Look: It's Football, OK?

The question being, "what is the only sport anybody watches on TV anymore?"

Hockey, Baseball, and, according to me, boxing, are all in the can. People watch football because it don't strain the ol' beaner and has lots of pointless aggression. NASCAR isn't a sport--it's hypnosis and muzak rolled into one--so that doesn't count.

But the NBA, now there's a pursuit swirling the drain among big lumps of poo. Michael Jordan retired and damn near killed that shit; and the leeway he was given by officials during his career killed the concept of "rules" in the sport. If one dunk was magical, then 50 dunks in a game would be...super-orgasmic-jizz-tastic-fantasmagorical! Or something.

Well, the NBA is unmitigated garbage. The games are over before they start, all the teams are exactly the same, none of the players can dribble, shoot, or play defense dependably, and the result is that only people with extremely low standards for "entertainment" (read: young males and celebrities) can stand the shit. This year's All-Star Game was decided by a score of 153-132, for Christ's sakes, and it drew the lowest rating EVER for the event (4.3). The year before had been the lowest ever (4.3), with the year before that being the lowest to that point, and the year before that being the lowest...and you get the point. In Jordan's last season with the Bulls, 1998, it was a 10.6, and that was the last time the game drew more than an 8.2. That is a steeeeep decline.

I would like to think that Kobe Bryant, the biggest name in the game, being an admitted adulterer and assumed rapist (he paid off his accuser to get the case dismissed), would hurt the league with viewers. But, as this article points out, the Lakers are in fact the only team keeping the NBA on television!

What is happening to sports in this country when one whole game becomes the purview of advertisers, misogynistic young men, and super-egos? And when do declining revenues drive the stake through basketball's heart?