Good thing the weather held for the Super Bowl, otherwise we may not have gotten the boring, lopsided game we deserve. Frankly, I can’t believe it’s the year 2014 and we still allow for any possibility of environmental factors at all. Every year, freakishly, less deserving athletes win a game or two because of events beyond the players' control. When will the madness stop?
Instant review was a step in the right direction, holding us over until we have robot referees that never miss a call. But robots alone won’t eliminate all the drama and excitement. I suppose we could employ a staff of physicists at each game to call “redo” on any play the ball takes a bad hop. I also favor nixing home-field advantage by building a stadium on demand exactly halfway between any two competing teams' cities. Logistics are no concern. We’ll dynamite whatever is in the way—mountains, rivers, grandma’s house. Just think of all the demolition and construction jobs we would create! Nevertheless, great though they be, none of these ideas fully solve the fairness problem, which is that the corporeal world is just too darn messy. The ideal solution is to have the Super Bowl and other games decided by DNA analysis.
By using DNA analysis, athletes would no longer play the game. Instead, each team would have all its players' DNA analyzed, and the league would feed the data into a computer simulation that would determine, more accurately than any real world scenario can, who really deserves to win. Weather, bad officiating, and drunken fans would no longer have unjust effect on the results—nor would injuries, illness, or age. This isn’t just better for the fans; it’s a great deal for the players, too. They would no longer have incentive to torture their bodies with drugs and abuse to compete at a high level. Heck, they wouldn’t even need to train or practice. We could test all babies at birth; the ones with the nucleotides to make them the fastest and strongest would automatically be drafted into the pro leagues, where the best of the best would enjoy winning championships for seventy years or so.
Some people might worry that a computer simulation wouldn’t be exciting, that there’s not much to look at. How foolish! Hollywood has shown that computer graphics are better than the real thing for all scripts. Never again will a camera fail to record the perfect angle or a mike capture a vitriolic curse; each play can be re-rendered infinitely many times. Audibles and taunts will be automatically translated into a hundred languages for a global audience. And don’t forget that the combination of player injury and moral pretense will no longer be limiting factor on the gore and violence of the game, so all those rules nerfing the game will be done away with. I’m looking at you, Roughing the Kicker.
Of course, let’s not be too hasty to virtualize everything about the game. The cheerleaders are best kept in the flesh.
