An allegation of “bounty” offers for players who injured opposing team players is violently shaking football to its core. And like with babies, shaking is the most dangerous thing you can do to football. The NFL is doing its best to cut down on injuries and concussions, so this is the last thing they need right now. In fact, under the circumstances, it’s quite the PR disaster. And by “under the circumstances”, naturally I mean it’s a slow news week.
Here’s what’s probably the truth here: The NFL would like the game to be exciting, violent and vicious, but they’d like to avoid having players get hurt. It looks bad when it seems like they don’t care, or that they’re fostering an environment where people are being injured, but most of all, it’s the fact that they don’t want to pay a lot of money in healthcare costs for injured players, and even more to the point, that they’d like to avoid losing lawsuits over this issue. So for all these reasons, the NFL has to pretend like they care about this issue. I mean, the NFL has to take a stand against these barbaric bounty things. That’s what I meant to say.
But here’s the thing: How do you have an exciting, physical contact sport without aggression and hard tackles, and then how can you have that without some people getting hurt? I have the answer, and I’ll let the NFL in on it, but I should get a small cut of the proceeds for coming up with it: From now on, rather than having people playing football games and broadcasting them, instead let’s have representatives from each team in a match-up play that Madden NFL video game, and they can broadcast that instead. That way they can hit and tackle as hard as they want to, but nobody will really get hurt, since it’s just video game representations of the players, and not real players. Our movies are mostly fake nowadays with CGI standing in for everything anyway, and people are fine with it. So why not do the same with football?
So the NFL could act like they care about safety, we’d still get a violent game, and nobody would get hurt, so everybody wins. Plus, it would be easier to get tickets to the game, since nobody wants to watch two people play a video game in a stadium anyway. And, the NFL wouldn’t have to pay for any more injuries. Now, wouldn’t that be better? And the best thing about this idea is that once people accept that we’re just watching CGI instead of real people, then they could ramp up the violence significantly, adding stuff like chain saws, grenades, shotguns, nunchucks, motorcycles, machine guns, medieval armor, etc. into the games, and having gore galore all over the field, with players slipping on it, etc. Now wouldn't that be awesome?
