Any other male DUers who don't give a rat's ass about football?

[stopbush]

Or basketball, for that matter. Am I the only one who finds it, well, boring?

Back in high school, I played freshman year and went to all the games after that. In college, it was the jocks vs the arts kids, so I lost touch with the game. Since then, I have had no interest whatsoever in football at any level. I don't even know how many teams are in the NFL, let alone their names or those of the players.

I've been to a few Superbowl parties over the years, but I never really watch the game. I usually end up in a corner discussing non-sports things with the other guy's wives.

I know many Dems are passionate about their sports, but I also wonder how members of a political party that comes down on the peaceful/pacifist/socially aware side of the ledger squares their love of a pretty violent sport with their political leanings.

BTW - I'm pretty passionate about baseball and tennis, so it's not like I'm totally against all sports.

Any comments?

[LuLu550]

1. I don't really care for sports

especially on TV. Don't get it....I used to like basketball in college but I understood it better the (1970s Knicks).
Now I jsut find it boring.

[PROGRESSIVE1]

2. Football!!!!!!!!!!!! Horrible sport. All of those neanderthals running

around and hitting each other! Who need this S--- anyways.

I'm with you!

[n0_data]

26. Neanderthals running around

I'd say it's a little more complex than that. Ultimately it's a game of strategy. It's the job of the athlete to use his or her speed, strength, wits and will to carry out the (usually) intricate game plan put forth by the coaches. It's also mundane things like all day practices, physical training, studying game film, and memorizing thick playbooks.

Moreover, it's a job like any other - though it has some pretty nice fringe benefits. It just so happens that there are a very limited number of people that can fulfill the job requirements.

[scarlet_owl]

3. I'm not a man, but my husband doesn't like football

or basketball. He doesn't like any sports at all and he thinks I'm crazy for watching baseball (the only sport I give a damn about). He's more of a role playing, anime watching, comic book reading nerd (not that there's anything wrong with that :)).

[LibertyorDeath]

4. Wow I thought I was alone.

[LastKnight]

5. baseball is the only sport worth it...

football i associate too much with my republican extended family. i dont even pretend to care about it anymroe when thier watching the game at thxgiving... its not worth the effort to try and find something worth watching in it.

-LK

[Deja Q]

6. I'm against professional leagues and the puny-minded brats who'll

trip and hurt others just so they can get the limelight.

As for professional leagues, it's nothing more than a gaggle of whinging mental rejects getting paid 100-10000 times the median working class salary (assuming that is $30,000/yr) to run around a field for 2 hours every week.

Gee, one player gets $3 million just to do that. No wonder they need taxpayer help to build them a new stadium. :eyes:

[zatoichi]

7. Include me out...

I have always been the weird renegade who could never take part in passionate sports discussion. I have, on occasion, been known to declaim football to be the root of America's evils (going as far back as the '70's was I doing this).

[BiggJawn]

8. Don't care for it.

Baseball lost me to the strike (HEY, Uberoth! I found life BEYOND beseball!)

Pro football sucks. NBA? Hey, in my old hood, the pick-up games included knives. Boring.

And I saw the company team throw away the Capital One Bowl...

Now, in about 9 months, a young fellow from Austin is gonna try to make history....And I'll be fuckin' nuts for Le Tour.....

[ET Awful]

9. I'm basically bored by most "team" sports. . .

Give me more individual sports and I get more interested. I'm from a background of surfing, snowboarding, mountain bike racing, etc. The whole professional team sports thing just never did it for me.

[stopbush]

10. Oh, one more thing -

What is it with the Superbowl and the roman numerals? I mean, I could see it up to the tenth version, but isn't it now like 30 some years of Superbowls? Superbowl XXXVIII seems pretty stupid as a moniker. Why don't the just call it by the year it's played in, like Superbowl 2004?

[LastKnight]

12. especially when 60% of thier viewers...

cant decrypt roman numerals lol...

i keed i keed...

-LK

[oustemnow]

11. not particularly into sports in general

if a game is on and it's a good game, I can get wrapped up in it, but it boggles my mind how much mental energy sports fans will expend following their team and the development of the season.

[bowens43]

13. Me.

Don't care for football, baseball, basketball, boxing, soccer, hockey, tennis etc.

But I find curling to be strangely fascinating......

[waywest]

14. yup.

nt

[drb]

15. Here's one of my favorite move lines for you!

From the movie "Drive, He Said"

Two guys are roommates in collge. One's a jock, one's not. The non-jock says to the jock, "To you it's fame and glory. To me, it's staying after school in your underwear."

