Why isn’t football an Olympic sport?

All is quiet on the Chargers front. As its often said, no news is good news. No one is on the police blotter. No one has suffered anything more severe than standard training camp bumps and bruises, except for Ryan Mathews. Here’s hoping this is Mathews’ one injury for the year and he’ll run like a Russian racehorse all season. Basically, its business as usual in Charger-land and that’s how The Greg One likes it. Guys are getting their work in, you know Philip Rivers is busy sharpening his new tools (Meachem, Royal, Gates etc…) and the Chargers are finally so far under the radar you can’t find them with GPS. Everyone has stopped expecting anything from them which is a great reason to expect them to emerge from ‘nowhere’, even if a team with the most talent in the division can come from out of nowhere, to shock the world and play in New Orleans in February. Since there is no scandal to report on, lets go to the just concluded Olympics. Lots of scandal still coming from the event which closed last week. Now we’re hearing stories of guys and gals who cheated, were stripped of medals, admit to unscrupulous acts and the new female marketed Nike Gold Digging t-shirts are causing a controversy. Attention to all responsible for this glut of unnecessary information: Its over. We’ve stopped caring! That being said, a question comes to mind.

Why isn’t football a Olympic sport?

Football isn’t as universal as basketball or soccer, there’s no doubt about that. However, there are a LOT of sports in the Olympics that aren’t universal. Did anyone get up at 3 a.m. to watch Water Polo? Is anyone clicking away from their favorite sitcom to watch Badminton? They were caught trying to throw the match to backdoor their way to a medal! Still, no one cared. After we laughed at the thought of thought of how do you exactly throw a Badminton competition we stopped caring.Who sat and watched skeet shooting? Archery? Thought not. Even Sportscenter wouldn’t air those highlights!

Football is something we would stop and watch on a Saturday afternoon. Who would make up this team? No one of significance from the NFL would be on this team because their teams wouldn’t allow it but that still leaves a lot of room for fringe players. Free agents who need to prove themselves. How would you like to see a receiver lineup of Terrell Owens, Plaxico Burress, Hines Ward, Chad Johnson and Randy Moss? Aging vets who still want to show the NFL they still got it and where better to get your rep back than in front of a worldwide sporting audience. Quarterbacks? How many quarterbacks holding clipboards or second guessing their decision to retire wouldn’t love this opportunity? Donovan McNabb, Brett Favre, Kurt Warner, TIM TEBOW? The man could focus on being a real quarterback instead of how to block the gunner on special teams. In the process, ending all war in the Middle East, ending the price gouging by big oil and curing all third world disease by rubbing a bead of sweat onto the head of the afflicted.

But I digress…

You may scoff at the pulling of older players for this team but how did that work for the original Dream Team? Just saying…Besides, there would be a great talent pool from the college ranks to build from. Assemble a group of collegiate all-stars to complement the age of the NFL vets and no international team could match that ability. There’s a lot of tweaking that could be done and maybe the NFL, seeing how they want to go global so bad, could let current players participate. This event could instantly increase the global appeal of the NFL and its players. Every other major sport has an Olympic sized event. MLB has the World Baseball Classic. Hockey and basketball are Olympic sports as is boxing, tennis, wrestling and on and on…Pro football needs a grand stage as well. That’s something I would turn off that Modern Family rerun to watch!