Cold discomfort

 I once watched two NFL teams wallow around in the mud for three hours.

It was Thanksgiving Day and 1968 and I was 13 years old, and end-of-the-world rain had turned the Detroit Lions' field into the world's largest tuna noodle casserole, minus the tuna. And the Lions and Eagles mucked around in it until the previously winless Eagles prevailed, sort of. 

The final score was 12-0. All the points came on four Sam Baker field goals. Although it might have been the Lions who kicked four field goals, because by the end of the game you literally couldn't tell the teams apart.

They were both dressed exactly the same: Liquified Mother Earth. Came in any color you liked as long as it was brown.

Anyway, it was horrible football. And it was glorious football. It was football exactly the way God and Knute Rockne 'n' them intended.

I bring this up because reports are coming out of a Missouri hospital that dozens of people have been treated for frostbite and at least a dozen had to have fingers or toes amputated because of a brutal cold snap in January. At least some of those treated were fans who attended the Kansas City Chiefs' playoff win on January 13, when the temperature was minus-4 and the wind chill was minus-27.

This has prompted scattered cries in some quarters for the NFL to do something about extreme-weather games -- although as long as the Great Monolith insists on scheduling its entire playoff schedule in the dead of winter, extreme weather will happen. That's why some NFL media is insisting every new NFL stadium from here on out should either be roofed or have a retractable roof.

The Blob's crotchety-old-man take on this is if that's the case, the NFL should stop calling it football and start calling it arenaball in the interests of truth in advertising.

The Blob's take is football, like baseball, is an outdoor game and it should be played outdoors, and if that means you wind up with a playoff game in minus-27 windchills, then shorten the season so you're not playing games in the dead of winter. But since the NFL is never going to do that -- hell, they just recently went to a 17-game regular season, and already they're lusting after an 18-game season -- then live with the consequences.

Yeah, I know. This sounds heartless given that no mere game should cost someone an extremity or two. But if you take the elements out of football, it's no longer football. It's just Patrick Mahomes and Brock Purdy pushing aside the furniture and spending a Sunday afternoon rough-housing in the living room.

Besides, you lose a big chunk of what makes football (or baseball, for that matter) memorable, if you take nature out of the equation. It's no accident that an inordinate number of the most memorable football games in history are memorable because of the conditions in which they were played..

Michigan and Ohio State playing in a blizzard in 1950. That Lions-Eagles Casserole Bowl. The Bengals and Chargers having it out in the cryogenic chamber that was Riverfront Stadium in January 1982, when the game-time temperature was minus-9 and the windchill was minus-59.

Coldest game in NFL history, that one was. Second-most iconic to the Ice Bowl in Green Bay six days after Christmas in 1967, when the game-time temperature was minus-13 and the Packers beat the Cowboys 21-17 on what was literally frozen tundra.

I don't know how many fans suffered frostbite at those two games, or if any fingers or toes were lost. I do know the fans dressed for the weather; in my memory, the stands in Lambeau Field were a vast sea of parka-ed up Michelin Men and ski masks. The only clue they were actually alive were the plumes of frosted breath that chuffed out of them like smoke from a power plant.

Conversely, I just saw a crowd shot from that Refrigerator Bowl in K.C. Lots of fans in Chiefs jerseys over several sweatshirts and stocking caps, bare faces hanging out beneath them. One guy in the photo wasn't even wearing gloves.

This is not to say people in Green Bay in 1967 were smarter than people in Kansas City are now. OK, maybe it does say that.

In any event, when Jim Cantore or whoever says it's so cold out there exposed skin will freeze in minutes, believe him. Unless you want Roger Goodell to swoop in and decree that Arrowhead Stadium be transformed into another charmless, sterile NFL living room.

 Mother Nature sold separately.