[teach1st]

16. I give half a rat's ass about football....

...I listen to some of the football games, mostly involving nearby college teams, but rarely watch them (I'm listening to the Florida/Miami game right now, but lost track of who is winning). I think the trash talk stuff has really turned me off to football and basketball lately. We work so hard to teach kids good sportsmanship and sometimes our work seems meaningless after watching the big boys.

I'm a baseball guy all the way, but due to the crap going down in pro sports in general, I prefer college and little league baseball, as well as womaen's softball. In general, they seem to play with more spirit.

[HEyHEY]

17. It changes season to season

Sometimes I care, sometimes I don't.

[slackdude]

18. I hate sports!

I cannot stand team sports at all. The only thing that bores me more than watching a game is a bunch of people talking about it.

[AndyTiedye]

61. The Worst of Hearing Them Talk About It

Has to be that John Madden(ing) on KCBS,
always blathering on endlessly about some minutia about some team
always goes way over his time and into when the traffic report should be.
He's always on at rush hour too, when we NEED that traffic report!

[NightTrain]

19. Ooo! Ooo-ooo! Ooo!

I fucking hate sports! It's all a bunch of mindless bullshit.

Imagine if all those people who sat on their asses watching sports on TV all weekend spent even half that time doing volunteer work in their community? The world we live in would be soooooo much better...!

[ramapo]

20. Me too

Never liked football. Very boring & violent.

I followed basketball for awhile during the MJ years but could care less now.

Was a big baseball fan up until the strikes started. The salary situation is so out of control. I've tuned that one out too.

Hockey? Never watched a whole game.

Golf? Boring.

Am I really a man?

I'm so out of it during the many guy sports conversations. Sometimes I say "Hey how about that game last night?" Then just nod, smile, say "That was really something", etc. Then I kind of fit in....

[ScreamingMeemie]

21. My husband used to care less about football, until he met me.

Sunday dates were football dates in front of the T.V. Sadly, he started out a Packer fan and now is almost as rabid a Lions fan as I am for the Packers....I told him that's not allowed. ;)

[Zomby Woof]

40. a mixed marriage then?

:D

Hey, he should have become a BEARS fan! :think:

[ScreamingMeemie]

50. Funny thing is...he thought that Vince Lombardi was a Bears coach

when I first started dating him. You should have seen the look on my poor father's face. :7

[Rowdyboy]

22. Have watched one Ole Miss football game

in the last 15 years. Plan to watch the Cotton Bowl tomorrow because its their biggest game in 40 years.

Nothing else.

[jonnyblitz]

23. me. n/t

[carolinayellowdog]

24. Loathe it!

along with all other team/spectator sports. Hiking, kayaking/canoeing, x-c skiing, OTOH, help make life worth living.

[tkmorris]

25. I hate football

But I like soccer. OK I love soccer.

I grew up around sports, here in the US that meant baseball, football and basketball depending on season. I played em and watched them as fans.

Somewhere along the way though I started to dislike the "normal" sports. Hard to say why. The ridiculous money being thrown around was part of it, ticket prices are just stupid anymore. Plus so many of the "stars" turned out to be major assholes. A lot of the fans I knew wre idiots as well. I have always been a critical thinker (that's why I'm a Dem LOL) and fans, well, they just aren't usually. It's hard to talk football with some clown who REALLY believes this will be the year his team wins the Super Bowl, even though every star just left town and the owner just fired the whole coaching staff. Or whatever.

So I turned to lesser sports. Hockey at first, in the mid 70's. Big Caps fan, went to lots of games. The atheletes were real people who didn't make fortunes nor think they were somehow superior human beings even though they couldn't spell "superior". Ticket price for the cheap seats was under 10 bucks. Well under IIRC.

Then I discovered soccer and have never looked back. I like the international nature of the sport a lot. I also like that the US doesn't win internationally merely by showing up, like say the Olympic basketball team does. In fact, the US got no respect at all in soccer until recently. It's fun to be an underdog at something. The pro league here, the MLS is full of people you never heard of that don't make a mint to play. The tickets are reasonable and the teams are actually accessible.

I really do believe that Soccer is a more "pure" sport than the big 3 are. It is all about skill, you gain little advantage if any through being 6'7" tall, or weighing approximately as much as a 78 Oldmobile. It's players play both ways for the most part, you must play defensively AND offensively, switching with one misplaced pass.

