If you aren't into sports, you might not have noticed that the players and owners in the NFL can't find a way to amicably share 9 billion dollars a year (4 times the GDP of Greenland, for those of you scoring at home), and are threatening to cancel the upcoming season. One particularly troubling consequence of such a work stoppage is that it would wreak havoc on America's chicken wing industry, including the big buffalo wing sports bars like Buffalo Wild Wings and Hooters.
Now, as you may recall, I'm not a huge fan of wing joints. However, I love chicken and football, and anything that threatens to take away both of those in one fell swoop has got problems with me. I sent the following letter to Buffalo Wild Wings and Hooters as a rallying cry. Since my gripe wasn't really with them, I won't use my standard letter-response format (hint: I didn't get any response. Surprise!), but rather just throw it out there for fun. Enjoy!
The Letter
To the giants of the buffalo wing industry:
It is my understanding that the NFL lockout, which threatens to cancel part or all of the 2011-2012 football season, is a cause of great concern for you. No NFL games means no Sunday business. I share your worries; people should be in bars shoveling chicken wings in their faces on the Sabbath, especially the children. If not, they're all the more susceptible to the perverts in church!
And where would the perverts in the NFL go?!
Conventional thinking says we should petition the NFL to avoid this crisis. BWW, you have already started the ball rolling on this front, with your "save our season" campaign on Facebook. However, there is a serious flaw with your strategy here. Namely, you are relying on the sympathy of a company that routinely refuses to cover the medical expenses of its employees when, in the natural course of doing their jobs, their brains are smashed into the consistency of banana pudding. Your odds of success are only slightly greater than those of a black woman running for governor of Tennessee.
No corresponding logo exists for the NFL. Seriously, look for it.
I am writing you to propose a radical alternative, one that will bolster your bottom line while simultaneously engendering the goodwill of your consumers. It is my belief that you don't need the NFL. Why?
Get ready for this...
You could start your own football league.
And it could be bigger, badder, and more profitable than the NFL.
Crazy? In the traditional sense, yes. But then, think about your business model and its dependence on football. You don't offer the "standard" game-day experience. And that's a good thing. You don't need to pay for stadiums, parking lots, business offices, or JumboTrons because you don't WANT people going to the games! You want them parked on a bar stool guzzling beer and eating buffalo wings that will give them the most painful hangover shits of their lives. Your operating costs are virtually zero; just have a game going on somewhere--schools, parks, wherever--and get a live feed to the TVs in your restaurants!
Once you have the basic framework in place, the logical extensions become obvious. This system gives you the opportunity to integrate the fans into the experience in ways never before possible. For starters, you could have teams in as many cities as you want, thereby generating local interest. And the teams could all have catchy buffalo-wing/boobie related names, like the Dallas Ranch, the Green Bay Blue Cheeseheads, the Miami Jerks, Oregon Owls, and the Buffalo...I'm not sure about that one, but you get the idea.
Bills?
The players don't have to be expensive, either. Take the cast-offs! I've never associated either of your establishments with particularly outstanding personal conduct; hell, John Daly is the biggest-name spokesman either of you have ever had. I don't think your core constituents will complain about rosters full of steroid abusers, recent parolees, and coach-killing clubhouse cancers. In fact, they fit in perfectly with the system I'm proposing. You see, we're going to relax the rules a little bit. By striking the penalties for late hits, hard hits, head hits, etcetera, every game will have the speed and excitement of a 40-car NASCAR wreck from kickoff to the final whistle. Get coaches the same way. What's Bill Romanowski doing these days? Lawrence Taylor, too. Hell, I won't be satisfied until O.J. is coaching via a Skype connection on the sidelines.
Now, I know what you're thinking. "This is starting to sound a lot like the XFL, and they didn't gross dollar one." This would be true, except that you are going to go places they never did. See, while the XFL promised football fans excitement and access to the game that was previously unheard of, what they actually delivered was mostly phony and contrived. Where you will succeed will be in the way you literally put fans IN the game. BWW has, without knowing it, already seen the future with its ridiculous commercials. Fans deciding to rig the game so that it goes to overtime is a good start, but why make them wait until the last play to get involved?
You probably already have the equipment you need to put this baby together in your Trivia Night box. Imagine: between every play in the Wings Football League, your TVs pop up a Madden-style playbook. Then, using a clicker on each table, your customers actually vote on which play each team runs next! The possibilities are endless. Hate your quarterback? Don't bitch, just run a QB draw every down until you've gotten him plowed into a wet sack of bone dust by the roid-raging linebackers on the other side! Want to know what kind of cardiovascular shape Ted Washington is in? Line him up at wide receiver! If you don't think this would need a new adjective stronger than "awesome," you probably shouldn't be running a wing joint.
Nothing like this has ever been attempted in sports.
I'm not done, though. We can do better. The final step is to enter any customer who can drink ten or more beers in a single sitting into a national drawing. Then, you select 100 candidates each week, make them sign a waiver, and let them PLAY the Monday-night game. It can't lose. Let O.J. and Romanowski fire them up, put beer in the Gatorade coolers, and let them smash the shit out of each other on national TV. You'd put the reality TV industry out of business because you just invented a level of "keepin' it real" nobody thought possible. And it would beat the hell out of Raiders-Redskins or whatever the NFL ran out there even if they did come back.
"If this fat drunk can play football, so can you!"
If you're ready to turn the world of football upside down, let me know, because I'm down to do this thing.
