The Art of Manliness - How Football Took Over America — and Could Collapse

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00:01:12.780 Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the AOM Podcast,

00:01:16.160 which since 2008 has featured conversations with the world's best authors, thinkers, and leaders

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00:01:43.200 Now on to the show.

00:01:50.820 American football is so big, so braided into our weekends, our language, and our culture,

00:01:57.040 that it can be hard to see it clearly as a whole.

00:01:59.540 In his new book, Football, Chuck Klosterman helps us see the game from unexpected angles

00:02:03.280 and argues that football isn't just a sport, it's a kind of national operating system.

00:02:08.140 Chuck explains how it became the dominant televised spectacle in America,

00:02:11.440 despite having elements that should count against it.

00:02:13.740 We then explore football as a simulation of war, of reality, and even of itself,

00:02:18.340 and how its simulation through video games has actually fed back into the sport.

00:02:22.500 We also talk about who Chuck thinks is the GOAT,

00:02:24.580 hint, it's not Tom Brady, and the difference between achievement and greatness.

00:02:28.440 At the end of our conversation, Chuck lays out a compelling argument

00:02:31.160 for why football may be headed for a steep and surprising fall.

00:02:34.660 After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash football.

00:02:48.340 All right, Chuck Klosterman, welcome to the show.

00:02:54.620 Hey, it's great to be here.

00:02:56.220 So you have written several cultural explorations during your career,

00:02:59.560 and in your latest book, Football, you dig into the game of American football

00:03:04.200 and try to suss out how it has influenced American culture in different ways

00:03:09.280 and how American culture has influenced football.

00:03:13.000 The publisher's description of the book calls football a hyperobject.

00:03:16.660 What is that, and why is football a hyperobject?

00:03:20.400 A hyperobject basically is sort of this philosophical term

00:03:24.340 that means something is so large and so intertwined and imbued

00:03:31.980 in every aspect of society that it's impossible to see the thing in totality,

00:03:37.660 that we only are really understanding the part of it that we're engaging with.

00:03:42.020 Everything around it is still happening.

00:03:43.780 Everything around it is still sort of informing that idea,

00:03:47.120 but it is pretty much invisible simply due to size.

00:03:50.880 I mean, it's like, I suppose an obvious example would be like, you know, to say the internet.

00:03:55.600 Like the internet is a hyperobject.

00:03:57.460 It's so large that we all understand what it is,

00:03:59.620 but it is impossible to sort of understand it in an all-encompassing way

00:04:03.460 unless you step back and say almost nothing in specific, you know.

00:04:07.960 And I think that accurately, that's sort of an analysis of how football sort of operates

00:04:13.120 in American society that we certainly feel like we understand it.

00:04:18.020 We can see it on like a one-to-one basis and really engage in it in a really personal way.

00:04:23.120 But it is involved in the larger culture in a way that is not only impossible to see,

00:04:30.120 but sort of unconsciously understood, even by those who don't really care about it as a game.

00:04:36.380 So, yeah, football is the most popular sport in America.

00:04:40.680 I mean, you highlight the fact that if you look at the most viewed shows on TV,

00:04:45.760 I think it's like the top 25 are football games, basically.

00:04:49.060 Well, yeah, I mean, in 2023, of the 100 most watched broadcasts in the United States that year,

00:04:56.600 93 were NFL games, and then I think three more were college games.

00:05:00.880 Yeah. And then, I mean, also just the football metaphors have just seeped into our everyday

00:05:07.100 conversation. I mean, we make analogies to it all the time in work, in life, et cetera.

00:05:13.620 Well, sure. I mean, sometimes, you know, there's obvious examples, like, you know,

00:05:16.500 people using things like a political football or whatever. It's like that's like a,

00:05:19.680 that's kind of the straightforward use of it. This popularity thing, though, it's actually more

00:05:24.380 fascinating, I think, than people accept, even though we all know it, right? There are very few,

00:05:29.260 I can't think of anybody who would be a more than casual follower of sports, who would not concede

00:05:35.040 that, you know, football is the most popular sport in the United States, but its popularity,

00:05:39.780 it's like a different version of it. I mean, there are many countries in Europe, or it is very obvious

00:05:45.120 that not only is soccer the most popular sport, in some ways, it is all their sports. It is almost

00:05:50.520 their combination of football, basketball, and baseball kind of all put together to this one thing

00:05:57.080 that's really shared. And yet you would not find 93 of the hundred most popular television broadcasts

00:06:04.860 in France be a soccer. Like, it just doesn't happen. I mean, like, you know, baseball is beloved

00:06:10.280 in Japan, you know, yet at the same time, its popularity there is in no way a mirror of the

00:06:15.580 way football is popular here. And that's also particularly interesting because football is

00:06:22.320 an ethnocentric sport. It's played in the United States, Canada, a little bit in Germany, you know,

00:06:28.560 here and there, there'll be a few places that'll play it, but it's really just in this country.

00:06:33.940 And in a sense, that makes it particularly reflective of our society in this, you know,

00:06:39.560 it kind of along the idea of like American exceptionalism or whatever. It's like only in

00:06:43.620 America does this thing exist. And only in America could this thing have the magnitude that it does.

00:06:49.140 And what's pretty crazy about football being the most popular sport in America,

00:06:54.180 you talk about this in the book, and I was nodding my head the entire time.

00:06:58.100 It's a really complicated game. Like you, you note that football is probably the only sport that you

00:07:04.400 can't play recreationally. There aren't pickup football games. There are touch football games,

00:07:09.220 there's flag football, but it's not actual pads on pad football with 22 players. I mean,

00:07:15.560 like I played football in high school. The last time I played football was in high school. I remember

00:07:21.320 my last game as a senior, my coach said, for a lot of you guys, this is gonna be the last time you

00:07:27.320 play football. I was like, wow. And it's true. What was your experience with the sport? Did you

00:07:31.880 play football when you were in high school?

00:07:33.480 I did. Now I went to a very small high school in North Dakota. So I played nine man football.

00:07:38.520 Now that is a version of 11 man football where on offense, you essentially remove the offensive

00:07:42.780 tackles. On defense, you essentially remove the cornerbacks. Okay. The idea, of course,

00:07:48.780 is to have it be as close to 11 man football as possible. So schematically, it's actually very

00:07:53.660 similar. It's just for, you know, schools with extremely low enrollment. People play both sides

00:07:58.880 of the ball of the punter as well. But beyond that, you know, coming from a town of 500 people

00:08:03.200 where the high school is really the center of the town, even more so than any of the churches,

00:08:07.220 the town is really built around its school in a place like that. And your football program was

00:08:12.160 strong and it just sort of imbued every aspect of life. It's hard to even, I mean, like, I can't

00:08:18.740 really imagine what the experience of high school would have been like without sports and particularly

00:08:23.980 football involved. Now, my kids are going to have the opposite experience. It's not going to be the

00:08:27.320 way it is for them. But I mean, that's how it was for me. Then, you know, I went to college and

00:08:32.060 I got into journalism and initially I was a sports reporter and I covered the football team.

