Manducare Stercore Subridens

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[W]hile many Mississippi State fans might call for second chances, or try to say he was just defending his family to make ourselves feel better for taking Jeffery Simmons without any real repercussions, I just can’t bring myself to do it. I’ll just know we decided to take a really bad hit to the image of our school all in the name of winning football games.

Brian Hadad of Bulldog Sports Radio has often called taking Simmons similar to eating a turd sandwich. It tastes terrible going down and you just have to find a way to choke it down. He was completely right, but I’m not even sure I could anticipate how difficult this would be to swallow once we got here.

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But smiling while trying to get your shit down is nothing.

Football is so popular that people (myself included) have private conversations about how many people would have to die on the field before we’d seriously consider giving it up.

If you want to know the answer to that, consider the long history of drivers dying on the race car track. People in the stands dying at race car events. I think if we’re being honest about this, public deaths in the course of violent sports events are – fanwise – a plus.

Indeed, let’s continue with Chuck Klosterman’s argument:

There’s an embedded assumption within all arguments regarding the doomed nature of football. The assumption is that the game is even more violent and damaging than it superficially appears, and that as more people realize this (and/or refuse to deny the medical evidence verifying that damage), the game’s fan support will disappear. The mistake made by those advocating this position is their certitude that this perspective is self-evident… The contemporary stance on football’s risk feels unilateral, because nobody goes around saying, “Modern life is not violent enough.” Yet this sentiment quietly exists… Football could become a dead game to the casual sports fan without losing a fraction of its cultural influence. It could become the only way for a certain kind of person to safely access the kind of controlled violence he sees as a critical part of life… [Football will not become extinct; rather it will become] a mildly perverse masculine novelty.

But the more violence faction ain’t such a novelty, is it? It’s about to elect our next president.

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“Look, our nature, we like competitive violence. We do. As much as we talk about the quarterbacks, and where the game of football has gone the last 25 years, we still like when you show a big hit or a big tackle. We like that. You can throw five touchdown passes and that’s great. But one big hit, that’s what you’re here for.”