Who would name a professional sports franchise after a building material? Well, a team in something called the Alliance of American Football would … and has. The Birmingham Iron. What’s next, the Petersburg Plastic? Duluth Drywalls, Wyoming Wood, the fuckin’ Butte Bricks? So dumb, but then again the whole idea of a pro football league that’s not spelled N-F-L is a lesson in dumbness.

The concept is based on the flawed theory that America is so enamored with football that it will care about it in any form in any season. The originators of this league (and the NFL) think football fans are stupid, sheep, that we have time and money sitting around in piles waiting to waste. And while it’s true we have a month or two to kill before baseball season, we have thousands of distractions we will pick before scraping the bottom of the barrel and tuning in to the fuckin’ Iron game. Personally, I have a bunch of televised bass fishing tournaments to catch up on.

And why is called the Alliance of American Football? What other kind of football is there? Were viewers gonna confuse it with the Alliance of Russian Football? Dumb. And why the fuck is it called an Alliance? Did the teams take some kind of blood oath? Is there a secret charter where they promise to wear the ugliest color combinations they can find, where they vow to hire only coaches we all thought were dead? They should have called it the Football League of Unknown Players … the FLOUP. Before the games started they could have had the coin FLOUP.

Anyway, no one gives a fuck. Players and teams you don’t care about in cities you’ll never go to. I can see why players hoping to get picked up by the NFL would play, shit, who wants to get a real job? But the old fuckin’ coaches they’ve dug up are just delusional … embarrassing themselves. And the fifteen ex-football players working the broadcasts are just whores, gridiron mercenaries. They insult our intelligence by thinking, for even a minute, anyone cares how the QB from Obscurity State reads defenses.

I should say that the people running the television networks and the NFL too (the NFL has a minor stake in this) are in the business of having you believe that something is exciting and popular and talked about even when it isn’t. That’s why we have Storm Watch! when it sprinkles, that’s why they’ll to cram the Grammy Awards down your throat, that’s why every political Tweet is a step toward Armageddon. It’s not that it’s fake news, it’s fake importance … it’s brainwashing for financial gain. I guess it really is an alliance, that is, collusion to get the football public to watch the unwatchable.

We’re all better than this.

♦

But the team names are by far the dopiest part of this stupid alliance. The ever-dangerous Iron, the raw metal buried in the dirt of a mining town near you, will have to engage in epic battles with the likes of the Fleet and the Apollos and the Hotshots. I’m not making this up. Crap, if the Hotshots were named the Hot Pockets instead, at least we could all have a fine microwaveable meal to go along with the thirteen-dollar stadium beer. What’s an Apollo? Is it the space thing? Are you gonna root for a spaceship? Hi, what team do you like … oh, I follow the Flying Saucers.

A team mascot doesn’t, shouldn’t, have anything to do with the fuckin’ town a team plays in. If that was the case you’d have the fuckin’ Hawaiian Pineapples playing against the dam Vegas Slot Machines.

No, teams are supposed to be named after the meanest, coolest and scariest animal you can find, not after a city’s topography or weather conditions or what a city grows or makes. You can’t play sports with a team called the Virginia Peanuts! What if you live in a dairy state? … Lets go Milk! (clap, clap, clap-clap-clap) Lets go Milk!

We need teams like the Raleigh Rats and the Monticello Maggots. The object is to strike fear in the minds of the opponent. No one will want to do battle against the Killer Whales, no one wants to be on the bottom of the pile when you’re playing the Black Widows. But you know you’ve got a pretty good shot at victory when you line up versus the fuckin’ Iron. Hell, one of your coaches could wear a giant magnet and all the Iron players will be powerlessly drawn to him while your ball carriers run untouched to the endzone.

Hey, maybe the Iron isn’t named after the material they use to make buildings. Maybe they mean the kind of iron in cereal, you know, Frosted Flakes now have 11 vitamins and iron? And if so maybe they’ll have expansion teams like the Pine Bluff Potassiums and the Cambridge Calcium and the Beaverton B-12s.

It’s dumb now but I think it’s gonna get dumber.

Photo on VisualHunt.com