​Dumb Football with Mike Tunison: The Year In Dumbening

This feature is part of Super Bowl Week at VICE Sports.

"Previously on Dumb Football…"

The 2015 NFL season is drawing to a close. A week from now, a Super Bowl champion will have been crowned, the NFL Draft Industrial Complex will once again ramp up to the full extent of its speculative powers, and fans will start to forget most of what transpired over the last five months.

Honestly, the NFL will take it. After the Shield-on-fire, crisis-filled year the NFL had in 2014, a follow-up season in which the biggest issues were a general sloppiness in play and near-constant officiating conundra can practically be considered a boon. The league has shown time and again that it doesn't need competent management or even an especially good product to make money hand over fist. The last two seasons have proved that.

Recent events have even emboldened those who push back against the Death Of Football narrative. The conference championship games drew nearly 50 million TV viewers, an increase of eight percent over the year before, with the AFC championship posting its best numbers since the late 1980s. A Hollywood movie about the origin of the league's CTE crisis was a box office flop. The cries for Roger Goodell to resign have dimmed to a more manageable dull roar. The NFL might have suffered an embarrassing and hilarious legal defeat in the mostly pointless matter of illegally deflated footballs, but if anything, Ballghazi just kept the NFL in the news during the offseason while making fans more eager for actual football to take the place of courtroom wrangling.

Getting things back to business as usual was key for the NFL this season, because business, for all the league's other issues, is booming. So long as football is king, a former offensive lineman turned analyst can inexplicably call out the world's most popular sport after a particularly compelling NFL playoff game, and think he's doing so from a position of strength.

Take that soccer
— Ross Tucker (@RossTuckerNFL) January 17, 2016

I can kind of understand where he's coming from, even if making that statement is a trollish impulse I wouldn't act on. To be an NFL partisan is to listen to the rest of the sports world constantly dump on the many things wrong with your sport. General interest writers who sniff at the retrograde nature of professional football and its culture are all too content to trade on its popularity rather than ignore it altogether; ignoring it might be the more ethical choice, but people care about it, and clicks are for the getting. There's plenty of cynicism to go around.

Indeed, an essential part of being an NFL fan is accepting that, on some level, you're part of the problem. That's awfully dumb. But if you haven't already embraced and made peace with the fundamental dumbness of the NFL, I'm not sure what I can tell you at this point.

Here, then, is the Year in Dumb Football. It wouldn't be possible to encapsulate every dumb thing that happened in the 2015 season, so I'm just sticking with major themes and whatever dumb shit I'm still capable of laughing at despite the frequent thudding dumbness.

The Dang Field Caught On Fire In St. Louis

I mean, they might as well burn it all now that the Rams have relocated to Los Angeles. Nevertheless, let's not forget what an ultra-bleak death trap the Edward Jones Dome was during the team's final season in St. Louis, whether it was the field catching fire from pregame pyrotechnics to the sideline concrete being a death trap that resulted in multiple injuries.

Q: What's A Catch? A: LOL Nothing Matters

There's little use in cataloging the myriad examples from this season that illustrated that the NFL has no idea how to define a football catch. They'll go back to the drawing board this off-season, and they're even planning on letting Dez Bryant speak to their committee about it. Whatever minor alteration will result is guaranteed not to fix the problem, and this bullet point will see you back here this time next year.

Johnny Manziel, And Everything About Johnny Manziel, Was Really Dumb

There's an immediate news peg for this, since Manziel was investigated by police over the weekend regarding a possible assault on his ex-girlfriend. But when it comes to Manziel-related idiocy, there has been a news peg—some new instance of bottle-service corniness at best and actual odious shitheadedness at worst—more often than not. The Johnny Football saga was an all-season soap opera, and it increasingly looks like a permanent state of being for Manziel. This year, he took turns getting benched for partying, because investigated for assault, and looking slightly improved but hardly great on the field.

Just about every report indicates he's through in Cleveland. What franchise is going to give him another chance? More to the point: why?

Jerry Jones Promised A Reformed Greg Hardy, Then Spent All Season Not Giving A Shit When He Didn't Get It

After spending nearly all of the 2014 season on the commissioner's exempt list as a result of a domestic violence incident that saw a conviction dismissed on appeal for suspicious reasons, Greg Hardy returned to football in 2015. Jerry Jones promised a changed man. Charlotte Jones Anderson, Jerry Jones' daughter, publicly defended the move. There was a lot of second chance talk.

And even before Hardy's four-game suspension to start the season was up, he was inflaming the public with music videos and public statements that made it clear he had no remorse for his deeds. On the field, he fought with coaches; Jones described it as leadership. It was only when Hardy was late for team meetings that the Cowboys' toothless threats to discipline him surfaced. While there are reports that Dallas won't retain him after this season, they had no qualms standing by him all year.

Mike Mularkey, Chuck Pagano and Jeff Fisher Are All Still Head Coaches

The Colts underachieved in fantastic ways this season and yet Chuck Pagano remains the head coach going into 2016. Clearly, his grit chips are getting through to management, if not the players. His still-inexplicable fake punt against the Patriots might be the most remarkable thing about the Colts season, other than people making Photoshop jokes about the AFC Championship Participant banner they hung in Lucas Oil Stadium after 2014. Although, to be fair, the fake punt might be the best thing that's happened in the NFL in a decade.

Other franchises hanging on to depressing coaches: the Titans, who decided to retain interim coach Mike Mularkey for… reasons? And Jeff Fisher gets to make the trip to LA with the Rams. Fisher explicitly said during the 2015 season that he's out of answers and somehow didn't get fired on the spot. That just proves the Rams are committed to getting him the record— Fisher is just one 10-loss season away from being the all-time leader in losses in NFL history. You can do it, Jeff. Don't let the bright lights of Hollywood distract from your goal.

