Arena Football: Big Dudes On A Little Stage

Truth be told, I’ve been intentionally holding off on writing this post. I sort of feel that way any time we do an achievement where the outcome is less-than-awesome. But…dammit, we put arena football on our list this year, we went to a Pittsburgh Power game, and I’m going to write about it. So let’s go backward, shall we? Way backward, back to the beginning — to a safer time, a more innocent time, when the world was getting on relatively okay, and “Hey, arena football might actually be totally awesome to watch!” I’m speaking, of course, about mid-March 2014.

(Note: the pictures on this post are of a lesser quality than most of our entries. This is because they were taken on an iPhone, and not our Canon 5D, which was prohibited at the door by the Pittsburgh Powers that be.)

The first thing we noticed about arena football is…

That the field is freaking tiny! You see the ref on the right edge of this picture? He’s standing at mid-field. In arena football, you can literally kick a field goal from your own 5-yard line. So, you see a lot of scoring.

I mean, a ton of scoring.

Sometimes scoring plus Yinzer belly-flashing.

Interrupted only by a brief bout of cheerleading.

See, arena football is pitched as a higher-octane version of outdoor football; faster-paced, more big plays, etc. But don’t believe the hype. The game takes just as long as a Steelers game, on account of all the damn play stoppages due to scoring, and…well, I don’t know why play stopped so often in the last two minutes of every quarter. I guess to squeeze in more scoring.

I mean, there are definite similarities to the gridiron game we Pittsburghers so love.

You’ve got your kickoffs…

You’ve got your battles at the line of scrimmage…

You’ve got your periodic injury break.

But what’s missing is any semblance of defensive drama. And that, friends, renders this game B-O-R-I-N-G, boring. So boring that, after the cheerleading ended, Fox and I did what we do at the act break of a particularly egregious piece of theater: we pretend we thought it was over, and go home. “Wow, that was a fast game!”

Though, even cut in half, the game still wasn’t fast enough for some members of our family.

“You ditch me at home, I make a fort of your clothes.”