Calling for Questions!

It's that time again -- Pigskin Time! Tiffani awaits a new season of thrills and heartbreaks. If you have a question about any aspect of the game, send it to peaco@peacotoons.com, with "football question" in the subject line.

Esprit de Corps

Dear Tiffani,

When do you think professional football teams will start using corporate sponsorship?

Madison Man

Dear Madison,

May I call you Mad? Well, I don’t know if this is something where you want to get in on the action, but you don’t think the whole thing is commercialized enough already? Are you picturing a team coming onto the field in the Oscar Mayer wienermobile? It’s true that football uniforms do not look like Nascar uniforms. Between the car and the driver, they’re lucky to have an unclaimed inch. We usually see those drivers from the chest up, covered with a million logos. If we saw a full-body shot, we might also see strategically placed ads for Dr. Scholl’s, Cialis and Preparation H. The great thing is, they have so many ads visible at once that the eye is overloaded and we don’t see any of them.

But let me point to a few instances where corporate America has ever so subtly infiltrated the game of football. In college football, they managed to jam an ad even on the net that goes up behind the goalposts for the kicks! This missed field goal brought to you by Acme! And then there are the bowl games. Looking at a list of thirty bowl games, I see very few not pimping a sponsor. I think the Rose Bowl made it with its virtue intact, but even the ones we may remember from the old days have become the AT&T Cotton Bowl, the FedEx Orange Bowl and the Allstate Sugar Bowl. All pretense has been dropped in the Capital One, the Outback, and yes, the Chick-Fil-A Bowl. Imagine the pride of telling your grandkids you played in, say, the Enron Bowl!

So, Mad, in the pros, have you ever noticed Gatorade on the sidelines, or Motorola on a coach’s mike? And the players’ jerseys—hey, what’s that swoosh? And “The Visa Halftime Report, brought to you by Visa.” Who dat? If Visa wants to make a few bucks, we’ll have “The Visa Halftime Report, brought to you by Polident.” And Gillette Stadium, Bank of America Stadium, and—oh brother—Mall of America Field, Qwest Field, Mile High Stadium, no, I mean Invesco Field. The people at Arrowhead Stadium and Lambeau Field are probably shooting themselves for those stupid no-money names.

Of course, Mad, the bottom line is, the NFL and each pro team is, of course, its own corporation, and they don’t want encroachment by others. But maybe there will be teams in extremis where say, the 1-15 St. Louis Rams (or the Lambs, as somebody said), have so many empty seats they’re going broke, and they need to make a deal with the devil. Talks with Dodge fell through when the St. Louis Dodge Ram Toughs identification reflected poorly on the trucks, and “They take a buffeting, and bounce back with Bufferin” seemed too pessimistic. So The Man agrees to come up with the long green if only the team and the fans chant, “USA, USA, USA Today!” or, at each occurrence, “First and ten for CNN!” It’s not that far away.

Whither the Weather....

Dear Tiffani,

How come football gets played in all kinds of weather, unlike most other sports?

SofaSpud

Well, Spud, I think your question is a little bit inaccurate. Now it’s true that some professional sports wimp out when the skies get cloudy—baseball, of course, with its rain delays that keep the fans sitting in the rain while the players stay dry; tennis and golf, would you expect anything else? Horse racing, more an excuse for betting than a sport if you ask me, happens rain or shine. However, there are obvious examples of sports that go on regardless of weather. Think basketball, hockey. Well, duh, they’re played indoors.

But this brings me to what your question should have been: “Football players are real hardasses, and football gets played in all kinds of weather. How come there are any domed stadiums?”

Great question, Tiffani! I mean SofaSpud. Everybody loves the games where the snow is coming down so hard they need to keep shoveling out the yard markers. Remember the Snow Bowl in New England where the fans threw snow in time with Rock and Roll Part II (before Gary Glitter went to jail and the song was banned). I remember a game so foggy you couldn’t see the end zones from the camera position. And mud? Yay! (Stupid Astroturf.) So what does it say about a team and its fans if they want to be enclosed in air-conditioned comfort? Furthermore, who has the domes? The cities that don’t have any weather! Do you see a dome in Pittsburgh or Green Bay? New England or New York? NO!! You’ve got to believe an outdoor team has to love miserable weather and have, say, Miami visiting, wearing parkas over their uniforms and the home team is in short sleeves. Tear down this dome, Mister Gorbachev.

"Unnecessary" Roughness ??

Dear Tiffani,

When is roughness “unnecessary”?

Dat's Who Dat

Dear Dat,

Right! Here’s a sport constructed around roughness, and we’re going to slice it so fine that some of it is unnecessary? Really, can you believe unnecessary roughness even exists in football? But heck, what football considers necessary roughness doesn’t translate into any other sports. Remember, in tennis, there is no contact (!) between opposing players! And in basketball, while the team members occasionally line up in a lackadaisical fashion, then the most they do is kind of elbow one another. Oooooh, I’m so scared. And in track, if you bump the other guy you are disqualified! What??

