Outgoing Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, agree with him or not, is plain spoken and tells you what is on his mind.
In this case, I agree with him. The idiotic decision of the NFL to shift the game between the Eagles and the Minnesota Vikings from Sunday night to Tuesday night in anticipation of a snowstorm is indicative of how weak we are becoming as a society.
Rendell gave the NFL and Commissioner Roger Goodell both barrels in wake of the game change.
“It goes against everything that football is all about,” Rendell said Monday on radio station 97.5 The Fanatic in Philadelphia.
Rendell was rankled by the league’s decision to move the Philadelphia Eagles’ home game against the Minnesota Vikings from Sunday night to Tuesday evening.
The NFL cited the winter storm that wound up slamming most of the East Coast as the reason for the change, but elected to postpone the game before any snow had even accumulated. About a foot of snow fell on Philadelphia, though less than 5 inches was on the ground before the scheduled kickoff at 8:20 p.m. EST Sunday night.
Rendell viewed the NFL’s decision as a referendum on the toughness, or lack thereof, of the United States.
“My biggest beef is that this is part of what’s happened in this country,” Rendell said. “I think we’ve become wussies.”
“We’ve become a nation of wusses. The Chinese are kicking our butt in everything,” Rendell added. “If this was in China do you think the Chinese would have called off the game? People would have been marching down to the stadium, they would have walked and they would have been doing calculus on the way down.”
This game would have been played in the Midwest. Can you imagine the NFL cancelling a game on the Frozen Tundra of Lambeau Field – or, if you are Sen. John F-ing Kerry, Lambert Field?
Somewhere, Vince Lombardi and Tom Landry, the coaches in the Ice Bowl, are turning over in their graves. Every player who participated in the Ice Bowl and every fan who attended the Ice Bowl no doubt are embarrassed by what now should be known as the Nancy Football League.
How many times have we seen this locally, where panicky school administrators cancel school and others cancel events when bad weather is predicted? Cancellations based on a forecast. Happens routinely around here.
I’m not that old. Seriously, I don’t remember anything ever being cancelled because something might happen. As a child and adolescent, it took a major snowstorm for school to be called off. Now, if the meteorologist calls for 4 to 6 inches of snow, the odds of there being school closings are 50-50.
A nation of wimps. Weenies. In Rendell’s words, wussies. Ah-nold would call us a nation of girlie men. Of course in the black-is-white-and-white-is-black world in which the women are behaving more masculine and the men more feminine (after decades of cross-gender indoctrination by our gummint-run skoolz), should we really be surprised? When adults shelter and shield children from adversity and anything remotely requiring courage and toughness, this is the end result.
Football is a game meant to be played outside in the elements. The only thing I can support suspending play for is lightning, since the players’ metal cleats provide perfect grounding.
This was an abject surrender on the part of the NFL. The league was correctly being laughed at across the Internet yesterday.