00:08:36.880 I then moved into this phase professionally where I was like a rock critic and a film critic and sort

00:08:43.300 of more of a straightforward cultural journalist. I never stopped watching football, though. That

00:08:47.860 was always there. And then about 20 years ago, I started thinking about the idea of football as

00:08:54.360 having a meaning that despite being impossible to escape, is still somewhat underrated, particularly

00:09:02.700 as a way to understand the last half of the 20th century. And what you're saying in general is,

00:09:09.240 you know, it's a very true thing. So soccer is the most popular sport in the world. Everyone

00:09:13.280 understands that. One of the keys to this is that it is the easiest sport to play in the sense that all

00:09:19.620 you need is one kickable object and two teams. You can go to the most remote place on any continent,

00:09:27.660 except Antarctica, obviously, and you can like see people playing soccer. It's very easy to do.

00:09:32.700 Basketball is a sport you can play by yourself. You know, the idea of shooting a jump shot alone

00:09:38.760 in a gym is not like being in a basketball game, but the mechanics of that activity are identical.

00:09:45.320 Baseball takes space in a lot of guys, but yet we've built this whole superstructure of

00:09:49.600 recreational softball to kind of simulate that through life. If you're somebody who was a track

00:09:55.140 star in high school, you can still go running. If you were a swimming star, you can still go to the

00:09:59.060 pool. You can bowl your whole life. You can play golf your whole life, but not football like you

00:10:04.340 and I could go out in my yard and throw a football around. We could even get two more guys and run

00:10:08.920 little patterns, play offense, defense. It has no relationship to the game for real. Like the only

00:10:16.000 version of football that really matters is the official version. It can't really be simulated.

00:10:21.300 And that should be a detriment, right? Like if you were inventing football for the first time,

00:10:25.860 if we didn't have these sports and we were inventing them, the fact that it's impossible

00:10:30.640 to recreationally simulate should be a real problem. It should make people feel distant

00:10:36.800 from the game. But it appears that the opposite has happened. It feels that this distance has sort

00:10:43.040 of in a weird way, democratized the experience of watching it. That we're all kind of in the same

00:10:48.700 position where we have this understanding that is not really inherent to who we are. It's not our

00:10:56.040 own experience. It's just like learned information that we sort of all pretend is something that we

00:11:02.260 can easily sort of understand. Yeah. And very few people have actually played football. I think you

00:11:07.240 did the numbers. It was ended up being like maybe 0.2% of the population in America. Oh, way lower,

00:11:12.940 way lower. Like 0.02. I mean, you know, it's like, there's like a, there's a, maybe a million kids

00:11:16.820 playing in high school and then you have a couple thousand playing in college and, uh, you know,

00:11:22.720 a small number, whatever, you know, roster size, you know, times 32 in the NFL, you know, if you

00:11:28.000 include the practice squads, you got some people in Canada and that's it. It is not a universal

00:11:34.600 experience in any way. You know, it's exclusionary by design. Yeah. So, I mean, what, maybe we'll get to

00:11:41.380 this through our conversation, but like first blush, why do you think so many people like watching

00:11:45.740 football if they've never played football? And it's this kind of complex game that, I mean,

00:11:50.700 even talk about, there's not a lot of action in it. I mean, it's action packed, but there's a lot

00:11:54.360 of standing around walking between downs while the, the chains get moved. I mean, okay. So this is

00:12:01.420 the mysterious thing. Okay. I'd mentioned earlier, like, you know, if football was being invented now,

00:12:06.460 we would see its exclusionary nature as a detriment. An even greater detriment would be seen during like

00:12:12.480 the theoretical pitch meeting. If we're trying to all come up with new ideas for sports is if

00:12:16.780 someone were to say, well, you know, in a three hour game, there's actually 11 minutes of action.

00:12:21.380 It was this kind of famous wall street journal article where they did research on all these NFL

00:12:25.640 games. And they realized that the average three hour NFL football telecast involves 11 minutes of

00:12:31.820 activity. Now on paper, that just seems insane. If someone said, Hey, I made a three hour movie,

00:12:38.220 but actually there's only things happening in 11 minutes of it. People be like, what is that?

00:12:43.660 Like that's the antithesis of what entertainment is. But what is strange is that the way those 11

00:12:50.000 minutes are broken down into these little bursts of activity with these gaps in between, where you

00:12:55.900 can think about what you saw, you can think about what you're going to see next, and you can think

00:13:00.580 about whatever you want, even if it's divorced from the game you're experiencing. That is part of

00:13:06.400 like almost the magical quality of football as a television enterprise. Like it doesn't seem like

00:13:12.560 what we should watch, but it is. And the evidence of that is overwhelming.

00:13:18.380 You mentioned television. Okay. Football is a television enterprise. This is one of your main

00:13:22.940 theses in the book. It's this line. I loved it. I have a friend who's a media theory professor here

00:13:28.380 at the University of Tulsa. He loved it. The line is this. You said, football is a purely mediated

00:13:34.420 experience, even when there is no media involved. What do you mean by that?

00:13:40.500 Oh, yeah. Okay. So that's the key point to this, this whole idea. So, okay. So football is invented

00:13:45.140 a little bit after the Civil War. And, you know, the reason for this, it's arguable, but there's

00:13:51.140 this sort of built-in belief that there were people in the wake of the Civil War who was like,

00:13:56.520 our sons are not going to fight wars. They're not going to face adversity. Our society will be

00:14:03.540 a failure because they'll be too soft. We've got to create some simulation for this. And they kind

00:14:08.580 of came up with this sport of football. Now, whether or not that's exactly true or partially

00:14:12.540 true, it doesn't really matter. Regardless, for the next 70 or 80 years, football evolves into

00:14:17.440 something that's kind of close to what we imagine now. And then it intersects with the inception of

00:14:24.600 television. And by chance, no one made this happen. It just worked out this way. Football is the

00:14:30.800 perfect product for the television experience. And television is the perfect vessel for showing

00:14:36.140 what football is. No one has ever constructed a better TV experience than the way football worked

00:14:41.880 out accidentally. And it kind of begins with the kind of famous championship game between the Colts

00:14:47.700 and the Giants, you know, the greatest game ever played, where even though the game was blacked out

00:14:52.320 in New York, you know, like 46 million people or whatever for the first time, like saw this game.

00:14:57.180 And it wasn't that they were seeing something they'd never experienced before. They just never

00:15:00.560 experienced in this way. It was the merging of those two mediums. And since then, football's

00:15:06.800 relationship to television is really the driving force between how it has become this kind of

00:15:13.560 cultural monolith. Our understanding of football is through the TV experience, even for people like you

00:15:20.420 and I who have played. Like if someone were to say to you, like, imagine a football game.

00:15:25.560 I am guessing the first thing you imagined was the way it looks on television, even though you've

00:15:30.560 played it, that you almost imagine that shot from that midfield, you know, where you can't really see

00:15:36.500 depth and the game is being played horizontal across the screen. You can't even see the free safety.

00:15:42.160 It's not even the ideal way to see it if you really care. But it is the way we understand it.

