The NFL is Perfect! The NFL is Doomed! 

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Chuck Klosterman and I grew up on football, the Notre Americano, the United States, and NFL version. As such, the two of us are about as far from objective as two people can be on a discussion about football. Chuck Klosterman spends a majority of his book Football celebrating the NFL’s era of almost uncontested dominance, and I smiled and nodded throughout his walk down memory lane. The NFL was and is so dominant that most of us thought their reign would pretty much last forever, but as Football points out, nothing lasts forever.  

We both grew up thinking the NFL was the perfect league running the perfect sport, but I did that comparing it to baseball in the Major Leagues and basketball in the NBA. Klosterman takes his thesis in another direction, comparing it to the other most prominent football league in North America, the Canadian Football League (CFL).

My obsession with the NFL is so myopic that I never even considered the idea that someone might think there is a better professional football league out there. If we were to make the argument that the NFL is perfect though, we would have to use some comparative analysis, and there is only one other league of professional football worth including in such an argument, the CFL. Before we attempt to compare the two, I must confess that I’ve never made it through an entire CFL game. I’ve watched it for the novelty and to watch some of my favorite college football stars who didn’t make it to the NFL. Once the novelty wore off, and I watched those players a couple of times, I flipped the channel. I did not watch enough CFL to establish an informed opinion of the league. Thus, it’s impossible for me to imagine the flip side: a Canadian watching enough NFL to develop an informed opinion on the NFL and walking away with the thought that the CFL game is superior. My myopia on this is the very definition of subjectivity though.

There are BIG reasons that I think the NFL is superior. The iconography the NFL game, its teams, and its players have achieved is not only nationwide, intercontinental, and worldwide. The CFL has never and will never match the NFL in popularity, and I don’t think I need to qualify that statement. What percentage of Parisians are aware of the Cowboys, the Chiefs, or the Jets? That number might be lower than I think, but number would be so much higher than those aware of the Argonauts, the Alouettes, and the Stampeders that it wouldn’t be an interesting survey. How many Londoners know the names Tom Brady, Patrick Mahomes, and Peyton Manning when compared to Nathan Rourke, Andrew Harris and Justin McInnis? Some could characterize my opinion as subjective, as I watched those elite college athletes mature into NFL stars, but I don’t think it’s subjective to say that the NFL is the go-to place for elite athletes in football. If you argue that point, you’ll have to provide me a ratio of elite college athletes in football who chose to play in the CFL over the NFL, when the NFL wanted them. After that argument is over, you’ll also have to give me a ratio for the number of elite athletes, in their prime, who have left the NFL for the CFL, and when you come up with that insignificant number, I’ll provide the number of CFL stars who have left the CFL for the NFL, when they NFL decided to give them a shot at making an NFL roster. Even if we include suspended NFL players, those in contract disputes, or the attempts aging players have made to revive their career in the CFL, the number of elite athletes who want to play and stay in the NFL for as long as they can is an argument no CFL fan would enter with a straight face.

Even with all that, the primary reason to watch the NFL over the CFL is that to get a first down in football, the NFL provides its teams four downs (chances or tries) and the CFL provides three, and four downs provides more drama.

“Ok,” you, the dispassionate observer might say, “if four is more dramatic than three, wouldn’t five downs be more dramatic?” To paraphrase Klosterman, five downs would probably feel like too many and three feels like it’s not enough. “Four just feels perfect,” Klosterman writes. I agree, because four downs allows for more incremental progressions, or a running game. The CFL’s three-down pass-oriented game almost makes the running game unnecessary and even strategically unwise.

Casual football fans routinely complain that the running game “Is the boring part.” Those of us who grew up in the 80s and 90s, heard this from our friends in Nebraska who hated the Cornhuskers in college football and loved the Joe Montana-led 49ers.

Those who didn’t grow up in Nebraska have no idea how tough it was to maintain allegiance to the Huskers in the 80s and 90s. We were teenagers and early twenty-somethings during this era, and when you’re in that demographic, you don’t like what everyone else does. My teenage friends, and the kids I wanted to befriend, loathed the Huskers, because their dads, teachers, uncles, and everyone else they knew loved the Huskers. It was deemed “uncool” to like the Huskers. We had a teacher ask the class “Who is a Husker fan?” I was the only one who raised his hand. 

The kids I knew also hated them, even after they won national championships, because running the ball was so boring. I watched the same 49er games they did, and I knew that a twelve-yard pass play was sexier than a twelve-yard running play, but I never made the leap with them to the 49ers. I never considered the running game boring, and I still don’t. 

Their the type who say that if the NFL wants to be more popular, they should do everything they can to create a climate in which NFL teams pass more, if not all the time. As a football fanatic, I disagree that running plays are boring, but if I am going to provide an objective perspective, I must admit that a twelve-yard pass play is sexier than a twelve-yard running play. Also, the NFL’s Competition Committee (NFLCC) has made strides in various rules to try to make the passing game more prominent.