Bah! I am rambling badly here, I haven't had enough sleep. Sorry all!

[NoPasaran]

27. My house is a football free zone

My sole interest in football is loathing the Dallas Cowboys. I don't watch it, talk about, only chuckle when I hear they've lost again.

Don't watch or follow any other sports except baseball.

[porkrind]

28. Me ...

I like to play sports, but I think watching other people play is boring. Also, I find college and pro football, baseball, and basketball particularly boring.

I would much rather watch something unusual and amateur like timbersports, strongman, or junkyard wars. :)

[BeatleBoot]

29. Sorry, I Love Football

Fell asleep yesterday with a football in my arms.

[RandomKoolzip]

30. No, I can't say I give a damn about sports.

Just doesn't interest me.

[mike_c]

31. me....

...I can't fathom why adults give a rat's buttocks about kicking an odd shaped ball (or even a round one) around a field. Sorry 'bro. I don't get it.

[TreasonousBastard]

32. Can't give a damn about any of 'em.

Once in a while a game catches my interest, but once in a while a Bulgarian poetry reading catches my interest, too.

The Bulgarian poetry reading is usually more inspiring. And the beer is better.

[MercutioATC]

33. ME!

I'm always amazed by the effort and money spent on professional and college sports. It's a game, right? Why take it so seriously?

[pmbryant]

34. Former football fan. Now I have zero interest.

I was a NFL junkie growing up. Once I got out of college, though, my interest faded rather quickly. And now it is totally gone (and has been for many years).

I haven't even watched the Super Bowl since 2000, and I only did so then because I was stuck by myself in a hotel room in Waterloo, Ontario on a business trip bored out of my mind.

About the only sport I follow is baseball, but given that my team is the Cubs, I am having serious reservations about continuing doing so.

;-)

--Peter

[Uzybone]

35. Very sorry thread

full of people who like to bitch about what other people like. I always wonder about people who feel the need to rip other people pleasure...what inadequacies about themselves are they dealing with. Oh and the next time someone compares a sporting event with political leanings Im gonna puke.

[Faygo Kid]

47. A wise and insightful post

You have it exactly right. Bunch of snobs.

[beawr]

49. Thank You

Well put. It's just entertainment. There's stuff I don't like, but I don't go ascribing qualities to those with whom I disagree.

[stopbush]

52. Oh, puh-leeze!

At any given moment DU supports dozens of threads on "Team This" and "Bowl Game That," but let one thread arise that offers a non-conformist opinion on uh-Murk-ah's Game and it's suddenly about "people who like to bitch about what other people like." Right... That's almost on par with the old repug canard about "they hate me for my material success," which I know wasn't your intent.

Someone else said that people who don't like football are "a bunch of snobs." Well, if the declining viewership numbers for the NFL are any indication, we're becoming a nation of snobs, and not just when it comes to football, but all sports. Even ABC'sMNF consistently pulls a lower viewership than both of the CSI shows and barely eeks out newbie crappers like "Two and a Half Men."

And the NFL is TV's biggest sports draw, out-pulling basketball and baseball. The NFL audience - while drawing very highly among the 18-24 year old crowd - also has the highest median household income, about $55k compared to baseball's $38k (I guess football appeals to the higher-income non-snobs while baseball appeals to the lower-income snobs). Sure, the Superbowl draws in half the country for at least 6 minutes of viewing time, but that indicates that the other half of the country - who we'll now call "the snobs" - doesn't care.

This thread was started in The Lounge - right next to all the "My Team Just Won/Lost" threads. It was meant in a lighter vein. Big deal. I think you're being overly sensitive.

[Faygo Kid]

53. Now who is being "overly sensitive?"

Geez, ya post something like this, you're going to get a response from those who disagree. Some of these posts do reek of a certain snobbery. I posted the snob comment, and it wasn't about people who don't like football, it was about some of the posts here. Gadzooks. Your first paragraph is the most overly sensitive thing yet to appear on this thread. I like football, and I will not apologize for it, even (especially?)in the face of some of these comments.

[stopbush]

59. There's no need for anyone to apologize for liking football,

and people who dislike football aren't snobs.

Of course I expect those who love the sport to hop in and defend it, that's the nature of posts at DU. And yes, I think you football lovers are being overly sensitive here. Everything and everybody is regularly praised, trashed and debated at DU, from movie stars to politicos to TV shows to musicians etc, etc. If someone opines that they don't like Tom Cruise's acting or says that they think the Food Network® sucks, I'd think it was overly sensitive for someone to refer to such dissenters as "snobs" or "people who like to bitch about what other people like."

