Permit a brief editorial on the sport of American Football: It’s stupid.

As possibly the last of the true gladiator sports, football allows spectators to achieve that visceral rush from watching violent clashes unfold. I readily admit there is some beauty and incredible athleticism in the game, but the NFL has become a house of pain for so many people. It is hard for me to stay a fan with the absolute brutality witnessed on an ordinary Sunday and injury reports that can’t fit on a scroll.

Granted, it would be challenging to find a period of time or culture throughout history where we didn’t celebrate some form of violence. Spectators have often taken great pleasure in vicious harm done to another person. In ancient Rome they filled the Coliseum to watch men fight to the death against each other or some carnivorous beasts, feasting emotionally on the carnage. Torture in the public square used to do the trick – a nice disemboweling on your Sunday afternoon to get the blood flowing? A virgin sacrifice perhaps? We crave watching another person’s pain for some strange reason. Hopefully we continue to evolve, and football (at least as we know it today) is no more. Boxing finally fell off of prime time. It has been replaced, it seems, with Ultimate Fighting and MMA. But football is still the dominant sport for satisfying the desire we have to witness violence.

Perhaps the league can effect enough rule changes to get football back to a sport that doesn’t require risking severe long-term injury and death. Rugby must be doing something right, and even ice hockey avoids a lot of these issues (now that they wear helmets). Unfortunately, the NFL seems to still be tolerating the violence, and we go right along for the ride. The penalties for vicious hits are very modest in relation to the salaries. And what does it take to get suspended for a game or more? “Unnecessary Roughness” would end if you ejected repeat offenders and fined them a percentage of salaries vs a more modest fixed sum. But boys will be boys is still apparently our collective rationalization for the stupidity we see on our TV screens each week.

So the irony of it all is I’m heading to my second NFL game of the season this Sunday – my Bengals take on the Minnesota Vikings. I like being around 65,000 people and feeling the thrill of the crowd when a great play happens. And I will be hard-pressed not feel some perverse excitement if one of our gladiators “lays out” one of the opponents. I wish I didn’t feel that way, but I will. Like I said, it’s stupid.