paxamericana:

cryptid-sighting:

If the XFL makes a come back, I hope this time they actually fully commit to borrowing from pro wrestling and have all sorts of crazy characters and rivalries and ridiculous angles. They tried to do a little bit of that last time, but couldn’t fully commit to the concept because they (probably correctly) decided too much of that would make people assume it was just like wrestling and the whole thing was faked.

Now, I’m not saying the games should have predetermined outcomes or anything, but the way football’s public image is going thanks to our new understanding of traumatic brain injuries, kayfab is about the only way anyone will be able to morally justify watching football in the future. So they should just embrace it now.

I want to see guys with names like Skirmisher and The Green Mile who played college ball at the University of Parts Unknown have overly complicated rivalries and settle their differences with brutal illegal hits that are actually carefully choreographed so no one suffers long term damage.

this is what it should be, but it’s definitely gonna be a “de-pussified” NFL with twice as much CTE and mandatory standing for patriotic songs between quarters

growing up a Philadelphia Eagles fan

the thing is Veterans Stadium was one of the first multi-sport artificial-turf stadiums and so it was basically carpet on bare concrete, so no matter how good a lineup we had one or two of the keystones would be out injured by playoffs

so what we took pride in was season-ending injuries to the other guys

Philly is mean, it’s like the white part of Boston plus the black part of Baltimore, took pride at being the asshole fans – throwing batteries, throwing snowballs at Santa, cheering the longer our injured opponents stayed down potentially paralyzed – and I think at that point we were multi-sport city with the longest slump without any championships

anyway growing up i took that in my head and ran with it, people complained about the rise of superstar mercenary athletes bidding themselves to anyone that seemed the proper countermeasure, raise the season-ending injury rate to make big single stars riskier

(and maybe not go all Bounty Bowl, but rig things such that hopeless teams somehow gained - in revenue-sharing, draft picks - when they put down a rival hotshot)

anyway the original XFL made a selling point of how it had no fair catch rule on kickoffs, that’s the spirit I’m talking about