-
New here? Register here now for access to all the forums, download game torrents, private messages, polls, Sportsbook, etc. Plus, stay connected and follow BP on Instagram @buckeyeplanet and Facebook.
Latest activity
Upvote
0
Upvote
0
NFL Discussion (Official Thread)
- By cincibuck
- Professional Football
- 13875 Replies
Welp, something for the mods to deal with: Saw a book review in the NY Times abut a book that predicts the death of football, and since this site is full of people who would shed tears at the wake, I thought hmmmmmmm, dare I post this whole thing? So here ya go, mods:
One of the best arguments for football came from Roy Blount Jr. in his book “About Three Bricks Shy of a Load,” an account of the 1973 Pittsburgh Steelers. “Pandemonium!” Blount wrote. “What a great thing football is, that it allows us at rare moments to be pandemonious.”
Chuck Klosterman argues in “Football,” his new book, that the pandemonium is going to end sooner than we think, probably within four or five decades: Football is doomed.
The sport, he suggests, has already begun its death spiral. (“Death spiral” sounds like one of Josh Allen’s 62-mile-an-hour passes.) Klosterman compares football to horse racing, another sport that captured the national imagination before it became a quaint niche venture.
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
I like reading Klosterman. He’s a dorm-room philosopher and, on pop topics, the overthinker’s overthinker. There are two quick, early things to say about “Football,” a book I enjoyed though it goes into the weeds, at least for a casual and distracted fan like me.
The first is that it’s not especially brave to make insane long-term predictions because, as John Maynard Keynes remarked, in the long run we’re all going to be dead. Klosterman is aware of this. “Living people are not my target market,” he writes, as if he were channeling Anne, rather than Grantland, Rice.
The second is that his argument takes up a relatively small portion of his book, mostly at the beginning and at the end. The “football is doomed” material is like a pancake that arrives alongside an order of Peking duck. The tastiest stuff is mostly tucked inside.
Klosterman argues, for example, in words that will drive a stake through certain hearts, that football is “the most visibly successful example of American socialism” because of the way television revenue is spread equally among all 32 teams. (Others might call this a cartel.)
He works through why Jim Thorpe remains the sport’s greatest player, why Canadian football is ridiculous and why few people bought Gov. Tim Walz as a football coach even though he’d been one and Kamala Harris often referred to him as “coach.” Klosterman, who grew up in a red state (North Dakota), writes:
SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
He goes deep into fantasy leagues, video games like Madden NFL and especially gambling, noting the “ecstatic evil” of hoping to win certain bets against the point spread. Real football games can be boring, he writes, but the version in gambler’s heads rarely is: “That blocked field goal shifted millions of unseen dollars and probably broke up somebody’s marriage.” The people in Las Vegas who set betting lines, he writes, are some of the most competent people in the world.
Klosterman suspects that a near-extinction level gambling scandal will arrive someday, but he thinks betting enriches the game, “at least conversationally.” He writes: “Listening to someone talk about their fantasy football team is like listening to someone talk about their garden. Listening to that same person talk about their gambling failures is fascinating as hell.”
He works through a discussion of football and race that’s notable, in part, because he picks up the topic with an unusual series of handles, asking questions like:
Klosterman reminds me of an updated version of one of the garrulous young men in Barry Levinson’s wonderful movie “Diner,” sparring over records and the Baltimore Colts as if their mother’s reputations depended on it. He reminds me, too, of the very funny journalist and commentator Drew Magary, but Klosterman is cool while Magary is hot. I’d like to see them, a humidifier and a dehumidifier, fight it out in the same damp basement.
Football is a limb, Klosterman argues, that society is eventually going to cut off. “The game will never completely disappear, in the same way you can still hear jazz on NPR and you can still smoke Lucky Strikes inside a casino,” he writes. But it’s destined to exit the central status in American life.
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
The reasons are myriad, but I will boil them down to two. The first is straightforward: Klosterman thinks advertisers will come to their senses and realize that spending enormous sums “for 30 seconds of (mostly ignored) exposure is a bad investment.”
The second requires more teasing out, but to put it simply: Horse racing receded from the American imagination, he writes, because people lost their close everyday connection to horses. Something similar will happen to football. We are already losing our organic connection to it.
This is in part because fewer mothers, even in football-mad states, will want their sons to play the game due to fear of head injuries. Most young people will know the sport only from television and video games. It will become distant from lived experience.
Image
He also blames the NCAA for a series of bad decisions — the end of traditional conferences, the introduction of the transfer portal, enabling players to make huge amounts of money — that have made it too much like the professional game. College football, like so much else in American life, is losing the weird, local, grass-roots aspect that gave it its flavor. Psychological investment in the game is bound to ebb.
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
(H.L. Mencken had an idea for saving it: College games would be more interesting if the faculty played instead of the students, and even better if the trustees played.)
Klosterman, with his prophetic intensity, is good at sounding certain. Yet one of the best things about his writing is watching him put his ideas on trial: He’s judge and jury, witnesses and bailiff, prosecutor and defense attorney.
As he wrote in a different book, “the best hypothesis is the one that reflexively accepts its potential wrongness to begin with.”
One of the best arguments for football came from Roy Blount Jr. in his book “About Three Bricks Shy of a Load,” an account of the 1973 Pittsburgh Steelers. “Pandemonium!” Blount wrote. “What a great thing football is, that it allows us at rare moments to be pandemonious.”
