the saints and hurricane katrina

John Clayton of ESPN just struck a nerve with this bit from his latest ESPN.com article: "New Orleans fans deserved something like this following the tragic events of Hurricane Katrina." Clamp it, John. Let's all just STFU already with the way-overplayed Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans Saints stories. Okay, Katrina sucked big time. And it sucks that so many people were displaced from New Orleans, including the Saints. But please, please knock it off with that "feel good story of the year" crap. If I read or hear one more sports pundit go on about how the Saints and/or their fans "deserve" this because of that hurricane I'm gonna shoot somebody. The NFL is about football, not heart-touching emotional junk that belongs in the daytime talk shows.

Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against pulling for the Saints. I've come to kinda like them myself just because I'm tired of all the gushing some of their hugely overrated divisional counterparts (read: Atlanta, to a lesser extent Carolina) get year in and year out. But if you do root for the Saints then at least do so because they're a damn good team making a solid push at the playoffs, or because they've pulled off a nice turnaround from last year, or because a rookie coach is doing wonders with them, or because you're just a Saints fan, but not because we want them to make us feel better about the disenfranchised of the world. That's not what football or sports in general is about. And when we make it about that, we take the sport out of sports.

Come to think of it, there needs to be an auto-shutdown rule here similar to that Hitler one. You know, the one that says the first idiot to mention Hitler or Nazis in any argument not directly concerned with Hitler or Nazis automatically loses the argument and the issue is considered settled. Well, the first Oprah wanna-be that mentions Hurricane Katrina when the Saints are being discussed should have to shut up right then and there and cease to participate in any further sports-related discussion for the duration of the event at hand. That would solve a lot of problems I think.

To set the example, since my post title breaks that rule I'll shut up now.