The NFL Should Be Worried

Big Cuter is appalled.  He's having a hard time justifying his love affair with professional football in America. 

His Sunday-on-the-phone-talking-football-with-Dad call was tinged with sadness.  The Carolina Panthers allowed Greg Hardy to practice with the team this week, after a judge found him guilty of domestic violence, Sure, he's appealing, but right now he's a convicted felon... how can they let him play? How can his 49'ers allow Ray McDonald to take the field when there are pictures of his pregnant fiancée's bruised arms and neck all over the internet?  "Pay him and sit him out, but don't put him out there....."

There was pain in his voice. Sports aren't supposed to showcase the ugly underbelly of society this way.  Not in such a concentrated period of time, with such abhorrent, visually revolting, morally repellent actions.

Adrian Peterson's abs have been the source of much sighing. The notion of him standing over a screaming 4 year old.... his own screaming 4 year old... and swinging a tree branch... over and over and over and over on his back and his legs and his scrotum, is horrifying.

As he admitted in a text to the child's mother, "I got kinda good wit the tail end of the switch.”   Don't call it a switch --- it was a part of a tree.  Don't diminish the action with gentler terms - his child was bleeding because he couldn't stop hitting him with a branch.

This is not admirable behavior, and the Minnesota Vikings are benching their star running back until the situation is examined more fully.  That's one small ray of hope in an otherwise dismal arena.

"Sundays are for football."  Agreeing with that statement has been a prerequisite for all my son's long-term relationships. The International Church of Big Cuter has, as its most auspicious holiday, the NFL Draft... or, perhaps it's the opening game... or the Super Bowl.... I just know that it's NFL related.

He's not that invested in the college game.  Being a Georgetown graduate may have something to do with that.  He loves college basketball. He's followed the NBA's Chicago Bulls since his childhood and Michael Jordan's ascendancy coincided. He's knowledgeable about soccer these days, in a way he would have scorned a decade ago.  None of this fandom comes close to his relationship with the NFL.

He has home and away jerseys for his 49'ers; I know this because I bought them for him.  I have been banned from the room if the team was doing well before I arrived; I never messed with the karma.  His brain is a repository of statistics and analyses x's and o's.  He loves the game and the product the NFL has created.

That is, until this afternoon.

He was almost apologetic about spending the day watching grown men run into one another.  He was looking at them as human beings rather than as a team. He was questioning their morality, their heroism, their character.

The NFL should be worried.... very very worried indeed.