00:15:47.660 And then this is part of the reason why I really think that in some ways, football is the perfect

00:15:54.880 metaphor for understanding America from, say, 1950 to the year 2000. It may not be going forward in

00:16:01.860 part because of our changing relationship to television. So what makes football the perfect

00:16:07.320 game for television? Okay. So with almost any other sport, the idea of the televised version of that

00:16:14.760 sport is how can we transmit the live experience into the TV experience? Okay. Hockey is the one

00:16:22.220 game that we all sort of understand to be better alive because part of hockey is, you know, the sound

00:16:28.000 and the feeling of guys smashing up against the plexiglass and you just can't simulate that on that.

00:16:33.360 Now, almost every other sport is kind of debatable. Like baseball can be better live if it's a beautiful

00:16:39.380 day. And, you know, it's just like the ballpark is great, but it can also be in some ways harder to

00:16:46.200 watch if you really care about the outcome than when you see it on television. Basketball is great

00:16:50.980 if you're next to the court. It's bad if you're in the rafters. The best seats tend to be actually

00:16:55.600 the ones that simulate the TV camera. You know, boxing, auto racing, those have like palpable energy

00:17:02.280 and it's like the sound of it's incredible, but at the same time, you can't always see everything.

00:17:07.640 Golf and tennis, there's an intimacy to being live, but it can be monotonous. All these other sports,

00:17:13.160 there's sort of like a debate. Is it better live or better on television to see the actual sport?

00:17:17.900 With football, there is no debate. It's always better on television. There's a million reasons to

00:17:22.500 go to a live football game, but one of them cannot be, I need to really see what's happening.

00:17:27.700 Like even the guys in the game, even the coach on the sideline cannot see the game the way a person

00:17:34.440 on television can. And as a result, our understanding of this mediated event is almost like a full-time

00:17:42.760 mediation of the experience that you think about football means to think about how it is presented

00:17:48.680 on TV. And, you know, if you want to get down to real specific things, I mean, it's the fact that like,

00:17:55.100 unlike other sports that kind of happen when they happen, we know when football is going on. We know

00:17:59.780 it's college games, Saturday, pro game, Sunday, it's a Monday night game, it's a Tuesday night game.

00:18:04.540 You know, we know this. That's why part of the reason fantasy football, that while not as maybe

00:18:09.700 illustrative of the game as fantasy baseball is more popular. People like fantasy football because

00:18:14.620 it's very easy to do because you can really, you understand when you need to watch these games.

00:18:20.480 There's also the aspect of that when you're seeing football from its televised perspective,

00:18:25.380 there's moments where no one knows what's happening. You know, the quarterback drops back

00:18:29.540 and he throws the ball deep. There's a split second where the camera has not followed it yet.

00:18:33.480 And we don't know if the guy is open. Is the guy covered? We don't. It's like it's this fleeting

00:18:38.160 moment of complete unknown that is kind of an exhilarating rush. The starting and the stopping is a huge

00:18:46.720 part of it. It seems like something we shouldn't want, but we do. We nonstop action, say like a,

00:18:53.000 you know, a sport like soccer or whatever. You know, yeah, that can be exhilarating when the play

00:18:57.940 is incredible, but it can also be sort of monotonous and almost hypnotic when the action

00:19:03.060 is kind of a lesser vintage. Football doesn't have that problem. Like the worst football game is still

00:19:09.280 watchable. Yeah. I mean, I've noticed in my experience, whenever I go to a football game in person,

00:19:15.160 I typically spend a lot of time watching the jumbotron because you can't see like what's

00:19:20.600 going on. Cause I mean, like I said, it's complicated. Sometimes there's like a misdirection

00:19:25.900 and you want to see, okay, well, how did this running back end up in the end zone?

00:19:30.480 Well, okay. I'm going to watch the instant replay up on the TV because for my vantage point,

00:19:36.580 I completely missed it. And when I look back at the like live games I've been to at the

00:19:40.740 university of Oklahoma, I remember there's like a, like maybe one instance where I had a great view

00:19:45.960 of Adrian Peterson making this amazing, like 90 yard run, but that's it. The other football games

00:19:52.700 I went to, like I saw some good games, the Sooners won, but I really didn't see in person live in real

00:19:58.680 time. What was happening. I had to look at the jumbotron. Okay. The thing you're saying is like

00:20:03.420 almost a perfect encapsulation of something I write about. So you had this one play where you see,

00:20:07.320 I'm guessing my assumption is that Adrian Peterson was running the ball and he was running right at

00:20:11.780 you for whatever. Right. Yeah. Correct. He was coming at you, you know, and you were the only

00:20:15.380 person maybe, or maybe the people in your very close vicinity who had that specific experience

00:20:21.280 as if this amazing play was actually built for your vantage point by chance, because that's where

00:20:26.840 your seat were. But for the rest of the game, in all likelihood, what you were usually doing

00:20:32.360 again, unconsciously is seeing something from your seat and mentally transposing to how it would look

00:20:38.920 on television that like we see these things, we triangulate in our mind and put it into that

00:20:45.160 kind of television scope that shot from midfield, you know, kind of in a downward angle as the players

00:20:51.900 are moving sort of, you know, like I said, across the field horizontally. Now there's some people listening

00:20:56.220 to this podcast who are probably saying like, well, that's not how it is for me. You can't get inside

00:21:00.960 my brain. That's not how it is. That's true. Okay. This is not something I'm able to really prove.

00:21:06.700 I can't get inside another person's head and say, this is how the experience is, but I'm confident

00:21:12.540 that that's how it is for most people, including most of the people who deny that this is their

00:21:18.360 experience. I think that in general, uh, and in fact, maybe in totality, the experience of a video

00:21:29.060 screen of the monitor overwrites our understanding of reality. I think that's just a, you know,

00:21:36.620 either a consequence or a problem or maybe even a benefit of modernity that we have now sort of

00:21:44.800 experienced a mediated world so fully that the things we like most are the things that best fit

00:21:53.180 into that sort of technological experience. And football is one of them.

00:21:58.640 Well, if football is better to watch on TV or on a screen, why do people still go to live football

00:22:04.000 games? You think?

00:22:05.100 Well, there's a lot of ancillary reasons to go to an event besides I want to see it in the most lucid way.

00:22:12.080 I mean, you know, in the same way, you know, if you really love Steely Dan, uh, you were never going

00:22:18.780 to get a better experience than you were on the record. I mean, you know, you were never going to

00:22:24.100 hear something live that would be as perfect as, as the way you'd hear it on the record, but you

00:22:28.500 still might even want to go see the show. I mean, you go to a football game, there's a whole bunch

00:22:32.260 of things going on. There's the collective feeling of being with a bunch of people with the same ideas

00:22:37.200 and that suddenly you kind of have a relationship with strangers because you all kind of like the same

00:22:42.240 thing. And it is interesting to be in a large crowd. There's a kind of a palpable exchange of

00:22:48.680 energy. When that happens, it might remind you of maybe having gone to a game when you were a kid

00:22:53.980 and now you're bringing your own kid. It's I think in some people's mind, the ability to cheer and sort

00:23:00.260 of act like a different person in a live event is extremely attractive. And, and many live events

00:23:07.300 sort of allow this to happen. Uh, these are all reasons, you know, it's like the idea that maybe

00:23:13.280 if I yell, help my team or whatever, that's sort of a insane thing to think, but people think that

00:23:18.320 right. And that's totally fine. But to see the game, if someone says I'm going to the AFC

00:23:25.620 championship because I really want to see what happened. I mean, that's insane. That would never,

00:23:30.520 if you really wanted to see it would be the television experience. Yeah. I was just thinking,

00:23:35.620 you know, so television has made football viewing better. Like you can view the game better on TV,

00:23:41.060 but I do think in some ways television has made live football viewing worse. Here's an example.