But, I suppose that without limiting certain activities, say tackling a player after he’s on the ground, or clobbering the quarterback while a completed pass is being galloped away, etc., things might get out of control. Like in Rollerball—remember after they suspended calling penalties the games got really … oh wait, that’s fiction. But anyway, most every football play ends with a tackle, and everybody, whether or not in on the tackle, is crashing their multi-hundredweight body into opponents, and others not active in roughness are threatening roughness, like rushing the passer.

So I’m thinking that this unnecessary roughness stuff is simply a fig leaf to pretend that our sport is veddy civilized, maybe like polo, even as all the while we get our fix of necessary roughness.

Why Do Women Hate Football? The Explanation.

Why do women hate football?
--Curious

Well, sweetie, women don’t really hate football. I would characterize it as something you might call a hate-love relationship. Admittedly, there are some things hateable about watching football on TV. Just how many pickup truck commercials can any person bear to watch? (Answer: a number far far less than contained in one afternoon of football.) Trucks manned, I mean he-manned, by professional drivers on closed courses full of slow-motion trucks slewing and bouncing through muddy craters and mountain ridges. These are appealing to the demographic that would screech if they hit a pothole or got their truck splashed, and wouldn’t know what to put in the bed of the thing. And you might guess that advertisers think the bulk of viewers are male, given the aforementioned commercials, along with those for erectile dysfunction, prostate problems and beer.

But what’s this got to do with football, or your question? Other than being a reason for hating.

Now what about the game itself? Look, if it’s just a matter of having no conception of what the heck is going on—why, just break out your copy of The Girl’s Guide to Football (featuring me & available for purchase right here!) for enlightenment. Ah, ha ha ha, thought I’d drop that in. That’s the ticket if you are female. Now, if you’re a man, and I can’t tell from your obfuscated email signature if this is so, your question has a soupçon of whine to it. Is it Professor Higgins complaining, Why can’t a woman be more like a man?

Oh, by the way, did I mention that I had an affair with Tiger Woods? He’s married? Who knew?!

Well, look, I’ve kind of run on and run out of space, so maybe somebody some other time can re-ask the same question so I can continue.

A Game Called Football...Which Isn't

Dear Tiffani,
What is the difference between football and soccer? And why is soccer called football in U.K.?
--Sunniya

Why, indeed? They use only their feet in the game, hence the name; otherwise there is no similarity with true football. The differences are legion. One paltry point per score. No real tackling—what? No helmets, no shoulderpads, no tight pants! No hands, so you can’t throw a pass, much less catch one. One similarity is pre-game partying, and incredibly the British (and maybe the rest of the Europeans and other foreigners too) get rip-roaring drunk, more so than we do while tailgating, then they go and beat each other up and knock apart the stadium. I don’t know if there’s something to be learned there.

The sport that they could have named football they call rugby, which is much more like true football. Played by some Brits and Australians, it’s kind of caveman football with no pads and no obvious rules, with lots of mud and toothless smiles we used to associate with hockey.

Soccer is an extremely unpopular sport in the US, with a limited number of parents (the brie and chardonnay set) coaxing their kids into soccer before they know better. Hopefully those kids will grow out of it without cult reprogramming.

One other similarity I found is there are also fantasy soccer leagues. What a snore that must be. (Sorry, fans.)

Soccer is an Olympic sport, what gives there? We should get our football into the Olympics so we could crush the rest of the world, like we used to do in basketball and baseball before they all caught on.

Pigskin, Religion & Tight Pants

Dear Tiffani,

OK.... I've always compared football to organized religion (sorry all you football fans) and well, organized religion is like, well, brainwashing, so what's all the hoopla about anyway? Is it just an American's way of ignoring reality for a few hours? Hey, listen, I realize we need to pass on all the world political mumbo jumbo once in awhile, no pun intended, but I mean, a bunch of guys in tight pants chasing pigskin?... jumping into a heap onto one another - poor bastard on the bottom! So, why are so many Americans so crazy about this sport anyway?
--Marcia

Dear Marcia,

The answer to your question may in fact lie in religion, lady. Remember the admonition that God worked building the world for six days and on the seventh He rested? Many have taken this to mean that we should rest on Sundays (though looking at my calendar, I cannot figure how Sunday became the seventh day). As time went on, more and more people used Sundays to play golf, riding in electric carts and occasionally hitting a ball. Purists claimed that this was not actually resting. Watching golf on TV was proposed; however, widespread sleep set in across the land. All of America could rest, sitting on couches and recliners, yet be "involved" in physically demanding sport, necessitating BBQ and beers for sustenance. How you associate this with ignoring reality I certainly can't imagine.

Your observation of guys in tight pants requires further research.