I am a big sports fan. I love the NFL and have been a fan of the Oakland Raiders my entire life. In fact, at age 8, I received a Kenny Stabler football uniform for Christmas. The NFL has always been a part of my life and I look forward to it every year. I love the fall season as it comes to a close and football is a big part of that for me. So it is with sadness that I have seen professional sports in this country become totally neutral and a joke for any intelligent fan to watch.

However, it seems that the NFL is becoming more like the NBA in that the players play and the refs call the shots. The players no longer decide who wins the game on their own merits, the referees do. It’s sickening to see when EVERY game contains multiple – ghost pass interference calls. Peyton Manning has another chance to score because he got hit in the head: he’s wearing a helmet! Touchdowns are removed every game by some new non-rule rule and all previous rules are either ignored or interpreted differently. Lost fumbles where it was obviously not a fumble, but stands because the team ran out of challenges. If you watch games like I do, you see this in every game. Refs over reproducing and over parsing to the point where it’s no longer a game, but a rule interpretation war. You can’t even look at a quarterback anymore without getting fined and a 15-yard penalty and games are frequently decided late due to pass interference. Just ask Pittsburgh’s James Harrison how he feels about the $100k he’s earned this year alone.

Yeah, winning the games by superior athletic ability, skill, training, planning, those days are long gone. Now, if the refs interpret the decisions in favor of their teams, they COULD win. Or if your team contains a superstar player. For example, if Ed Reed or Ray Lewis hit hard, then they are great ‘busting’ players. But if an Oakland Raider hits, well, the Raiders are a dirty team that take a lot of penalties.

Perhaps it was repetition and technology that changed gaming forever, but now, like basketball, soccer has become a game of whoever gets the most calls wins. You do not believe me? It started with the ‘tuck rule’ a few years ago when the Patriots got a spot in the Super Bowl. Watch Kobe or Lebron shoot 15-20 free kicks per game, EVERY game if you have any doubt. Oh, and now, if you complain, you’ll get a technical and sent off after two, so fans can pay huge and expensive ticket prices to watch the players on the bench play.

It costs an average of $450 for a family of 4 to watch an NFL game. Now, instead of watching the game, you can spend that money to watch an umpire stick their head under a hood and interpret a rule you didn’t even know existed. What a thrill!

Along with this, there is likely to be a lockout between owners and players. Millionaires against billionaires deciding what to do with the money from a game that isn’t even a real game anymore.

Maybe watch hockey…