Auchtoon!

Originally published in the Grand Rapids Business Journal, December 22, 2008

This week’s comic actually has roots in my longstanding (and intense) dislike of the Dallas Cowboys. I know professional football has no direct application to my life. I know time I spend thinking about and watching professional football is time wasted. I know acting on negative feelings about professional football is like a double waste of time. Okay? I know all this. But when you’re seven years old and you arbitrarily pick the San Francisco 49ers as your favorite team, and for three consecutive years the Cowboys eliminate the 49ers from the playoff, well, it sort of gets into your DNA.

So the story here is that the AFL (Arena Football League), which is professional indoor football, announced that it is suspending its upcoming season. Essentially what happened is that several franchise owners who also own NFL franchises (like Jerry Jones, the Dallas Cowboys owner) are hurting. They are spending too much on their NFL teams and their NFL stadiums. (The new Dallas Cowboy stadium will cost beyond $1.1 billion and is way, way over-budget.) These NFL owners — instead of trying to run the AFL more efficiently — decided to cut losses and walk away. Grand Rapids is home to the Rampage, a franchise owned by the DeVos’s, who were very keen to play the season. In fact, it was thought that a deal had been worked out, but an 11th hour decision by the NFL owners ended up killing it.

So, yeah, I don’t know all the details. And maybe suspending the season was the prudent thing to do. But I do so very much despise the Cowboys. And Jerry Jones is a cheap-shot jerkface stupid stupidhead. And that’s just the way it is.