The Foxbots.

Here come the 'bots. The Fox robots. The Fox football robots.

I'm not speaking figuratively. I'm talking about the animated robots that appear before and after commercial breaks during Fox's NFL coverage. Though they are small -- about one inch high on your television screen -- they have a demeanor that implies a great size were you to encounter one in 1:1 scale. They are also rather violent, which is fine. They're robots. Unless they're programmed to feel pain, we shouldn't feel bad (although we just kind of do for some reason). They remind me of Cyberball.

Cyberball, for those who don't know or can't remember, was a popular video game in the early nineties. It consisted of football played among robots. The robots had different sizes and different skills. With each victory, the owner (being you, the player) would receive money which you would use to upgrade your team. Rules that reflect actual life. But there were other rules that made the game more fun... and weird.

The ball - which appeared to be made out of some future metal alloy - would grow hotter and hotter the longer your team held it in possession. If the ball got too hot, it would explode, taking out the ball carrier. Sort of a super-harsh 24 second clock. The only ways to stop this from happening were to cross the fifty yard line, and/or get the ball into the end zone.

There were other fun elements. For instance, as the time-bomb-ball got closer to doom, the robot holding it would light on fire. If this were the case, once the defender tackled the robot ball carrier, both would explode (which is kind of awesome). Ultimate sacrifice.

So why has Fox chosen such a character for their football coverage? And why do they place it where and when they do? It's not really a mascot. It's placed in the lower left-hand side of your television screen. It's almost a subtle gesture - as subtle as a destructive football robot can be. Is this a portent of what is to come of football the way they see it? The inevitable taking over of human jobs by robots? Are they tempering us into this future? Are they promoting it? Or are they trying to de-humanize the game by placing the robots as a parallel to actual humans? Maybe the last. This way we don't feel bad when a player gets injured.

Yet, Fox implies that they care (and therefor we should care) by playing the minor-keyed 'concerned' version of the Fox NFL music (BA-DA-NA-BA-DA-NA-BA-DA-NA-BA-DA-NA-DA-NAN-NA-NA-NA), when a player lies out on the field with a concussion only to be rescued by the golf cart.

Or maybe Fox wants the NFL to eventually turn into Cyberball. But with humans. Humans that we view as robots - which we kind of do until they get a concussion and we hear the sad Fox NFL piano.

But why would they want robots? How are they going to fill all the pre-game humanistic bullshit that sports coverage seems to love so much with back stories of robots? What will Terry Bradshaw talk about?

Maybe there's some other agenda. These robots first appeared a few seasons ago when David Hill was the head of Fox Sports. Maybe he's a secret psychotic that would like to see NFL players fused with robots... sort of like terminators, but with emotion, or at least programmed emotion, like the prototype in Terminator Salvation (which was ridiculous, by the way). Not only that, you could use the NFL as a sort of Logan's Run-esk way of getting rid of people in an over-populated planet. Here's how it would work:

Every-one gets drafted. EVERYONE. Everyone has to play professional football. If you don't have what it takes to get the ball in the end zone, obliteration. One must prove themselves on the field. If one can, then they can go ahead and procreate.

Only Fox could come up with such a dystopian system of thinning the herd (although technically I just did).

But, whatever. David Hill, you're a sick fuck!