As I wrote, I haven’t watch a CFL game, but I attended an Arena Football League (AFL) game. The AFL passes the ball 70% of the time, and the NFL passes the ball 53.3% of the time. I didn’t know that stat when I attended this game, and I didn’t spot the huge difference for the first couple of quarters. I just considered it a fast paced game that was actually pretty exciting to watch at first. As the game progressed, the game lost some of its sex appeal, and I didn’t know why, because I wasn’t looking for it. Somewhere around the fourth quarter, it dawned on me that exciting, sexy plays lose their definition when they occur an overwhelming percentage of the time. The running game is the ebb to the flow of the passing game. Their relationship is intertwined with one another, as one strategically sets up the other and vice versa. When I attended the AFL game, I was excited to attend an AFL game, and I was bored about 50% of the way through it. There was just too much passing involved. The CFL is a passing game, largely because they only have three downs to secure a first down, and that, in my opinion, is the primary reason it will never be as popular as the NFL.

Klosterman’s book also illustrates the NFL provides the superior game, because the CFL has the rouge. I must confess ignorance here, as I never heard of the CFL’s rouge before reading this section in Klosterman’s Football. The rationale behind the rouge, in my humble opinion, is to give the most boring play in football, the punt, some excitement. The rouge allows for a point to be awarded if a punt, field goal attempt, or kickoff ends up with the ball landing in the touchdown area with no return by the opposing team. The rule discourages teams from simply kneeling or letting the ball fall into the end zone. The CFL believes this promotes excitement, strategy, and field position battles, especially in close games. I must award some theoretical points in this scenario, because I imagine that it might add some small parcel of anticipation amid the otherwise depressing fact that my team is conceding that they cannot secure a first down by punting. Other than that, the rouge just feels like a gimmick that the CFL developed to compete with the NFL, even though it was first implemented over 160 years ago. In my independent research on the rouge, I learned that there have been regular season games decided by a last-second, walk-off rouge, and I also learned that there was a rouge-only game in which Montreal beat Ottawa 1-0. To try to achieve some level of objectivity, I must admit that it’s an interesting quirk, but if my favorite team won a game by a rouge, I can’t imagine it providing so much satisfaction that I would celebrate it. I would categorize it as a win for my team and never talk about the details of it ever again.

Another distinction is that while the NFL only allows eleven players on either side of the line of scrimmage, the CFL has twelve. My initial reaction is that this would lead to a crowded appearance, but the CFL adopted a wider and longer field. If it’s wider, longer, and more populated with players, does that make it better or more popular? The NFL draws more viewers within the nation of Canada than the CFL does.

The only rule I see that favors the CFL is motion toward the line of scrimmage before the snap. The NFL’s Competition Committee states that it provides too much advantage to the offense, and I understand that, but they’ve passed so many rules that favor the offense that I don’t understand why they never passed this one.  I’m sure if I dug deep, I could find other reasons, but this is the only CFL rule I wish the NFL would adopt.

The CFL’s play clock is 20 seconds as opposed to the NFL’s 40 on most plays. This allows for a quicker pace, of course, but again, we go to the drama. Whether the typical fan sees it or not, there’s a lot of pre-snap drama that affects the pace of the game. Watching AFL, CFL, and NFL, you see the drama and the pace that favors the NFL game.

NFL purists still complain about the relatively recent rules the NFL Competition Committee put in place to promote more offense and more passing in the game. The rules committee also inserted rules for player protection, particularly the QB, and most NFL fanatics loathe them, but when comparing them to CFL rules, the NFL still provides the superior product. As I wrote, I’ve never watched a CFL game, but I imagine that watching one would tell me how perfect the allowances and limitations the NFL rules are.

The NFL is Doomed 

“The NFL is doomed!” was author Chuck Klosterman’s pitch to get us to buy his book Football. It worked on me, but I am such a Klosterman fan that I would probably purchase a cook book from him. He writes that the NFL’s implosion will not happen today, tomorrow, or within a couple of years. It will happen decades from now, long after our generation goes down.

The sociopolitical theory Klosterman posits for the NFL’s downfall is that there are so many elements of football that we do not want for our culture. He lists a variety of elements of football that we could label political in nature, and he concludes each element with the sentence, “This is not what we want.” We apparently do not want a violent sport, a sport exclusive to male participants that is only loved in the U.S. He also writes that football does not reject toxic masculinity, celebrates the ability to ignore pain and injury, rewards domination of the weak, shuns individuality and identity, and it is authoritarian and militaristic, and hierarchically controlled, with objective outcomes.

“This is not what we want,” Mr. Klosterman asks after listing each characteristic of football. My question to Mr. Klosterman apes a question my uncle used to ask us when we’d say “we” when talking about sports, politics, or any other element of life for which we developed an affiliation of some sort.

“We really need a touchdown here,” we’d whisper while watching our favorite NFL team on TV, for example.

