The NFL Lockout is Public Enemy #1 in America. Hide your kids. Hide your wife.
Jun 27, 2011 - The NFL Lockout has created a barren wasteland with regards to interesting and exciting topics to write about. There are the typical offseason write-ups on the state of your roster, the free agents that might be available once the lockout is over, and the retrospective type posts on how well this player or that player did in this game or that situation. Those posts are interesting enough as part of a more diverse whole, but speculation and retrospection cannot possibly fill the entirety of a sports team's blog unless you want to bore the crap out of your readership and lose all passion for the sport. It simply helps to have news about tangible and visible player improvement, offseason team activities, free agent signings, rookie signings, veteran re-signings, ANYTHING actually football related. The lockout has really put a damper on this type of news.
You may have noticed an influx of Top-10 lists in the blogosphere because of this 'real news' void. I even ventured into this realm quite unsuccessfully with a top-10 best/worst NFL throwback uniforms list that I purposefully and mercifully cut short because it was so damn boring and ill-received. (This is not really a surprise, mind you. I've found that the quickest and easiest way to invite ridicule and criticism upon yourself is to try and rank anything in some sort of numerical order, and I MEAN ANYTHING. Even something as trivial and subjective as how pretty one team's outfits are.)
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The Lockout has been like the movie Groundhog Day. Every morning, you wake up and realize that you're living the same day you lived yesterday. Each day, the Lockout is 'about two weeks away from being over.' Every single day, you read about the Owners offering concessions to the Players and the Players offering some back, but you still wake up the next day and nothing has been completed. Every day, you write up a big update about the leaked specifications regarding the new CBA, and then you wake up the next and read 'the deal is nowhere near done.'
So what else is there to write about while we wait for this stalemate to end? It's 4:42 PM PST on June 25th, 2011, a Sunday afternoon, and if you type "NFL" into Google News search, the first article you see is one about Chad Ochocinco's plans to wrestle an alligator.
Let me repeat that: the first article you see is one about Chad Ochocinco's plans to WRESTLE. AN. ALLIGATOR.
Sorry, that was wrong. He plans to wrestle ALLIGATORS. PLURAL.
The second one is about how Phyllis from the Office used to be an Arizona Cardinals Cheerleader. I'm not kidding. THIS IS THE STATE OF THE NFL. A meglomaniac NFL player is going to wrestle an alligator this week instead of riding a rodeo bull and some lady from a TV show used to be a cheerleader. Those are the two most important stories in the entire world if you want to read about the National Football League.
Incidentally, ...actually, no, consequentially, if you type in "I hate my life" to the Google News search pane you get an article called "Why I Don't Sing the Star-Spangled Banner" by a guy named Wee Wong. Not kidding. I wouldn't recommend clicking on that article, it's super boring.
The only consolation to all this is knowing that once this lockout really ends and we stop living the same day and same dumb news over and over and over, there's going to be an ecstatic and insane period of free agency that will make writing a blog about the NFL fun again.
Until then, we bloggers and sportswriters are forced to talk about other stuff we may find entertaining. First, I saw this on the internets: some local kid got drafted by the Harlem Globetrotters. This is all well and good and I'm happy for the kid, but am I the only one wondering about the idea that there's a DRAFT for a basketball team that puts on comedic exhibition games? Is it weird that players get drafted to a team without a league that has a "win" percentage of 98%? A team that has players consistently run out of bounds, travel egregiously, throw buckets of water on the referees, and at least once a game a guy gets pantsed on the court.
Secondly: the stadium where the Seahawks and Sounders play changed from one stupid name to another, different, stupid name. The Seahawks organization apparently (I think anyway) held an unveiling ceremony of the new corporate moniker and live-broadcast the whole thing on the internet via streaming video for those people who were looking for something inconceivably more exciting to watch than seeing the Mariners get swept in three games by the Nationals DESPITE only giving up ONE EARNED RUN.
Thirdly and finally, we always have Twitter to fall back on. I like to keep things fresh and exciting by re-tweeting stuff from DeathStarPR, Fake Bo Pelini, and the unintentionally hilarious Jose Canseco on a daily basis. Earlier this week, I was so bored I started a hashtag battle that legendary Seahawk Walter Jones took part in. On Saturday night, I resorted to live-tweeting what people next to me at the Mariners game were wearing while taking note of the tremendously disconcerting amount of people that wear sweatpants in public. Sportswriter extraordinaire Doug Farrar pretty much summed up the entire lockout and corresponding media NFL coverage when he responded to and framed my inebriated twitter ramblings:
This is your brain. This is your brain on NFL lockout. @FieldGulls I'm going to continue to live tweet what people around me are wearing.less than a minute ago via web 
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