World Cup: Over

And not a moment too soon. I am not much of a soccer fan. It is marginally fun to play but, like baseball, is horribly boring to watch. Now, of course, this is where everyone steps in and informs me that it is NOT boring, I simply don’t understand the sport.

Uh huh.

I understand baseball as well as 95% of its fans, and still think it is horribly boring to watch. Granted, I am spoiled. Having an intimate knowledge of one of the most complicated and diverse sports on earth (football, people) makes lots of other sports seem simple by comparison.

I watched the championship match today… I’ve tried several times during the course of the World Cup to give it a chance… see if it would grow on me. It did not. There is simply not enough going on.

Certainly there are parts of the game and certain plays that are very exciting and interesting… but they are few and far between and the games are long. I might even agree, if we had an objective scale, that the most “exciting” points of the average soccer game are more exciting than the most “exciting” points of the average football game… but the signal to noise ratio is awfully low.

Unless you get excited by the prospect of running around and kicking the hell out of a ball. And don’t even get me started on the awful diving that takes place. Gah. That sport has a disease. I say toss them. You dive? You’re out. Period. No “cards” or “fouls”… just ejection.

Anyway… there are more boring sports out there… but I don’t watch any of them. Thank god this mess is over and we won’t have to hear about it again for a while.

Now bring on a real man’s game: College Football.