It’s football season.
But to me and, I’m beginning to believe, most football fans in Greater Los Angeles … football season means college football. USC and UCLA. Maybe high school football.
It does not mean the National Football League.
I just am not interested in The League. Those guys have been gone from L.A. for too long. Their season lasts forever, and there’s months and months to go before we need to get interested.
When you don’t have a local team … you get out of the habit of paying attention. That goes for just about everything that isn’t the playoffs.
Draft, camps opening, guys holding out … so what? Those names mean little or nothing to me, unless they went to USC and UCLA … or played against them, maybe.
I suppose the exception in the who-gives-a-hoot crowd are the people who play fantasy football. Which isn’t me. I didn’t care for stat football when the Rams and Raiders were here … and I sure don’t care about it now.
I will watch much (or all) of the USC and UCLA games this weekend. I imagine I will see chunks of other college games, too. I am interested in the college game. It is dynamic. It is colorful.
The NFL is stereotyped offenses and defenses, played by people I don’t know for teams I don’t care about. With overly ornate and complicated, almost rococo rules.
The NFL has left this market open too long. This is Year 14 without a team here, and my interest has just ebbed, wasted away until it’s about 3 on a scale of 100. At least on Aug. 27.
I’m guessing others — lots of them around here — feel the same way. You’d think the NFL would be worried about that. Clearly, it isn’t.
4 responses so far ↓
1 Sarah // Aug 28, 2008 at 6:25 AM
GO SEAHAWKS!!!!!!
GO COUGS!!!!!!!! 🙂
2 Dave Gaytan // Aug 28, 2008 at 7:30 AM
Hard to imagine that the NFL would let this much time pass without an L.A. presence. Do you think that the late Commissioner Pete Rozelle would have let this happen? Or even allow the Rams to leave the area in the first place?
On the other hand, there are over a billion Chinese who don’t care.
3 John Hollon // Aug 28, 2008 at 7:36 AM
The NFL doesn’t seem to care that they have completely lost an entire generation of NFL fans here in Southern California. And, they refuse to put a team here without public money going into a new stadium — somethning that is just never going to happen.
If the NFL had been serious about LA, they would have done to the Rams what they did when the Cleveland Browns moved to Baltimore — made them leave the team name and immediately work on an expansion team to repalce the lost franchise.
Instead we get the Rams in St. Louis, where ownership acts like the long LA years never happened, the Cardinals in Phoenix, and no team in the second-largest market in the country. It is a nutty, short-sighted way to run things, but it has made all of us in SoCal embrace college football — and that’s a good thing. Go Trojans.
4 Brian Robin // Aug 28, 2008 at 10:43 PM
No, it’s just not you. The NFL is boring, tiresome, predictable as the second ring on a phone and borderline fascistic.
It’s the type of league that Franco would feel comfortable following. Who needs Real Madrid when you have the Dallas Cowboys?
And as John astutely pointed out, we don’t need a sporting entity extorting public money to build a sports palace out of “Triumph of the Will” for use by the few at the expense of the many.
I don’t know if it’s ESPN’s 1,000-pound gorilla status that insists on ramming the NFL down our throats, but it never seems to go away.
Unlike the Rams did 14 years ago.
Go Bruins.
Leave a Comment