00:23:48.920 So a few years ago, we went to the Oklahoma state BYU football game. It was cold. It was sleeting.

00:23:55.960 It was raining game went into overtime when it was televised. And like, we were just ready to go home

00:24:01.940 because it was like, Oh my gosh, we're just soaking wet and it's cold, but we had to do the 0.99

00:24:05.580 stupid TV timeouts. It wasn't like a timeout because like the team needed a timeout. It was 0.99

00:24:09.920 like, we need a timeout so we can show commercials on television for the people at home. And it just

00:24:15.400 made the game longer than it needed to be. Oh, absolutely. I think the first time any like kid,

00:24:23.320 like an 11 year old kid who likes football goes to his first pro game. It's always very weird

00:24:31.480 to see that there are these long stretches where nothing is happening. The players aren't even

00:24:36.700 talking to each other. They're just kind of waiting around while the sound system plays

00:24:40.080 guns and roses or something. And just we eat up two minutes and then the game starts again.

00:24:44.440 That's true. Television has made the live experience worse, but you know that, I mean,

00:24:50.740 I guess you, there's a lot of people who would say that that is one of the hallmarks of all technology,

00:24:57.700 which is that it detracts from the organic experience. You know, I mean, that, that,

00:25:03.760 I, this is probably a crazy thing to, to, to point out, but you know, like when you go back and read

00:25:10.700 like what the Unabonner, but like Ted Kaczynski was writing about, one of the things he was writing

00:25:15.420 about was that technology puts a ceiling on our freedom that we can't even recognize because we

00:25:21.860 assume the ceiling is normal. That our ability to sort of imagine or experience the world

00:25:27.520 is sort of limited by our mediated understanding of it. And that's what happens with television and

00:25:34.940 all sports in a way. I mean, it is interesting to say, go to an NBA game that's, you know,

00:25:41.400 not being televised by TNT or ESPN. Like when I go to a Blazers game here, that's just like being

00:25:46.680 shown locally, the game feels fast. They're not building in all these breaks, you know? I mean,

00:25:52.380 it's a better experience, but then it's, it's sort of like a risk reward thing. I mean,

00:25:56.780 if you're from the NFL, from their perspective, you know, what is more important? The 65,000 people

00:26:04.100 who are in a stadium maybe, or the 6.5 million people who are watching it at home. And in many

00:26:11.120 ways, subsidizing this sport in a way that people in the stadium are not. Yes. The people in the

00:26:16.340 stadium are buying tickets. They're paying for parking. They're eating hot dogs. Revenue is being

00:26:21.020 generated. But all sports now, all major sports are built around the television contract with

00:26:28.340 various networks and platforms. And those are the people who matter. Yeah. So this is a perfect

00:26:33.040 example of how football is a hyper object that when we're talking about football, we're talking

00:26:37.020 about something bigger than football. I mean, in our conversation, I didn't see this coming up,

00:26:40.960 but we, we name dropped the Unabomber. Yeah. There you go. Yeah. But I do that a lot.

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00:29:06.980 And now back to the show. So in the book, you mentioned that football is an unreality,

00:29:12.040 that it's a simulation on multiple levels. You mentioned it earlier. Football is often seen

00:29:18.940 as a simulation of war. The founding legends that it was started after the Civil War. People were

00:29:24.840 anxious about masculinity, the whole muscular Christianity movement, Teddy Roosevelt's

00:29:30.020 strenuous life. So they got to develop this game to toughen boys up, simulates war so they have

00:29:34.360 experience with it. I mean, I think Dwight Eisenhower, he played football at West Point. I

00:29:39.080 think he coached at West Point. Yeah, he played against Jim Thorpe. Yeah. And he, I think he even said

00:29:43.500 that football is like the best game to prepare men to fight in war. What do you make of that idea of

00:29:51.120 football as a good simulation of war? Is anything to that or is that kind of overblown? Well, you know,

00:29:57.220 it's a tricky thing. Like, is football the best game to prepare young men to later fight in war? I mean,

00:30:05.140 among sports, it probably is. I don't think that we look at sports necessarily as like that should be

00:30:10.240 their purpose. Certainly not now. You know, it's like it would be weird in a modern context if someone

00:30:16.840 wrote a book promoting the idea of football based on the idea that this could like help us militarily

00:30:22.220 moving forward or whatever. You know, but at the same time, you know, it's an interesting thing. I

00:30:28.020 mean, the thing that I argue in this book is like, you know, football is a simulation of war. There is no

00:30:33.340 question about it, but it's a simulation of ancient wars. It's not a simulation of modern warfare.

00:30:41.000 It's a simulation of the way wars would have been fought in the 19th century or the way that they

00:30:46.580 would work like in the board game Stratego or whatever. Like it's not, it's not like Don DeLillo

00:30:52.000 had a book come out in 1972 called End Zone and it's a football book and it deals a lot with the idea of

00:30:57.820 kind of nuclear holocaust. And people, they didn't really love this book when it came out because they were

00:31:02.840 like, well, it's kind of too on the nose to say football is like war. But he was actually arguing

00:31:07.860 something that was really prescient that the other people didn't get, which is that he was

00:31:11.860 essentially saying that football's relationship to war kind of ended with the advent of the atomic

00:31:17.780 weapon, that football's relationship to war is the way wars were once fought. And I think that is

00:31:24.100 the draw. It's not the draw that like I'm seeing something that's like a war. The draw is I'm kind of

00:31:30.280 seeing a modern incarnation of military history. And military history is, I mean, it's the fascinating

00:31:38.600 thing, particularly to middle-aged men. I mean, it is true that as you reach a certain age as a guy,

00:31:44.960 for whatever reason, you tend to become more interested in history and particularly the conflicts

00:31:50.260 of history. And the modern version of football, even though it's in many ways completely divorced

00:31:56.520 from that, you can watch a football game and it'll never come up. And yet there is a tie back to that

00:32:01.820 because, you know, what's the thing about military conflict? It's like the stakes could not be higher,

00:32:08.000 right? Like you live or you die. A mistake you make isn't something that you regret. It means that

00:32:13.900 you were killed or the people around you were killed. Responsibility is high. Like there's a version of

00:32:21.220 that in the football game as well, you know, where you can't talk your way around getting leverage on

00:32:28.380 the tight end. You know, you can't, you can't like make an argument that says I can run this guy down

00:32:34.120 even though he's faster than me. In football, a lot of the sort of visceral things about being alive

00:32:41.800 are present. It's a very intellectual game. It's a very sort of rehearsed and orchestrated game.

