2019 NFL Season

[Jocephus]

[Freed Roger]

Good for Andrew Luck. Google says he has NW of about 90 mill. Smart dude

[BottenFieldofDreams]

I'm a sports guy, but not an NFL guy. I do check in on national sports radio. It's always NFL. Always. If Bryce Harper quit baseball to join Klay Thompson and Taylor Swift in trying to create a new global language full time, the story would still be about Antonio Brown's helmet. Unless something like Luck retiring happens. Interesting to see the explosion when an actual story happens.

The hot takes are pretty hilarious. I didn't realize Gottlieb had become a sound of his own loud voice guy. God damn our era. The loudest, stupidest voice. Good on Troy Aikman. Is he not Joe's partner on Fox anymore?

[33anda3rd]

The hot takes are pretty hilarious.

Imagine you're the picture of white American male mediocrity. You have a job you hate that you have neither the talent, the intelligence or the marketable skills to quit. Your options are as limited as the diversity of your skills. Your brief respite from the misery of that mediocrity comes sixteen Sundays each year and you look forward to those sixteen Sundays like they are your birthright. 54% of your non-work clothes and 12% of your work clothes are team-related because as a demonstration of your loyalty you have given up part of your personality to sports fandom. Then some guy you're dependent on who has the talent, intelligence and marketable skills to quit his job entertaining you because he doesn't enjoy that job, goes ahead and quits that job in a move you could never relate to. You keep going at your mundane job to feed your kids, why doesn't he keep going, that charlatan, at a job he doesn't like to give you your sixteen Sundays?

That's roughly 68% of NFL Twitter the last 48 hours.

[vinsanity]

Good on Troy Aikman. Is he not Joe's partner on Fox anymore?

He still works at Fox, not sure if he's with Buck or not. He's gone at FS1 a few times - hated that they hired Skip Bayless a few years ago and specifically called out the leadership.

[Joe Shlabotnik]

The hot takes are pretty hilarious.

Imagine you're the picture of white American male mediocrity. You have a job you hate that you have neither the talent, the intelligence or the marketable skills to quit. Your options are as limited as the diversity of your skills. Your brief respite from the misery of that mediocrity comes sixteen Sundays each year and you look forward to those sixteen Sundays like they are your birthright. 54% of your non-work clothes and 12% of your work clothes are team-related because as a demonstration of your loyalty you have given up part of your personality to sports fandom. Then some guy you're dependent on who has the talent, intelligence and marketable skills to quit his job entertaining you because he doesn't enjoy that job, goes ahead and quits that job in a move you could never relate to. You keep going at your mundane job to feed your kids, why doesn't he keep going, that charlatan, at a job he doesn't like to give you your sixteen Sundays?

That's roughly 68% of NFL Twitter the last 48 hours.

That's awesome 33. Well done.
"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." Walden (1854)

[BottenFieldofDreams]

Could I make a million dollars starting a righteous meme comparing Pat Tillman to Andrew Luck?

1st panel, noble picture of Pat Tillman: Quit because God Bless America
2nd panel, unflattering picture of Andrew Luck: Quit because he had an owie.

Cynical, sure, but I want that million dollars. Is there money in outrage boners?

That Barry Sanders was such a petulant millennial.

[AWvsCBsteeeerike3]

I've got nothing against Luck getting out on his own terms. His life, his right to do with it as he pleases. Anybody that thinks differently can pretty much [expletive] off.

The colts fans booing him is pretty unbecoming, but if I try to understand their thoughts....it's really not that hard.

Here's a frustration I can understand and possibly even get behind:

The NFL is obviously huge, way more than just a game. It's that way in no small part because of demand supplied in mass by the masses of fans. The TV deals are beyond lucrative. The ticket and concession prices ludicrous. Etc etc etc. So, to say well it's just a game and Luck cna do whatever/whenever is kind of selling the state of the NFL short.

From my understanding, he gave no hint of retiring previously. Not to players, not to ownership, not to management and certainly not to the fans. Is that right? Well, again, it's his right not to. But, could he have picked a worse time? Two weeks before the season starts? Probably not. If you wanted to pick the worst day to retire on, of the 365 days in the year, he's probably in the top 20.

Could he have picked a worse reason to quit? Well, again, it's his right to quit whenever. But, the optics are terrible. A sprained ankle, rehab being hard, mentally worn down? I get that he was out last year with a shoulder injury. And, he's had one recorded concussion that cost him a game back in 2016 iirc. So, it's not like he's a spring chicken walking away unscathed. But, I've seen a lot of unfair focus on him quitting because of a sprained ankle and while that's obviously the straw that broke the camels back here, it does add ammo to the hate fire.

Throw in his position and how hard it is to replace him, and that's going to ratchet everything up a notch.

Regardless, I don't agree with the hate - especially anyone that thinks he owes them more than what he gave - but there are some criticisms that I can at least understand. And, I can really understand the frustration for a lot of people. The ones that are just sad and not out calling for his head, I can even sympathize with.

[lukethedrifter]

The hot takes are pretty hilarious.

Imagine you're the picture of white American male mediocrity. You have a job you hate that you have neither the talent, the intelligence or the marketable skills to quit. Your options are as limited as the diversity of your skills. Your brief respite from the misery of that mediocrity comes sixteen Sundays each year and you look forward to those sixteen Sundays like they are your birthright. 54% of your non-work clothes and 12% of your work clothes are team-related because as a demonstration of your loyalty you have given up part of your personality to sports fandom. Then some guy you're dependent on who has the talent, intelligence and marketable skills to quit his job entertaining you because he doesn't enjoy that job, goes ahead and quits that job in a move you could never relate to. You keep going at your mundane job to feed your kids, why doesn't he keep going, that charlatan, at a job he doesn't like to give you your sixteen Sundays?

That's roughly 68% of NFL Twitter the last 48 hours.

[33anda3rd]

So, to say well it's just a game and Luck cna do whatever/whenever is kind of selling the state of the NFL short.

But it is just a game. It's an entertainment, like a movie. There are people really emotionally tied to Spiderman, at least according to the people I know on the internet. I don't really know the details just that Spiderman retired, or went to play for the Golden State Warriors or something, and these folks are really way up in arms about it. But they're still gonna go see the next Spiderman, the next Marvel spectacle. They like comic book stuff, so they're going. They're not instead going to turn to cineaste corners of the web to find out when the new Achi Patang Weerasethakul film is coming to their preferred streaming service. NFL fans are NFL fans, they're not going to start getting up at 6AM on Sunday to watch Aston Villa play to a 0-0 draw in an away fixture at Burnley FC instead.

Speaking of which, that happens all the time in Euro soccer. Some 22 year old playing for Arsenal or Lille or Borussia Dortmund becomes an international sensation and goes "hey, I don't like it here anymore, I want to go play for Real Madrid" so then their team has to come to a selling price with Real Madrid so that Madrid can buy the player's contract and the player goes away. And the EPL, La Liga. Ligue 1, the Bundesliga just keep getting bigger and bigger by the year. Star players suddenly wanting to leave the country doesn't kill the EPL. So either Luck leaving doesn't really matter, big picture for the NFL, or it matters because as American sports fans we are fundamentally different than European fans and not in the most flattering of ways.