Chuck Klosterman argues in “Football,” his new book, that the pandemonium is going to end sooner than we think, probably within four or five decades: Football is doomed.
The sport, he suggests, has already begun its death spiral. (“Death spiral” sounds like one of Josh Allen’s 62-mile-an-hour passes.) Klosterman compares football to horse racing, another sport that captured the national imagination before it became a quaint niche venture.
Football
Save to your reading list:Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
I like reading Klosterman. He’s a dorm-room philosopher and, on pop topics, the overthinker’s overthinker. There are two quick, early things to say about “Football,” a book I enjoyed though it goes into the weeds, at least for a casual and distracted fan like me.
The first is that it’s not especially brave to make insane long-term predictions because, as John Maynard Keynes remarked, in the long run we’re all going to be dead. Klosterman is aware of this. “Living people are not my target market,” he writes, as if he were channeling Anne, rather than Grantland, Rice.
The second is that his argument takes up a relatively small portion of his book, mostly at the beginning and at the end. The “football is doomed” material is like a pancake that arrives alongside an order of Peking duck. The tastiest stuff is mostly tucked inside.
Klosterman argues, for example, in words that will drive a stake through certain hearts, that football is “the most visibly successful example of American socialism” because of the way television revenue is spread equally among all 32 teams. (Others might call this a cartel.)
He works through why Jim Thorpe remains the sport’s greatest player, why Canadian football is ridiculous and why few people bought Gov. Tim Walz as a football coach even though he’d been one and Kamala Harris often referred to him as “coach.” Klosterman, who grew up in a red state (North Dakota), writes:
He considers the Dallas Cowboys’ status as “America’s team” (“Everyone accepts it, but no one believes it”) and why Nick Nolte was terrific in “North Dallas Forty”: “The main thing he needed to do was act exasperated and hung over, his two greatest strengths as a performer.”
Editors’ Picks
The Bedazzling, Wild Designs of Modernism’s Forgotten Genius
Is Football Doomed? Chuck Klosterman Thinks So.
Sound Baths, Crystals and Couples’ Facials: Behold a Valentine’s Wellness Weekend
SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
He goes deep into fantasy leagues, video games like Madden NFL and especially gambling, noting the “ecstatic evil” of hoping to win certain bets against the point spread. Real football games can be boring, he writes, but the version in gambler’s heads rarely is: “That blocked field goal shifted millions of unseen dollars and probably broke up somebody’s marriage.” The people in Las Vegas who set betting lines, he writes, are some of the most competent people in the world.
Klosterman suspects that a near-extinction level gambling scandal will arrive someday, but he thinks betting enriches the game, “at least conversationally.” He writes: “Listening to someone talk about their fantasy football team is like listening to someone talk about their garden. Listening to that same person talk about their gambling failures is fascinating as hell.”
He works through a discussion of football and race that’s notable, in part, because he picks up the topic with an unusual series of handles, asking questions like:
Klosterman drops epigrams, as if they were empty Gatorade bottles, as he jogs along: “Nothing is faker than fake modesty”; “The sports world is about as secular as Iran” ; “You can’t beat a brick wall at tennis”; “Life is unfair, but sometimes it’s unfair in your favor.”
Klosterman reminds me of an updated version of one of the garrulous young men in Barry Levinson’s wonderful movie “Diner,” sparring over records and the Baltimore Colts as if their mother’s reputations depended on it. He reminds me, too, of the very funny journalist and commentator Drew Magary, but Klosterman is cool while Magary is hot. I’d like to see them, a humidifier and a dehumidifier, fight it out in the same damp basement.
Football is a limb, Klosterman argues, that society is eventually going to cut off. “The game will never completely disappear, in the same way you can still hear jazz on NPR and you can still smoke Lucky Strikes inside a casino,” he writes. But it’s destined to exit the central status in American life.
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
The reasons are myriad, but I will boil them down to two. The first is straightforward: Klosterman thinks advertisers will come to their senses and realize that spending enormous sums “for 30 seconds of (mostly ignored) exposure is a bad investment.”
The second requires more teasing out, but to put it simply: Horse racing receded from the American imagination, he writes, because people lost their close everyday connection to horses. Something similar will happen to football. We are already losing our organic connection to it.
This is in part because fewer mothers, even in football-mad states, will want their sons to play the game due to fear of head injuries. Most young people will know the sport only from television and video games. It will become distant from lived experience.
Image
He also blames the NCAA for a series of bad decisions — the end of traditional conferences, the introduction of the transfer portal, enabling players to make huge amounts of money — that have made it too much like the professional game. College football, like so much else in American life, is losing the weird, local, grass-roots aspect that gave it its flavor. Psychological investment in the game is bound to ebb.
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
(H.L. Mencken had an idea for saving it: College games would be more interesting if the faculty played instead of the students, and even better if the trustees played.)
Klosterman, with his prophetic intensity, is good at sounding certain. Yet one of the best things about his writing is watching him put his ideas on trial: He’s judge and jury, witnesses and bailiff, prosecutor and defense attorney.
As he wrote in a different book, “the best hypothesis is the one that reflexively accepts its potential wrongness to begin with.”
Upvote
0
Upvote
0
Upvote
0
Upvote
0
Upvote
0
Upvote
0
Upvote
0