“Who’s we?” my uncle would ask with a mischievous smile on his face. “What do you have a mouse in your pocket?” That joke wasn’t funny. It wasn’t funny when he first said it, and it grew exceedingly less funny the more often he said it. We could classify it as somewhat, sort of clever, in an excessively obnoxious vein, but it was never, ever funny. I think a few of us may have smiled when we first heard him say it, but I don’t think anyone ever laughed. Check that, he laughed. Based on the fact that he said it so often, he obviously considered it one of the most successful rhetorical parries ever created, but if he learned how to read focused groups, he might have discontinued this line of questioning. I don’t think anyone ever thought it was as poignant or provocative as he did either, but his decades-long replies did have one unfunny point, ‘Who do you think you are when you’re dropping your we on us? Who do you claim to represent here?’ 

When I ask who is we, some might guess that I’m accusing Klosterman of political proselytizing, but I’m not necessarily doing so. I’m suggesting that Klosterman is citing group thought when he says ‘we’, but it’s his group’s thought, or the group he knows. Without putting extensive thought into it, I can come up with three ‘we’s of group thought. My we and Klosterman’s we might parallel each other for some distance, but we perpendicular at a certain point. The difference between our similarities and differences are nowhere near the definitions of the ‘we’s that exists within the two sides of my extended family. I realize that’s anecdotal evidence, but that’s kind of the point. If we travel outside my family into the greater variations of we known throughout the country, we find that the country is not only bifurcated on ‘we’s, or trifurcated, it’s absolutely balkanized on so many topics. As one of my friends who was born and raised abroad, and has lived in several states throughout his adult life said, “The United States is almost, almost fifty different countries.” The country is so balkanized on so many subjects Klosterman discusses that I can’t believe he has the confidence, the temerity, and some might say the audacity to write ‘we’ in this manner. Time will bear this out, but Klosterman’s suggestion that his definition of we is more in touch than mine, or the two sides of my family, or those living in this balkanized country just wreaks of subjectivity. 

The much stronger argument Chuck Klosterman should’ve made is that the young ‘uns just aren’t watching football anymore. When I first heard his doomsayer “The NFL is doomed!” marketing pitch for Football, I thought this would be the crux of his argument. And I dreaded reading it, because I didn’t want to read that viewpoint backed or bolstered by analysis, data, and other facts. I read through Football, the book, as I would a horror novel, thinking that that big bad monster was coming, but it never did. If I wrote this book, this argument would be my final death knell, if I thought the end of the NFL was coming. I would approach my analysis from a ‘they’ viewpoint, as opposed to the ‘we’ however. My anecdotal information comes from the young adults around me defining my ‘they’, and the theys I know are very close to entering that key demographic, aged 25-49 that Klosterman admits set trends even though they don’t have any money. When they watch the NFL, or college football, and they don’t very often, they do so with passing interest and little in the way of “we-like” loyalties. They’re in and out of even the most crucial games, and they don’t even bother watching what they consider irrelevant regular season games. When they do watch anything under the football heading, it’s typically a YouTube broadcast that focuses on highlight packages. 

To bolster my point that the NFL is doomed, I would cite a story on a news program that had a 60 Minutes format. It had three separate and distinct stories in the manner that news program does, and one of the stories focused on the Super Bowl of gamers. I considered the story relatively irrelevant, but I asked my twenty something nephew about it, and he lit up. He began talking about the game they played in this Super Bowl of gamers, and he spoke about the individual who led his team to victory in the manner I would Peyton Manning and John Elway. I listened to my nephew’s extensive knowledge and enthusiasm for the game and the individual gamer with a lump in my throat, knowing that my beloved NFL was doomed. 

My nephew also reinforced the idea I had that we’re not only bifurcated or trifurcated, but balkanized, almost as balkanized as we were back in the Theodore Roosevelt administration 1901-1909, when there was no TV, no movies, about 9,000 motor cars in the country, and an overwhelming majority of the American public never traveled thirty miles away from their homes throughout their entire life. Citizens who called Roosevelt president, in their present tense, had print if they could afford books, newspapers, and various other periodicals in common, but that was about it. We had Buggs Bunny, Happy Days, Cheers, Frasier and Seinfeld, and we had the NFL throughout. Some of us say we watched the same shows, because we had three channels, but we had cable. The distinction we know now is that almost every show on cable sucked. We watched major broadcast shows, because they had all of the talented writers and stars, and when we went to work the next day, we talked about those shows with everyone else who watched them. We referred to these conversations as water cooler talk, and the generation that Klosterman and I share can now look back on that era as a very special time. We all shared a cultural zeitgeist, a collective consciousness, a shared cultural literacy, or to put it simply ‘a shared cultural common ground’. However we phrase it, we had those very special connections with a wide swath of the people we talked to for a long time in our lives, and now that it appears over, it almost feels like an hourglass type of timeline that will never be duplicated. The citizens in the Roosevelt administration had little-to-nothing in common in the early 20th century, because they had little in the way of travel or technology, and at the beginning of the 21st century we have little-to-nothing in common because, it could be argued, that we have so much technology that our definitions of entertainment are so fractured or splintered that we’re not reading, watching, or listening to any of the same things anymore. 

