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Footballs are good at many things—flying through the air, causing family arguments, being thrown to opposing teams by Eli Manning—but regulation-size balls are not particularly forgiving to the average dude. Sure, you think you look cool in your backyard, dropping back and calling plays like a version of Colin Kaepernick without the tattoos that look like a shirt. But in reality your spiral is probably more like a circling-of-a-drain, and your throwing motion looks like someone just plugged a microwave into your nervous system.

Still, many of us will lumber away from the dinner table this weekend to toss around the ol’ pigskin. Which is why for this year’s edition of the Post-Thanksgiving Family Football Game (if you have one; mine mostly just sits around after the meal complaining about Obamacare), you should use the Wilson K2 football ($39.95), a ball for those of us who aren’t “football players” so much as we are “seven layer dip-slurping fantasy-roster dudes.” The K2 is a fraction of a real football, being, you know, designed for 6-to-9-year-olds. It’s about eight inches long, which means you feel like you can throw it 400 yards at nine thousand miles per hour. And since it’s not a regulation thing, it makes your entire game feel more fun, which is what football should be, despite what all the dads attempting to secure scholarships for their 5-year-olds will tell you.

In fact, there are literally no downsides to the K2, aside from the way guys look at you all judgey when you arrive carrying equipment with the words “Pee Wee” on the side. But let’s put aside the stereotypes and consider hard science. For instance, I own two children, for whom throwing a full-sized football is very difficult. The 9-year-old finds it hard to grasp, though that’s probably because he regularly interrupts our iconic, damn-near-Maddenesque games of Sunday catch to unceasingly discuss his blueprints for a hybrid Minecraft/Starship Enterprise, so we’re not exactly investing in cleats for that one, if you get my drift. By contrast, the 2-year-old seems to be expressing an interest in ball games; to be safe, we’re starting him on steroids.

And I can tell you, having played with them and the K2 this past weekend, football’s a lot more fun when your kids can, what’s the phrase, throw things back.

Besides, who are we kidding? We’re not NFL players. I can tell because we’re home with our families this week, and also we’re not suffering from constant headaches. And if we’re not NFL players, we don’t need NFL-player things. We’re not out to prove anything; we’re playing a game in the backyard. Besides, what in the hell is the point of late-afternoon PBR-fueled football if I can’t throw a bomb? I might as well play soccer, like a CANADIAN. Ugh, I’m pretty sure they spend their Thanksgiving doing Canadian things, like watching all-moose Gordon Lightfoot cover-band concerts and going to doctors for free, which is probably something my relatives will bring up after dinner this year. God I can’t wait to spike my tiny football in their turkey-stuffed faces.

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