What is it with you football fans and your thin skins? :)

[Cat Atomic]

36. I'm lacking some gene, I think. I don't "get" sports.

.

[Jokerman]

37. Love to play, hate to watch.

The fact that I find EVERY sportscaster to be obnoxious & over bearing might have something to do with it.

[Ernesto]

38. Since you asked:

I have long contended that if there was no such thing as winter induced cabin fever, there would be little interest in football.

[ZenLefty]

39. They should play football with weapons. On ice.

[Braden]

41. pro football doesn't interest me

not sure why. I guess I just don't care. And most NFL fans care waaaaay too much.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

42. I'm not a guy

but I count it as a plus if a man doesn't know who's playing in the upcoming Super Bowl and a minus if he thinks it's really important. Enjoying it, but realizing that it's not important is a neutral factor.

The number of men my age who can talk only about their jobs and sports is really dismaying. I bet it goes a long way toward explaining why the political situation in this country is so bad.

If Marx were writing today, he'd say, "Professional sports are the opiate of the people."

[Flightful]

43. I only care about REAL football

The kind that's played on a 110x65 yard field, three downs, no fair catch and a live ball when a field goal misses. And our balls are bigger!

[nostamj]

44. never, ever watch football, baseball, basketball, hockey

or, god help us, golf.

I do watch tennis. gymnastics. figure staking. and enjoy most winter olympics.

[Faygo Kid]

45. "Figure staking??"

Not familiar with that one. Sounds pretty violent. Please enjoy your gymnastics, skating, et al. At least you didn't mention soccer.

[nostamj]

51. what? did you expect me to USE the spell check??

geuss agin!

[mdmc]

46. Yup

I could care less about football.

[Faygo Kid]

48. Bunch of snobs.

You don't see any posts about DUers who don't like classical music, art history, etc. (yes, all of which I also enjoy). Just nose in the air crap like this. Hey, if you don't like football, you don't have to watch, listen or follow it. These smug posts remind me of my incredibly snobby ex-sister in law whose air of superiority about other peoples' interests - including football - apparently gave meaning to her mean-spirited little life. By all means, stay away from football, please, and let the rest of us enjoy it.

[Logansquare]

55. Yes, I get so tired of turning on the TV

and seeing all of that classical music and art history. And devoting nearly a third of the news broadcast to classical music--outrageous!
<kidding>

[Logansquare]

56. I love football because it keeps the crowds down on Sundays

And shopping during the Super Bowl is awesome! It's like someone dropped a neutron bomb. The sales staff sometimes look a little distracted though...

[AndyTiedye]

62. I Bought My First Mountain Bike On Super Bowl Sunday 11 years ago

The store wasn't very busy.
In fact there weren't any other customers at all.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

60. Not to mention a whole section of the paper ever single day

and two sections on Sundays.

Then there are the high school band and choir teachers who corner boys in the hall and call them "little fags" because they don't go out for a musical ensemble.

And don't forget those pep rallies for the school orchestra, where the whole student body is herded into an auditorium and made to stand up and cheer the musicians on the afternoon before each concert.

And man, when the Oregon Symphony went on strike to demand a starting salary of $1 million while the Trail Blazers have to start at $30,000, it showed how warped the values are in this country.

And every holiday, the network TV schedules are full of nothing but classical music from all around the country.

Compared to classical music, sports get no respect at all in America!

[Logansquare]

64. LOL n/t

x

[mitchtv]

54. believe me , Ive tried

I can stomach a little baseball tho.rather watch a movie

[Scurrilous]

57. Let's ask Dubya what he thinks....

"Football Sucks!"

[Terwilliger]

58. I love football, but I don't follow religiously

I'd rather play than watch, but I enjoy the whole professional season, and pick my favorites and root for them. I don't like HS or college ball, however.

[AndyTiedye]

63. Baseball and Basketball Suck Even More

I developed a particular aversion to those sports early on,
due to my attempts to play them in school.
I couldn't hit a baseball (at all) because my reactions were too slow.
Basketball was hopeless -- I was always the shortest kid in the class.
I was terrible at all other sports too, but they were the worst.

I'll watch football or hockey if it's on the TV while I'm waiting for
a plane and there is nothing else to do. For baseball, I may glance at
the TV for a few seconds if I hear someone get a hit. Basketball I
completely ignore.