Something else I get but don't get - NFL cheerleaders.

I know, cheerleaders are traditional for football, and there's the selling point of scantily clad women moving and shaking things (bodily or otherwise) for a heavily young, single, and male demographic. But then there's the fact that, in a stadium that seats at least 60,000, whose cheering are they leading? The front row of one section?

I'm prompted to query the need for cheerleaders after reading Bill Simmons column about the first episode of ESPN's The Season about the Raiderettes. If his description is close to accurate, the line between NFL cheerleaders and the lap dancers brought in to hype up the scabs in The Replacements is fine indeed. I suppose hoochies need to work, too.

(I know, some of these women are upstanding citizens, realistic about what being a cheerleader means, and aren't carrying any STDs. It's that stability that pushes them to the margins, as the hoochier members grab for exposure like a Survivor cast-off.)

Oh, and Raiderettes? Nice name. Right up there with the Jills, Ben-Gals, The Roar, Top Cats, Gold Rush, and perhaps the worst name, Sea Gals. Most teams have the smarts to just call their group the (Insert team name) Cheerleaders, which is bland but doesn't sound like something from the 1950s or another name from the folks who brought us Verizon and Accenture.

Then, of course, there are the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. The less said about them the better. If you're looking for why the 1970s were so insipid, you could do worse than starting here. Then there's the whole sociological thing about cheerleaders and Texas that confuses the rank and file American while guiding addled mothers to the ammo aisle at Wal-Mart.

The prominence of cheerleader links on many official NFL team pages makes me think I may be marching out of step on this. I'm sure the NFL marketing machine knows what it's doing.