This spells doom for the NFL in the sense that it will no longer be the King Kong/Godzilla cultural behemoth of ratings dominance in future generations. When I write that, your next logical question would be, ‘Ok, well, what’s going to replace it?’ Nothing and everything. I know that’s a cop-out answer, but when we talk to those nearing the key demo, we learn that they don’t watch something. They watch everything. ‘Who’s your favorite influencer on YouTube?’ we ask them. They tell us that they don’t really have one. ‘Ok. What’s your favorite type of program, theme, or subject matter that you watch?’ First off, they’ll tell you that they don’t necessarily watch things on YouTube, Netflix, or any other streaming service. They have no loyalties in that regard. They also don’t have a type of program, theme or subject matter. Some of them will come up with something in the face of our disbelief, but if we ask them the same question a month later that will likely change. The final answer we walk away with is they don’t have a focus, and they never really thought about that fact until we asked that question.

Anytime we deal with high-minded questions such as is the NFL doomed, we feel compelled to come up with high-minded answers that lead our loyal readers to the notion that they got their money’s worth. I loved the first half of Football, as I loved the walk down memory lane, but I didn’t really connect with the ‘we’ answers in the second half. I write that, because I remember when the ‘they’s wanted to be a ‘we’ with me. They cared what I thought, wanted to learn from me, and they copied much of what I did, because they used me to define what adulthood meant, and if I might go bold, I think they considered me so cool that they thought it would be cool if I considered them a ‘we’. They tried to watch the shows I watched, they watched the sports I watched, and they even cheered on the NFL teams I cheered on. Those days are over, all of them. They now have their own identities, and their free will. They don’t care what my ‘we’s think, what Chuck Klosterman’s ‘we’s think, or anyone else’s from our generation. They’re going to do what we did and form their own ‘we’. I don’t think their definition of “we” will spell doom for the NFL, but I do think the NFL’s seemingly permanent engraving atop the highest peak of the Mount Olympus of the entertainment world will start to chink, decay and rot away when they take over, as they watch nothing and everything. And if the NFL were to call me and hire me as a consultant on the future that’s what I would tell them they should fear the most. If they then asked me how they could combat that, I would have to confess that I have no idea.

Using the Force on Uranus

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Most of the planets in our universe were discovered by some guy looking up saying, “Hey, lookee there.” And another guy saying, “That right there, that ain’t no star, Jed, that’s a damned planet.” That’s how most planets were first discovered, as far back as 1,000 BC. Neptune was different. Neptune is too faint to be seen by the naked eye. Neptune had to be theorized and mathematically predicted.

This probably reads like a perfunctory narrative at this point in history, because we have the technology and all of the tools and gadgets necessary to uncover numerous mysteries of the universe. They didn’t in 1845. It’s almost a “Who cares now?” story that is so over it’s over, but some of the my favorite stories from history aren’t necessarily about the event in question, but the mind over matter quest to achieve the unachievable. They’re about human ingenuity and/or the power of the human mind. Two men used the science and all of the data available at the time, a pencil and paper, some mathematical theory, and little more than their brains to declare that there should be a planet should be … right there! And they were wrong, initially, and then they were wrong by one degree! This is the story about the discovery of a planet we now call Neptune, a story that illustrates the beautiful idea that every problem we face is one genius away from resolution.

When it comes to the discovery of planets, there’s basically two stories. The unofficial record involved some guy spotting a Saturn, but he was an ancient who didn’t know anything about “the record”. Once the record was established, another guy beat everyone else to get his name on the record for being the “first to spot Saturn.”

“Crock of stuff is what it is,” the naysayers say whenever we talk about the first to discover celestial bodies. “There was always someone who discovered it first, before the record existed, AND, and someone would’ve discovered all of these planets eventually. Most of these names we applaud and memorialize were just right time, right place opportunists. We’re not talking dots of light in the sky when we talk about planets. We’re talking about massive complex bodies that have their own geology, weather, and sometimes even their own atmosphere or moons. They’re huge honking worlds in their own right that would’ve eventually been discovered by someone. The whole idea behind celebrating the humans who first discovered a planet is so ridiculous that it’s hardly even worth talking about.

“It’s like talking about the guy who, according to the record, discovered the moon. You discovered the moon? That right there? You discovered that?”

On July 26, 1609, Thomas Harriot discovered the moon. There is no record of the laughter, derision, or humiliation that followed Harriot’s discovery, but Harriot became the first known person in history to look at the moon through a telescope and draw what he saw. He made multiple maps, including recognizable features. Mr. Harriot either forgot to put his name on the record for his discovery, or his friends started mocking him so ruthlessly for trying to be the first guy to spot the moon that he decided not to submit his name for the discovery. 

