I love football season. I love the games, the tailgates and the fact that there’s always next year. So to merge the world of football into our everyday lives, I’ve decided we need to adopt a universal challenge flag system. I truly believe if you don’t agree with something, you should be able to throw a red flag at it and reassess its validity. Because how can something be true if we don’t all agree it is first?

For those of you who aren’t football fans, I’ll spare you the sports metaphors. I wouldn’t want to fumble my main argument on the opening tip off because it’s tough to hit a home run from the bunker. In football, challenge flags work like this: A coach disagrees with a ref’s call (“Excessive role-modeling on Michael Vick!”). He throws a red flag. The ref then looks at a Planet-Earth-style-super-slo-mo replay like 60 times and decides whether or not to uphold the original call.

Now imagine having that power in your day-to-day life. During a lively political discussion, you hear someone drop a statistic that may very well be made up on the spot. Whip a challenge flag at him and put it to the test. Someone misquotes Happy Gilmore? Challenge flag. Professor won’t hold an earlier final? Challenge flag. Favorite sub got removed from the $5 foot-long menu? Challenge flag in the face!

We’ve already embraced many of football’s other rules. When you call shotgun, you’re fair-catching the front seat. When someone hits on your girlfriend/boyfriend, you call an encroachment penalty. Why can’t I also throw a flag when someone says it’s creepy to DVR To Catch a Predator?

For this system to work, we will need some sort of legislative body to make rulings when a flag is thrown. Without the luxury of football’s video evidence, I say we turn to the next best option: Wikipedia. Wikipedia, according to Wikipedia, is a free Web-based and collaborative multilingual encyclopedia (meta-Wiki?). Some criticize the site’s user-submitted information as unreliable, but I know for a fact that’s not true. I know this because I just put it on Wikipedia, and no one’s taken it off yet.

Wikipedia works perfectly with the challenge flag because they both follow the consensus model of truth. If everyone decided right now the sky was puce or Nickelback had talent, it would have to be true. There’d be no one to say it wasn’t. And that’s just beautiful. After all, why should we allow something to be true if no one wants it to be?

The next time a bouncer takes your ID or someone says it’s weird to pregame a doctor’s appointment, challenge the ruling and see what Wikipedia says. Just remember to keep some red flags handy (or anything red, tomatoes have worked well in the theater for centuries). Of course, if you disagree with any of these ideas, all you have to do is throw the flag and I’ll be happy to put them under review.

Weinberg senior David Moss can be reached at [email protected].