Sports is really the main reason why television was invented. It’s the reason we own seven TVs – so we can watch games in every room. Back in Japan, Sony thought up the concept of television so that he could watch the NFL draft from his home in Yokohama, then he invented the remote so that he could toggle between the draft and the New York Yankees game.

Tv & sports, peanut butter & jelly, Sonny & Cher, it all makes sense when you really think about it. Still, if you watch enough sports on TV, you’ll witness a lot of stuff that just doesn’t make sense … dumb stuff.

The shift in baseball (essentially putting all the infielders on the same side of the infield) is lame and batters that hit into it are dumb. When teams put on the shift all batters should just automatically bunt to the side of the infield where there’s only one lonely fielder. They should do that every time until the defense is forced to play it straight. The reason why this isn’t standard operating procedure for batters is that A) most of them can’t bunt and B) they’d rather hit into an easy groundout eight out of ten times as long as the other two times they hit a home run.

Of course, the shift exists because baseball has shifted, from a game of instinct and hunches and human thoughts and strategy into a science project controlled by computers and statistics. Managers put on the shift because one-dimensional, dumbass hitters hit the ball to the same place every time. They see the stats, they play the percentages. Today it’s a game of home runs or strikeouts, the shift and the automatic walk. Baseball’s dumb without bunting and sacrifices and pitchers duels and batters who can hit the ball to all fields.

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The NFL Draft is pretty dumb. It has fun moments but why are all of the players forced to wear ballcaps the minute they’re drafted and then why do they need to hug the commissioner? Have you noticed that all of the team caps were designed to fit bald white guys? The guys that have big afros or eight-foot-long cornrows have to balance the hats on their heads like a bunch of little kids balancing an egg on a spoon.

Calling the room at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel where all of a team’s coaches and big shots make their draft picks a war room seems dumb. After every pick do we really need to switch to a shot of the war room? Does it provide riveting drama and intrigue? … No, it’s just dumb. Why do all of the coaches and executives and equipment managers hug and celebrate and congratulate each other after every pick? Are things so desperate in Cleveland that they need to celebrate the physical act of making a draft pick? It’s clear that the franchise is more than capable of picking players, what they are incapable of is picking the right players and then coaching them, so maybe they should go easy on the self-congratulatory “war room” crap.

And why in the hell do we need smartphone footage from a tiny little shack in Arkansas to capture the reaction of the friends of the punter from Arkansas Polytechnic who just got selected with the 257th pick? It’s cliched and manufactured and formulaic … oh, and dumb.

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Most of the commentators and analysts and so-called experts on TV are, well, dumb. There’s too many of them. Every slightly-above-average retired player gets a job on network television which is nice for their families but sucks for us. Very, very few of them have anything intelligent to say. I’m not saying that talking about sports requires any great intellect or that it needs to live up to any kind of high journalistic standard, but being a former player can’t be the only qualification.

The typical NFL pregame or postgame or off-season-analysis show has turned into a three-ring circus with what feels like hundreds of former players and one hot white chick standing in a circle waiting their turn to tell you something meaningless in what often amounts to broken English.

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Every baseball game is now shown with a rectangular white box hovering over home plate to simulate the strike zone. It’s dumb because it takes away from the game. It forces the viewer’s attention away from the players and the ballpark and the salted peanuts in the shell and onto the fuckin’ white rectangle.

You can’t see the strike zone for yourself anymore and with every pitch you find yourself waiting to see where the ball lands in the computer-generated box. I start asking myself, well, is the imaginary rectangle at the front, back or middle of the plate? Is it expanding and contracting with the batter’s height? What if the batter crouches? Is the spot depicting where the ball lands the point where it crossed the plate or the point where it landed in the catcher’s glove?

I used to really like determining for myself whether a pitch was a ball or a strike. I didn’t need a visual aid. I liked arguing with the TV and screaming profanities at the umpires purely based on my own interpretation of the strike zone. Now it’s just dumb.

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A lot of team mascots are dumb. It’s because all teams nowadays want to be fancy or different or with-it or progressive or intellectual. A team mascot was really intended to be an animal, it’s been that way ever since Sony invented sports back in Japan.

Preferably the animal should be ferocious, able to tear you limb from limb … tigers, lions and bears or some variation thereof. The team mascot was originally designed to strike fear in the heart of the competition and to look good on a t-shirt. Teams shouldn’t be named after natural disasters or a point on a compass or something that’s in your closet.

The Jazz is a dumb name. Who’s afraid of a kind of music? How about the Wild? What does it even mean? And if you have to use a grizzly bear to make the point that you’re in the wild, just call yourselves the fuckin’ grizzly bears. What about the Nets? Who in the hell is intimidated by a clothe net? Might as well call your team the Feathers or the Silk Scarves.

The Spurs? Really, you’re gonna name your billion dollar sports franchise after something that’s on your shoe? Was the name High Heels already taken? Magic, Thunder, Heat, Clippers (here we go Sailboats here we go!), Avalanche, Rockies … dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb.

Photo credit: antonychammond on Visual hunt / CC BY-NC-SA