The father of modern observational astronomy, Galileo Galilei didn’t give a crud about all that. He knew how to bite that apple. Galileo was an ambitious fella who knew how to get history to celebrate his name, so months later he published findings that mirrored Harriot’s. 

How many of you have heard the name Thomas Harriot? How many of you have heard of the name Galileo? Exactly. Thomas Harriot fell prey to the “publish or perish” dictum that haunts history’s otherwise anonymous names, by failing to publish his detailed maps of the moon, and he died anonymously. In fact, Harriot’s July 26, 1609 findings stayed hidden in notebooks for centuries, until he received proper accreditation in the 19th–20th centuries. The Thomas Harriot story might sound like a miscarriage of justice, unless you’re one of those “I’m pretty sure someone would’ve eventually discovered the moon” naysayers. 

The Perturbing Force 

On March 13, 1781, a man named Sir William Herschel used his trusty telescope to discover a planet we now call Uranus. His observations found that it wasn’t a comet, but a planet, and after his findings became “official” the society of astronomists pretty much thought “Ok, that’s it, Woo Hoo and all that, we’ve discovered the end of the universe.” There was one problem; the astronomists who used Herschel’s findings could not correctly plot point Uranus’ orbital positions based on mathematical projections. Uranus was so all over the place that it made no sense. 

Alexis Bouvard

Using all of the data available to him at the time, Astronomer Alexis Bouvard made seventy-seven projections on where Uranus should be at any given time, but his fellow astronomers called him out. They told him all of his projections proved incorrect. We can guess that Bouvard called them ordures, French for trash, but he went through the projections versus the reality, and he found that they were right. Much to Bouvard’s humiliation, this occurred after he published his seventy-seven projections. He probably could’ve simply corrected the record and published again, but that would’ve meant finding his initial errors and correcting them.

We can only imagine how much time, sweat, and passion Bouvard put into creating those tables, and we can guess that he tried to save face by saying,

“Hey, I didn’t just throw that out there. These were precise projections based on all the data I had at my disposal, coupled with Newtonian laws. I wouldn’t just guess and then publish those guesses to subject myself to this level of humiliation. There’s something more going on.” He initially blamed the data, but when that didn’t satisfy anyone, including himself, he came up with a “Perturbing Force” theory.

Bouvard’s Perturbing Force theory suggested that there was something beyond Uranus pulling and pushing on Uranus in a way that caused irregularities in its orbital path. He suggested that it might even be another planet.He submitted the idea that Uranus might not be the end of the universe to the Paris Observatory, but unfortunate for the legacy of Alexis Bouvard, the member of the astronomical society who received that request for a follow up left his position soon after Bouvard submitted that request for further findings. Furthering the unfortunate nature of Bouvard’s legacy, he died before anyone would substantiate his idea of a perturbing force gravitationally pulling and pushing Uranus off what should have been the precise data points dictating its orbit. Thus, we can only guess that Alexis Bouvard probably died believing himself a failure, or at the very least that everything he accomplished in life ended with a huge stain, in the form of an exclamation point, at the end. 

Skeptics argued that since Bouvard’s projections relied on Isaac Newton’s theories, Newton’s theories must be flawed. Mathematicians, like John Couch Adams, insisted that Newton’s theories were sound and after studying Bouvard’s projections, Adams insisted that he could use Bouvard’s projections, and all of the data the man compiled, coupled with Newton’s laws to deduce the mass, position, and orbit to discover Bouvard’s perturbing force. 

Couch Adams devoted four years of his life to studying, calculating, and projecting where a possible perturbing force could be, and he submitted that work to British Astronomer Royal George Biddell Airy. The esteemed Airy was understandably skeptical, as the mathematician submitting these findings was a twenty-four-year-old, and we can also guess that Airy was unwilling to put his reputation on the line without detailed computations. He did respond to Couch Adams, however, asking for greater precision, as Couch Adams’ findings turned out to be twelve degrees off, and unfortunate to the legacy of John Couch Adams he did not respond.Some suggest that the failure to respond may have been due to Adams’s unprofessional demeanor, his nerves, procrastination, or that Adams did not have the numbers required for greater precision. Whatever the case was, Couch Adams’s failure to respond in a timely manner cost him sole credit for the discovery of the planet Neptune.   

Some suggest that Frenchman, Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier, was unaware of John Couch Adams work, his subsequent submission, and his failure to complete the work, but Le Verrier was very aware of Alexis Bouvard’s work. He paid particular attention to Bouvard’s idea of a “perturbing force”, and it fascinated him. He thought he could find the missing link, and he thought he did. He thought he made the discovery of a lifetime, one that could make him famous. 