00:32:47.340 But when two guys are running at each other and they're going to collide, the outcome is based on

00:32:52.940 physics. It's not based on what we want to have happen. You know, that's what football does in a

00:32:59.540 lot of ways. Football eliminates the possibility of us saying, well, I want the world to be this way.

00:33:05.860 It's like, this is how the world is. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a great point that football is a

00:33:10.580 simulation of war, how it used to be. Because like now with the nuclear bomb, it's like, well,

00:33:15.580 everyone's hosed. Even the fans are, they're hosed. Like you can't do anything about it.

00:33:20.000 In a smaller scale, drone warfare or whatever, you know, so drones do real damage, but it's almost

00:33:26.240 like, you know, it'd be sort of like if, if all wars were fought with robots, would the outcome of

00:33:32.880 those wars still matter? I don't know. There has to be sort of that human consequence. And football is

00:33:41.220 a reminder that human consequences are not just constructions. Like it's real. Yeah.

00:33:47.180 Yeah. And maybe that's why I love trick plays because it's almost like guerrilla warfare. Like

00:33:52.700 you're flipping the script. You're not following the typical script, right? Like that's what guerrilla

00:33:56.820 warfare, they, they, their advantages. You don't follow what you're supposed to do. You don't follow

00:34:01.780 the typical rules of engagement. You do something out of the ordinary. Maybe that's what a trick play is

00:34:06.460 like, ah, I love seeing that flea flicker. It might not work, but if it works, it's just devastating.

00:34:12.440 Well, because that is sort of, you know, the, the counterbalance where the idea that this is really

00:34:18.100 just a game about, you know, size and speed, not on this double reverse. It wasn't on this. It was

00:34:24.660 schematic. It was strategic. It was intellectual. You know, we have these sort of ideas about what the

00:34:30.700 culture of football means. And very often it's seen in a pejorative way. It's like the culture

00:34:36.360 of football is almost like everything we're trying to erase from the world, but it is a complicated

00:34:41.780 game. It is a game based on sort of an understanding of your opponent and analytics and how much practice

00:34:49.220 you've put into it and sort of your own pure originality and creativity. I mean, you know,

00:34:55.120 is football art? Well, I suppose technically not, because usually when we say, you know,

00:34:59.880 what qualifies something as art, there's all these things that have to feel, you know,

00:35:03.760 intentionality and all these things have to sort of be recognized, you know, and football doesn't

00:35:08.560 necessarily do that, but the expression of football, the way football is as something we watch works in

00:35:14.620 the same way. It is an artistic experience. It wasn't there, there's some woman that wrote an essay

00:35:21.120 about the forward pass. I forgot the name. It was, it was really good. And she just talked about how,

00:35:26.280 like, it's just the most beautiful thing in the world to watch an amazing long bomb forward pass.

00:35:32.400 And it's like artistic, unintentionally artistic. But yeah, I mean, I appreciate whenever a team uses

00:35:38.940 artistry. Like, I mean, I'm an OU fan. I still think about that game, I guess it was 2007 when

00:35:45.700 they played Boise State in the Fiesta Bowl. Sure. And they ran the hook and ladder. Yeah. Or the

00:35:49.700 Statue of Liberty. It sucked because OU lost, but I'm like, man, that was awesome.

00:35:53.340 Yeah. I mean, I, I think it could be argued if somebody said to me, what was the greatest

00:35:59.100 five minute span of football in the 21st century, it would be the end of that game.

00:36:05.760 You know, it would be the play, the touchdown, the two point conversion, the player proposing

00:36:10.120 to his girlfriend in the end zone afterwards. The only time in many ways, an upset of that magnitude

00:36:15.920 has happened on that stage. I mean, obviously there've been like bigger upsets, you know,

00:36:20.480 a small school beating a big school, but like that was like a, you know, biggest game of the

00:36:24.520 year for both teams. It was just, it was almost everything that we want football to be in that

00:36:29.360 little encapsulation, you know? Okay. So football is a simulation of war. Another thing you talk

00:36:34.740 about, and I thought this was really interesting. There's like this reverse dynamic going on is that

00:36:41.980 video game football, which is a simulation of football has actually changed the real game of

00:36:49.020 football. Tell us about that. Well, it's strange, but in some ways, I guess it's also predictable.

00:36:56.380 There was a period in the nineties when there was a realization that the goal of a football video

00:37:03.760 game or really any sports video game, basketball, baseball, soccer, all of these was an attempt to

00:37:10.100 somehow find realism. This was a big part when Madden, that football game became this kind of

00:37:16.280 juggernaut. You know, John Madden was involved with the creation of that. And his thing was,

00:37:20.640 I want versimilitude. I want this game to be the, I want it to look the way football looks. In fact,

00:37:26.780 EA sports, when they made that game, they wanted to have it be seven on seven because it would be

00:37:32.460 kind of less stress on the computing. It would be less guys. And John Madden was like, no, it's got

00:37:37.100 to be 11 on 11 or it doesn't count, you know? So this whole thing became this idea. It's like,

00:37:41.120 well, let's try to make a football game. That's realistic. Now there are limitations. Of course you,

00:37:44.900 you make a football game on a video screen, you're going to have capabilities that don't exist in real

00:37:50.220 life. And that's what any kid or anyone playing the football game does. What are the limits of

00:37:55.140 this? What is fascinating is that many of the things that were only attempted or would have

00:38:00.660 only been attempted in a video game in 1997 are now part of football for real. A lot of the throws

00:38:10.300 Mahomes makes, for example, in the past, they would have only been seen as something that could

00:38:15.880 be done in a video game. You wouldn't have, you wouldn't have seen a guy, the throws Patrick

00:38:19.800 Mahomes makes in the past would have got a quarterback benched. And now not only does he do

00:38:24.880 it, but a lot of guys do it. You, you watch the old miss game in their play. It was like their

00:38:29.540 quarterback made three throws that to me seemed like they would have only happened in video games

00:38:34.360 in the past. And in fact, a friend and I have, we've been playing the college football game for

00:38:39.180 years. And I used to always criticize what he was doing as being too unrealistic that that would

00:38:44.700 never happen. Now, a lot of the things that he did in the past are actually part of the way the

00:38:49.420 game is played. Now they're the idea of, you know, of, okay, going forward on fourth down as often as

00:38:56.180 teams do now, a lot of people credit that to analytics. You know, they say like, well, we've just done

00:39:00.860 the math and the value and the risk reward and all this in some ways that started with people whose

00:39:06.660 introduction to play calling came through playing video games that, I mean, those people are adults

00:39:12.160 now. And they were sort of, of the belief that, you know, giving my opponent possession of the ball,

00:39:19.300 even if I gained 35 yards on this punt is not as valuable as the 50, 50 odds of me gaining two yards

00:39:27.200 on fourth and two. Like these are things that start in these video simulations by amateurs, move up to

00:39:33.780 the high school level, eventually are adopted by college coaches, and then become part of the NFL.

