I haven't told you much about my love affair with the Saints.

It's been a tough season, and the hits keep coming. Yesterday, Roger Goodell reissued player suspensions for the whole Bountygate thing. The issue of player safety and how much we are beginning to know makes being a football fan weird thing.

I have total admiration for Ta-Nehisi Coates' decision to stop watching the game he grew up loving. I'm still not ready to do that, though continuing to watch seems a bit like continuing to smoke when you know all about the risks involved. Maybe that's a bad analogy, since football is something I enjoy vicariously, something that--aside from sedentary Sundays complete with Scott's chili and wings--in no way threatens my own health. I'm sure the analogy it doesn't hold up. But the moral tug to disavow the sport grows stronger and my heart beats fainter each time I see a player laid out on the grass motionless from a hit to the head. It seems to happen almost every game. So, why continue watching?

Well, there are moments like this: 

(Two things: 1: Yes, any excuse to watch this one again, friends. 2: Even the pure athletic and cathartic beauty of this moment is bathed in ambiguity, considering Gleason's now suffering from ALS and football's possible links to the disease.)

Anyway, Coates has hosted interesting conversations that explore the psychology of football fandom, what we get out of it. I won't go into my personal reasons here, though I think I'd like to sometime. In the meantime, I know where I'll be on Oct. 21st at 12 pm, CST. I guess what I'm saying is being a somewhat thoughtful fan of football is tough business these days. Being a somewhat thoughtful Saints fan these days is near impossible. But again, the nature of fandom is, perhaps, anti-thought. Sure, we can think a lot about our teams--what they've done, what they should have done, how they should do it--but I think the word fan implies some sort of blind passion. I don't know. I'm making this up as I go.

Fandom, the antidote to thoughtfulness? ... Nah.

I've thought and read plenty about the whole Bountygate thing*. One problem I think I have with it is the hypocrisy of Goodell going after the Saints for something that the league, and millions upon millions of dollars in revenue, is built upon: incentivized agression and violence.

I understand that going after Favre for $10,000, intending to injure him is dirty. It just is. Full-stop. Still.

And this is the part where I could (and almost did) go into the number of personal penalties the Saints incurred from 2009-2012, the contradictory and ever-changing bits of evidence the league has produced, the questionable motivation of the whistleblowers. As Ryan Chauvin said this morning,

The NFL’s official explanation for its lack of action in other towns—that there’s no evidence of Jets, Ravens, Steelers, or Titans players doing anything illegal to cause injury on the field—is laughable. There’s no on-field evidence of the Saints doing anything unusual or illegal to cause injury, either. In the case of Rex Ryan, the NFL claims it can’t police intent. In the case of Gregg Williams, the NFL claims intent is all that matters. 

Etc., etc. etc. As a Saints fan, you can really only dig yourself a deeper hole the more you argue your case. Tinfoil Nutjob! Conspiracy Theorist! Asshole!

I started this post, intending to say that over at The Black and Gold Review, Chauvin almost perfectly summed up my frustration and fatigue with this whole Bountygate thing. And that despite all of this, I'm still building every Sunday around a team that's bathed in controversy, possibly down-right dirty, looking like a bunch of lost little lambs on defense without that asshole Gregg Williams, and maybe worst of all, carries a 1-4 record into the bye week.

So, I guess that's how I'll end it so I can get back to the work of writing that really matters Monday-Saturday. Sometimes bye weeks come at just the right time for fans too.


*It's probably my "fandom" that makes it impossible for me to simply say Bountygate, as if that would cede the investigation an air of truth or fairness.