He first sent those findings to the French Academy of Sciences in Paris, but due to bureaucratic inertia and a lack of proactive observation, the Academy did not follow up. They did not reject Le Verrier’s math, as they found it rigorous, but his findings did not translate into instant acceptance as a confirmed discovery because it remained theoretical until it could be observed. The Academy also had “other concerns”, and they may have lacked the capacity to immediately follow up. Whatever the case was, Le Verrier took some of the complaints The Academy had about the absolute precision of his findings, and he refined his coordinates and submitted them to Johann Gottfried Galle at the Berlin Observatory on September 18, 1846. Berlin had a powerful new refractor telescope, and they provided a more agile response, partly because Galle and his assistant Heinrich d’Arrest were eager to test the hypothesis. 

On September 23, 1846 Galle confirmed, through Verrier’s detailed calculations, that the perturbing force affecting the orbit of Uranus was possibly and probably a planet that we now call Neptune. Galle’s confirmation did note, however, that Le Verrier’s detailed calculations were one degree off. Here we reach another “think about it, before we move on” moment. The Frenchman took Alexis Bouvard’s precise projections, based on pre-discovery data, and he joined Bouvard’s mathematical calculations on his errors, coupled with some theoretical notion of a perturbing force, pushing and pulling Uranus off what should be its orbit, and it should be right there! And those calculating his math,using nothing more than their own math(!), found that he was one degree off! [Note: The international astronomy community eventually decided to settle the international dispute by giving credit to both the British Adams and the French Urbain for Neptune’s discovery, even though Adams unofficially discovered it first.] Astronomy.com also states that “Adams [eventually] completed his calculations first, but Le Verrier published first. Le Verrier’s calculations were also more accurate.” The lesson here for you kids looking to submit astronomical findings to a governing body, when they approach you for detailed calculations to support your astronomical findings make sure you either respond immediately, or maybe you should have your detailed calculations ready before declaring your findings. 

The naysayers have a point when they say someone would’ve eventually discovered something as massive as a planet, but Neptune is different. Someone would’ve eventually discovered it, as the technology advanced, but a couple of guys, we’llsay three in total with Bouvard paving the way with his perturbing force theory, located Neptune by mathematically predicting where it would be based on the irregularities in Uranus’s orbit. Is that phenomenal? No? How about we put ourselves in their era and learn that when they went to the office to complete their theories, they road a horse on a dirt road to get there, if they were lucky enough and rich enough to own a horse. Also, their definition of the heart of the city was often just a bunch of wooden store fronts, like the recreations we see on the old HBO show Deadwood. Most of what these 19th century astronomers and mathematicians saw in the nighttime sky is what we can see by stepping outside and looking up into the sky. They had some technological assistance back then, in the form of relatively weak telescopes, and some theorize that astronomers, like Galileo Galilei in 1613, Jerome Lalande in 1795, and John Herschel in 1830 may have used this technology to spot Neptune first, but they didn’t know they were seeing a planet, because their telescopes were not powerful enough for them to know that. Those of us who write articles about such topics and the geniuses who made ingenious discoveries or theories that proved slightly incorrect or somewhat flawed should asterisk our modern critiques by saying, “I am smart. No, really I am, really, really smart, but as ingenious as I am, I don’t know if I could’ve done what they did with the primitive technology they had, primitive when compared to ours. So, before I go about correcting and critiquing their findings with the technology I have at my disposal, thanks to those who developed it for me, I’d like to say how impressive it is that they came so close that it’s impressive that they did what they did with what they had.” 

Silly Super Sports Fans Saying Stupid Stuff 

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“Sorry fellas, I’m just sooo competitive,” Mark said after yelling as loud as he could in a public bar. He yelled because the other team just made a basket to clinch a victory over our team in game we were watching on the television set. His yell temporarily silenced the bar, so I assume his apology was partly genuine and partly based on embarrassment.

Men are biologically predisposed to respect other extremely competitive men, so when he said he yelled because he was “sooo competitive” we felt biologically required to understand. The sticking point for me is that Mark is old. He is a couple generations removed from being so loaded with testosterone that it occasionally boils over the top into the public. He’s so old that employees at Arby’s give him the senior citizen discount without even asking, yet he’s still “sooo competitive” that he can’t control his impulsive need to scream indecipherables at images on a television set.

‘Is that odd, or is it just me?’ I asked myself after Mark screamed. I didn’t care that everyone else acted like Mark just asked for extra cheese on his mashed potatoes, it was odd. I couldn’t accept this as a natural reaction to our favorite team losing. I couldn’t accept it as something we’ve all seen fans do, things I’ve done, so often that it’s become socially acceptable. I’m sure those who dismissed as an extra cheese considered it part of the package we all buy into when we decide to watch a game in public at a bar: We chose your bar to watch our game, we paid your cover charge, and we spent all this money on your alcohol, so if our team loses we reserve the right to scream like a lunatic in your establishment if we lose, because we’re “sooo competitive”. 

Not only is Mark old, he’s so well put together. The women I know report that he is a good looking man who knows how to wear a shirt. He’s also well-spoken, successful, and he displays an otherwise healthy, happy demeanor. If we asked long time bar employees to bullet point the typical indecipherable screamer, there would probably be a lengthy, inconclusive list, but we can guess that Mark wouldn’t fit of any of them. Watching Mark do that, opened my mind’s eye to how foolish I must’ve appeared after screaming like an idiot the minute the fellas wearing my favorite laundry, fail to make as many baskets as the fellas in the other laundry.  

