"Wouldn't it be easier if we just forfeit to USC every year? I know it would save me a lot of pain and suffering." (AP Photo/Ben Margot)

First, the Cal Golden Bears.  Every year I have to listen to college football analysts talk about Cal’s team: how good they are, how they are going to make a run at the PAC 10 Championship, and how viewers should circle the date when Cal plays USC because it will be a good one.  Let me tell you something, the only reason I would circle that day is to remind myself that that’s the day I need to bet everything I own on USC winning.  Cal stinks.  They have stunk for the past eight years.  The Cal-USC game is supposed to be a rivalry game, but what kind of “rivalry” game shows one team winning nine of the last ten games played (and, even though a win is a win, Cal barely beat USC 34-31 in 2003). That’s not much of a rivalry.  And this year was no different; USC slaughtered an over-rated Cal team 30-3…does that sound like the score of a rivalry game to anyone?

And I know that this goes back to 1912 and that’s why it’s a good rivalry and all that jazz, but right now we are living in the present…and presently Cal is garbage.  They have done nothing but find ways to disappoint.  This year, once again they are ranked high and are in National Championship contender talks, and then they get shellacked by Oregon, and then dismantled by USC in back-to-back weeks.  Even worse than that, is that college football analysts still view a win over Cal as a quality win.  That’s like racing a person on foot while you are in a car…it’s nothing to brag about.  From now on take that game out of the television lineup and replace wit any other college football game.  I’d rather watch a San Diego State inner-squad scrimmage than another Cal-USC blood bath.

"Football is a full-contact sport, you are gonna get hurt Keith...that's why you wear pads and get paid millions to play it."

My second issue…the NFL.  Now relax, I love football and I love the NFL, but after watching the Patriots beat the Ravens mainly because of a “roughing the passer” call in which Terrell Suggs was knocked down and breathed too close to Tom Brady’s knee, that disturbs me.  This is football, let the kids play.  I know athletes are bigger, faster, and stronger nowadays, but it is still a full-contact sport.  There are so many new rules added each year that soon the NFL will be reduced to a highly-skilled flag football league.  You can’t touch the quarterback at all (especially if it’s Brady – who has single handedly been responsible for the creation of two different fraudulent rules), you can’t hit receivers, and now (because of a fantastic hit by Hines Ward) no more crack-back blocks.  Seriously? These guys don’t need protection; they have pads.  There weren’t referees protecting players back in the day when they left the game looking like they just finished a bar fight that involved blunt objects and hand grenades.  I know the league wants to protect the players, but unfortunately it can’t do at the expense of the game.  Fans want to see big hits, big sacks, and real football – not two-hand touch.

And I know those hits hurt, and it’s easy for me to say guys need to deal with it because I am not one of those guys – but I am also not the guy who got to go to college for free, because I played football, got to make millions, because I played football, and (since I have a functioning brain) won’t ever have to work a day in my life after my pro career is over, because I played football.  I would gladly let someone break my jaw, or knock me unconscious for a pro football players’ annual salary.  If you want to make a case for guys’ careers being ended by big hits, and how much damage players have after football is over, then adjust the penalties and have players give some of their money back.  Football is for modern-day gladiators, and all of us fat Romans pay that money because we want to see two gladiators fight to the death…not hug and then retire into the sunset.