I'm fairly into football. I try not to talk about it around people too often, but it's an invaluable tool for making connections with higher ups at work, and as well as a nice little thing to get excited over for no reason, and a proxy for war or battle in some ways. Anyway.

This has actually been a pretty quickly growing topic of conversation among fans: we simply can't afford it. I have never been to a football game, and I never will, because I cannot afford, nor can I justify, spending a minimum of a hundred dollars to see a game, and more realistically closer to 500. That's exorbitant to a point we know money is the purpose here. Add to that the expensive packages to watch games that aren't local on TV, and it feels worse. Add to that the fact that if the NFL does not sell literally all of their overpriced seats, they refuse to show it on TV, and you feel even worse. (Note: I'm aware it was for protecting TV originally, but it certainly is not anymore.)

On top of all these, this year there was the revelation that the NFL had been usually significant amounts of money to suppress studies showing the effects of head injuries to protect themselves, and being in a country where there's already such a huge wealth divide, in a sport where the majority of fans are well below the wealthy line, it becomes hard to ignore how bourgeois the whole spectacle is, and that's the death knell for a lot of us. We look to the sport as an escape for that shit, where you can throw yourself entirely behind a team, make it a proxy for a country, or an ideology, or a cause, where if you win, great, you feel good, if you lose, it's all meaningless anyway.. When it becomes consumed by wealth the way it is, you can't get your mind off it, and win or lose, you're still losing as a fan, so you feel nothing but anger.

This season was big for me, because I went into it extremely excited. I followed everything from the draft, I had high hopes for my teams, and hoped well on some others, and mediocrity for the ones I hate, but I just stopped being happy about any of it halfway through the season, despite it being historic in a lot of ways. I barely watched anymore games. I don't get the rush I used to because they've become a symptom of the problem instead of entertainment. I don't know that I'll come back at all next year outside of following scores.