Jeff Kaley
WAURIKA — It’s vacation time for some, but I can’t head to the sun and fun capitals of the universe until I’ve reduced the excess of sticky notes that serve as my memory:
When it comes to being the dominant professional sport in the USofA, there’s little doubt the NFL rules. But keeping the league at the top is why Commissioner Roger Goodell is wrong to try to extend the season to 18 games.
Sure, sure, it means more TV dinero for the league, which is really what Goodell wants — that’s why he gets paid. Still, there are two reasons NFL owners should resist:
1. With four pre-season games and a 16-game regular season, NFL players’ bodies are broken down enough at the end of the season as it stands. During the past decade, there’s been an increase in the time players miss due to injuries, despite better training and medical techniques. Another eight quarters of collisions is going to shorten careers.
2. The NFL is the one pro sport that leaves its fans wanting more when the season is over.
Major League Baseball has diluted itself with a preseason, a 162-game regular season and a post-season that won’t end this year until November. NBA and NHL seasons are interminably too long; by mid-May, even rabid NBA and NHL fans are praying for the last game of the playoffs.
And as drooping TV numbers are revealing, having 36 Sprint Cup races in a NASCAR season that runs from February to November is overkill.
Goodell and the NFL owners have the Golden Goose. Why kill it?
• According to results of a GMAC Insurance National Drivers Test, if every Oklahoman had to take a written drivers test today, 78.9 percent would pass. That’s just above the national average of 76.6 percent, and it ties the Sooner State with Washington for the 17th highest percentage in the land. Idaho and Wisconsin drivers come out best, with 80.6 percent of their drivers passing, while New York state’s at the bottom with 70.5 percent.
Overall, 20.1 percent of licensed Americans couldn’t pass the drivers test if asked to do so today, which doesn’t sound that bad — until you realize, that’s about 41 million people.
• Speakin’ of drivin’: While making the commute from Waurika to Duncan t’other day, I was leading a line of four vehicles going north on U.S. 81, clipping along at about 68 MPH. When we hit a straight stretch outside Comanche, the driver of a high-powered pick-’em-up truck apparently didn’t like being fourth in line, and came blowing past the three cars ahead.
This Richard Petty wannabe had to be doing close to 90 MPH as he cut in front of me, about 30 yards away from a car headed south in the other lane. That’s when I noticed this idiot had a window sticker that read: “God is My Co-Pilot.”
While the color returned to my face, I was thinking: And God must be scared to death, you ... uh, jerk! (OK, I was thinking of names other than “jerk,” but this is a family newspaper.)
• Defining “politics”: When the best choice is obvious, we work hard to select another. (Thanks to cousin Steve Hanna for that one.)
• “Censorship reflects a society’s lack of confidence in itself.” So said former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart.
• The insurance companies, drug companies, politicians taking contributions from lobbyists and a pay-for-service payment system aren’t going to fix our broken health care system. Heck, they’re the primary reasons most studies peg America’s system is one of the most poorly conceived in the Western world.
• Has anybody come up with a name for the blue-gray-red color mix of an Oklahoma sky in spring?
• From the Big Book of Bad Analogies, which I plan to publish one day: “Her hair glistened in the rain like nose hair after a sneeze.”
