They could have extended the parable further and offered some explanations as to what makes Football actually tolerable to watch:
1) if you didn't watch football, you'd never spend any time with your significant other, so you might as well suck it up and plop yourself down next to them for the hour or so a week.
2) you have a fantasy league team and want to see how your players are doing this week (obviously this is a bit of stretch as far as the comparison with the Mass is concerned, as is the explanation that you have money riding on the game)
3) Prince is playing at the half-time show (again, strains the metaphor a bit)
4) Beer! (Arguably less of a stretch than 2 or 3).
The comparison isn't so farfetched.
As any sports fan will tell you, pro sports leagues aren't interested in pleasing the passionate fans who come regularly to their games. Rather, they're constantly trying to attract young people who simply aren't interested in any of their games, per se.
So, at NBA games, middle-aged men who just wanted to watch basketball are forced to sit through elaborate musical production numbers designed to appeal to teenagers who aren't actually present or even watching!
Pro Sport leagues are increasingly driven by marketing experts, all of whom are vainly rying to chase the same elusive fan: the apathetic teenager. The hilariously bad, utterly unwatchable football league known as the XFL represented what these geniuses THOUGHT kids wanted to see in a football league, and what the NFL still thinks it needs to become.
Sports leagues are just as insecure as churches. BOTH are afraid that what they offer just isn't attractive enough, and are prepared to jettison everything that made them great in order to woo young people who couldn't care less.
Let me know when you have some officials deciding that a touchdown is 8-points and first down is twelve yards and you'll have a pretty decent analogy.
A Mass is never as dull as a football game if you're paying attention.
I gathered from the parable that the idea of saying football is boring is as ridiculous as saying the Mass is boring.....I may be wrong...I do tend to have rose colored glasses.......
The parable doesn't work for me....because I DO dislike football. I was nodding my way all the way through the 'parable' before I realized it was supposed to satirize criticisms of the mass!
"I gathered from the parable that the idea of saying football is boring is as ridiculous as saying the Mass is boring"
That was my take, as well.
The point being that the Mass is only boring to those who are not really that interested in the Mass, per se.
My brother is a football nut, and he gets much more out of watching the game than I do because he understands what is going on - not just the externals, but the underlying dynamics.
Perhaps this is saying the obvious, but... isn't sex intrinsically repetitive? And yet people do seem to be interested in that. 
http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=LD...h?
v=LDPwNPAV6tA
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