So how do you explain all the lousy, bad, horrible calls and non calls on the Broncos/Ravens playoff game last year?

You had me right up until you start waxing on about how it's all rigged for Manning and clearly last year's playoff game was very much not the case. If anything, the NFL rigged it so the killer LBer Ray cut-them-up Lewis got is fairwell ring right?

Ray Lewis practically has his own show on NFL Network, and they knew that Manning would be back for another year. It was their last chance to make Killer Ray into a legend, and they obviously believe that he has marketing value.

As I've mentioned before, I'm not being anti-Bronco on this topic. If it works better to screw you guys over, they will. It's all about return. You guys just have a great hedge fund in Manning, and at some point it will pay off.

Okay, here's my essay.

The rules of the contest are apparently not available online any more, but in essence the mission was to write about why you love football, and what it means to you. It was a 1,000 word limit (or you could submit a video), and they basically said something like, "We're looking for essays that present a story that we can tell in a three-minute video" or something like that.

I envisioned it as them reading the essay and producing a video supporting it, and apparently their vision was that they wanted a video that featured the author. So I understand not winning and frankly am glad that I didn't, because I really wouldn't want to be featured in a video. My goal was to write an essay that would describe the typical arc of football in a human life, using myself as an example. But anyway, here's my essay just for grins.

In a quiet corner of my house, displayed on a high shelf, is a football.

It probably doesn’t have much monetary value, though it may be an antique now. It’s a beautiful aged leather, circumscribed by the white stripes of its era, and it’s inscribed with the machine-etched autograph of Gale Sayers. The laces are chewed up by past dogs who tackled it, and it won’t hold air any more, but that doesn’t really matter. It’s the only item from my childhood that I keep on display.

My uncle gave me the football in the Christmas of 1971, when I was eight years old. I was already an avid football fan, and I did all the normal football things that a kid did. I collected football cards, memorized stats, and was a sixty-minute man on the playground. I lived and died by the fortunes of my beloved Kansas City Chiefs. But I did not own an actual football, and I guess he recognized the gap that winter. He gave me his.

It would be nice to say that this gift unlocked an athletic greatness in me, that I found fame or fortune from its roots. It would be a wonderful story to say that it helped me get a college scholarship or date the homecoming queen, or perhaps that I caught the winning touchdown in some game that really, really mattered. Football has certainly been that story for many people.

But in my case, none of that is true. The reality is that I was a skinny kid with glasses, and athletic greatness was never in the cards for me. My greatest football feats, my touchdowns and interceptions and booming punts, came on vacant lots or playgrounds against other skinny kids with glasses. My field goals were scored over a clothesline. No fan ever saw my glories and no scoreboard ever recorded them.

But as important as they were at the time, in the end it wasn’t the touchdowns or the interceptions or the booming punts that really mattered.

You see, my uncle didn’t do this gift halfway. It was a high-quality football that he gave me, not some cheap toy. It had an ideal friction in the leather grain, and it was perfectly formed to produce spirals, even from small hands. If you played football, you loved this ball, and that was the key.

We moved a lot, so I was always the new kid. I went to eight different schools in twelve years. I was always starting over, regularly touching down in a place I’d never been before. But two facts held true no matter where I landed. Everybody played football, and I owned the best football in the neighborhood.

I learned that the best way to start anew was to show up with the football, whether it was at recess or at the park or in some field, and ask to play. I’d find the kid who looked like the leader and toss him the football. He’d look at it, grip it, and say, “Yeah, you can play.” And then he’d tell the other kids, “Let’s use this ball.” It worked when I was eight, and it worked when I was 18, and it even worked at my first company picnic after college.

At that point, the hard part was done. After that, whenever the neighborhood guys played football, my football was unequivocally the ball of choice. And if they wanted to use my football, I came with the deal. An interception here, a punt return there, and pretty soon they forgot I was the new kid. A good football and hustle would earn my way into any group. Football was my passport.

The football itself had an active career of about 20 years, and in that time I suspect that five hundred different people threw it, caught it, carried it, or hit someone who did. Nearly every best friend I’ve ever had has thrown that football to me at some point, along with a lot of people I met once and probably a few people I couldn’t stand, though I tend to forget about those. The friends were the important part, and that football helped them recognize that skinny new kids with glasses could have something to offer. I would be a different person today without that football, and I would be a different person without those games in vacant lots.

