America’s Game

Football dominates American culture like no other sport before it.  Based on Week 1 TV ratings from the 2014 NFL season, NFL shows took the top 3 spots in the broadcast TV rankings, with two other slots in the top 20 occupied by football programming.  The Week 1 Monday night NFL doubleheader took the top 2 spots in the cable TV rankings, with the Thursday night game taking two additional spots in the top 25 cable shows.

Business elites can’t get enough of football, wanting to be associated with a large and profitable industry.  Stadiums, TV broadcasts, and individual players are sponsored by the nation’s largest and most prestigious companies.

Political elites can’t get enough of football, wanting to be associated with a winner and a popular cultural phenomenon.  [From my years of living in the Washington, DC, area, I can confirm that the Imperial Capital is a football town.]

A brand-new, NFL-quality football stadium takes a minimum of $1 billion to construct.  There is no shortage of cities and states willing to shower local teams with buckets of taxpayer money.

America’s cultural elites, on the other hand, are not so enamored of the game.  Football reflects the values held by the blend of cultures that supply its players and coaches, which are disproportionately rural, southern, and inner city.  Our cultural elites have as much use for football as they do for NASCAR or the army.

But given the popularity of the sport, and its prominent place in society, it was inevitable that it would become yet another front in the ongoing culture wars.  If you want to push an agenda, you go where the audience is.

Tim Tebow, an openly-Christian quarterback, and Michael Sam, an openly-Gay defensive end, are two incredibly-talented football players.  However, neither appears to possess the unique blend of skills to play in the NFL.  Despite their limitations as players, each represents larger cultural forces and has received enormous media coverage, completely out of proportion to their impact on the field.

Benjamin Morris—a statistician at the 538 website—has made a startling discovery:  crime rates among NFL players, across the board, are much lower than their peers in the general population.  You can be forgiven for believing the opposite:  literally every crime committed by an NFL player is documented by the national media.  Morris reports that the NFL player arrest rate is 13 percent (1/7) of the national average.

But with the popularity of football in America, every crime committed by a player, coach, or owner provides a platform for cultural elites to push their agenda on race, class, wealth and every issue in-between.

Most of us watch football to be entertained, to escape politics and our everyday lives.  No longer.  America’s game has become too big to exist as mere entertainment, it must now host the ongoing disputes in our politics and culture. 

My advice?  Baseball playoffs start next month.