Are You Ready for Some Football?
I’m waiting all day for Saturday night
For someone who never quite had the makings of a varsity athlete, I have quite the familial connection with football.
I spent my four years of undergrad working for Notre Dame athletics, primarily with the football team. My middle brother played college football for one of the nation’s premier Division Three programs, the Ithaca Bombers, and he currently serves as an assistant with our former high school’s team while also working part-time with the Syracuse Orange.
Meanwhile, my two younger siblings each recently started new jobs related to football — one as an SEC video production coordinator and the other working the sidelines as an athletic trainer — and my dad is preparing for another season refereeing high school games across Central New York.
My experience is far from unique. Writers, politicians, and your grandfather love to wax poetic about baseball as America’s Pastime, but football is the true American sport, dominating domestic television while failing for decades to capture the attention of the rest of the world.
More than a quarter of MLB players are foreign-born. Last season, there were 125 foreign-born players on opening-night NBA rosters, and the two best players in the league hail from Greece and Serbia. But in the NFL, just 136 players — 6% of the league's roster size — are international citizens.
There are thriving professional leagues, albeit with different rules, in Canada and Australia, and burgeoning collegiate leagues in Japan and Mexico, but by and large, football remains an insular affair. A few times each season, the NFL drops into a city like London or Munich to the amusement of locals, more akin to a traveling circus than a sporting exhibition.
Football’s spread has been slow for many reasons. Throughout the 19th Century, the British Empire took frequent breaks from pillaging to spread the game of rugby, resulting in the enduring popularity of rugby rather than football in nations like South Africa and Fiji.
Football requires massive amounts of equipment, people, and space, to the point that even in the United States, dense population centers like New York City and San Francisco have relatively few high school football programs. The sport’s rules are so complex as to befuddle even long-time fans, making it hard to embrace football if you weren’t immersed in the sport since birth.
Football is also extremely violent.
A groundbreaking study from Boston University found that NFL players develop chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a neurodegenerative disease that often leads to dementia, at shockingly high rates. The Boston study builds on work like that of Dr. Bennet Omalu, portrayed by Will Smith in the movie Concussion, as well as research funded by the league itself as part of the settlement of a massive lawsuit brought by thousands of former NFL players.
The overwhelming medical documentation leaves little ambiguity as to the serious neurological danger posed by football. Yet I, like millions of others, am anxiously counting down the hours until I can watch my college team kickoff its season today, just as I will be next week when the NFL season gets underway. The release of CFB25, the first college football video game released in 11 years, was a major factor in my decision to upgrade to a PlayStation 5. Football has me in a trance.
People in my life who did not grow up watching football, like my girlfriend and my manager, find it surprising that I like the game so much. At first, I assumed this was because I do not give off the stereotypical jock vibes — recall my aforementioned lack of athletic abilities — but it wasn’t until my girlfriend asked me if the violence of the sport ever makes me feel guilty did I realize what it is about the game of football that is so mystifying to many outsiders. Are football fans bloodlusted?
Having grown up surrounded by football (in a completely healthy way, lest anyone think my parents forced the game upon me), this was a jarring moment for me. Not once during high school football, not even when I was briefly knocked unconscious covering a punt, did I think there was anything wrong with the sport I loved.
In college, not only did I seek out paid work with my school’s team, I voluntarily played two additional seasons of intramural full-contact football at the last university to offer the sport, much to the jealousy of my former high school teammates. I considered myself lucky to maintain a tenuous connection to the sport, an opportunity very few people have after finishing high school.
I should be clear: I’m not going to stop watching football. While I’ve certainly cut back since moving to the Bay Area, where college football is far less popular than the Midwest or Central New York and the 49ers jerseys seem not to emerge from closets until the team qualifies for the playoffs, I still love the emotional intensity of watching close game, the camaraderie the sport fosters even amongst fans, and the tactical ingenuity spurred by the very same rulebook that frustrates new viewers.
But it would be a lie to say that my reduction in football consumption was driven by some moral crusade. Rather, the combination of time zones, adult responsibilities, and the fact that big cities offer plenty of other things to do on a weekend besides watching sports on TV have all naturally caused the amount of free time I devote solely to football to dwindle.
At the same time, I will never be able to unsee football from the eyes of someone like my girlfriend. With each TJ Watt sack and Najee Harris goal line carry, a tiny part of me is reminded that the game I love so much enacts quite a toll on all who step onto the gridiron.
And so I write this post as penance, an ode to the only thing more important to Notre Dame than football. As restitution, I seek not the eradication of football, but for the game to be made safer. Young children have no business playing full-contact football, and instead should learn the game’s basic rules through flag football.
At higher levels, rule changes like the new kickoff formation in the NFL and the much-maligned but well-intentioned targeting penalty in college will go a long way toward reducing head injuries that ultimately lead to dementia, Alzheimer’s, and death, and continued research and tweaks to the rulebook are necessary. Perhaps most radically, I maintain that the United States should join most of the rest of the world and add a Secretary of Sport and Culture to our nation’s Cabinet, along with a corresponding federal department that would ideally replace the NCAA.
Football is laughably complicated, needlessly dangerous, excessively profitable, and incredibly compelling to watch. In other words, it’s the quintessential American sport, and I’m glad it’s back for another season.
Things I Recommend This Week
Is Albuquerque the best US city for pro runners? |
(Substack)The Problem of the Unionized War Machine | Jewish Currents
Why Are Controllers Buttons Like That? | Lextorias (YouTube)
Uvalde shooting shows contrast in preparedness between students and police | The Texas Tribune
Marketing Company Claims That It Actually Is Listening to Your Phone and Smart Speakers to Target Ads | 404 Media
And to any fellow fans of the Fighting Irish, I highly recommend
, the only rational Notre Dame football blog on the Internet. Here’s the Rakes Report on today’s matchup.Thank you as always for reading, even when my posts veer closer to “maybe this could’ve been a journal entry instead” territory. Go Irish, Beat Aggies ☘️