During the Christmas week I was not in the Pacific Northwest, I decided that it was a good time to update the rosters on the 2008 DS game Tecmo Bowl: Kickoff, and by update, I mean I erased the memory on the game since I had already changed all of the names of the teams and players (to something other than NFL teams) and I wanted to start over from the beginning.
Unlike previous iterations in the Tecmo Bowl franchise, Tecmo Bowl: Kickoff did not have an NFL license, so all of the teams, while from their respective cities/states, the names of the teams had been changed along with their team colors, and the names of the players with their jersey numbers. What is nice in TB:K, is that all of this is customizable (which apparently is not a word), so I decided to recreate the color schemes and rosters from the 1988-89 NFL season (back when Los Angeles still had two NFL teams. That's right, William "The Refrigerator" Perry is still with The Bears, Steve Young had only been with the 49ers for a season or two, and Joe Montana is still number 16). One anachronism that I had to implement was that the Houston Texans, Tennessee Titans, Jacksonville Jaguars, and Carolina Panthers did not exist during the 1988-89 seasons, but I included them since TB:K has 32 teams as opposed to the 28 teams that existed in 1988-89.
Another customizable feature with TB:K, is that you are able to change/alter the player's skin tone. This is purely a cosmetic alteration so I began to look up players to find out their ethnicity since a name like Bryan Taylor or Gerald McNeil does not allow for profiling based on a name.
That is the context.
So there I am, looking up rosters for particular teams, let's say, the 1989 Seattle Seahawks and when I do a search for former quarterback Kelly Stouffer, I see a Google search result come up for his wife. I first thought that this was kind of odd, in a similar way that someone might look up fan-fic porn of a side character in Star Trek. However, as I continued this customization process with other teams, I found that this was not the only occurrence.
Granted the wife of the particular football player was not always the first result that Google suggested back, but being in the top four results I still found to be a little odd. I even found that for one particular player, whom I forgot to write down (but I know they were on either the Seattle Seahawks, Phoenix Cardinals, Washington Redskins or the Chicago Bears), listed a search result for the players' daughters.
Without further investigative research, I can only speculate as to the reason behind these searches for a players' wife and/or daughters. I didn't know that this was a thing, but leave it to some modified form of Rule 34. Could it be people who failed to reach any kind of NFL status in their own football careers and want to fantasize about another athlete's life, sexual or otherwise?
While talking with The Kid, we thought that putting together a spreadsheet to figure out if the position of the player had anything to do with the searching for a players wife. Could it also be related to the ethnicity of the player? Maybe it had to do with the jersey number of the player (Stouffer: 11; Mitchell: 30; Waddle: 87). If I Or maybe it was simply that their wife was objectionably attractive to a significant portion of the population who felt some kind of connection with the particular player. I admit that to put a couple of days into coming up with a hypothesis and collating this information into something that could result in discernible data would not only be intriguing but fun, but I don't think I would feel productive putting that much time into something that would not benefit Donald Trump's run for the republican nomination; or maybe it would, who knows.
Some people are odd, but who am I to judge?
~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
