It's not that the NFL wants to legislate emotion out of football games. It absolutely would do that if there were some way to fill the vacancy with advertisements for pickup trucks or ice-cold beer, the official drink of when you're having a good time with National Football League action. But because brands have not yet effectively leveraged exposures in the Notional Emotional Space, the NFL is stuck with emotion, for now, and must settle for trying to constrain it.It doesn't work, of course. Football is too wild and violent and strange to be played dispassionately; the things it asks of the people playing it are too insane to be done in a reasoned way. Predictability is useful—the one thing we really know about football games is when and where the commercial breaks will come—but the game hates predictability with its life, even as coaches and executives look to regiment it ever further, and even as the league seeks to sanitize the surface to a level of cleanliness that will allow brands to adhere to it. In all the cosmetic and uninteresting ways, this works. In every way that matters, it never will.And so, over time, we can expect that—while the rulebook will fight it, while every backwards bitter boomer in charge will work to stop it—the NFL will follow the lead of the Canadian Football League and allow rabbits to run around wildly on the field of play, cutting this way and that and then leaping high into the air for no discernible reason. It is an idea whose time has come, and the game finds a way.