00:39:39.260 Like I say, in some ways, it seems strange. It seems weird to imagine that some high school kid in the

00:39:44.500 90s is affecting football now. But in another way, it is predictable because that's what simulations do.

00:39:50.680 Like simulations teach people of new ways to think.

00:39:53.140 Yeah. I mean, I, I, I love playing NCAA college football and my go-to is like, if it's fourth down

00:39:59.860 and I'm in my own territory, like 10 yards from my own end zone, I'm not punting it. I'm just going

00:40:04.800 to do a Hail Mary and see what happens. And oftentimes it works.

00:40:09.340 Well, it, well, it's weird to see. I'm kind of the opposite. When I play, like, I know I've played

00:40:13.100 this game now, you know, thousands of times. I don't know how many hours I've spent for real,

00:40:16.760 but you know, the guy, I don't know. I play against the same guy. He's another sports writer named

00:40:20.980 Michael Weiner. Only person I've ever played against in my life, I think, but it drives him

00:40:25.080 crazy because I am, he feels I'm just so conservative. I'll like, if it's late in the

00:40:30.180 first half, you know, and I have the possession of the ball and I'm deep in my own territory,

00:40:34.280 I will have my quarterback take knees and go to the locker room. And he just finds that

00:40:38.220 maddening. He's like, this is a video game. Why are you doing this? Like we can do whatever

00:40:41.940 we want. You're just trying to make it less fun for both of us. But I love the idea of trying

00:40:46.460 to make it as real as possible. What is interesting is society, at least, or the culture of football

00:40:52.420 has advanced faster than me. I still think that way. I still think like a coach from the 70s.

00:41:00.280 Like I still think that way. That's the way when I watch a football game, that's how I am.

00:41:04.500 And the game itself has moved way past that. That now if you watch, you know, you watch the Rams play,

00:41:10.260 whatever McVeigh is doing things that are far more innovative than I sort of believed were even

00:41:15.540 possible when I sort of got into football, you know, and that's but that's also kind of in a

00:41:21.080 weird, strange way. The conservative draw of the sport is that football is always about the past.

00:41:27.440 In a way, it is tied to the world that we've left and it's still operating in the world that we now

00:41:33.920 inhabit. All right. So another example of the medium changing football. So television changed football.

00:41:40.720 Video games have changed football. Another simulation of football that's having an effect on the game

00:41:45.200 that you talk about is fantasy football. And then fantasy football, it's kind of morphed into

00:41:50.620 gambling, essentially. What do you think is the appeal of fantasy football leagues? I've done

00:41:56.360 one or two when I was in high school. I never really got into it. But some guys like they live for this

00:42:01.380 stuff. And the thing about fantasy football, it is a complete simulation because you're creating

00:42:04.780 these imaginary teams of players who are not on the same teams, trying to create a winning team

00:42:11.060 based on real gameplay. What's the appeal of this weird simulation of football?

00:42:16.760 Well, OK, so fantasy football is really an outgrowth of fantasy baseball. Fantasy baseball

00:42:22.220 starts in the 70s, late 70s and early 80s. And I mean, it may have existed before that,

00:42:27.720 but that's when people started. I mean, there was a big story about an inside sports magazine

00:42:32.060 that went a long way to sort of popularizing it. And then when baseball season would end,

00:42:37.120 because baseball is well suited for the fantasy realm, even though it's a team sport,

00:42:41.820 individual batting, individual pitching, like they're separate from everything else. So

00:42:45.480 statistically, it actually was an accurate reflection. A good fantasy baseball team would

00:42:51.700 have been a good baseball team. We just we just one to one. So football kind of comes out of that

00:42:55.440 guys who play fantasy baseball are like the season's over. Now what do we do? I started playing

00:42:59.900 fantasy football in 1990. That was a very, very different time for lots of reasons, particularly for

00:43:05.860 something like this. It was no yardage, no reception, nothing like that. It was just touchdowns

00:43:10.340 and field goals. All the math was done by hand from taking the newspaper on Monday and Tuesday and

00:43:15.660 going through all the stuff. And what that was at the time initially, it was almost like here's just

00:43:21.900 one more way to experience football. It was additive. Like you can watch the games, you can read about

00:43:27.660 the games, but now you have this other thing you can kind of like play your own little version of it.

00:43:32.380 It was not at the time that connected to gambling like gambling in 1990, 1991. That's kind of like

00:43:40.940 when, you know, Pete Rose was getting banned from baseball. It was still seen as something only really

00:43:45.860 degenerates did because it was illegal and you have a bookie and all these things. Well, it's not very

00:43:50.820 clear that fantasy football was sort of priming the pump for this coming world of gambling. We now live

00:43:56.440 because what fantasy football did was something that was really novel. It could appeal to the kind

00:44:03.520 of person who loved football and didn't necessarily care about the outcome of the game. That you could

00:44:10.900 watch a game and care about the tight end because he was on your fantasy team and it didn't matter to

00:44:16.900 you if they won or lost. In fact, you might want them to lose because that might force the team to throw

00:44:21.480 more in the fourth quarter and your tight end might have more receptions. It individualized the sport

00:44:27.000 and allowed people to think about football in this different way that was divorced sort of from what

00:44:32.360 used to be the only thing that should have mattered, who won or who lost. You now see this all the time.

00:44:37.640 I mean, that's what gambling is. I mean, anybody out there like I'm not a gambler, really. I don't

00:44:42.040 really have the right constitution for it, but I really follow it because I'm really fascinated by it.

00:44:45.780 There's something very strange about, you know, picking a team to win by more than five and a

00:44:51.600 half points and watching them in the fourth quarter when they're up four and just trying

00:44:56.640 to figure out ways. Well, how can, how can they get one more field goal here? How can the, how can

00:45:00.780 it, you know, like you're, you're, you're, you're watching this completely different game. It's still

00:45:04.980 the same game that you would be watching if you had no money involved at all, but now it's an

00:45:10.160 completely evolved thing where there's a game inside the game and really the main player is you

00:45:16.060 fantasy football sort of did that in a way without, you know, now it was also just, you know, I think

00:45:22.880 in a lot of ways, a way for people to connect through a sport, even though they might have

00:45:29.800 asymmetrical interest in that sport. And what I mean by that is I've been in fantasy football leagues

00:45:35.280 that are like in an office, like I'm working in an office and someone wants to start a fantasy

00:45:39.600 football league and the 12 people involved all have different levels of interest in football.

00:45:45.100 There's a few people who live and die for it and would watch it every weekend of their life if

00:45:49.100 they could. And a few people who wouldn't watch it all and only follow it because they have a fantasy

00:45:53.820 team. And yet the way fantasy football operates, especially through the internet, everyone is

00:45:59.940 equal. You know, the internet does the work for you. It tells you who to draft. It tells you who to

00:46:05.720 start. So you don't need to be an expert to win your fantasy league. I'm in a college football fantasy

00:46:11.540 league. The league is called Kiffinology. We call it when he ended after Lane Kiffin. This was back

00:46:16.300 when he was not now. This was years ago when he was a totally different kind of figure. And a guy who

00:46:21.780 dominates that league, the name of his team is, who is Lane Kiffin? He had no idea who Lane Kiffin was

00:46:28.240 when he joined this league. And yet he's become by far the best owner in this thing because it's not

00:46:34.400 really about knowing about football. It's being able to understand the outcome of past games. Yeah.

