26 Ways That Football Can Be Improved
By Brad Pike
Today, my roommate learned I don’t actually know the rules of football. His mind struggled to process this because up to that point, I’d been staring raptly at the game on the screen, fully engaged. He doesn’t understand that I’m like a squirrel or a small bird — fascinated by fast movements and images played in sequence, the same reason I’ll suddenly find myself enraptured by TVs playing football at bars during lulls in the conversation. So he began explaining how football is essentially chess on steroids, expounding on the rules, and describing the different players’ criminal records. He seemed intent on uncovering some latent mania for sports in me. Meanwhile, I interjected every few seconds during the game with some aspect that needed improvement.
- Football would be better if players did hits of salvia beforehand.
- Football would be better if the jumbotron only showed BBC World News reports.
- Football would be better if played in a giant centrifuge chamber rotating in deep space.
- Football would be better as a comic book written by Jonathan Hickman.
- Football would be better if played in a dense cornfield and one player had a knife.
- Football would be better if Edgar Oliver was the announcer. (“Who’s Edgar Oliver?” asked my roommate.)
- Football would be better if at the end of the game, John Madden burst out of the ground and devoured the losing team.
- Football would be better if there was also football fan fiction.
- Football would be better if teams were made up of seven foot tall trained parrots. (“What? Stop drinking all that coffee.”)
- Football would be better if players acted out the game in reverse like a tape rewinding.
- Football would be better if Eddie Murphy played every position.
- Football would be better if players could tag in their wives when they got tired.
- Football would be better if each player on the losing team had to tell an embarrassing story from high school.
- Football would be better if a penalty call meant the offending player had to eat a piece of hairy dumpster goo.
- Football would be better if players could arbitrarily switch teams in the middle of a play.
- Football would be better if all the players had half their bones replaced with twigs and cardboard. (“Are you still talking?”)
- Football would be better if the quarterbacks were skinny white poets who didn’t know the rules.
- Football would be better if footballs were replaced with hams, and you had to eat it every time you made a touchdown.
- Football would be better if played on the roof of a skyscraper.
- Football would be better if Jeff Koons designed the uniforms. (“Who’s Jeff Koons?”)
- Football would be better if the losing team had to recite a poem expressing their despair.
- Football would be better if players had to do a shot every time they got tackled.
- Football would be better if players had to answer a basic math or science question before crossing the end zone.
- Football would be better if there were bottomless pits scattered around the field.
- Football would be better if played in a pitch black 10’ by 10’ room.
- Football would be better if the field and shoes were made of Velcro.
At this point, my roommate decided that maybe football simply wasn’t my game, that maybe my game was the fucking quiet game. I, however, decided I was hilarious, finished off my peppermint white mocha with five shots of expresso, wandered around the neighborhood for forty minutes, and finally retired to my closet/ bedroom where I stared blankly into the darkness, eyes vibrating in their sockets. I thought, ‘What am I doing with my life? Oh God…’