I wanted to go see “The Thirteenth Warrior” Saturday night, but no one would go with me. They wanted to watch the football game on TV.

When the game was almost over though, we all decided it would be fun to go watch the crowds leave the game.

Even though I’ve lived in Ames my whole life, I’ve never seen a riot. We went down to Lincoln Way, hoping to see a drunken mass holding the goalpost.

I was still whining about wanting to see the movie, but I reasoned that if I couldn’t see a film about a group of filthy, perverted Norsemen, I could at least see a bunch of drunken sports fans in the throes of victorious inebriation. Most of you Iowa State students are Nordic in descent anyway, right?

To put my viewpoint in perspective, I never have understood the appeal of spectator sports.

For me, if you’ve seen one football game, you’ve seen them all. They all go about like this : Players form lines, players suddenly spring into action, crash into each other and fall down.

Players take a break. Players repeat this for about three hours. I pointed out this pattern to my sports fan friends, but I don’t think they understood what I was saying.

Supposedly, there’s some sort of “ball” or “strategy” involved somehow, but it’s not as if anyone can really see the ball on TV or from the bleachers.

As for strategy, how many ways can ball players run into each other anyway? Do players huddle and say things like “OK, this time, I’ll run into that guy and fall down, next time, YOU run into that guy and fall down. Maybe you could fall to the left this time or something.”

It’s true, sports don’t make a whole lot of sense unless you accept my roommate Tom’s hypothesis. Basically, athletics are a replacement for war.

It would not be socially acceptable for you to kill, loot and pillage other universities, yet the same antisocial tendencies of your ancestors are still present in you.

Instead of mead, you have Bud Light, instead of the enemy who eats the dead and whose name cannot be spoken, you have University of Iowa, where the faucet water cannot be consumed.

You think you’re sweet because your football team won? You drunken fools. Back in the day, you wouldn’t even want to sail back home unless you had vanquished your enemies in battle and drank from their skulls in an appropriately gory manner.

Usually, you took all their stuff, too. And even that was nothing to brag about.

I don’t know what it would take for the Vikings to get really ecstatic, but I bet it took a lot more than just their sports team beating some other sports team.

And I bet every time the Vikings did party, a bunch of people would die on account of all the drunken sword-waving. I guess what I’m trying to say here is that your standards have gone down.

This was especially evident Saturday night on Lincoln Way. Mostly, people just walked by, laughing or talking or whatever.

Certainly, you were cheerful and stuff, but nowhere near the riot-crazed state that I was hoping for.

I even shouted a few disparaging remarks about dry Veishea to passing trucks, but nothing much happened. They just shouted back similarly worded sentiments about the Hawks. This is no way to live.

All this led me to question the role that sports are supposed to be fulfilling in today’s society and examine whethet sports do a good job fulfilling that role.

Obviously, if sports are supposed to be a socially acceptable replacement for conflict and tribal mentality, our system is deeply flawed.

Why are spectators so boorish and violent before, during and after the games? Isn’t this the very activity that sports are supposed to provide an outlet for?

It seems that our new system should involve greater participation on the part of students.

Specifically, I’m thinking some sort of vast melee in which students from various universities attack each other directly on vast playing fields, possibly with weapons of some sort.

I realize this may seem like hockey, but maybe hockey is a good model for us to examine. It works for Canada.

This new form of “sport” would not just consist of observing some team made up of players you don’t even know.

I think that sports teams should be drawn from the student population, with equal representation from each college, department and so on.

Then, when you went to games, you’d be cheering for people you actually knewand who truly represented the university, as opposed to athletes who go to college specifically to play sports.

Each game, new students would be chosen, so lots of people would have the chance to play.

If we made our new melee-based athletic competition big enough in terms of scale, we could cut down on post-game riots and destruction because the people who would be rioting would all be tired and hurt.

I realize this system wouldn’t be perfect, but it would be a better alternative to the way things are done now.

I realized this fully when I walked up Lincoln Way and saw the masses of students standing in line to get into bars.

Your Viking ancestors would be ashamed.

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Elton Wong is a junior in biology from Ames.