Baffoe: Finding Interest In The Bears Game By Rooting Against Daniel Snyder
By Tim Baffoe--
(CBS) Unless you're one of the delusional Chicago Bears fans out there — and apologies if I just repeated myself — you know we've entered the "playing out the string" emotional desert of hometown football.
The final four games of the season will be tough to get up for when you know their tangible effects are a mere shuffling of mediocre spots in the next draft.
"Hey, some guys these next few weeks are playing for a job next year," some will say. Cool, whatever.
"Jay Cutler has to prove he can be the QB in-" another will say. Yes, yes, good for you. If you can lie to yourself to justify watching, more power to you.
I can't. But I'm going to watch these Bears games because they're football, and I'm too intellectually lazy or socially inept to do anything better (or I can pretend I'm neither of those things and have to watch as "homework").
This next game is a bit of an exception, though. I've found a something to stir my soul for Sunday.
Look at this assclown:
How could anyone want anything good to come into that man's life? A person like that deserves constant pain. Toddlers should be punching him in the groin at all times.
And that's before even considering that Daniel Snyder's the guy who owns the Washington NFL team.
Snyder is compacted garbage held together by hair gel and that jacket and a scarf indoors and whatever else is in the trash bag full of your absentee dad's stuff being donated to Goodwill.
https://twitter.com/Redskins/statuses/393175713924526080
This past Monday night featured Washington against the Dallas Cowboys. Normally, this is a lose-lose matchup for non-sociopathic viewers, but I was able to extract joy in the hilarious way Washington gave away the game, even if it meant rooting for the lesser of two evils and essentially Jerry Jones.
The schadenfreude invigorated me ever so briefly and made what's become a habit of putrid primetime NFL football actually watchable (for fewer than two minutes). Rooting against Snyder's positive feelings nourishes those of us with a soul he lacks, but it's more than just about him looking like the first target everyone would go after if The Purge was a real thing.
I've compiled a list of why rooting against Snyder's team should be the motivation you need this coming Sunday to watch (and perhaps even be less than apathetic) toward the Bears game.
- Washington hasn't been bad enough to where it can't win its division. The absurdity of this NFL season demands that the Bears have a hand in derailing that which no reasonable NFL fan should wish to happen anyway.
- The team will never be good so long as Snyder is involved. So you almost have to root for him to (figuratively) fall down stairs year after year until attrition somehow takes over.
- Snyder — as further evidence that he's deranged and actually hates football — is jacked up for his team to play in London next year. "We are excited to showcase (our team) on an international stage," Snyder said in a statement. "We are honored to help grow the game overseas." He will also be honored to remind the British what colonialism and subjugation of a people is like.
- He bribes Native Americans to speak favorably of him or just shut up about his team's racist name. Snyder will tell you they are "gifts," but they're bribes.
- Snyder keeps doubling down on offensiveness by using disgraced, questionable or outright fake Indians as evidence of Natives supporting him. And he keeps getting caught being blatant or shady about it.
- The team's social media people have the same head injuries as the players, apparently. There's the annual tradition of making you choke on your turkey:
But at least they're the butt of other team's clever jokes.
- Snyder will sue media that correctly points out he's vile. Or he'll just buy the media and link up with a newspaper whose readership mostly thinks Indians-as-mascots is the price of losing the hostile takeover of land. And he'll own a radio station that insulates criticism.
- It's very likely Snyder's responsible for Robert Griffin III's rostership this season while actual football people would have preferred otherwise.
- He's swindling the people of Richmond, Va., while Washington holds training camp there. Though people not in the biz who really want to watch a football practice deserve to go separate ways from their money, but that's an argument for another time. Yet even those rubes seem to be wising up and staying home.
- Meanwhile, Washington fans aren't showing up to the actual games. The franchise is second-to-last in attendance this year in percentage of available seats filled.
- "We're winning off the field, but we've got to start winning on the field," Washington team president Bruce Allen laughably said a year ago. Allen is almost as loathed by Washington fans (and likely players) as Snyder, but Snyder won't get rid of him either.
Let's hope the not winning on the field part lasts another week for Washington and that Daniel Snyder can be sad. And at the least, we can pretend to care about the Bears one game longer.
Tim Baffoe is a columnist for CBSChicago.com. Follow Tim on Twitter @TimBaffoe. The views expressed on this page are those of the author, not CBS Local Chicago or our affiliated television and radio stations.
