The stages of bad football, or what America experienced if they watched Cardinals/Seahawks on Sunday Night.

I still can’t believe that game happened. That game is going to go down in history for how it ended but it almost doesn’t deserve to because it might have been the most boring, terrible game to watch since the Miami/Pittsburgh “Punt stuck in the mud” 3-0 game many years ago.

I don’t really want to hear people defend that game. Yeah the defense was good but if you’d actually watch that 5 quarters of nothing happening over a game where touchdowns sometimes happen then you’re the weirdo. I can appreciate the Seahawks and Cardinals defenses in that game, but it wasn’t actually much fun to watch. Good defense is fun to watch up to a point. That game went far beyond that point. Part of great defensive games is wondering when either team is going to break through. Neither team broke through. It was an entire game of nothing. No touchdowns. No really exciting plays. Nothing. Then two kickers miss easy field goals and the game becomes legendary because at that point all of us who stuck with it had gone completely insane.

Bad football is a depressing experience. Even clownball is fun to watch, but bad football (aka 3 and outs for 4 quarters) is just a boring slog and probably the worst football watching experience. There comes that time during a bad football game when nothing has happened for what feels like ages and then you look at the clock and it’s still 4 minutes left in the 3rd quarter. There comes a time watching bad football when you realize just how much time of your life you’ve wasted watching grown men run into each other. There comes a time watching bad football when you either just say “screw this” and do something else or you stubbornly sit down and hate watch the rest of the game because you are an addict and you are afraid you might miss something, like most people who turned off last week’s Texans/Colts comeback. And of course, there comes a time in bad football, near the end, when you think it can’t possibly get worse, and it does, and your brain breaks.

At least that game gave us probably the greatest gif of the season.