At this point in my description, Gary, the line cook, would cut me off in a way he often cut me off to suggest I’m taking too long to get to the point: “It’s funny when someone makes an ass out of themselves in public.” It is still funny, and I don’t care how much societal and cultural pressure they apply, we’re still going to laugh when someone acts like that. It’s the ‘it’s funny, get over yourself’ level of comedy that will probably never be entirely vanquished. When Mark screamed like that, he silenced the entire bar of patrons momentarily, as they probably assumed it was a cry for help from someone having a heart attack. If Mark laughed after doing that, comedically implying that he was imitating a twenty-something reacting to a loss on TV, it probably would’ve been humorous. The fact that Mark genuinely had such trouble controlling his impulses that he felt the need to apologize for it, felt like another level of comedy. It felt like a level that unintentionally commented on itself with a sprinkling of irony and cleverness on top. 

It is funny when people do foolish things, but when someone does something that informs us what we look like when we do foolish things, it’s a level of comedy that is so funny we don’t laugh or even smile in the moment. It’s a level of comedy that if a professional standup comedian properly deconstructed it and simplified into a three-beat punchline, it could change the manner in which all super sports fans react to soul-crushing losses by their team. The rest of us are better off trying to pretend it never happened, or ignoring it.

So, I wondered if I accidentally silenced a bar with a loud, obnoxious scream, and they thought I was so old that I might be having a heart attack, would I say something like, “I’m sorry I’m just sooo competitive” as an apology for my over-the-top reaction.

The reaction I did not give voice to was, “Who cares if you’re sooo competitive? You’re not playing, and you don’t have kids playing in this game. No one cares if you’re watching this game with a sense of competitiveness attached to it, or if you’re just watching it passively.” What would I do if someone said that to me following a similar outburst? I would probably consider the idea that I need to seriously reevaluate how I react to watching my teams on TV.

The funny thing is when Mark and I watch our sons play baseball, Mark cautions me about going overboard when I react to my son’s errors. “They’re just kids,” he says. And he’s right, but the young men playing on our favorite basketball team are young enough to be his grandsons.

Any criticism I direct at mark should be asterisked with the notion that he and I are far too similar for my tastes. As I wrote, seeing someone act foolish is funny, but seeing someone mirror the manner in which we’ve acted foolish silences us because we don’t know if our laughter is self-referential, ironic, or a meta moment that circumvents our definition of humorous in a manner that makes fun of us. 

I, like Mark, considered it a testament to my character that I refuse to accept mediocrity from the players on my favorite teams. “It says a lot about you that you’re willing to accept just being in a championship game. You should refuse to accept anything less than that ring.” Those are the type of things we super sports fans say to one another, and when I say we, I’m talking about everyone from my inner circle to talking heads on sports shows, to commentators on message boards. We all preach such platitudes so often that they became gospel to those of us watching sports on TV. 

“You do understand that I was not playing in that game, right?” is a reply I learned too late in life to use against those who badger me about my team’s failures. I don’t know where I heard that, but I wish I learned it earlier. It would’ve saved me from the emotional turmoil I experience when someone calls me out. Anytime I watch a game, I want my team to win, but I also don’t want to face those who love to badger me when my team loses. I use this line now when some idiot confronts me with the fact that my team “WE” just lost a crucial game, and I’ve just recently added, “And I realized, with about two minutes left in the game, there was nothing I could do.”

Of course I want my team to win that championship game, I want my team to win every single game, but what are we supposed to do when they don’t? What do I do if they do? It turns out, I’m not playing in that game, so it really doesn’t matter what I do, it doesn’t matter what I think, and it doesn’t matter what I punch, who I insult, or what I scream in the aftermath. That score will not change. If you need this therapy as much as I did, repeat after me, “If my team is in a championship game, it’s the team I chose to support that is in there. It’s not me.” Some of us need to create some distance from the “WE” mind meld we’ve created with our favorite teams that nearly exceeds beyond the vicarious enjoyment and misery we experience watching sports. We need to mentally rewrite what we super sports fans say to one another when we’re watching sports on TV. “It says a lot about you that you’re willing to accept that your favorite team is in the championship game. You should want your favorite team to win that championship game.” If you’re on the outside looking in, and you see this article as so obvious that it’s kind of funny that it took us so long to see it, we applaud you for your happy, healthy outlook on watching sports. Some of us take far too long to get there.

