Football. Already. Yeah.

NFL Football is back. Actually, it seems like it's been back about two weeks, since July, for God's sake. I am really sick of NFL football.

Don't get me wrong. As a game, NFL football is pretty good. It's not as good as major league baseball, which has tension just built into it. Waiting, waiting for that pitch with the bases loaded. Watching a Bugs Bunny curveball, like Eric Gagne throws when his arm isn't falling off. Football also isn't as good as NBA basketball. Nothing in football is as good as a well-executed fast break. But I do like good playoff football. The playoffs, not the Super Bowl.

The Super Bowl, in fact, is indicative of what has good seriously off the rails with the NFL. There's. So. Much. Hype. And blather. Blather. Blather. It's a fundamental problem with the NFL. There's only one game a week. The rest of the time, it's just talk, talk, this guy's got a turned ankle and is "questionable" (the NFL has an official injury scale, kind of like the Dept of Homeland Security's rainbow of doom), that wide receiver said something marginally questionable about his quarterback and what a controversy, this coach says his punter needs to focus on getting more hangtime, Mel Kiper Jr. has moved huge fat 11-year-old up on his big board for the 2015 NFL draft, blah, blah, blah. There's so much freaking' hype about the NFL that you hear a lot of people -- on sports radio, at least -- about how the NFL has become "by far the dominant professional sports league."

What few people other than Tom Tolbert talk about, though, is how so much of the interest in the NFL is about gambling. The NFL is uniquely suited to gambling. Baseball and hockey aren't good for gambling, partly because the pure quantum of runs and goals make point spreads almost useless. The spread on almost every baseball game would be one, maybe two. Same for hockey. The NBA would be somewhat easier to bet on. There's lots more points scored, of course. The final score of an NBA game, though, can really because of the way the ends of games work out. Teams that are just a little bit behind foul to stop the clock. So a close 5-point game can go to a 15-point final very easily. Similarly, they put in the guys at the end of the bench in a blowout, so a 15-point game with three minutes left can go to an 8-point final or a 30-point final easily. How can you bet on that?

This stuff doesn't happen in football. No one kicks meaningless field goals. It's hard, but not too hard to score points in the NFL. So it's easy to bet on the NFL (I didn't say that it was easy to win -- that's why I don't do it).

And the gambling seems like a huge deal with the NFL. The NFL turns a blind eye, of course, but, unless you live in Phoenix or Detroit, there's almost no reason to care about that Cardinals vs. Lions game in November. Unless you have money riding on it. (And don't tell me that your fantasy league isn't gambling.)

I don't agree much with George Will, but, when he wrote one time that football marries two of the worst things about American society -- violence and committee meetings -- I had to agree. He could have added gambling. So, no, I can't get very excited about Bill Parcells trying to keeping the score in the teens again, like he has for the 20 years. I can't get worked up about what the Raiders QB said about Randy Moss. I don't care how the Dolphins' new coach plans to resurrect their long-dead winning tradition.

Wake me up when the Colts are getting ready to lose in the playoffs again. Let me know when Ben Rothlisberger is going to save the Steelers' season again by tackling a fast guy (I do like Rothlisberger). Tell me when Tom Brady is getting ready to school some defense in the snow in Foxboro. Just don't ask me to get worked up about Carolina playing Tampa Bay in October. Don't ask me to try to explain a Cover 2 or an H-back.