Why I keep watching football

I never played organized football. I watch the Super Bowl every year, but I don't really have a favorite team. I am a casual fan. I acknowledge that football has negative effects -- it's a violent game, it encourages marketing to men based on the lowest common denominator (namely, sex and objectification of women), it's a waste of money, and it's ridiculously overhyped. The battles at the line of scrimmage are the most important part of the game, and those battles are more or less ignored by the announcers. Officiating and "scandals" like "deflategate" have a bigger effect on the big game than they should. So why keep watching? The answer is partly personal and partly cultural.

I grew up watching football on Sundays with Dad and my brother. My dad's brother was killed while playing high school football, when my dad was still a child. He had a head injury. They named the stadium at his high school after him. My uncle's memory lives on in our family, and the loss of his brother tempers my dad's enthusiasm for the game, I'm sure. Nonetheless, football is something my dad, my brother, and I have in common, and we can talk about it on the phone or in person. My brother is more passionate about his favorite teams than Dad and I are, but we each have our own way of connecting with the game, and I like that.

The cultural part has more to do with the shared memories of the game than with a particular team or things like cheerleaders. I remember Refrigerator Perry, Joe Montana, Jerry Rice, Emmitt Smith, Deion Sanders, and a few other outsized personalities from the last 30 years of watching football. Some of those players I remember more fondly than others. I remember the Super Bowl in 2002 and the half-time show by U2 being an important part of healing from September 11. Football is the number one sport in America, and it feels very American to be watching the game. Sport does play an important role in our society -- it's entertainment, it's a release from the mundane parts of everyday life, and it allows us to blow off steam as a society in a way that is relatively safe compared to killing each other.

Just think about how military football is -- the coaches are the generals, making decisions about strategy on the sidelines; the quarterbacks and all the players have defined roles, like officers and enlisted men; there's the "air superiority" of the passing game vs. the "ground attack" of the running game; there's even "grunts" working on the "front lines" while the skill players run "flanking" maneuvers or make tactical decisions while being protected by the offensive line. Heck, defenses even "blitz" the quarterback -- a term derived from the German word for lightning attack, "blitzkrieg," that the Nazis liked to use. Almost every move on the football field is planned in advance, but the players still have to execute the plays or disrupt them based on their defined roles. I'm not sure this military analogy is a good thing, but it shows how football reflects the tensions in our society between safety and risk, between defense and offense, between America and the world.

There's always the element of surprise in sport. No one can truly predict the outcome of the game, no matter how much they think they know or what the pre-game discussion has been about. The NFL tries to keep it fair, to the extent possible, and the Super Bowl itself is usually pretty entertaining, even in blowouts like last year's Seattle Seahawks victory. I try not to buy into the hype around the game each year, but the game is impossible to ignore for me. I may not care about the outcome as much as a die-hard Seahawks or Patriots fan might this year, but I enjoy watching the game. I know football isn't perfect, and it isn't a religion or a faith. There are more important things in life, and there are a lot of things about the game that aren't good. Still, I want to watch football to stay connected to my dad and brother, and to participate with the life of my family and the American culture. Football is part of the American way of life, for better and worse.