I was already about 70% of the way there when Mark screamed indecipherables at the bar, but that episode absolutely clinched in for me that when we’re on the cusp of the senior citizen demographic, we should start to distance ourselves from the “WE” mind meld we have with our team. When the players on our favorite team are all young enough to be our grandchildren, it’s probably time to cut the frayed tendrils of the leash we have on the idea that we’re still a part of the team. “WE” can’t help it, because we’re “sooo competitive.” “WE” love our team so much that when we watch them on the screen “WE” know when we need to run the ball more often, “WE” know when we need to put the ball in the paint more, and “WE” know what everyone else knows … we really need a hit here.” As hard as it is to accept the realities of age, it’s probably time we stop wanting our team to win so badly that we scream gibberish, hundreds of miles away from the players, in a bar of unsuspecting customers after “WE” make a horrible mistake. It’s probably time we accept the fact that it doesn’t really matter how competitive we are while watching sports on TV? We don’t have to accept the idea that second place is good enough, or that our team had a “good” season, a “good” game, but if we have good kids and grandkids, and we’ve lived a great life, the idea that that some kid dropped a ball is no longer going to cause me to scream something in a bar. I honestly don’t remember doing that, but if I did that part of my life should probably be over now. 

I did get that “NUTSO!” when one of my fellas “WE” dropped the ball, but I did it in the privacy of my home, and I now see that I did it in conjunction with how satisfied I was with the direction of my life. When things weren’t going as I planned, I was a rager. I never harmed myself or my appliances when watching the methodical destruction of my team, or when playing video games, but I was probably pretty miserable to be around. I scared my dog, and my wife no longer enjoyed watching sports with me. Now that I’m more satisfied with the general direction of my life, I’m finally starting to see how foolish it was that I got SO UPSET!!! over a group of guys young enough to be my grandchildren wearing my favorite laundry, losing a game on a television program. I love sports, always have, always will, but I don’t know if I ever really enjoyed watching sports.

“Ok, but if we’re going that deep into underlying psychology, we could say that screaming about a team losing a game is actually quite healthy,” this sports fan once said when called out for my unreasonable displays of frustration and anger. “As you said, we could probably draw hysterical reactions to matters we cannot control with the dissatisfaction he have with the life we lead that we ostensibly have more control over, but those reactions usually manifest in one way or another. Couldn’t we say that yelling at anonymous figures on a screen, be they characters in a video game or in an athletic contest, is actually a no harm no foul way to vent frustrations in life? It’s better than yelling at the wife, the kids, or the dog. If you think the universe is against you, and your favorite teams, beating the furniture, throwing the remote control across the room, or screaming out in public bars are examples of healthier ways to deal with our frustrations in life, at least when we compare them to the alternatives. If we do it right, it can be quite cathartic to be a silly, stupid sports fan.”

“If you do it alone,” I concede. The cathartic effect is all internal, so you might want to create a man cave, tell your family you don’t want to be bothered for three hours, pour your favorite drink, eat your favorite snack, and surround yourself with inexpensive fixtures to undergo your therapy. Or, you might want to consider a more nontraditional, modern method of watching sports: tape it. I know this violates a number of the commandments of the super sports fans bible, but if you have some issues dealing with your team losing that your wife characterizes as unhealthy at times, tape the game, wait until it’s over, find the final score before watching, and just enjoy watching the victories. This might defeat the whole purpose of pursuing therapy through hysterical tirades, but seeing final scores on a phone amounts to seeing numbers as opposed to the vicarious condemnations of character we experience when witnessing our team’s slow progression to failure. Mistakes and miscues during a game are also a lot easier to deal with when we know our fellas will eventually overcome them and prove victorious.  

Needless to say, the reason Mark’s over-the-top reaction affected me so deeply is that if we dismiss the time and place argument, Mark and I are lot more like-minded than I’d care to admit, I admit. We are silly super sports fans who say and do some incredibly stupid things watching sports on TV. The man did give me perspective though, as I now see how foolish I used to be. I thought about some of my bizarre reactions, my hysterical tirades, and about the nonclinical periods of depression I’d go through in the aftermath of a disastrous defeat of my teams on television. The old talk show host Phil Donahue once asked how sports fans do it, “Isn’t it enough to have women break your heart? Why would you welcome more pain into your life?” That probably sounds hyperbolic to non sports fans, but I’ve had sports teams cause me far more pain than women have. Then, after one of my teams finally FINALLY won a championship, I remained purposefully and stubbornly unsatisfied, because I immediately began to focus on next year. If you know a true super sports fan, you know that “Next year” is their refrain. Win or lose, it’s all about next year. We might raise our fist high, scream indecipherables, and maybe cry a little when “WE” win a championship, but if you’ve ever been at a championship-winning table at a bar of screamers, you’ve seen those screams stop and talk about the natural attrition of losing talent, and how “WE” were going to replace them, if “WE” hope to have a chance at a repeat. Then, when “WE” repeated, “WE” wanted a three-peat, and “WE” were miserable when it didn’t happen. Being a super sports fan should be fun and enjoyable, but it’s not if you’re purposefully and steadfastly never satisfied, and you take it as seriously as I did, it can actually make you a little miserable. The only antidote is to understand that you’re not playing in the game, and in sports, no one can hear you scream…if you’re in a public bar that is 897 miles away.