Yin, Yang and Y.A. Tittle

Besides being a Hall of Fame quarterback, Y.A. Title has nothing to do with this post. I just needed a football player whose name started with Y to go with Yin and Yang.

Anyway, the annual football-apoolza of the Super Bowl got me thinking about football. As any decent sports fan knows, football has become by far the most popular spectator sport played in the U.S., at least in terms of attention paid and money bet. (Simply due to the relatively low number of football games, I suspect that far fewer football fans attend football games than other fans attend baseball games or basketball games.) There is a special football network, NFL Network. Many football fans are in multiple fantasy football leagues, as well as football pools. Many of those football fans probably bet on football games, and not just professional football games, but college football games, too. Lots of football fans wear football-related paraphernalia, whether or not they’re watching football games or not watching football games. The craziness about football seems to have really increased in the last few years. What is it that has triggered this increased obsession about football? I mean, football more or less took off when ABC introduced Monday Night Football, which I believe was shortly after the two professional football leagues, the National Football League and the American Football League, merged in 1970. Plus, you know, the more people are obsessed with football, the more they say the word “football” because, when people talk about football, they say “football” every third word. Right, football fans of football? (I once tried to read a book about the history of salt – I’m a geek, I know, no further comment is necessary – which was called, appropriately enough, “Salt.” I stopped reading it after about a hundred pages. I had not anticipated how tiring it would be to keep reading the actual word “salt” at least twice in every sentence.)

So why has the sports-loving word gotten so much more obsessed with football in the last few years?

Here’s a theory.

As we all know, football is a uniquely American game. We’re really the only place where football – not futbol – is played. Unlike our other classically American, non-football sports – baseball and basketball – football hasn’t really taken off in other countries. More than other sports, then, you would expect football to be more purely representative of American culture.

Football is a polarized, specialized game. Players generally play position and they for damn sure play on one side of the football. You play offense or you play defense. (When someone switches for any time at all, like Troy Brown on the Patriots, people behave like they have seen a unicorn. A really muscular manly unicorn, kind of like the centaurs in the Harry Potter books, because, you know, it’s football.) In fact, a lot of football players are assigned to only play on very particular offensive or defensive plays. There are “nickel backs,” who only play on defense and only when the other team basically has to pass. There are “third down backs,” who basically only play on offense and only in those same situations. There are so many substitutions going that offenses sometimes will try to run up to the line and snap the ball really fast to stop the defense from shuttling eight guys on and off the field between plays. All of these specialized guys then train their bodies to do their specialized things, so their collisions are very efficient in their speed and ferocity. This then seems to lead to a really over-the-top mentality, particularly among defensive players, who seem to relish thinking of themselves as, and being, basically guided missiles.

Why is this relevant? I think it’s relevant because, in the last few years and concurrently with football’s explosion in “importance,” our country has been very polarized. Beginning no later than Bill Clinton’s Lewinsky mess, continuing through the disputed 2000 election, and the Iraq war, and the 2004 election, and the 2006 election, we have been a very divided country. Classes of people view their roles in our politics basically as being guided missiles for their side. In this context, it seems unsurprising that the sport that best embodies these tensions has really taken off.

Now contrast football in these terms to baseball and basketball. Those sports generally require players to play offense and defense and to prepare themselves to do both. (The fact that the designated hitter messes this up in baseball is the reason why that thing is such an abomination. I agree with Crash Davis: “I believe there ought to be a constitutional amendment outlawing Astroturf and the designated hitter.”) Like the Force, they require balance or at least some semblance of it. (I’ll bet you thought you might get through this post without any Star Wars reference. Sorry about that.) They have the yin and the yang.
Football doesn’t have yin and yang and our country hasn’t really in the ten years or so either. It’s like football got its chocolate in our politics’ peanut butter and everyone is having Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. The big ones, too, not those little “Fun Size” ones you get at Halloween.