One Fan’s Humble Plea to Every Network in the Business of Airing Professional Football Games to Help Me Hate My Life Less
As we’re all aware by now the NFL instituted a policy this year subjecting all scoring plays to a mandatory review, a move that—from this fan’s perspective at least—is literally the dumbest thing to happen to football since the XFL, because now there’s no such thing as a TOUCHDOWN!! anymore because it got replaced by this thing-I’d-like-to-be-able-to-be-excited-about-but-can’t-right-now-because-it’s-only-conditionally-a-TOUCHDOWN!!-pending-official-review, which, you know: not as much fun!
And there’s nothing we can do about this. But what we can change, however, is the coverage. Specifically: the way we do replays.
Because here’s the problem: there has been a massive uptick in the amount of replay footage we see as a result of this new policy, which correlates to an equally drastic increase in the amount of time whichever unlucky pair of daft bozos charged with calling a game must spend struggling their way through the most fundamental basics of space-time. Such as:
Announcer A: Welp, his knee sure does look down.
Announcer B: Mmm hmm, but I just can’t see if the ball’s crossed the plane yet.
Announcer A: Maybe let’s see if the boys can git us a better angle.
They’ll then repeat these same three lines over and over again, oftentimes with a commercial break thrown in for good measure, and you can just picture them squinting at their monitors as if trying to mentally superimpose some Riemannian topological manifold onto the field—and this is a serious problem because I don’t want to have to listen to Cris Collinsworth try to think.
But it’s an easily solved problem! Because one thing we can be sure about is that “touchdown” is just a funner way of saying “a body moving through space,” which means, er, at least on a classically Newtonian football field, that every discrete point in space traversed during a touchdown occurs at a discrete moment, and (as we know) time flows consistently for all observers, etc etc etc, or put another way: if you have two camera angles, and one shows whether or not a knee is down but you can’t tell if the ball’s across the plane, and the other one shows the ball crossing the plane but not if the knee is down, YOU CAN PUT THEM SIDE BY SIDE ON THE SAME SCREEN AND ROLL THEM AT THE SAME SPEED STARTING FROM THE SAME POINT IN TIME AND IT’LL BE SUPER OBVIOUS AND I WON’T HAVE TO LISTEN TO CRIS COLLINSWORTH TRY TO THINK ANYMORE anyway, thanks in advance, go Giants, etc.
