Just Show Me The Highlights

When I am watching football, all I'm looking for from my announcing team is the score, time remaining and the names of obscure players who were added to the roster this week. If they feel like they should include any more information I'll take it but it is really not necessary. What I most definitely do not want or need is some kind of opinion about sports and morality. But, that is exactly what I got this Sunday following the Bills/Jets game. For those of you who did not see it, the Bills scored a touchdown late in the first half. Bills wide-out Stevie Johnson, who had caught the touchdown, proceeded to do a little endzone celebration where he mimicked being shot in the leg while dancing. For a little context, three years ago Jets wide receiver Plaxico Burress was in a New York City night club when the gun that was in his waistband slipped down and shot him in the leg. He was subsequently charged with various gun violations and served 20 months in prison. Clearly, this dance was intended to make fun of that.

Almost immediately people started commenting about it on various social media sights. Scott Hanson, the host of NFL's RedZone channel (greatest channel in history), said the celebration was classless and seemed much more upset about it than Plaxico was when asked about it after the game. Other sports analysts seemed to take great glee in the fact that Johnson got a penalty for unsportsmanlike conduct, meaning that the Bills had to kickoff from the 20, as if the entire roster should somehow pay for this. (The happiest guy in this entire incident has to be Bills kicker Dave Rayner, who whiffed on the ensuing kickoff. Even with Johnson's penalty the Jets' drive should have started around midfield. Rayner's awful kick, the equivalent of a pro golfer whiffing on the tee box, put them at the Bills' 30. Yet somehow everything that happened was Johnson's fault.) Johnson later had two critical drops in the closing minutes of the 4th quarter that would have won the game for the Bills and from the tone in a few guys' voices you would have thought it Johnson was getting karmic payback for kicking a box of puppies.

However, it was Bob Costas that took it to another level by basically saying the Stevie Johnson celebration was a sign of how this country is going down the tubes. At halftime of every Sunday Night game NBC gives Costas a little soapbox to speak about something that happened in the NFL. This week he started off by saying that people are too busy "keeping up with the Kardashians to notice that we live in a culture that gets more stupid and graceless by the moment." Yes, tell the people watching your show (whose ratings wouldn't suffer one bit if Costas left tomorrow) how much you think they suck. Solid start. He then went on a rant about how players are too self-absorbed and spend too much time worrying about their endzone celebrations. He couldn't have sounded more like an old man griping about how things were better in his day than if he was sitting in a rocking chair on a porch and yelling at the neighborhood kids to get off his lawn. Also, it's a little hard to take a lecture about how people are too self-absorbed from a guy who probably spent 30 minutes in hair and make-up right before his appearance. Costas had been universally praised for his handling of the Jerry Sandusky interview a couple weeks before this, but it took just two minutes for people's opinions to be severely lowered.

Even though I'm not much of a dancer I have no problem with guys doing some celebrating when they make it to the endzone. Admittedly, I think most of the time they end up looking like idiots and I really can't stand it when they celebrate while down by a lot of points, but I get that football is a rough game and it has to be played with emotion to be played well. It you want to let those emotions out, fine. I actually have a much bigger problem with penalizing people for celebrating, especially at the pro level. This isn't pop-warner where everyone gets a trophy and no one's feelings should ever be hurt. We're talking about professional football and if you don't want to see somebody do a dance in your endzone then I suggest you stop them from getting there. It feels like Costas had the wrong rant anyway. If he was going to be offended he should be pissed at how PC we've become. When did making fun of the guy who brought a loaded gun into a crowded nightclub even though he clearly didn't know how to handle it, thereby endangering dozens of people and only by sheer dumb luck ended up just hurting himself become worse than actually being the guy who did the crime? I get that Plaxico served his time, but that doesn't mean he isn't above making fun of.

I can't stand it when people like Bob Costas think we give a crap about their opinions. Joe Buck's moral stand on Randy Moss fake-mooning a crowd in Green Bay is one of the main reasons people dislike him. Why don't you let us worry about whether or not we're offended and you can focus on calling out the right people's name, which some of these guys often get wrong. We're there for the game, not you. You could replace most play-by-play announcers with silence and I'm not sure many people would complain. Hell, I didn't even watch Bob's rant live - I never watch his halftime spiel. I only went online to see it later because everyone was remarking about what a tool he was being. People have enough unwanted opinions in their lives, sports should be the one place where they can just watch what is happening and not have to be told how outraged they should be about some event. But, the good news is that if Costas still feels like he has to give out these opinions no one really cares about he can start a blog like the rest of us.