00:46:40.900 Well, I mean, so, okay, if television has changed football, video games have changed football. Do you

00:46:46.500 think gambling, fantasy football is changing football, the actual game? Well, I don't know if

00:46:52.880 it is changing the actual game between the lines on the field. It's changing everything else though.

00:47:00.200 I think that all the sports leagues, including the NFL, understand that they need to have a

00:47:08.080 relationship with gambling, not just to flourish, but potentially to exist in the future. That right

00:47:17.560 now, you know, the NFL is this monolith due to wealth that is mainly acquired and accumulated

00:47:26.180 through advertising. That because football is so popular and because it's a live event and it's the

00:47:32.600 only thing that, you know, if you make, you know, Pepsi or you make, you know, Volvos or whatever,

00:47:38.520 and you want to reach the largest possible audience and expose them to these ads, football is the best

00:47:44.640 means for that. I don't know if that will always be the case. And if that starts to change, there's

00:47:50.100 going to have to be a way to continue, not just this level of revenue we have now, but to keep

00:47:55.980 increasing it because football can't operate in a static sense. It can only get larger, you know,

00:48:01.580 and I think gambling might be the only way to keep that happening. I mean, I felt that one of the

00:48:08.420 very, you know, there were many very instructive things about COVID, but one of them was, it was

00:48:13.920 like, they still got to play all these football and basketball and baseball games. They got to still

00:48:18.260 play these big 10 football games to no one in the stands. They got to do it. And it was like, wow,

00:48:24.120 this is a little more fragile than I realized that the entire world can essentially shut down,

00:48:30.360 but we still have to make sure Rutgers plays Iowa. Like it has to happen. I mean, that just shows you

00:48:37.880 how much of the foundation of these things is brittle because it's like, it's not that it's too

00:48:44.200 big to fail. It's too big to stop. It's got to keep going, you know? Yeah. Well, I want to talk about

00:48:50.040 the fragility of football and maybe the potential future of the game. But before we go, one question

00:48:54.720 I want to ask, because I thought it was really interesting. You have this whole chapter about who's

00:48:57.640 the greatest player of all time in football. Most people would say Tom Brady because he's won all the

00:49:02.680 Super Bowls. You make the case that it was Jim Thorpe. And as an Okie, I was ecstatic to see this

00:49:09.300 because, you know, growing up in elementary school, middle school, high school, you learn about Jim

00:49:13.540 Thorpe, greatest athlete of all time. You hear the story of him rummaging through the trash can to find

00:49:18.140 a track shoe so he could run this race and win it. He played football. He didn't play football for

00:49:24.120 very long. We don't have any footage of him playing football. How did you then determine that he was

00:49:30.460 the greatest football player of all time? Well, you know, that's a, that's an interesting section

00:49:34.780 of the book that a lot of people bring up to me because, you know, on the surface, it's kind of

00:49:40.620 like chock full of football discussion, discussion of players, discussion of Randy Moss, discussion of

00:49:48.060 Tom Brady, this, you know, but in a larger sense, it is kind of an ideological point about the concept

00:49:56.000 of greatness. And how does one gauge that, right? Like if we go simply by, you know, who would be

00:50:05.420 the most outstanding physical specimen to have on your team right now, it kind of becomes a

00:50:13.520 completely irrelevant argument because what that's going to mean is that the best player of all time

00:50:18.540 is always going to be who is the best player right now. I mean, any average quarterback in the NFL

00:50:26.380 right now, if you put him back into the 1980s and he's a legend, I mean, he's going to be on par

00:50:31.960 with Marino and Elway and those guys just because the way that physicality changes and skills change

00:50:37.720 and all that stuff, it's like modernity is always going to reward whatever is the greatest thing in

00:50:42.420 the moment. But that to me is kind of the wrong way to think about greatness. To me, greatness is

00:50:48.940 the creation of archetypes. It's the first elite version of something that is still contained through

00:50:57.460 all the latter versions. In other words, it's like, it's almost the invention of the idea of what being

00:51:03.500 a great football player is. And that to me does seem to be Jim Thorpe. Okay. So Jim Thorpe was playing

00:51:09.020 in the 1920s. It's an 11 man sport at that time. It's four downs. It's six points for a touchdown.

00:51:15.560 Yes. The guys aren't wearing face masks. It's a primitive version of the game compared to what we

00:51:20.980 do now. It's a primitive version of the game even compared to the 1950s. But yet what was great about

00:51:27.940 Jim Thorpe were the core characteristics of what we think about a great football player now, which is

00:51:33.980 basically speed, strength, agility, the ability to understand these positions and master them to be

00:51:40.400 the person other players aspired to be like, you know, that is the foundation of what a football

00:51:46.260 player is. It kind of goes back to Jim Thorpe. Yeah. I mean, that is sort of what I'm talking about in

00:51:51.880 that section. That's sort of the idea of that, like our understanding of what a great football player

00:51:57.800 is or what a great football player looks like was kind of in the DNA of Thorpe, the experience of

00:52:05.480 Thorpe. Yeah. I like how you make the distinction in that chapter, the difference between greatness and

00:52:10.440 achievement. So you mentioned the fragility of the game. People might think, well, how is football

00:52:15.920 fragile? It's the most popular thing on television. It makes billions of dollars, billions and billions of

00:52:21.880 dollars. There's no way that this thing could go away. But you make the case, we might have a world

00:52:27.080 where football, it might exist, but it's not going to exist how it exists today. So why do you think

00:52:32.740 football 30, 40, 50 years from now might not be a hyper object anymore? Well, I mean, the simplest

00:52:40.040 answer is that the world's going to change. And when the world changes, large objects have a harder time

00:52:47.200 transitioning than small objects. You know, it's like the largeness of football is both its sort of value

00:52:54.620 in the present and its danger in the future. Like I said, like football, it's not just that football is so

00:53:00.280 big, it can't in any ways collapse, but it's like it needs to keep expanding. It's only set up to become

00:53:06.660 a bigger and bigger thing. Every year, the revenue has to go up. Every year, the popularity needs to go

00:53:12.960 up. They need to play games in England and in Germany and in Mexico City. They need to make it larger and larger and

00:53:18.200 larger because the way it is created and the amount of money it consumes, the amount of money the players

00:53:24.160 consume and the franchises consume consistently goes up. It just keeps going up and they're never going

00:53:28.800 to go back. There's never going to be a point where, you know, the players union would say like,

00:53:33.620 okay, well, I'll take a pay cut because it's good for the league. Like that will never happen.

00:53:37.720 So what the NFL and pro football and all pro sports in general are dependent on is that the amount of

00:53:45.200 money that they earn from ad revenue is always going to be able to sort of outstrip the costs

00:53:53.260 and that every year the contract for who gets to show the NFC and the AFC that Fox or NBC or CBS or

00:54:00.840 ABC or these places, they'll always pay more because it's, you know, worth so much to them.

