Puppy Bowl VII: The Most Entertaining Thing You’ll See This Sunday…and a Starting Point for Better Football Movies?

Folks, I love football and actually have a vested rooting interest in the Packers vs. Steelers Super Bowl, as I like small-town, nonprofit football organizations and don’t like morally bereft jackass quarterbacks. Still, I’m pretty sure the most entertaining thing I’ll see all day is the seventh annual Puppy Bowl on Animal Planet. At the Puppy Bowl, you might see a few canine athletes who enjoy humping the occasional leg, but otherwise, you’ll see no one with tendencies toward sexual assault, unlike a major player in this year’s actual Super Bowl. To hell with that guy—go Packers.

Now that I’ve finished alienating plenty of would-be readers, I’ll return to the Puppy Bowl. If you’re a Rottweiler lover, or a dog lover in general, I’m fairly sure you’re like me, in that you have absolutely no immunity to the lethal cuteness on display at the Puppy Bowl. I’ve finally decided to stop fighting that reality and just embrace the inevitable—I’m going to watch the Puppy Bowl and I’m going to gush over the puppies like a complete idiot.

In fact, such is my fandom that I’m starting to believe that other elements of our sports-related culture would be improved by the Puppy Bowl touch, starting with the obvious fact that most of our prominent football movies would be better off with a heavy dose of puppy power added to the formula.

With the benefit of not having seen some of these movies, I offer these basic pitches for puppy-infused remakes with emphasis not on fidelity to the original story, but on maximizing the star power of some future Hollywood big dogs. As with most animals-in-sports movies, it will probably help to drink heavily and/or submit to a voluntary lobotomy before reading these pitches.

Rudy—Rudy is the least talented guy on the team, and he gets by through pure heart. But, as played by a basset hound puppy, Rudy’s got another secret weapon when he finally makes it into the last game of the season and recovers a fumble in the fourth quarter. He’s so slow that the other team just gets bored and leaves the field, and Rudy walks in for a touchdown with one second left on the clock. An exhausted Rudy celebrates by sleeping for 18 straight hours right there on the field.         

Remember the Titans—Inspired by this guy’s amazing wheezing and farting noises rather than the BS, over-the-top, pseudo-inspirational motivational speeches they’ve been hearing from coaches all their lives, the Titans go out and trounce everybody. At the end of road games, the coach develops a signature habit of dropping a load all over the opposing team’s mid-field logo.

Jerry Maguire—Every major part is played by puppies. Even if we decide to go with human voiceovers, that’s still an obvious, massive improvement over having to watch Renee Zellweger and Tom Cruise for two hours. The original’s signature catch phrases can be hilariously adapted—“Show me the kibble!” and “You had me at Alpo” come to mind immediately. Best of all, the little kid role is played by this guy.

Take that, mean people.

Man, you know what I’ve realized in thinking about other football movies to “puppify”? Just about all football movies are pretty terrible—the ones above are actually the best ones I can think of! So if adding puppies will make the above list so much better, which of course it will, think of what we could do for The Longest Yard, Necessary Roughness, or The Replacements. Replacing Keanu with a Shih Tzu? We can’t lose!