Brian Kimmes
This past Sunday, I had the opportunity to attend the loud and raucous Vikings home opener. For three-and-a-half hours, I was immersed in a sea of purple and gold. I saw past and current Vikings jerseys, and old and young Vikings fans. It was quite the display of enthusiasm for a mediocre team.
The excitement for the Vikings, as well as any football team, is in stark contrast to any other professional sports team in the country. The great country we live in is a football-obsessed nation. Plain and simple, Americans are nuts for football.
We cannot get enough of it. Americans want more and more football. The NFL has its own network. College bowl games keep popping up everywhere. NFL teams’ voluntary minicamps make the 10 o’clock news. Terrell Owens’ press conference is the lead story on SportsCenter. The NFL draft is its own two-day event on ESPN, while the Super Bowl is the single biggest television event of the year. It never ends. Football is king in the U.S.
Football triumphs over other sports teams, even if the other sports team is a winner. In Minnesota, the Twins have been the hottest team in baseball for months and are in the middle of a post-season race, yet Vikings pre-season games draw more fans.
Why are we so in love with football? What is it about the sport that makes us revert to the six-year-old mentality of “My football team can beat up your football team?” How has “Your football team sucks” become comparable to any of the “yo’ mama” jokes?
I don’t have any definitive answers as to why. I only have speculation.
Perhaps football is the easiest game to second-guess coaches. Fans love to talk about what they would have done differently. Everybody loves to play “Monday Morning Quarterback.”
“I would have run a flag route because the Cover 2 is weak against the corners,” says one Monday Morning Quarterback.
The other Monday Morning Quarterback responds, “No way. You need to run a guy deep to clear the safety and then hit the flanker running across the middle.”
Now, neither of these two geniuses probably know exactly what they just said. They are more than likely regurgitating a sentence they heard from one of the thousands of football analysts on the endless Sunday night recap shows. Maybe the ability to take what you heard on television and pass it off as your own thoughts to impress co-workers is what makes football so appealing.
Maybe we need to look to economics for the solution-the law of supply and demand. Football games are in short supply. Teams only play one game a week. The NFL has, by far, fewer games in a season (16), than the MLB (162) and the NBA and NHL (both at 82). Each individual game means more in the NFL than in the other sports. If a baseball team loses a game, it has a multitude of chances to make up for it, whereas in football, a single loss can be crippling to the season.
Is it possible that great economic thinkers like Adam Smith and Karl Marx can explain America’s modern-day obsession with football?
Perhaps a sophisticated concept like economics does not explain our obsession. Perhaps the answer lies in our lust for unsophisticated violence. We love violence. We cannot get enough of it. Football is a violent game, and fans love to see the big hits. Without those hits, it’s soccer. We don’t like soccer in America.
Maybe these three reasons-false expertise, economics and a thirst for violence-have led to the biggest possible reason of all that people love football: It is everywhere! Newspapers, magazines and television shows all have football. Office workers, truck drivers and school teachers all talk about it. It is damn near impossible to spend a single day with human contact from the months of August to January and not hear football mentioned. You are forced to like football because everybody else likes football.
Bottom line: During the fall and winter, football is a plague. You cannot escape. You are better off being one of the people on the inside, than one of the people standing outside asking yourself, “Why is his face painted? Damn idiot football fan.”
#1.883398:2207854054.jpg:ball_talk.jpg:Brian Kimmes, Ball Talk:
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