{"id":18986,"date":"2013-02-12T11:05:06","date_gmt":"2013-02-12T16:05:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=18986"},"modified":"2013-02-12T11:05:06","modified_gmt":"2013-02-12T16:05:06","slug":"the-state-of-the-union-address-is-the-political-version-of-the-nfls-pro-bowl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/02\/12\/the-state-of-the-union-address-is-the-political-version-of-the-nfls-pro-bowl\/","title":{"rendered":"The State of the Union address is the political version of the NFL’s Pro Bowl"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jim Geraghty<\/a> explains:<\/p>\n

If you said to me, \u201clet\u2019s end the NFL Pro Bowl,\u201d I\u2019d probably disagree. Because while I haven\u2019t watched a Pro Bowl in its entirety in decades, I\u2019d hate to see a tradition end. But as any football fan will acknowledge, the Pro Bowl is a quasi-necessary event that is executed in a fundamentally flawed fashion. For starters, it occurs at the end of the season, instead of at the halfway point of the season like in other sports. This is because of players\u2019 legitimate fear of injury in a game that has only pride on the line; as a result, everybody plays at about half-speed. Selected players decline to go, so you get the second, third, and sometimes fourth-best players at each position. The NFL moved it to the week before the Super Bowl, to make it less of an afterthought to the season, but now the players on teams in the Super Bowl skip the game.<\/p>\n

My friends, the president\u2019s State of the Union Address is our national pro bowl \u2014 a simulation of the art of persuasion and politics featuring all the big stars, played at about half speed, with no real consequence.<\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/p>\n

You\u2019ll recall Matt Welch\u2019s discovery from last year<\/a> about just how interchangeable the rhetoric is:<\/p>\n