Friday, November 18, 2022

(S)no(w) go

 Well, isn't this is a setback for Man Football. The Buffalo Bills and Cleveland Browns are not going to play in Buffalo after all Sunday, on account of Buffalo is supposed to get a lil' snow this weekend.

"For cryin' out loud!" Vince Lombardi just spluttered from the Great Lambeau In The Sky.

"Well, I never!" cries Ernie Nevers, who played for a team called the Eskimos in DULUTH FREAKING MINNESOTA.

"Pantywaists!" snarls Sam Huff, Bronko Nagurski, all those old rub-some-dirt-on-it tough guys.

And, OK, I guess this is the part where the Blob admits to a slight exaggeration.

Buffalo isn't supposed to get a "lil' snow" this weekend. It's supposed to get between, um, two and four feet of snow.

This perhaps explains why they're moving the game to Detroit, but it doesn't explain it to the Blob's satisfaction. The Blob is a firm believer that the elements were always intended to be an integral part of football. If it rains, you wallow around in the mud until no one can tell which team is which. If it's 10 below zero and the windchill is I Can't Feel My Feet, you throw on a couple extra sweatshirts. And if it snows ...

Well. You shovel off the field and you get after it.

"But Mr. Blob," you're saying now. "Two to four feet of snow ..."

Granted, that's excessive. It would turn the game into Dogsled Left and Dogsled Right. Throwing the ball would be next to impossible. But you know what?

It would be damn glorious.

Think about the all the most memorable games in the history of football, and they all involve extreme weather. The Ice Bowl in Green Bay, Packers vs. Cowboys. The even icier Ice Bowl in Cincinnati, Bengals vs. Chargers.  The Fog Bowl in Chicago... The game Michigan and Ohio State played in a full-on blizzard in 1950 ... that epic 1960s Thanksgiving Day game in a lasagna of Detroit mud ...

Football in two to four feet of snow?

Bring it on, baby.

Alas, it's not going to happen. For any number of completely rational yet boring reasons. 

Safety concerns for the fans, especially getting to and from the game. (Once there, they wouldn't care. This is Buffalo, after all.) Safety concerns for the players, expensive assets all. Liability issues out the wazoo.

Rational. Boring.

So, off to Detroit they'll go. And maybe that wouldn't set off so much geezer grumbling if it were somewhere else, because Ford Field is an indoor stadium and that violates EVERY rule of football ever established anywhere.

Indoor football isn't football, see. It's PlayStation 5.

It's a video game that deprives us of one of football's true joys, which is watching multi-millionaires suffer like Antarctic explorers. I want to see Josh Allen press onward like Roald Amundsen. I want to see Nick Chubb break trail like it's the Iditarod. I want the Bills and Browns to find the remains of Ernest Shackleton buried in the snow somewhere in Orchard Park.

I want Man Football.

Instead, we'll get (s)no(w) go, and not "snow, go." 

Zzzzzz.

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