I learned the next day that I'd had the wrong emotion. I was supposed to be offended and even outraged. As The Denver Post's Mark Kiszla wrote here and here:
What happened next for mothers, fathers and all the kiddies watching the game as part of the holiday celebration was reality TV gone bad... So much for the myth that the NFL is wholesome family entertainment. The public appetite for pumping-up violence and the unedited noise of the game's raw emotion is insatiable.
Fortunately, the NFL Network raced to apologize for their oversight. Leaving me with just one question:
Do any of these jackasses actually have children?
Watching a football game with a small child is a nightmare, not because of the occasional f-bomb, but because of nonstop promos for graphic television shows such as CSI. I turn off all of the commercials. Always. Because during the first week of the season the game segued into a promo that showed a mutilated corpse and a terrified woman, leaving my child ashen and me scrambling for the remote control.
The networks that broadcast NFL games can send their phony, hypocritical apologies to someone who cares. If they want to make football family-friendly, they should edit or ban show promos that feature dead bodies, sobbing victims, firing guns and tortured screams. As McDaniels himself might say, do your job and quit making shit up.
