Dave’s Football Blog

In August of 2004, I launched this humble little football blog with no other purpose than to share my thoughts on “our modern-day gladiators” in the National Football League. The four and a half years since then have been quite an adventure, but alas, all adventures must end, and I have decided it’s time to bring this blog to a close.

It’s been an illuminating 54 months, to be sure. Three years ago, I was telling the world that soccer was evil. Now look at me. I’ve spent two years plumbing the depths of football’s origins, and I’ve come away with an appreciation for pretty much every type of football there is. My mind is free, and I can stand up and cheer for the beautiful game just as much as I can for America’s game — or Australia’s game, for that matter.

Your average football fan is not capable of this. Most people still argue over what constitutes “real football.” If you take nothing else from this blog, however, take this — there’s no one football code that can call itself “real football.” All these football games are simply the games that we have chosen to play, and ultimately, they all come from the same tradition — the idea of two teams kicking and/or running with a ball, trying to reach a goal. The fact that we can’t always agree on how we should play football simply shows how diverse we are as a species.

Because football games are humanity’s games, and they crystallize for us all the joy, all the sorrow, all the qualities and all the flaws that come with being human. They touch something deep within our psyches, and when they do, we can’t help but stand up and cheer.

Naturally, I stood up and cheered for my Steelers as they won Super Bowl XLIII on Sunday. For whatever reason, though, I haven’t really feel much like writing about the NFL lately. Perhaps that will change in the future. After all, the great thing about 21st century media is that you can create a new blog for almost no money — and I could easily see myself doing that in the future.

In the meantime, though, I’ll be contributing two articles a week to EPL Talk for at least the remainder of this Premier League season, and I will continue to make infrequent stops at World Soccer Daily along the way. Plus, you can check out stuff I find interesting — football-related and otherwise — at Permanent4.com, which currently links to my Google Reader shared items page. I’m also going to leave this blog open as an archive for at least the rest of this year, as I’ve written a lot of stuff here that I don’t want to vanish overnight.

So until we meet again out here on these here internets, this is your pal Dave signing off. Enjoy your football, everyone.