00:54:04.880 But that is dependent on advertisers seeing advertising as the same value it has now. I think

00:54:12.100 that this is going to change. I predict that over the next 40 or 50 years, there is going to be

00:54:17.260 a pretty massive sea change over what is seen as the value of a commercial and the value of

00:54:23.840 advertising. You know, we've never really been able to prove that advertising works at all. We know it

00:54:30.840 does in terms of introducing a product to people that like if, if someone has never, ever heard of

00:54:36.700 Budweiser before and they see a Budweiser commercial, now they know it exists. But then if they see

00:54:41.300 15,000 more commercials for Budweiser, it's not going to necessarily make them thirsty. It's just

00:54:46.360 the best thing we have. Like we don't know that advertising works, but there's kind of a tautology.

00:54:51.440 Well, the most successful places spend a lot on advertising. It must work or whatever. I think

00:54:56.620 that's going to shift. And when it shifts, it's going to shift really fast. That suddenly there's

00:55:01.700 going to be an understanding that spending a bunch of money on a commercial and then spending more money

00:55:06.420 to have that commercial shown during the Super Bowl or whatever is going to evaporate. And when

00:55:12.380 that happens, there's going to be this real sort of grinding moment of friction where it's like,

00:55:17.500 well, now the NFL has to work. We're not going to be able to expand. We're not going to be as much

00:55:21.860 money as we used to. You know, we do contract teams. Do we change these contracts? The players

00:55:27.320 will strike. Now there have been strikes in the past before in the 80s, you know, but this will be

00:55:31.700 a combination of a strike and a lockout because the owners will see the same thing. They will see

00:55:36.580 like, well, we're going to lose money by playing these games and the players still want more money.

00:55:40.620 They still want to raise. So there'll be this big stoppage. Now, if that happened right now,

00:55:45.900 today, there'd be a national freak out. Okay. If football was suddenly gone every weekend,

00:55:51.380 people would be like, Oh, what am I going to do on Sunday? What am I going to do on, you know,

00:55:54.880 what am I going to gamble on? What about my fantasy team? What about my insight? It would be,

00:55:58.840 you know, that might not be true. And I don't think it will be true in 40 or 50 years because

00:56:04.840 the personal relationship to football that we had for most of the 20th century is kind of

00:56:11.220 disappearing. There's a bifurcation now between the very small sliver of people who have a personal

00:56:17.700 relationship to the game and the many, many more people who just kind of see it as an entertaining

00:56:22.640 distraction, an entertaining distraction they love. And what's that they see is something that's like,

00:56:27.760 you know, maybe intrinsic to who they are, but not in a, a way that sort of touches who they

00:56:33.240 actually, who they actually are, I guess, you know, it's like, it's, it'll be something like,

00:56:37.200 well, I watch football. Cause you, my dad watched it and he didn't play either. My grandpa maybe did

00:56:41.320 like, it'll just separate and separate and separate. So when this sort of work stoppage occurs,

00:56:46.880 people are going to care much less than we would expect them to much less than they would care today.

00:56:52.960 Um, the kind of the comparison I use in the book is how, you know, 1920 or whatever horse racing was

00:56:58.820 one of the three biggest sports. And that was because people still had a relationship to horses

00:57:03.800 in all walks of life. Like even if they lived in an urban area, they had grown up in a rural area and

00:57:10.040 their father had owned horses or, or they had a blue collar job where horses did the labor or,

00:57:15.080 you know, or like, you know, I mentioned out like in Chicago in 1900, it was called the city of horses.

00:57:20.460 Even if you lived in Chicago, horses are everywhere. So horse racing was a natural

00:57:24.740 extension of that. We had a relationship to the horse. Okay. For a long time, most people in

00:57:30.980 America had some relationship to football, even if they didn't play, it was something that their

00:57:36.280 friends played or, or that meant a lot in their high school or college or all these things. It was

00:57:42.620 the one time their family was all together on Sunday watching the same thing. I think when that

00:57:47.180 disappears, a super lucrative hyper object becomes extremely fragile. Okay. So fewer people are

00:57:55.180 playing tackle football. So people are going to have less of a personal connection to the game.

00:57:59.960 And I think too, people are going to lose a connection in the game just because with NIL

00:58:05.180 and portal transfers, people are just going to lose their connection to the college game. Like the

00:58:11.200 teams are always changing. It's all just so mercenary. So you lose that connection to your,

00:58:15.320 your hometown team or the team you root for. And then the leagues rely on the networks paying tons

00:58:21.340 of money for the rights to air these football games. I think it's something like 12 billion for

00:58:26.380 the NFL. It's billions to air college games. And right now networks are willing to pay that money.

00:58:33.040 They're willing to pony up because the advertising is valuable enough to justify it. But eventually

00:58:39.900 advertising won't have the same ROI. So networks won't pay as much. And the NFL, its model is based

00:58:49.080 on, you know, it, it, the rights costs going up and up and up. Um, so when the money stops going up,

00:58:54.900 it all start to collapse. And this reminds me, um, of a guy we had on, on the podcast a while back ago,

00:59:01.360 who's an expert on roaming gladiatorial games. And he said, this is one of the reasons why

00:59:06.920 they disappeared. They just got bigger and bigger and more and more elaborate. And eventually they

00:59:12.560 were too expensive to put on. So they went away. Yeah. They were trying to do things like they

00:59:16.880 would fill us Coliseum with water and have like, you know, naval battles on this. It was like,

00:59:22.280 I'm sure that was essentially the super bowl of its time. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny. Cause people

00:59:27.220 often kind of compare football games to gladiatorial games and the same fate might happen to football,

00:59:32.920 American football. Well, Chuck, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn

00:59:36.200 more about the book in your work? Well, I mean, if you want to learn about the book, you got to buy

00:59:41.100 the book, I guess in terms of learning about it and learning about me. I don't know. I, I guess all

00:59:46.580 my old books, I don't really do much social media anymore. I do these podcasts when people ask me

00:59:52.220 to be on them, but, uh, I'm a, yeah, I, I, I, it's, I, I, I don't know. I don't know how to tell

00:59:59.680 people besides. You're a hermit. I love it. Yeah. Kind of. Yeah. All right. Well, Chuck 0.99

01:00:03.860 Klosterman, thanks for time. It's been a pleasure. Thanks. My guest today was Chuck Klosterman. He's

01:00:08.920 the author of the book football. It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Check out

01:00:13.040 our show notes at aom.is slash football, where we find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic.

01:00:22.220 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AWIN podcast. If you haven't done so already,

01:00:28.840 I'd appreciate it. If you take one minute to get us reviewed up a podcast or Spotify,

01:00:32.240 it helps out a lot. And if you've done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the

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01:00:39.540 thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it's Brett McKay reminding us how to listen

01:00:42.680 to the AWIN podcast, but put what you've heard into action.

01:00:52.220 Thank you.

The Art of Manliness - January 20, 2026

How Football Took Over America — and Could Collapse

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