Slow painful death

Via Oyster we find Matt Taibbi complaining about the NFL's ever-tightening rules governing the use of hands by defensive backs and hitting upon one of the best descriptions of good football I've ever come across:

Add in the fact that offensive tackles are allowed to hold on virtually every play, and you have a game that’s more and more like basketball every year. Football should be like watching a slow, painful death, and not in the “I’ve had to watch 500 Subway five-dollar footlong commercials in three hours” sense of slow, painful death, but real, terrifying, on-field death.

It says something about either the patience of the average sports fan or, more accurately, what is expected of it, that it's no longer assumed that some of us are actually watching for nuance and substance rather than for the sake of seeing things light up.

It's one of the reasons I'm not such a big fan of Coach Soupy. Sometimes I think he'd rather be playing X-box than coaching actual football. Certainly he's not the "slow painful death" sort. He tends to go for swiftly killing Grandma instead.