Show Me All The Rules, I Just Want To Belong
The Minnesota Vikings lost a football game on Thursday night that they probably would have lost under any circumstance, but.
They were whistled for a safety at the end of the contest, giving the other team two points and the ball back when said other team grabbed their quarterback by the facemask and yanked him down in the end zone. This is against the rules. A flag should have been thrown, the Vikings awarded 15 yards, and play should have resumed with the Vikings retaining possession. This didn't happen. The player from the other team played for the Los Angeles Rams, which doesn’t really matter, but what does matter is that the Vikings weren’t given the proper chance. Again, they would’ve lost this game 99 times out of 100.
Football is funny this way. It's probably the most flawed sport in terms of its rules and their implementation (tennis is best at this, as David Bazan said, “fewer moving parts means fewer broken pieces”). There’s a real argument that most of the time a team loses it's absolute bullshit and most of the time a team wins it’s hard-won and earned. Fandom in every sport is a carcinogen in this way, but football is unique in its aphorisms. You can call a penalty for holding every play is something you will hear if you watch even 3 football games in your life, yet it’s the most watched sport in America by a wide margin. The top 10 most watched television programs in America have all been Super Bowls (the 11th is the finale of MASH, numbers 12-20 are also Super Bowls, this is funny to me). So why do we give football this power if it’s ultimately up to a few underpaid referees much of the time? The announcers even generally punt the idea of referees as important rule enforcers and mostly denigrate them to people who at best are doing their jobs and otherwise are mostly fucking up the game.
I don't want to talk about why you root for something so arbitrary, that's for another, likely much longer piece. Maybe that's the point of this entire website, I'm not exactly sure. You probably have a job or a child or classes or some obligation. And there is something important in that. You are not the referee or at least you don't feel like it. For example, when I truly consider my position I know in my heart that I am in fact the referee for my dog. I don't like thinking about this but it's completely true. Most of the time, however, I am not the ref and I don't really decide anything. Maybe for you the ref is your boss or your landlord, but it probably isn't. It's usually something more conceptual like traffic.
Part of the reason that you've been promoted or honored or given an extension is just because someone likes you. These things rarely have to do with merit. You probably work with someone who is totally incompetent and can barely complete a simple task without being taken step-by-step through it. I promise you that this is fine. Someone likes them. I know it's frustrating and I know you would never be that stupid. But sometimes you are. It's just that nobody tells you because they like you.
There's a common but vague understanding that football is war and America is war and that's why we can't take our eyes off either or something. I don't disagree with this idea but I think it's too simple. Football is sort of like if every day in your attritional life you were declared the winner or loser. This never actually happens to anyone (although the thought of my fiancé declaring me the winner of each day is as intriguing as the thought of her declaring me the loser of each day is terrifying). You never really get to decide what happens, you play through, and maybe it works out or it doesn't. Yeah, you can hate the Cowboys or the Rams or your awful coworker, but when the game ends they're never the ones on which you call bullshit, it's always the referees.
You hope against hope that next time, just next time, someone will blow the whistle and deliver justice. What you haven't realized is that you've been getting it the whole time, you just couldn't see it.
-Michael Campana