Garcia Media Life

Back in the days real men played football in snow storms

As Tom Hanks famously stated in the movie, “A League of Their Own,” there’s “no crying in baseball.” And there’s no cancelling an NFL football game because of bad weather. It’s blasphemy. It’s un-American. We, as a nation, have changed forever.

Reacting to the rescheduling of the Sunday night Vikings-Eagles match-up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Governor, Ed Rendell, called the postponement due to blizzard conditions an “absolute joke,” and declared, “We’re becoming a nation of wussies.”

The arguments are all covered in this excellent rant by columnist Will Bunch in the Philadelphia Daily News in a piece entitled the Wimps Who Stole Christmas:

If you grew up anywhere in the wintry half of this country, you probably have fond memories of hiking up your snow pants and sloshing around with your buddies and your Pete Rozelle-signed football in the backyard drifts – and the only thing that comes a close second to playing football in the snow is watching a classic NFL matchup in a furious downpour of the white stuff.

And he goes on to mention that if the same wimps who postponed last night’s game had been in charge, there would never have been the “Ice Bowl” NFL championship game between the Packers and the Cowboys, or the infamous “Snow Plow” game between the New England Patriots and the Oakland Raiders or the 1948 NFL title game at Shibe Park in Philadelphia that attracted nearly 40 thousand fans in a raging blizzard not dissimilar to yesterday’s conditions.

Do you know how memorable an NFL game played in Philly would have been last night? Wind gusts of 50 mph would have wreaked havoc on every pass. The footing would have been atrocious. There was no keeping up with those conditions and the field would have been a total mess; a quagmire. In other words- the perfect setting for a legendary gridiron contest.

It’s one thing to cancel a football game because the roof atop a domed stadium collapses. It’s one thing to cancel an exhibition game as they did once in one of those games they use to play between the NFL champs and college all-stars because a vicious storm washed away one of the goal posts. But postponing a football game because of a blizzard?

They have a subway in Philly that goes to the stadium. They have fans in the City of Brotherly Love that are certifiably insane who would have gladly braved the blizzard conditions for their beloved Eagles- in T-shirts.

And they delayed the game until Tuesday! Do you know how much that screws up the Eagles who then have to turn around and play in a shortened week next Sunday? Not only has the NFL succumbed to the soft-bellied political correctness of “public safety,” they’ve potentially messed up a team’s fortunes and deprived us all of what surely would have been the talk of the nation for years to come.

No- this is wrong; very, very wrong. NFL- I don’t even know you anymore.