A Football Rant

My wife and I have season tickets to the Houston Texans Football team. They have to be nigh the worse team in pro football right now. Anyway I hate going to their games. And it’s not just because they are absolutely boring to watch. No, it’s the little things.

• First, it takes forever to get into the stadium. That place is the epitome of inconvenient. We have to walk 1/2 a mile to get to the stadium.


• Second, we have to walk another 1/4 mile just to ENTER the stadium. Heaven help us, if people could just enter the building where it is most convenient and then while inside, walk to where they need to go, the terrorists would win.


• Third, once you get into the stadium, they don't let you wander around. I have friends in another place in the stadium, but I can't get there. No one will let me travel around the place. I feel like I am in a concentration camp.


• Fourth, the food service sucks. You can't buy any candy there. Can you believe that? No candy, no chocolate, no friggin junior mints. What kinda place doesn’t have junior mints? The only thing sweet you can get there is cotton candy, soda or dippin' dots. Yes, you heard me right: Dippin' Dots -- you know that crappy ice cream designed to be mostly air? That's "dessert".


• Fifth, some moron is in charge of opening and closing the roof. The first home game, when the temperature outside was 105 degrees F, the effing roof was open. I felt like I was gonna die in there. The last game, this Sunday, when the outside was a blissful 83 degrees F, the effing roof was closed (I am trying not to cuss, because my mother may read this someday -- but I really want to say "fuck", I just have to edit myself, I guess). The worst case scenario is that someone heard everyone bitching about the roof being open the first game and they thought they would teach us a lesson by closing it last Sunday.


• Sixth (this list will grow for quite a bit longer -- bear with me), I can't see replays of close plays. I hate it when I would see a better game if I just stayed home and watched it on TV. I know, I know, the reasoning is that if the crowd could see the replay, they might boo or sigh or something that might change the mind of the replay official. To which I retort: that is the stupidest thing I have ever heard. Hire some new officials if they are taking their cues from the crowd.


• Seventh, I cannot stand football fans. I am beginning to loath people that rah-rah the team. I am way too cynical to be in a 3 hour long pep rally. I didn't go to pep rallies in high school. Why in the HELL am I going to one now?


• Eighth (almost to the end, bear with me a bit longer), the game of football is decided too much by officiating. I have the same problem with basketball. When you specifically have plays designed to try to get the other team to break a rule is boring. I want to see people hit each other. I want to see cool passes and tackles. I do not want to see flags and stopped plays and things called back and entire offensive lines frozen, unable to move and if they blink a whistle is blown. That just plain sucks. I wish rugby were more popular in the states because then I might be able to get in to it and watch what I want to watch and not a bunch of old men doing semaphores on camera.


• Ninth – and I can't believe I waited so long to rant about this one; I hate the utter proliferation of advertisements. You can look around Reliant Stadium, and I swear if 33% of your viewing plane isn't an ad of some kind then well, you aren’t in Reliant Stadium; you must be somewhere with less ads – like Times Square. The Texans have a large scoreboard, but maybe 25% of it is actual scoreboard, the rest is ads.


• Tenth, the Texans have been so unhappy with the crowd's response to their lame-ass team that they have been piping in "cheers". I kid you not, about 1/4 of the crowd noise in Reliant stadium during the game is fake. Yes, they play it over the loud speakers. It makes me want to vomit every time I hear Announcer: "It’s another..." Loud speaker spewing fake crowd chant: "FIRST DOWN!"


• Eleventh, fireworks inside a closed stadium. When the roof is closed there should be NO fireworks. At the start of the game, during the national anthem and while the players are introduced, the Texan's let off smoky fireworks. There is no ventilation when the roof is closed. I can still see the smoke residue left over from the fireworks at the beginning of the game AT HALFTIME! Thank goodness the team can’t score squat, or else I would be choked by nauseating smoke every time a touchdown was thrown.


• Lastly, you have a team that has had problems protecting the quarterback. Notorious problems. Horrible problems. They set all sorts of records for sacks allowed. So when you decide to fire your offensive coordinator and replace him with someone, who would you pick? I know who the Texans picked – the offensive line coach. Yes, the same guy in charge of the worst offensive line in NFL history. Great choice guys. Way to pick a winner.

To top it all off, the Texan’s played their crappy game while the Astro’s were playing their finest game. The loudest cheers in the crowd are when Berkman hit that grand slam to close the gap and then when Ausmus hit the game tying homer. The whole stadium (which was about 18 people that bothered to stay until the 4th quarter) erupted into a “Let’s go Astro’s, let’s go” chant. Yes, I know, I claim to hate all that pep rally crap – and I do. But at least THAT cheer was for a good team playing their hearts out. Sure, maybe the Texans are playing their hearts out too, but they still aren’t anywhere close to a good team. And sell some friggin candy, willya, Mr. McNair?