Football

"Veiled autobiography" has become the default way to view any opinion about any topic whatsoever. In a postmodern environment, no idea matters as much as the biographical identity of the person who expresses it

Having worked in media for three decades, I’m psychologically invested in journalism, and my nonthinking inclination is to assume that what I read in a newspaper or a magazine is relatively reliable. My life outside the media tells me this assumption is irrational and incorrect

There’s no global equivalent to the way football controls U.S. television, an enigma further underscored by its isolationist quality: American consumers are myopically obsessed with something other countries don’t really consume at all

And while watching football on TV is a form of distraction, the purpose is not to stop people from thinking about important things. Just as often, it allows people to unconsciously consider concepts that would be too hard to otherwise contemplate, particularly for those unwilling (or unable) to ponder such issues in any other way.

It’s hopeless to view every single thing through the lens of the trolley problem hypothetical, where the only moral endgame is identifying the greater tragedy. There’s no reason to value life if we’re not going to value living

a desire to insist that everything is bullshit is just a lazier form of bullshit

Classifying someone as the greatest of all time means significantly less if the selection criteria guarantee that the answer will change every twenty years. A better metric is measuring the gap between the best player from an era against everyone else who was playing at the same time, with an emphasis on their physical abilities (relative to their peers) and their skill set (relative to how much those skills were dependent on the opportunity to develop them)

there are now real collegiate coordinators who call plays the same way a thirteen‑year‑old kid in 1999 would have called plays in a video game. This is the hidden value of an active simulation: As years pass and times change, things that regularly happen only inside games eventually start happening in life.

But as is so often the case with soft history, the received message is more relevant than whatever actually happened

“It’s what I call coastal condescension,” Carville said at the 2024 Aspen Ideas Festival. “Don’t eat hamburgers. Don’t watch football. Don’t drink beer. . . . I’m sorry, but Democratic messaging is too feminine. It just is.”

Switzer claimed one of his recruiting techniques was to walk through the alley behind a potential recruit’s residence before going inside the house. He wanted to see what brand of empty beer bottles were in the trash. This way, if the recruit’s father offered him a beer, he could off‑handedly request whatever he’d seen in the garbage bin. Some might see this as a deception, and I suppose it technically was. But it’s also an example of a person willing to meet strangers on their own terms, in the context of their own lives, without judgment

What I saw as buffoonish was actual leadership. So how did I get Dan Campbell so wrong? I suspect it was my inability to accept that his methods - which still strike me as outdated - have more relevance to the material world than I want to admit.

Football’s relationship to race is confusing, inconsistent, and willfully misread. Which is how it must be, in order for it to feel like life.

Football is never watched as a blood sport; fans want a spectacle where the possibility of injury is omnipresent, but without anyone getting seriously hurt. What they love about football is the strategy and the skill, and those qualities only have meaning when pursued under dangerous circumstances. The violence is necessary, but not desired. ... Football’s predicament is that the game itself is what people love, but the game becomes uninteresting if the level of physicality falls below a certain undefinable threshold. This is why every rule change introduced to improve player safety is immediately unpopular. It’s not that fans want to see guys get hurt. It’s that every incremental move away from high‑risk physicality makes the sport less like itself.

There’s a desire to view moral conflict through the eyes of whoever is most negatively impacted, based on the premise that their perception is the most relevant. But the truth is closer to the opposite. The more a person personalizes a conflict, the less they can be trusted to think analytically. ... This doesn’t mean personal feelings don’t matter. It only means personal feelings are a separate conversation.

The overwhelming majority of pro football players could never build a better life than the one afforded by the NFL, in terms of wealth and prestige. Even if the risk of CTE was five times greater than it appears, the short‑term payoff would seem greater than the long‑ term risk, particularly since one in seven Americans living past the age of seventy will be diagnosed with dementia no matter how they live or what they do.

For more than a hundred years, the National Football League only got bigger and richer. It was designed only for imperial expansion, which is the only thing it did. But now it has to somehow get smaller, and that’s something it cannot do. It is too brittle to contract. It can only shatter.

The difference between a sweltering 100‑degree afternoon, a perfect 70‑degree evening, and a chilly 20‑degree morning has an explicit dialectical clarity that disappears if those same digits become 38, 21, and –7. The metric system is designed for scientists. The imperial system is designed for people