those are good, solid products that I rely on to get by in life. Ain’t nobody squealing with delight when they see the logo for something called “Radiance Technologies” painted at midfield.
Ghostface Bowlah:
Morality, opportunity and circumstances aside, how many living people that you know (friends, neighbors, co-workers, your kids' teachers, etc.) do you think would willingly have sex with you? Sex workers don't count. Spouses do. For me, I'm pretty sure it's about three.
I’m gonna be conservative here and peg the number at 596. You know how handsome I am in person. You also know that I could charm the peel off a banana. I don’t mean to turn everyone on, but I have to face the harsh truth that virtually everyone who comes into contact with me wants to jumps my bones, and jump ‘em hard.
(The real answer is like, two. I’m old and frail. I also haven’t had to spit game in literal decades, and a sociological revolution has transpired since then. I don’t think any of my kids’ teachers are dying to knock down the door to my boudoir.)
HALFTIME!
Ben:
Maybe I was too high when I came up with this, but I feel like there's a really simple solution to tanking: instead of having draft positioning based on the worst record, let's create a points system. You receive one point for losses while you’re still in playoff contention, but if/when you get mathematically eliminated from the playoffs, you then receive two points for every post-elimination win and no points (or maybe only half a point?) for any post-elimination losses. At the end of the season, draft positioning is determined by who has the most points. This way, fans are never in a position to have to root for their team to lose a game.
I admire your resourcefulness in coming up with this system, but the salary floor renders tanking a much smaller issue in the NFL than in other leagues. We had an uncommon number of truly awful teams this season, but many of those clubs (even the Jets!) weren’t actively trying to tank. They wanted to win some games, only to end up sucking ass the RIGHT WAY. The Titans didn’t spend like crazy in free agency last offseason to end up with the No. 1 overall pick this spring, and yet here they are. That’s enough variance to leave me uninterested in fixing a problem that hardly exists.
More important, tanking doesn’t work. Ask the Bears as they’re presently constituted. Sometimes you can luck out like the Bengals and suck your way into Joe Burrow. But a majority of the time, where you pick isn’t as important as who’s making that pick. If your franchise has its shit together, it can stock up on talent (or replenish it) regardless of where it falls in the draft order. The Chiefs got both Trent McDuffie and George Karlaftis in the same draft. They didn’t have to engineer a 15-loss season to do it. Having a well-run team is the only thing that matters. Ask yourself if you’d rather have the No. 32 pick every year for the next five years or Woody Johnson as your owner. It’s not a tough choice.
Edward:
My wife wants me to go ahead and talk to our nine-year-old son about sex. Fair enough. I just have no idea how to do that. I'm an old, tired dad (age 52), and I grew up in a very Baptist household where this, nor any other weighty issue, was ever discussed. Everything I learned about sex was from Penthouse, late '80s video store porn, gossip amongst my idiot-teen friends, and fumbling around in the back of an '89 Bronco II. Probably not ideal. Any suggestions on how to do this with a minimum of psychic damage on my son (or me!) is greatly appreciated. I figure you've done this two or three times, and I'm counting on the Commentariat as well.
You’d be surprised, amigo. I only gave the talk to one of my kids, and it was only because he was about to start the Health part of the fifth grade curriculum. Sex ed. Every kid his age felt both awkward and amused by the prospect of talking penises and vaginas in a classroom setting, so I figured I’d sit the boy down and give him a sneak preview of what he was about to hear. I told him how babies were made, and about the anatomical logistics of sex. I also described the concept of masturbation to him, and his response was something along the lines of, Wait, that’s a thing people do? Then we finished up our chat and never talked about it again. I have no idea if he retained anything I told him, or if it only sunk in once his teacher put up the fabled cross-section illustration of the human sex organs up on the overhead projector. Either way, I trusted him to get the gist of it at some point.
That’s how I learned, after all. I only got two lectures from my Dad about sex. The first one came after my mom discovered an issue of Playboy under my mattress (Kerri Kendall was the centerfold; she remains one of the hottest women ever airbrushed) and told me to stop looking at it. The second time was before a high school trimester abroad in Mexico, when he warned me, “Don’t just stick your dick in anything,” and that was it. Dad, I would’ve KILLED to stick my dick in anything on that trip, but I failed miserably.
So all of my talks with Dad about sex centered—in true '80s fashion—around the consequences of horniness and little else. For a proper education, I had to rely on friends at summer camp (one of them had a copy of Velvet and cracked it open to explain to me what the word “pussy” referred to), porn, very special episodes of The Hogan Family, standup comedians, and Poison songs. But I sorted it eventually. In fact, I became so carnally literate that I lost my virginity at 20 years old! THAT’S PRETTY FAST!
