Arena Football Kinda Sucks

I went to a Tampa Bay Storm game tonight. Apparently they are an Arena Football team, and apparently they have won 5 Arena Bowl titles. Anyway, it was not a pleasant experience. I've always said that football was meant to be played outside, and this is my second indoor football game where I came away with an even stronger opinion. It was just so unbelievably loud. The pregame intros consisted of about 12 Harleys driving around revving their engines right before the players were introduced. What Harley's have to do with storms I wasn't sure, but the noise made everyone incapable of thought so no one has had the change to ponder the rediculousness it. Between every single play they felt the need to entertain the crowd either by playing a song at a deafening level, or having a sideline announcer shout into the microphone to announce the next fan giveaway, or have the stadium announcer scream for the crowd to make more noise ("LET'S GET BEHIND YOUR STOOOOOORM DEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEFENSE!!!!!!!!!", ok, my ears actually started bleeding that time). And trust me, the crowd didn't need any encouragement. Ok, so I can stand the crowd noise, but what really gets to me is the concept of fireworks indoors. In an open air stadium, the sound has somewhere to go. In a small arena (or any indoor place for that matter), the sound of the booming fireworks are just deafening, frightening, usually startling, and excessive. I've been to a couple NHL games, and at no time was I ever concerned about the loud annoying, non-game noises being too loud. It was clear that the game is not the reason why people attend AFL games.

So mixing in the announingly loud announcers and the insane idea of indoor fireworks, the game wasn't that interesting either. In arena football, teams don't not score. 4 posessions ended in turnovers, and 1 ended on downs. Every other posession ended in either a touchdown or a fieldgoal. The final score was 55-51. It might just be me, but I'd kinda like to see some defense every once in a while. Watching a game where you know the outcome is going to come down to who has the ball last just doesn't do it for me. In fact, offensive is so big that there were 2 onside kicks in the game. The fist was with about 1:00 left and the kicking team had a 7 point lead. That's right, the team with the lead kicked an onside kick. They didn't recover, the other team received the ball at about the 3 yard line, and 2 plays later tied the game. Then, with the score tied, they kicked another onside kick. Seriously, if defense is that impossible that you onside kick it when you have a lead then there is something a little bit weird about the game. Not that any of this mattered, because the stadium was doing everything it could to distract the crowd between plays that no really paid any attention to the game until the last 2 minutes.

All in all, I don't think I would recognize the difference between a WWF Wrestling show and an Arena Football game. There was just way to much glitz and sparkle and annoyingness that the actual game became secondary, or maybe tertiary. And what was worse is that nobody but me seemed to mind. What kind of sport is this? One that I won't ever see in person again. Oh, in case anyone wanted to know, I sat in about the 6 row for $10 per ticket and I bought the ticket at the gate. Man, I missed Lambeau's comfortable 15 degree confines.