Today is the day that football, a subset of a genre known as sportsball, begins anew. Well, let me save you all the time and disturbingly invested emotional interest in one particular team that may or may not correlate with your place of birth or current residence by recapping every football game ever viewed from the comforts of a couch or chaise longue.

Each and every Sunday, the game of football commences when a man wearing prison stripes tosses money obtained in a recent bank robbery into the air. A member of one of the football teams known as the Team Cap’n correctly guess which blade of grass it will land on, winning the right to one half of the field.

Next, a very padded man in spandex throws the ball to another very padded man in spandex who sometimes catches it, other times not, but mostly just struggles to see the ball through a very narrow helmet window crisscrossed with bars so as to prevent his face from escaping. The catcher is almost always tackled by an angry mob of very padded men in spandex who create the potato sculpture from Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, only with people instead of potatoes.

A whistle blows.

The throwing and catching and tackling and potato sculpturing repeats over the course of about fourteen hours. The longness of the game necessitates seventeen bazillion commercial breaks. During the most important one, men in suits talk about the throwing and catching and tackling and potato sculpturing. Viewers often call this the “bathroom break” or “snack time.”

Eventually, the team who does the most solo interpretive dances wins.

by