Fuck The Fourth-Down Bluff

Drew Magary’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday at Defector during the NFL season. Got something you wanna contribute? Email the Roo. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it.

We’re on the cusp of the NFL offseason, which portends a great many ruminations. We get our last wall-to-wall weekend of football for this divisional round and then POOF! The sport all but disappears after that. Chances are, your team’s season ended weeks ago anyway, as mine did. Once the football ends, there is only thinking about football to subsist on. That usually means obsessing over free agency, the draft, and getting a new head coach for your team who isn’t a complete boob.

Most of all, the NFL offseason allows your mind to wander away from your team so that it can obsess over the league itself. As the number of games shrinks, you glean nits to pick with how this sport is played and, much more important, how it’s officiated. This is why every spring brings endless discourse surrounding otherwise minor affairs: the overtime format, the ethics of the tush push, and so on and so forth. Being the visionary that I am, I have already found the most important petty grievance to bring to the NFL’s rules committee: