The American (foot)Baller

Zach what you described leaves me less then convinced about the state of your alcoholism. Let me join with Kyle in the shock that Saint Patrick's Day is your favorite holiday. I would've put my money on Good Friday.

I agree that people really, really care about football and I think it goes beyond most of what we've been discussing. The "scene" draws people in for sure but that doesn't explain the hours of sports talk radio discussion (even here in Montreal where there is no natural team to root for). My guess is this can be attributed to the popularity of gambling.

However, I want to raise one more discussion point, so we can bring this down the homestretch of Super Bowl weekend. I think we are missing something about why football is so popular and I'm not sure exactly what it is. We've been ignoring high school football, which can not be directly attributed to the "scene", I think there is something that separates football from other American sports that we havn't quite put our finger on.

We might be able to figure it out though by answering this question that I have shamefully stolen from you Zach since you didn't mention it in either of your last two posts.

Why is football so popular in this country, but not rugby? It does seem to me that rugby combines all the good parts of football without all the bad parts. The violence is paramount to the sport, the action never stops, scoring is high.

A few months ago I was in Paris and couldn't sleep. I stumbled across a Rugby match on television and watched nearly the entire thing. It was Australian rules, I believe (though I'm hardly an expert) and I was thoroughly entertained. So why is it that it never caught on in the U.S.? I suspect that it has something to do with the ideas espoused by Ralph Waldo Emerson in "The American Scholar".

For those of you who are not familiar with the essay, Emerson is basically arguing in the early/mid 19th century for the United States to commit itself to scholarship and begin to create a unique American culture.

Emerson writes early on:

"As such, it is precious as the sign of an indestructible instinct. Perhaps the time is already come, when it ought to be, and will be, something else; when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids, and fill the postponed expectation of the world with something better than the exertions of mechanical skill. Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close."

He was encouraging a burgeoning country to break off from being dependent on the arts and science of Europe and develop an identity of it's own. Now of course he was speaking mostly of literature and art, but I think, on some level, this speaks to what has happened with our American sports, foreign policy and just generally our national identity. We, by our very nature, want to be a nation apart, to pour the ingredients in the melting pot and make them something unrecognizable.

Since we've spent a lot of time discussing football as a representation of the American Psyche or even ego (or Id? I need to brush up on my psychology). What draws us towards football is the sense that it represents something central about where we stand as Americans. I mean that in both positive and negative ways. It is a sport that is somewhat recognizable, and yet arbitrary in some of its differences. It is a sport that embraces technology, and encourages unhealthy sacrifice. It is a sport that is extremely team based, and yet a disproportionally low number of individuals get much of the credit. It's coaches are expected to work crazy hours and sacrifice family and friends to be the best. It is a sport that encourages loyalty to region and yet a general love of the sport that is at times inexplicable. There is an expectation that if we are American we love football, no questions asked.

I think that our disillusionment with it could well have something to do with our disillusionment in general.

Am I reading to much into this? Maybe, but I don't think so, I think there is something tangible about it's qualities that makes it important, and i think while entertaining, this article by Jason Stark about turning the World Series in to the same sort of spectacle as the Super Bowl is futile. Baseball is what we were, football is what we are now, and as we fracture globally football will exist in it's own niche, but lose its primacy.

The Drink

Ah, I remember the days when I didn't put anything evil into my body, they were.........ok. Now I am pretty sure that in my first post that I said I would probably contradict myself. Here goes: football is not just an excuse to drink. There are many, many people who really follow football passionately and know an absurd amount about it, more than I ever care to know. The connection between drinking and football is not that football is just a universal excuse to drink, it is more that people go drinking and then decide they care about football. It is similar to a person buying a yankees hat and THEN claiming that they are a yankees fan. The love of the game (or whatever) is supposed to come first. Either way, I like my love of sport to pervade my life, not simply be an easy way to spend a sunday.

As for St. Patty's day, I don't really have much to say about it, other than I find it wild to hear Zach call it his favorite holiday, for I have never heard him say this before. You said in a previous post that you need no reason or excuse to go and get blitzed, so who cares about St. Patty's day. To me it simply means that I will get yelled at for not wearing green, everywhere will be too crowded, cabs will be harder to find, but the killer one is that I am not really allowed to not drink (follow the negatives). If on St. Patty's day I just don't feel like drinking, or a know I have a cold coming on, or whatever, I have little choice but to suck it up. Furthermore, I can't have one or two, then I look like even more of an asshole than if I had stayed home (like going to a baseball game with someone you half-forced to go with you, only to discover that they brought a book to read). A similarity between St. Patty's and Football. I can't do anything but drink on St. Patty's day, and I can't do anything on Sunday but watch football. Now of course I am not actually forced to do either of those things, yet I am culturally inclined to parktake in both with fervor. Fuck that.

Defending St. Patty

I came to the conclusion this evening that I may not even watch part or all of the Super Bowl on Sunday. There was definitely a time when this was unthinkable. However, it is so thoroughly (both symbolically and literally) everything that I less-than-secretly don't love about America that I don't know if my minimal interest in seeing a competitive sporting event will win out at all. I am kind of doubting it. I may just watch Arrested Development on DVD, even though I've seen every episode like a dozen times. Why? Because it's entertaining, which is more than I can say for the Super Bowl, particularly if there are 11 hosts. 11 hosts? If there were 11 guys who had something to say about football that I cared about, don't you think I would know their names? Well, I don't. So I hope those guys have a good time in their eleven-man circle jerk. I will not be joining them.

So are we still talking about St. Patty's Day? I never thought I would need Mike and Sam for intellectual back up, but I may have to call them in on this one. (Note to readers: Mike and Sam are some good good friends of ours who like the drink).

As for your suggestion that it is somehow hypocritical of me to defend St. Patty's Day and hate on the NFL, despite the fact that they are both decidedly arbitrary in nature, I think you're wrong. How are the two different? I think it's a relatively simple answer.

Truth: Football is an excuse to drink. Truth: Football is an excuse to drink more than it is an excuse watch football. Truth: Football is the kind of thing you need an excuse to watch, because truly, NO ONE really cares about football, not even the people who think they do. No one could possibly get all tingly and fuzzy inside because of football. No one with a brain, anyway. Which pretty much means that even former NFL players don't like football! (Get it? Because they don't have brains...because of football...you're not laughing. Too soon?)

On the other hand, St. Patty's Day pays respect to drinking. Is the date arbitrary? Yes. Does it have absolutely nothing to do with St. Patrick? Yes. Are there more people than normal who seem to go out of their way and especially make me want to hate them for being totally hollow shells of human beings on St. Patty's day? Yes. Is it in many ways like football, in that it is an excuse? Yes. But here's the thing: it pays homage to drinking. I can respect that.

Drinking has been a vital part of pretty much every society that has ever mattered. I mean, can you think of an ancient, or modern, civilization whose chief virtue in the eyes of historians and anthropologists is/was their culture-wide sobriety? No. Why? Because no such countries exist. And because if they did, no historian or anthropologist would ever go there, because even academics like to tie one on and have a good time every now and again. We are humans, and in varying stages of misery and/or joy, and many of us cope and/or celebrate with one substance or another. Alcohol has been around the longest, it's the most popular, and it's legal. It deserves to be celebrated.

I mean, think about it: like it or not, drunkenness has had an undeniable impact on most peoples' lives. I mean, all three of us went to college in (North) America, and I think it's fair to say that none of us are or were alcoholics, and that we all did less drinking than many of our peers. But it is undeniable that some of our very best times and very best friends inevitably happened and/or were enhanced because of alcohol. Imagine college without it. Frankly, I can't. What else would smooth over that argument and help calm everyone down? Only alcohol. What else would bring two young people who don't even know each others' names together for a night of platonic hand-holding and mutual respect? Only alcohol. What else could make me want to alternately cry and smash things? Only alcohol.

Spirits deserve their own special day of celebration, for their own sake. If it weren't for alcohol, I never would have broken my foot, or gotten punched in the face, or said those things I said to my ex-girlfriend, or woken up on sidewalk somewhere in Manhattan. St. Patty's day is not an excuse to drink, it's a reason, and a perfectly good one. Now stop comparing my favorite holiday to the NFL or I am going to have to start binge drinking.

Re: Tying it all together.

My goodness Zach, just a virtuoso performance. Thank god you're back in the fold because I think Kyle and I could only have gone back and forth for so long.

OK first off, you know people named "Bob and Dotty"? I mean, we're both Preachers Kids but if those aren't the names of two early retirement Lutheran church goers I don't know what is. Nothing against them of course, I think "Dotty" should make a comeback, but my god.

Second, if we're going to make fun of my comma usage I'm going to make fun of your sentence fragments. For instance, you wrote: "Yes, I said it Bills. Freed of my burden." You don't think a comma, or even a semi-colon would have been an excellent replacement for your period?

Alright, back to the topic at hand. I think the globalization "argument" is funny. This isn't something that we can argue about, it is a fact of existence. We can talk about the pros and cons all we want but it doesn't change the fact that fundamentally it is happening, one way or the other. This is why I stopped reading The World is Flat a hundred pages in. I got the point. I didn't need another 550 pages of examples about how national boundaries are falling and communication is increasing. It is patently obvious.

However, I dispute your claim that Baseball can, or should, replace football as the natural sport of choice for all the reasons that Kyle has explained so eloquently. The sheer accessibility and ease to follow of the NFL means that until something MORE accessible and EASIER to follow comes along it is going to stick around. There are few things Americans respond to better that ways to engender our laziness.

I should also say that in this struggling economy I'm not sure it would be wise to end the NFL because of the hundreds of thousands of pundits and commentators who would lose their jobs. NBC is going to have no fewer then ELEVEN hosts in house on for the Super Bowl.

Finally, I will bring up Saint Patrick's day over and over (and over) again BECAUSE it hits at exactly what we're talking about. What is Saint Patrick's day other then an arbitrary event that is an excuse to get wasted. This is the precise point Kyle was making. The question is, why are you so excited about something as arbitrary as Saint Patrick's day and so non-committal about something as arbitrary as football on Sunday?

Out on a limb to tie it all together

First of all, I can not allow you guys to talk that way about St. Patty's Day. It's just unacceptable. Okay, obviously no one needs a holiday as an excuse to binge drink. I mean, we're Irish, okay? That's all the reason we need. We just wanted to get everybody else a day off. Way to be uptight about it. Sheesh.

Ben, you are a braver man than I if you will admit to watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer on purpose. And no, I won't just "give it a chance."

I spent the better part of this NFL season ignoring football altogether. That is because I only follow the Buffalo Bills and you cannot call what the Buffalo Bills did in the second half of the '08 season football. You could call it heartbreaking. You could call it painful to watch. You could call it surprising. But if you're a Bills fan, you just call it business as usual. Like Ben, one of my very earliest memories is of the aforementioned missed kick by the aforementioned kicker. I was a child, and had multiple neighbors who were season ticket holders. The entire block was at Bob and Dotty's house. It was gut wrenching for a six year old to see adults so thoroughly dejected, to see them robbed of their very souls, their breath stolen from them, their eyes wide in disbelief.

Clearly, it has scarred me. And I will be a Bills fan for life, for bad or for worse. (Clever, eh? Wait, is this really my first parenthetical? In the third paragraph? I am slipping). Unless they move to L.A. In which case, I will be freed of my burden. Yes, I said it Bills. Freed of my burden. You're like a first true love gone wrong; you make my heart hurt but I can't give you up.

Ben, you said some shit about the UFC, or whatever, and I'm going to do us all the favor of ignoring that. The collective bargaining agreement, though, is ripe. (I threw that extra comma in there in your honor Ben). You think this conflict is governed by what, exactly? Business? Lawyers? Money? Come on. This is the NFL. These guys play for the love of the game. They smash their own brains into mush for the love of the game. They get replacement knees and hips and shoulders and rods in their legs and backs and arthritis and seizures and paralysis and mental illness for the love of the game. That's sports, man, that's love! Sacrificing their bodies on the field, and you call it distasteful?

Is a baseball player willing to sacrifice his cardiovascular health and his testicles to hit another ten home runs a year distasteful? No. Is it distasteful for an American soldier to sacrifice his body on the field of battle? No. Is it reasonable for me to make this comparison? I think so. (Is the tone of this paragraph coming across? I hope so.) A football player is doing his patriotic duty. He's playing football. He's worth a dozen soldiers! Soldiers don't sell. But football sells. And America buys. That's why we love football so damn much: because it involves men willing to make sacrifices that no man should rightly have to make. It's tragic, but we can't look away. Football isn't central to our national consciousness--it IS our consciousness. Which is why no other country will ever appreciate it.

NFL Europe. Enough said.

Alright, who cares about the salary cap. Yes, the NFL is a paragon. Blah blah blah. I'll tell you what it's a paragon of. It's a paragon of heroic bravery. It's a paragon of Christ-like sacrifice. These dudes are giving their bodies up for our entertainment, man. Like hookers. Nothing could be more selfless. They need to be immortalized. And pitied. And paid well.

I do find your point about globalization interesting. I can only hope that it brings about the end of the NFL. That would be like the first nice thing globalization did for anyone. I mean, hell, the trade deficit is out of control. The world's great economies are crumbling, The rich are still getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer. And civil rights are in calamitous decline here at home and around the world. And we can thank globalization for all of it. But if globalization could just do this one thing, and put the NFL out of its parity-loving high-profit misery, a real sport could return to national prominence, to being the way we pass our time. The way things used to be. You know what I'm talking about, people. Pass. Time. Pastime. I'm talking about BASEBALL! In a minute, that is. But first...

Kyle, you want to talk about football as event, as spectacle, and you are spot on. (Yeah, I just repeated your cute little phrase. I hope you can see now how dumb it sounds). But I loved a couple of things you said (in a platonic and yet simultaneously not homophobic kind of way): "Because I realized that watching football usually has nothing to do with the actual game. Football is an excuse. Football is an excuse to have an event dedicated to beer, the clogging of one's arteries, and sitting on the couch." This totally supports my point that football IS the American consciousness. Beer, clogging our arteries, sitting around on our fat asses? Needing new excuses to do nothing? That's what this country is all about. Not only that, but the fact that football only gets played on Sundays (and Mondays, and some Thursdays...why Thursdays?) forces us to binge and purge. NFL games are like the crack of the sports world.

Well, I have no taste for the stuff. Crack, that is. Both in the literal sense, and in the more-than-literal metaphorical sense regarding football--I don't care for either. I'd much prefer beer. That's what baseball is: having a couple of beers on a couple of week nights. Chilling out. Relaxing. Letting the beers slowly build on top of one another. Like watching a baseball game. The anticipation is enticing. You can't look away. The longer the game goes on, the more twisted and complex the plots and subplots become. The text is rich with its own self-awareness, it own self-amusing irony...something like what this blog should be, in fact. In terms of structure, that is...steady, in it for the long term, ebbing and flowing and ultimately building upon itself. It ought to be like a conversation, as if the three of us were in the room together, in the midst of a lengthy conversation. We will follow it where it goes. How very fucking organic and bloggy of us. I love it (again in a platonic and yet simultaneously not homophobic kind of way).

(Just to be clear, I wasn't suggesting that this blog needed to be more ironically self-aware. I am sure that my memoir voice, infected as it is with my cheap attempts at putting my own spin on the styles of Dave Eggers and Chuck Klosterman, is thinly veiled and annoying to some of you. Memo to some of you: you've got to appreciate the ability of people to make themselves laugh just a little bit more. Maybe you wouldn't take these things so literary. I mean so literally. I mean seriously. Because I am laughing at myself right now. Are you capable of that? If you're not, than it's time to seek help. Or write a parenthetical aside that lasts a whole paragraph!)

I can laugh at myself, even if I have been guilty of acting like a crackhead, of treating this blog like it was my crack rock, like it was the NFL of blogs. I got all hyped up about starting this blog and I did it and I dropped the first post and it felt great. And then I purged. I literally thought I would wait until next Sunday. Why not wait? Why do now what I could put off 'til later? Then just do a whole bunch? But then I remembered: my blogging doesn't have to inadvertently adopt all the crappy qualities of a crack addiction and/or the fleeting and overrated NFL just because it's the week before the Super Bowl. I'm a baseball fan. I like things nice and steady. I like pitchers working out of the stretch. I like batters stepping out to spit and tap their toes and wiggle their bats. I like the pause between innings, the time to reflect, regroup, and prepare to respond. This gamesmanship, it builds on itself, and it leaves me plenty of time to prognosticate, to shoot the shit, to offer my analysis, to mark my score card, to read my program, to buy a beer and a hot dog. I have time to breathe it all in. That's what this blog is going to be like.

And for you, the reader, this is excellent news, similar or related to a point Kyle made about the pleasure...and dedication...of following the 162-game regular season. In baseball, you get to know guys. You see them every day. You understand them. There is routine. There is warm familiarity. Again, this blog will mimic some of the best qualities of baseball by letting us each take several at bats per day. In baseball there is the distinct sense of Americana and family values and hard work being rewarded and fun for the whole family. And while I don't normally go for that kind of crap, with baseball it feels authentic, it feels real. With this blog, it is authentic. Football has never felt that way. I am ready to bid it adieu. Are you, America? (How melodramatic!)

Excuses for my Great-Grandkids to get wasted.

I think you hit the mark on number of things in that post. But let me pose a hypothetical.

Lets say the NFL does have a lock-out or a strike, and lets say they lost an entire season. Would something else fill that get-wasted-on-Sundays void? Is there anything about the actual sport itself, leaving aside scheduling that endears itself to this kind of behavior?

*OVERUSED BEN FLASH ANALOGY BREAK*
What you are describing is precisely why I don't go out and get wasted on Saint Patrick's day. I am not Irish and I don't need an excuse to go out and get wasted. If I feel the urge to drink to excess for no reason I don't really need a some contrived holiday. Just to be clear, I have no problem AT ALL with Irish people celebrating Saint Patrick's Day, and I don't even have a problem with anyone celebrating it. As I referenced, I really feel the American equivalent is Super Bowl. So I celebrate Super Bowl as an alternative to Saint Patrick's day.

ANYWAY, I want to bring this back to the question of globalization vs localization. My suspicion is that without football something would fill this void. My general sense is that MLB and the NBA as organizations will outlive the NFL. I'll leave the NHL out of this because, in my opinion, the sport of hockey will survive indefinitely, but I suspect that league is cooked.

But Football is a relatively recent sport, and my guess is that in the broad scope of sports history we may eventually view it as a flash in the pan. There is something timeless about the other sports, football on the other hand feels like a specific representation of our age. I really wonder if 100 years from now our great-grandchildren who are flying to Rome in an hour are going to care as much about a sport that has a such narrow influence world-wide. To that end I bet football evolves much more so then the other sports, into something we wouldn't recognize as football. Honestly I think I'd like it better if it was played by robots or organically manufactured drones.

Want to know why? Read this.

The Speciousness of Football (part 2)

Continuing on.........I think I bring a unique experience to the table in this discussion: I was in Pittsburgh when they won the super bowl in 2006. Pittsburgh is a town that lives and dies with football. Casual Friday in Pitt is not casual Friday, it is jersey Friday. If the CEO of PNC bank went to work in a Troy Polomalu jersey not a person would bat an eye. I found this rather odd, yet extremely agreeable (agreeable because I think that if we all agreed that casual friday be made into casual everyday we would all be happier). On Sundays when the Steelers were playing the city was a ghost town (except of course the area right around the stadium). The bars were packed around the University of Pittsburgh, but no one was outside, no one was moving from bar to bar, everyone was static. Every Sunday I half expected to see one of those wild west dust balls go rolling down the street only to have John Wayne AND Clint Eastwood pop out of an alley, look at me sternly and say, "What the fuck are you doing not watching the game pilgrim?" It was essentially impossible to NOT be a football fan in Pittsburgh. When Big Ben fell off his motorcycle without a helmet it was the only thing that anyone talked about, and he wasn't even hurt.

Ironically enough, this state of affairs actually turned me OFF to football. But first, a little history of Kyle. I am a sports fan through and through. It is an addiction. However, being the contrarian that I am I decided early on that I was not going to be a typical fan. Most people think that a person is only a "true" fan if they grew up near the team that they root for. I reject this totally and completely. I grew up in Rochester NY but I have been a fan of the (inhale deeply) The Milwaukee Brewers, Los Angeles Dodgers, Atlanta Braves, Florida Marlins, New York Yankees, Detroit Tigers, and (currently) the Pittsburgh Pirates. That is just baseball. But Kyle, I thought you were only supposed to have one team, and aren't you supposed to keep that team for all eternity? No. I fell in love with a punk-ass-gangster mother fucker named Gary Sheffield. My allegiance was to him, not a team. Sheffield, being a gangster, doesn't take any shit. As such, he moved around a lot. So I am known as a "player-fan" and not a "team-fan." This poses a problem for my potential relationship with football. Nothing sticks. But that point has been made by Ben so I don't need to go over it again. My original point was that the hullabaloo surrounding Steelers games made me dislike football. Why? Because I realized that watching football usually has nothing to do with the actual game. As I have thought about my football-as-an-event claim throughout the day I decided that football was something more than an event (or perhaps something less). Football is an excuse.

The observation that many people congregate around football is not very profound. However, the ability for people to congregate AND completely debauch themselves is something to note. Yes, I realize that people get drunk and do stupid shit at all types of sporting events. But there is something unique with football: 99% of games are played on a Sunday during the afternoon and night. When I was 14 watching three games of football back to back to back was a completely acceptable excuse for spending an entire day on the couch. Once I came of age and beer was added to the mix, the laziness only increased, but never once did I feel guilty for doing nothing for an entire day. This is what I think truly attracts people to football: the fact that no one will give them shit for taking an entire day off from life. Moreover, it always appears that football and gluttony go hand in hand. People tailgate for baseball games, and hockey games, and even golf, but it seems that people really "do it up right" on Sunday. No one has the endurance to get fucking wasted and eat four dozen hot wings for 162 baseball games, or 82 hockey or basketball games. But because football is played primarily on Sundays, and there is only sixteen games a year, people just cut loose, and this kind of action is championed by the sport and the fans (just look at the ads). This is precisely why football is an excuse, because most people want to be cutting loose all the time, but they can't, they have jobs, they are cogs in the machine. But on Sunday, well, football is on, what else could I possibly do but get obliterated? Football is an excuse to have an event dedicated to beer, the clogging of one's arteries, and sitting on the couch. And I am brought to my next observation.....

I would rather watch hockey live than on TV, same goes for baseball, same goes for basketball. However for football I would ALWAYS rather watch the game on television. I would think this even if I lived in Miami and going to games didn't mean freezing your scrotum off (as it does in Buffalo). There is never a good angle, I can't hear the refs whistle, I have no idea why any flag is thrown, and beer costs a pound of flesh. When I watch it on TV I have my own beer (myriad choices, not simply bud or bud light), I get a digital representation of the first down line, I get all sorts of stats, I get distractions in between plays, the bathroom has a toilet and not a trough, and I usually have some friends over and we can have a nice chat while we watch the game (one might argue that the commentary for football is atrocious, and they would be right, but it is better than listening to the person sitting next to you at a live game, they are infinitely more retarded than the typical football commentator). Sport should be MORE magical in person than on television. Football is the exception to this rule.

Finally (haha), do you know how fucking easy it is to be a football fan? Your team plays sixteen fucking games. Almost every one of those games happens without conflicting with your real life. Knowing the good players and teams consists of reading the sports page once a week. This is not a challenge. And that is essentially the crux of why I do not care for football anymore. It requires almost no effort, being a football fan is gift wrapped. Compare that to the marathon of a 162 game season for baseball (with a seven game championship), a nine and a half month season for hockey, and 82 game season for basketball and you will see that football is just a good excuse to do nothing for a day, it isn't a real commitment to anything. And it is my firm belief that being a fan of something should require one to commit more than just a day of drinking and eating.

Yet at the same time it is the most popular sport in America. Everyone has to go to a super bowl party (even if they don't know, or care, who is playing). Having a basic understanding of the game and knowing who won "the game" on Monday allows for easier socializing in almost every arena of one's life. It is common ground for so many. I mean if it wasn't for football people would have to talk about what happened at church when they are getting their Monday morning coffee, jeez, maybe football isn't so bad after all....

For myself, I will leave football to the commoners, I have no use for it.

Decline and Fall

Good stuff. I'm not going to trample on your Football as an event take, but I'm really interested to hear it. Chuck Klosterman wrote about that at length during his Super Bowl running diary a few years ago, I'll try to track it down but I want to see what you have to say first.

What I do want to say, is RIGHT NOW the NFL is the best run league from a financial standpoint, but my question is: will this continue to be the case when the CBA expires? If 2011 is a cap-free season, can football continue to be a paragon of economic sports virtue? I'm not going to go all Ralph Wilson here, and I have pretty mixed feelings about salary caps in general. But one of the oft-repeated reasons the NFL is considered so great, is parity.

However, I question if this will continue to be the case. If, for instance, they do lose the salary cap and contracts are still not guaranteed then what is to prevent a handful of teams for loading up for one year and cutting the players afterward? I feel like this would have a devastating effects on a whole host of teams.

I hate the lack of guaranteed contracts in football. Teams front-load with bonus money but no contract means anything. Honestly, the Bills could Marshawn Lynch to a 25 year 8 billion dollar contract, but cut him with no consequence (its conceivable I’m fuzzy on the details here but I know for a fact no team will ever get saddled with a Julio Lugo, or Barry Zito contract). So, careers are short but careers with any one team are even shorter.

If I was to pick one league that was going to gear up for a major work-stoppage it would be the NFL because the players have such an excruciating raw deal from every side and I suspect if such a work-stoppage does occur this will effect the primacy in the American sports consciousness. At the very least the argument that it is a league above all others will indisputably be put to bed.

The Speciousness of Football

There are a couple of points in Ben's post that I want to highlight and expand upon: First, the international expansion of football is certainly a problem for the sport. However, from a purely economic standpoint it is one of, if not the best, run league in the gamut of American Sports. I find it particularly funny that the World at large was playing Futbol long before Football was ever concocted. Why did we think that we could get away with giving our brand new sport the same moniker as Europe's storied pastime? Regardless, the name of the sport alone presents a considerable challenge to the hope of making the sport international. And I think it is a significant to note that Football is not played in the Olympics and probably never will be. But I Digress....

Secondly, Ben is spot on with his mention of how ephemeral the life of an NFL career usually tends to be. For every Brett Farve there is a plethora of no name players who now face life changing injuries and medical predicaments. I remember reading a Sports Illustrated article that highlighted these post-career injuries and the one that stuck with me was a linemen who had to have his foot amputated a few years after he retired. I hope that in upcoming posts that we can discuss steroid use in sports and baseball, so let me get in a plug now...one of the main arguments against steroids is that it kills the body. The drugs ravage your insides for a potential increase in power and endurance within the game. Two scenario's: 1) a football player who is willing to use his body as a weapon in a way that other players refuse to do, and in such a way as to make him a better defender than all other players and 2) a baseball player who takes steroids to increase his ability while at the same time knowing that his body will pay a hefty price. Again, I digress....

Unfortunately, I have to go to work right now, but I will be expanding on this post tonight. The main thrust of the entry will be to claim that Football isn't valued (in a typical American mind) as a sport, but rather as an event. As to the difference between a "sport" and an "event" please check back later.

Ben Flash the Football Slayer

I've recently started watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This was spurred by my fiancé’s (or handler as Zach would say) deeply abiding love of the program, and my somewhat morbid curiosity to be informed of as many pop-culture phenomena as possible. I have to say I am taken by its kitchyness, and the relatively clever writing. I don't think a University course on the show would be terribly interesting because I don't think the metaphor is particularly original or in need of parsing (i.e. monsters and vampires representing the demons of adolescence etc., etc.), but it is enjoyable to watch and I think wasting a day doing nothing but watching a show back-to-back-to-back on DVD is one of the unique pleasures of our era.

This is not the point of this post however. The point of this post is that I chose to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer rather then watch the second round NFL playoff games. This is a choice I would not have seen myself making in the very recent past. I am without a doubt, a very serious sports fan. I have a deep, abiding and timeless love of baseball, I am a relatively recent convert to the joys of hockey, I think the NCAA Men's Basketball tournament is the single greatest sporting event (or series of sporting events depending on how such an event is defined) and I've always been a football fan. Until very recently I would have called it my second favorite sport. However something has been eroding my support enough that rather then watch playoff football I was content to follow along on the computer and watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

It is commonly held in North American sports culture that football is our most popular sport and it is the best run league of all North American professional leagues. This may take a hit when the collective bargaining agreement expires because I suspect that football players are not going to be so willing to have non-guaranteed contracts and play for the right to be mortally debilitated for the rest of their lives. But in trying to understand this discrepancy between what is widely understood to be true and my personal feelings, I identified a couple of factors.

First, and most importantly, I am a diehard fan of the Buffalo Bills, there is no need to recount the trespasses committed against Bills fans in my lifetime alone, but let me just state that my first conscious memory is Scott Norwood's famous "wide-right" Super Bowl kick. Literally the first thing I remember in my entire life. In addition, my elementary school principle would show up with his tie shredded if they lost and promise the entire school would have no homework for a week if they won the Super Bowl. This is a great way to cultivate Bills fans, and also, by chance, a great way to cultivate adults who are chemically dependant.

So I am still a Bills fan, but am no longer particularly a fan of NFL.

Second, I’ve begun to find the long-term health of the players really distasteful. There are long term health effects and risk for injury in every sport, but Football in particular gets very ugly. This is especially the case with head-trauma. Former Patriots linebacker Ted Johnson is now divorced and alienated from his kids and his family due to the multiple head traumas he incurred and the fact that he was encouraged to ignore them for the good of team. This is just one of a multiplicity of examples, and is something that really has been coming to surface recently.

However I’m being a little high on the horse here. I watch the occasional boxing match and UFC is growing on me. I suspect that the long-term implications wouldn't bother me so much if the average football career wasn't so short. The average NFL career is 3.5 seasons. Compared to basketball, hockey (5) and baseball (5.6) it is significantly shorter. With the exception of wide-receiver and quarterback, most NFL players just don’t stick around a team or the sport long enough for me to develop a long-term connection with them. The lack of guaranteed contracts and hard salary cap mean that there is little or no continuity on most NFL teams.

Football is purported to be central to the American consciousness and yet I feel its impact so much less. Beyond the shadow of a doubt Tom Brady and Peyton Manning are central cultural figures, and maybe I would put T.O. in that category, but beyond that the individuals of football are less central to our national awareness then they used to be. Are the teams more important then players? That is certainly a point of discussion, because the Steelers, Cowboys and Packers do represent something, but I don't know that the matter any more then the Red Sox, Yankees, Celtics, Lakers and even Canadians.

Perhaps I'm displaying something of a Northeastern liberal bias here because its conceivable that if I grew up somewhere where high school football was the be all and end all I might feel differently. My high school did not even have a football team. But nonetheless my sudden and precipitous drop off in interest in the NFL on the whole strikes me as something worth investigating. However, this is a blog post and I’m very nearly over my time already so here is what I'm trying to identify having postulated my personal reasons for caring less.

Is this unique to me, or are we at the beginning of an era that will decrease the primacy of the NFL in the American consciousness? The NFL is clearly the LEAST important major sport from an international perspective, so as comes globalization so goes the decline of the NFL?

If this is unique to me can we expect the NFL to grow internationally? I can certainly imagine European basketball and hockey teams being integrated into the North American leagues in the future, and the same applies to baseball and Asia but where is the market for the NFL abroad? It seems that if we are not going to see the NFL decline then it must at some point in future decades become popular beyond North America. I have a hard time imagining this due mostly to its' inherent "Americanness" (though this may display a potential flaw in my line of thinking.)

Now I should point out that I’m really only discussing this in regards to the NFL, because I don't think local sports are in any danger of mattering less in the near term, I’m mostly referring to a national common interest.

Finally, is all of this just a reaction to my deep-seeded fear that the Bills are going to move to L.A.? Becuase if they do I’m out for good, except for American Saint-Patrick’s day (Super Bowl).