Bonus points to Fisher for also being partly responsible for a concussed Case Keenum remaining in a game and suffering no consequences for it. Even the league doesn't want to do anything about Jeff Fisher. He might be the only one with better job security than Goodell.

The NFL Stopped A Player's Attempt To Raise Domestic Violence Awareness Because Of Uniform Rules

NFL players being fined for not doing Pinktober right is now an annual thing thanks to the league's strict uniform code. This year, the NFL is more clueless than usual in enforcing it, as demonstrated most glaringly by the decision to fine Cameron Heyward for honoring his father, who died of cancer, on his eye black. DeAngelo Williams, whose mother and four aunts have been lost to breast cancer, wanted to wear pink on his uniform all season in tribute and was denied. Then there was Steelers defensive back William Gay, who wore purple cleats in two games to raise awareness for domestic violence issues, something of great interest to the league. Gay's mother was killed in a domestic violence incident. Nevertheless, the league still fined him after the second game with the non-approved cleats.

The Super Bowl Ref Can't Flip A Flippin' Coin

The Super Bowl has yet to experience an overtime game. Wouldn't it be fun if the first time that happened was in a game overseen by a referee that made a mess of the last two overtime coin flips he oversaw? I think so, at least. That's a possibility, too, as Clete Blakeman is the lead official for Sunday's game. I wouldn't put it past the NFL to have snipers positioned to hit the coin in midair if Blakeman makes another flat toss.

Daily Fantasy Sports Pretty Much Owned The Season

While it's the Panthers and the Broncos in the Super Bowl, you can't say DraftKings and FanDuel didn't have a nice run. During the first few weeks of the regular season, the topic most prominent in NFL discussions was just how overwhelmingly omnipresent the daily fantasy ads were. And it wasn't just TV media. DFS more or less sponsored all of sports media in September and October. As the season wore on and the backlash scored key victories against the DFS menace, their power waned. Still, 2015 will be remembered as the one year that DFS badgered the hell out of us.

A Head Coach Chewed Tobacco On The Sidelines

Lots of football coaches dip. Because of the NFL's extremely serious sense of decorum, though, you won't see too many of them do it on the sideline at a stadium. This is something I would usually only joke about a coach like Todd Haley doing, but then Mike Zimmer went and actually did it after a story circulated that Adrian Peterson felt sick before a game because he swallowed his dip. This all happened and I'm glad there's video to preserve it. It's important.

The NFL Tried To Make The Extra Point Exciting

Exciting isn't the word I would use for it, though the extra point was at least less rote of a procedure in 2015. Kickers missed 71 of them, which is nearly double the misses from the previous five seasons combined. There was even one defensive score on a blocked extra-point attempt.

Ideally, the best consequence of the tougher extra point would be more teams being aggressive about going for two. Aside from the Steelers, that wasn't really the case in 2015. Hopefully the NFL's copycat nature will actually be a good thing in this instance, once anyone gets around to copying it.

Phil Simms Was His Usual Dopey Self And Even Jim Nantz Couldn't Take It

Far be it from me to give ESPN free advertising, but I'm definitely going with the Spanish broadcast of Super Bowl 50 on ESPN Deportes for at least part, if not all, of the Super Bowl. A Phil Simms reprieve is too tempting to pass up.

A Wide Receiver Intentionally Leapt Crotch-First Into The Uprights

This requires no additional commentary.

A Washington Player Said The Team Gets Bad Calls Because Refs Hate Their Awful Name, Then Claimed To Have Forgotten Saying That A Few Days Later

After a lopsided Washington loss to Carolina in late November, Jason Hatcher vented to the media about how he thought the referees were picking on his team because of a moral objection to the team's widely loathed slur of a nickname. That's a pretty controversial statement, but apparently not a memorable one: Hatcher claimed to have no recollection of making it a few days later. A fairly classic Washington move, all things considered.

Cam Newton Had an MVP Year and White Folks Lost Their Damn Mind

Wrong/Bad Cam Newton Takes were hardly a new thing in 2015—Nolan Nawrocki invented the form before Newton even took a NFL snap—but they certainly hit a crescendo that should peak sometime within the next week. These gripes have downshifted from the mainstream to the weirdly petty, but they're still popping. Whether it was a mom concern trolling how to explain dabbing to her kids or someone complaining about Cam not being married to the mother of his child, there was no limit to the things that people found to complain about with Cam during what was otherwise a nearly perfect season. In retrospect, it was wise of former quarterback Sage Rosenfels to get his Cam hot take out early in the season when it could get noticed. There's just too much competition these days.

A Teammate Compared Jay Cutler To Jesus

is Jay Cutler too often criticized? Martellus: "They threw rocks at Jesus, & Jesus was an excellent guy who did a lot of awesome stuff."
— Patrick Finley (@patrickfinley) October 4, 2015

2015 was blessed.

Buffalo Fans Turned Dumb Football Into a Community Art Project

Gamedays at Ralph Wilson Stadium are the most pure representation of the don't-give-a-fuck self-destructive essence of NFL fandom, and they were better—or at least better documented—this year than ever before. Bills games have always been at least a little crazy, though perhaps it was the arrival of Rex Ryan that pushed it over the edge. That, or people were just better at remembering to point their phones at the folks flying through flaming tables. Hard to say. But rest assured Rob Ryan is going to be out there next year. It is going to be lit, and by lit I mean basically Mad Max: Fury Road as acted out by people in Sammy Watkins jerseys.