Is this game responisble for American Footballers losing their edge?

At any one moment 3 million players are locked down and playing Call of Duty 3 online. In its first week of release in early November the game shifted over 775 million dollars worth of cyber war joy, enough to make small countries, let alone the latest cinema blockbusters, weep jealous, covetous tears of saline envy into their morning cereal bowls. Modern Warfare: the game, is as monetarily successful as Modern Warfare: the reality.

The hours of lost revenue that this one game must be costing doesn’t bear thinking about; the minds of children’s this game must be warping, unknown; the cost to society; considerable. The average Call of Duty player logs over 170 hours a year, and that is small fry compared to some. But it is a damn-sight more fun than Facebook, so its not all Doom™ and gloom.

So powerful is the call for Call of Duty that University of Louisville Coach Charlie Strong has blamed the game itself for his football team being crap. Now you may think that a computer game couldn’t possibly be responsible for university men clad in over-sized ponchos failing to live up to their preconceived notions of excellence, but you would be wrong.

“That new, what do they call it, Call to Duty? Yeah, they got called to duty…… But, these are young people and that’s what we’re dealing with. Guys who, all of a sudden there’s something new and they want to try it and it just engulfs them.”

As ludicrous as it sounds, the coach could obviously be hitting on something he has no idea about, squarely in the heart. Professional athletes need a few things to keep at their peak levels, both in terms of mental and physical fitness. If these athletes are not sleeping and not training but are instead sitting in the dark twiddling their buttons and shooting German, Afghan and Iraqi soldiers for 16 hours per day, something is going to give. Sacrificing sleep for X-box is going to have a direct result on performance. Really it actually goes without saying.

Lets be honest. American football is an anomaly. So is Christine Aguilera. So many things are wrong with this combination of characters that apologising for all of them would be more difficult than explaining the rules of American football to an, as yet to be discovered, Amazonian tribe and then, having explained the rules to their blank, non-comprending faces, getting them to sit down on Superbowl Sunday and enjoy the spectacle.  All four, advert filled, hours of it. So that’s not why we are here today.

That over 100 million people tuned into watch The Green Bay Wolverine Dragon Cubs overrun the Pittsburgh Killer Penguins by 7 thousand points to 4 thousand five hundred and sixty eight is cause enough for concern. Didn’t it begin at 1am? Shouldn’t these people have been sleeping? And whats with tipping orange Gatorade over peoples heads? It’s not funny and seems to be the only actual point of the whole shebang they have going on over there.

If you didn’t know, part of the Superbowl megaadvertisingextravganza is the half time show, where like it or not, some band you hate plays some songs you hate even more whilst gyrating about on a specially designed stage made to look like a pair of sunglasses. Our fault. Sorry. Even worse than this is the annual singing of the national anthem before touchdown at the start of the first quarter eighth 10 minutes.

Now you would have thought that singing your own national anthem wouldn’t be too much of a challenge to a singer. Well, it would appear that the pressure of doing it in front of 7 billion screaming fans got the better of dear Miss Aguilera and she forgot the lines. She didn’t forget the lines when she sang the same national anthem one year earlier during the NBA American basketball finals where she did it twice no-less. So why this time? Well, according to the statement released by her publicist it was because she “got so lost in the moment of the song that I lost my place. I can only hope that everyone could feel my love for this country and that the true spirit of its anthem still came through.” That is not an apology, it is an excuse. We at Taketheblame would like to do what couldn’t be done and apologise.