The last time I threw or caught the ball in a game was when I was 30 years old. After that, it became harder to get a group together, and the ball started losing air, and eventually it found its way onto the shelf. Neither of us has seen action on the field in twenty years, and we probably never will again. So why is the ball there, still within easy reach? Maybe it’s because it makes me smile whenever I see it, that it takes me back to a golden time of my life where I could run from sunup to sundown and bounce up from a blindside hit. Or maybe I’m secretly hoping for one more game.

I’m fifty years old now. I have no children, and my life has taken me far from those who know my history. Some day I’ll die and someone will clean out my basement and they’ll either throw the football away or they’ll sell it for a few bucks. No one will know its power, or how it helped to mold my life.

Like me, this football will never be famous. It will never be in a museum, or have its story told other than this simple essay. Like me, it will someday be gone and forgotten. But I hope and believe that somewhere on that same day, some other kid will be given a high-quality football that offers a perfect spiral, and the story will start again. It’s not really about the ball.

so the NFL really, really wanted to honor a defensive player in the age of it's-all-about-the-offense!!? And Flacco, let's not forget his kind of wonderful, amirite?

You are 100% correct about this together we make football promo crap. It's totally rigged and the winners are not picked on their stories, nor their love. They are picked based on how much it will sell to the market place of women and minorities. So you are right in that regard!

I don't understand it, either, but the NFL promotes the intestines out of Ray Lewis. I don't get it at all, because I find him completely objectionable in every way. But from a marketing perspective he likes mugging for the camera, he gives them showboating and footage before and during the games, and he's got an insatiable appetite for the press. He embodies the three-ring circus that they want to project. Plus, they know they can count on him for exposure and interviews after retirement, so I guess they want to make him a legend for that reason.

Oh, and I should also note that the marketing people may possibly have been aghast when Rahim Moore didn't do what any basic middle-school safety does when protecting against a hail mary pass. Perhaps they wanted the Broncos to win and it didn't work out, so they were forced to ride the murderer's horse.

tuck rule :)

Rain Man just needs the Chiefs to find their own franchise QB.

Then it will seem "more real."

I have felt like this team has had 0 shot to win a SB since Green left, and it has dampened my enthusiasm for the team significantly. The Chiefs won 45-10 Sunday and I felt like saying "oh, that's nice."

BTW, I do think we have marketable commodities in Alex Smith and Andy Reid.

The league would love to see either of them win a SB after they were treated harshly in their exodus (exodi?) from Philly and SF.

But they are probably less marketable than Brady, Manning, Brees and Wilson.

Awesome essay, man.

yeah...



...get it, tucked away?! I'm hilarious.

Great essay, BTW.

You should have embellished it by taking a photo in a wheelchair, claiming that you were paralyzed in a flag football game at age 30. Football took your legs, but it gave you so much more.

Then when you are firmly in your Super Bowl seats (after being wheeled around all day), you could stand up and claim I'M CURED! FOOTBALL MADE ME WALK AGAIN!

Winning masks a lot of things, so if we were winning with a big media star, I'd probably be just as happy as the next guy.

There's certainly room to criticize the Chiefs for their naivete over the past few decades. While the league was huddling and figuring out how to maximize the business model, and while other teams were recognizing that and adjusting, the Chiefs continued to think blocking and tackling. They sought to play the sport of football while other teams won football championships by better understanding the business of football.

Perhaps the Chiefs were slow to adjust because their ownership was one of the football families. Maybe Clark will be more of a businessman than Lamar was, and the Chiefs will join the 21st century and start playing the business game. Yay, Chiefs. If they do, it'll likely decrease my enjoyment of the game since I actually like football, so either way I think I'm screwed.

But Rain Man is kind of right, what if the "business side" of the league gets their way in the next decade

*Teams in London, LA, and Toronto?
*expanded weeks
*TWO Thursday night games
*those bullshit playoff rules

I mean at what point is too much, too much?

Whatever you do don't click on Bobby's photo on their website

I agree. Last year was Ray Ray, killer Ray Ray's last chance to go out like Elway. I do believe the refs are paid by the NFL to swing the games for marketing. Just watching yesterday's games shows you that. The Ravens and Pats games were crazy biased.