Rules Explained: Taking a Knee

Taking a knee is a common play in football. It is usually performed near the end of a game or near halftime. The team possessing the ball (aka the “offensive team”), to protect a lead, may wish to run down the game clock without taking any risks that might jeopardize that lead, i.e., to kill or waste time — thereby boring the spectators with an anticlimactic conclusion to a contest they have paid two hundred dollars to see from too far away.

In such a case, the quarterback (QB), upon receiving the “snap” — in which the center, who is not allowed to have the ball (but is the first person with his hands on it for every play), passes the pigskin backwards between his legs to the QB, who waits with his hands resting gently against the center’s anus — rather than handing the ball off or throwing it to another player, simply kneels, thus ending the play immediately, as the game time continues to run down pointlessly. 

This kneel, also called the “genuflect offense,” since the QB and his team are effectively genuflecting in supplication before the sport’s tyrannical god, The Almighty Clock, is extremely dull and disappointing to everyone, and vaguely suggestive of a kind of cowardice or unmanliness. For this reason, spectators whose team performs this maneuver usually take the opportunity to begin celebrating their victory early, rather than face the embarrassment of cheering for weakness, while fans of the opposing team, frustrated by seeing their heroes being defeated by The Almighty Clock colluding with the supplicants, feel like hitting something, and typically begin filing out of the stadium early when this play seems imminent, rather than face the humiliation of losing to cowards.

Recently, the National Football League has begun toying with a new rule wherein everyone on the field, on both teams, must take a knee before the game begins, thus leaving fans of both teams bored, frustrated, and humiliated even before The Almighty Clock begins its oppressive taunt, and before any center has even snapped the ball between his legs to the pair of hands gently pressed against his anus.

Some fans, exceedingly annoyed by this new rule, have exerted a great deal of energy fussing and protesting against the humiliation of being forced to watch their heroes — a group of belligerent, uninformed, semi-literate, steroid-enraged knucklehead one-percenters — acting like time-wasting cowards before the game even begins. 

Here’s a suggestion for those frustrated fans. Stop caring. If the players are going to start taking a knee before the game begins, why not beat them to it, and start filing out of the stadium before the game begins? The Almighty Clock controls football, but it doesn’t control real life, a realm which those heroic one-percenters, who never had to attend a class to “earn” their college degrees, know nothing about. 

Take a knee against them. Let the clock run out on the NFL. Commercially mass-produced spectator sports have devolved into bread and circuses anyway. Their social function is to palliate the mob, prevent them from remembering what freedom meant — hint: it had nothing to do with being entertained, as even slaves had entertainment — and keep them passive and half-blind before the great progressive swindle being perpetrated against them.

If you really want to make a statement to those sheep-like tough guy heroes, take away their childish livelihood as spoiled entertainers (i.e., take away your money from their fantasy world), leave them to their own devices for ten years, and see how many of them don’t end up in a soup kitchen, in prison, or in the gutter. Their recent pregame “take a knee” stunt is their way of spitting on their fans, on the nation and its real heroes that made their mindless life of privilege possible, and on the very idea of manhood. (Remember the hint of symbolic cowardice entailed in taking a knee to avoid risk? This new elevation of knee-taking to a grand statement is no longer a symbol, but rather the real thing.)

So don’t get angry. Turn the other cheek. Ignore them. Realize that you don’t need them. They need you. Without you, they and their idiotic “statements” will disappear from public view forever, along with the progressive millionaire “owners,” league executives, and TV networks who are facilitating all this nonsense.

Just move on. There is a big, beautiful world out there, and Sunday afternoon is the perfect time to take advantage of it.