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It's tough enough enduring Bill Belichick for 16 games a season, but wonder if his New England Patriots did it baseball style and played 162 times a year. Would sports fans survive such an ordeal? More to the point, would they want to?

(The Associated Press)

Syracuse, N.Y. -- We're creeping closer and closer to the start of the World Series that will likely pair America's two best baseball towns, St. Louis and Boston, one against the other. Still, the TV ratings (and why do they matter to anybody beyond TV people?) may prove to be a relative disappointment as they'll almost certainly lag behind those of regular-season NFL games.

Again.

This will provide further evidence, the football religionists will insist, that blocking-and-tackling has become our national pastime and that the runs-hits-and-errors thing is about as hip as The New Christy Minstrels.

Now, only a fool would argue that football -- despite its well-documented penchant to eat its young -- is anything less than an American obsession. And it matters not at all that a fair percentage of football's participants are doomed to an inevitable life of diminished physical capacities and compromised mental faculties.

But if the players and coaches and general managers and owners don't care that football gnaws on its own leg, why should the fans? And so, for the most part, we don't. Which means we are free to celebrate football and ignore that it is the Russian Roulette of sports, and that every athlete who plays it pretty much puts a pistol with that one bullet in the chamber to his temple each weekend and pulls the trigger.

Nevertheless, the game is stupendously popular. But is it the game . . . or is it the game's choreography?

The thing about football is that it is so perfectly presented that the reality of it -- the reality of what takes place during those 60 scoreboard minutes -- has been blurred by its packaging. Indeed, we may not love football as much as we love the idea of football. That is, its staging . . . the week-long buildup to each kickoff . . . the cheerleaders and halftime shows . . . the gambling and office pools . . . the tailgating and sis-boom-bah.

Honestly, would there be anywhere near the football fervor that exists today if football operated in the fashion of baseball? And would there be an empty seat in any ball park in all the land if baseball adopted football's rules of the road?

What would happen to the NFL if its teams had the audacity to play 30 preseason games, 162 regular-season games and, in some instances, as many as 20 postseason games? Would people actually turn out in meaningful numbers to watch, oh, the Detroit Lions play 10-games-in-10-days homestands again and again and again over a stretch of six months? Would real, living, thinking souls choose to listen to 162 post-game press conferences (and more) featuring the likes of Andy Reid or Bill Belichick or Mike Shanahan?

Conversely, if Major League Baseball teams played only eight home games a year, the vast majority on Sunday afternoons -- and if Clayton Kershaw pitched every one of them for the Dodgers and if Felix Hernandez pitched every one of them for the Mariners and if Yu Darvish pitched every one of them for the Rangers and so on and so forth -- does anybody believe that season tickets would be available anywhere but in wills?

Work with me here. Oh, and consider, too, the words of Thomas Boswell, the splendid columnist for the Washington Post, who once addressed the canard that football was actually more exciting than baseball when he wrote:

Boswell also wrote: In football, nobody says, "Let's play two!"

He was right both times.

Coming later this afternoon: It's Grab Bag Day on the BudBlog.