Then I got older and made some babies of my own. Pop culture conditions you to go into parenthood thinking you’re gonna have all of these landmark Moments that both you and your kids will remember forever, the talk included. The majority of these moments never come to pass in some tidy, 20-minute, Oscar movie sequence. Your kids learn about everything, sex included, over a much longer span of time. Shit, you can be a sexually active adult and still not know everything about how it works. That’s something of a letdown, but it also means that these early exchanges are nowhere near as fraught as you, Edward, might think they are. Go ahead and have your talk, but don’t expect it, or the ensuing discomfort, to leave much of an impact. So long as your son understands that you love him and have his back, you’ll be fine.
Do tell him to put a rubber on it, though. Don’t want him getting diseases.
Luke:
I live in Albury, a town in country New South Wales, Australia. Why do I know about congestion pricing in New York?
Because of our own David Roth. Lousy Roth. In all seriousness, our NY-based media has long been intent on making sure that the rest of the world knows about what’s happening in New York. Combine that with the grievance culture that has overtaken our most entitled citizenry and HEY PRESTO! What should be a local political issue is now supposed to be everyone’s problem. This is our digital society in miniature, and there’s very little I can do about it outside of diluting the grievance pool with my own horseshit. PARKING SPACES IN MARYLAND ARE TOO NARROW AND DONALD TRUMP WON’T DO A FUCKING THING TO FIX IT! THE WHOLE WORLD MUST KNOW ABOUT THIS HEINOUS CRIME!
Ben:
On a message board I was drawn into a thread whose premise was that you can't watch a sport if you aren't a fan of one of the teams in the sport. I honestly don't have a team in any sport that I root for or against, I just get some enjoyment out of having the game on and watching the games. But apparently this makes me a weirdo and I should find something much better to do with my nights and weekends. Am I weirdo?
No. Who the fuck made up that rule? I sure as hell didn’t. I have no favorite NBA team, but I still watch the NBA. What is this haughty subreddit gonna do, arrest me for it? If you enjoy watching a sport, you get to watch that sport. Normal people accepted this as fact long ago. We don’t have to discourse it. It’s a waste of time.
Vince:
Which sport has the coolest pre-game warm-up? I vote hockey, with its players flying around at high speed and fancy loops and blasting shots at awesome goalies who make effortless saves.
Oh yeah, hockey warmups are fucking tight. The fact that they pave the ice right before the players skate out only adds to the spectacle. The players skate out onto the ice in a single file and start flying around, and your mind instantly lights up. OMG it’s showtime! Things are happening now! I never played hockey long enough to participate in a skatearound like this, but I bet it makes you feel like a rock star.
Let’s give it up for batting practice while we’re here. It’s an hour before the first pitch. Good a time as any for Shohei Ohtani to casually knock out 10 straight practice dingers.
Ben:
Mermaids. Top half human female, bottom half fishie. But is the top half meat and the bottom half fish? Is there a clear boundary line where it suddenly switches, or is it a mix of fish and meat? You could get surf AND turf from one animal!
It’s definitely surf and turf in one. The more pressing question is: are you a cannibal if you only eat the fish part of a mermaid? What about a centaur? If I get a nice cut of horsey tenderloin off Firenze the magical centaur, have I committed an unspeakable crime? I say no. The animal part of any mystical hybrid beast is fair game. Just imagine a big ol’ basket of Pegasus wings delivered to your table. Who’s gonna refuse a treat like that?
Email of the week!
Dave:
I grew up in South Central PA, and my mom's family was from the Lehigh Valley, so trips back home would involve I-81 and I-78. Anyone who has taken that route is quite familiar with what is now a Sam Adams brewery location west of Allentown. In my childhood, it was a Stroh's brewery, with a bigass sign on the top of the massive building, above the three-story high windows displaying the biggest brew tanks you've ever seen.
But I didn't know what the hell it was. It was the early 90s, and my parents weren't drinkers. Beer only existed in TV commercials and the six-pack our family friend would bring to NYE. So one day, after years of riding along in the backseat past the most majestic building I'd ever seen (did I mention I grew up between a corn field and a cattle farm?), I finally plucked up the courage to say, "Hey mom and dad, next time we come out to visit Grammy and Pappy, I want to stay at that hotel!"
I thought my dad was going to crash the van, he was laughing so hard. My mom, my dad, and my much older brother spent the remaining 30 minutes of the drive laughing their asses off. They did at least eventually let me in on the joke. Anywho, if any childhood story could possibly have presaged my future as the family boozehound, it would be that one...
Go Birds, and be well.
Same to you, Dave. I hope you get to visit that not hotel one day.
