How Football Took Over America — and Could Collapse
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 1 minute
Words per Minute
188.62636
Summary
Chuck Klosterman s new book, Football, helps us see the game from unexpected angles, and argues that football isn t just a sport, it s a kind of national operating system. After the show s over, check out our show notes at awimis.net/football.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the AOM Podcast,
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American football is so big, so braided into our weekends, our language, and our culture,
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that it can be hard to see it clearly as a whole.
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In his new book, Football, Chuck Klosterman helps us see the game from unexpected angles
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and argues that football isn't just a sport, it's a kind of national operating system.
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Chuck explains how it became the dominant televised spectacle in America,
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despite having elements that should count against it.
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We then explore football as a simulation of war, of reality, and even of itself,
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and how its simulation through video games has actually fed back into the sport.
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We also talk about who Chuck thinks is the GOAT,
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hint, it's not Tom Brady, and the difference between achievement and greatness.
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At the end of our conversation, Chuck lays out a compelling argument
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for why football may be headed for a steep and surprising fall.
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After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash football.
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All right, Chuck Klosterman, welcome to the show.
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So you have written several cultural explorations during your career,
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and in your latest book, Football, you dig into the game of American football
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and try to suss out how it has influenced American culture in different ways
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and how American culture has influenced football.
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The publisher's description of the book calls football a hyperobject.
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What is that, and why is football a hyperobject?
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A hyperobject basically is sort of this philosophical term
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that means something is so large and so intertwined and imbued
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in every aspect of society that it's impossible to see the thing in totality,
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that we only are really understanding the part of it that we're engaging with.
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Everything around it is still sort of informing that idea,
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but it is pretty much invisible simply due to size.
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I mean, it's like, I suppose an obvious example would be like, you know, to say the internet.
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It's so large that we all understand what it is,
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but it is impossible to sort of understand it in an all-encompassing way
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unless you step back and say almost nothing in specific, you know.
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And I think that accurately, that's sort of an analysis of how football sort of operates
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in American society that we certainly feel like we understand it.
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We can see it on like a one-to-one basis and really engage in it in a really personal way.
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But it is involved in the larger culture in a way that is not only impossible to see,
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but sort of unconsciously understood, even by those who don't really care about it as a game.
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So, yeah, football is the most popular sport in America.
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I mean, you highlight the fact that if you look at the most viewed shows on TV,
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I think it's like the top 25 are football games, basically.
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Well, yeah, I mean, in 2023, of the 100 most watched broadcasts in the United States that year,
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93 were NFL games, and then I think three more were college games.
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Yeah. And then, I mean, also just the football metaphors have just seeped into our everyday
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conversation. I mean, we make analogies to it all the time in work, in life, et cetera.
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Well, sure. I mean, sometimes, you know, there's obvious examples, like, you know,
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people using things like a political football or whatever. It's like that's like a,
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that's kind of the straightforward use of it. This popularity thing, though, it's actually more
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fascinating, I think, than people accept, even though we all know it, right? There are very few,
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I can't think of anybody who would be a more than casual follower of sports, who would not concede
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that, you know, football is the most popular sport in the United States, but its popularity,
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it's like a different version of it. I mean, there are many countries in Europe, or it is very obvious
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that not only is soccer the most popular sport, in some ways, it is all their sports. It is almost
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their combination of football, basketball, and baseball kind of all put together to this one thing
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that's really shared. And yet you would not find 93 of the hundred most popular television broadcasts
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in France be a soccer. Like, it just doesn't happen. I mean, like, you know, baseball is beloved
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in Japan, you know, yet at the same time, its popularity there is in no way a mirror of the
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way football is popular here. And that's also particularly interesting because football is
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an ethnocentric sport. It's played in the United States, Canada, a little bit in Germany, you know,
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here and there, there'll be a few places that'll play it, but it's really just in this country.
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And in a sense, that makes it particularly reflective of our society in this, you know,
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it kind of along the idea of like American exceptionalism or whatever. It's like only in
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America does this thing exist. And only in America could this thing have the magnitude that it does.
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And what's pretty crazy about football being the most popular sport in America,
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you talk about this in the book, and I was nodding my head the entire time.
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It's a really complicated game. Like you, you note that football is probably the only sport that you
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can't play recreationally. There aren't pickup football games. There are touch football games,
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there's flag football, but it's not actual pads on pad football with 22 players. I mean,
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like I played football in high school. The last time I played football was in high school. I remember
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my last game as a senior, my coach said, for a lot of you guys, this is gonna be the last time you
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play football. I was like, wow. And it's true. What was your experience with the sport? Did you
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I did. Now I went to a very small high school in North Dakota. So I played nine man football.
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Now that is a version of 11 man football where on offense, you essentially remove the offensive
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tackles. On defense, you essentially remove the cornerbacks. Okay. The idea, of course,
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is to have it be as close to 11 man football as possible. So schematically, it's actually very
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similar. It's just for, you know, schools with extremely low enrollment. People play both sides
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of the ball of the punter as well. But beyond that, you know, coming from a town of 500 people
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where the high school is really the center of the town, even more so than any of the churches,
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the town is really built around its school in a place like that. And your football program was
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strong and it just sort of imbued every aspect of life. It's hard to even, I mean, like, I can't
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really imagine what the experience of high school would have been like without sports and particularly
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football involved. Now, my kids are going to have the opposite experience. It's not going to be the
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way it is for them. But I mean, that's how it was for me. Then, you know, I went to college and
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I got into journalism and initially I was a sports reporter and I covered the football team.
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I then moved into this phase professionally where I was like a rock critic and a film critic and sort
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of more of a straightforward cultural journalist. I never stopped watching football, though. That
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was always there. And then about 20 years ago, I started thinking about the idea of football as
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having a meaning that despite being impossible to escape, is still somewhat underrated, particularly
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as a way to understand the last half of the 20th century. And what you're saying in general is,
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you know, it's a very true thing. So soccer is the most popular sport in the world. Everyone
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understands that. One of the keys to this is that it is the easiest sport to play in the sense that all
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you need is one kickable object and two teams. You can go to the most remote place on any continent,
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except Antarctica, obviously, and you can like see people playing soccer. It's very easy to do.
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Basketball is a sport you can play by yourself. You know, the idea of shooting a jump shot alone
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in a gym is not like being in a basketball game, but the mechanics of that activity are identical.
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Baseball takes space in a lot of guys, but yet we've built this whole superstructure of
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recreational softball to kind of simulate that through life. If you're somebody who was a track
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star in high school, you can still go running. If you were a swimming star, you can still go to the
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pool. You can bowl your whole life. You can play golf your whole life, but not football like you
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and I could go out in my yard and throw a football around. We could even get two more guys and run
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little patterns, play offense, defense. It has no relationship to the game for real. Like the only
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version of football that really matters is the official version. It can't really be simulated.
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And that should be a detriment, right? Like if you were inventing football for the first time,
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if we didn't have these sports and we were inventing them, the fact that it's impossible
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to recreationally simulate should be a real problem. It should make people feel distant
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from the game. But it appears that the opposite has happened. It feels that this distance has sort
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of in a weird way, democratized the experience of watching it. That we're all kind of in the same
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position where we have this understanding that is not really inherent to who we are. It's not our
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own experience. It's just like learned information that we sort of all pretend is something that we
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can easily sort of understand. Yeah. And very few people have actually played football. I think you
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did the numbers. It was ended up being like maybe 0.2% of the population in America. Oh, way lower,
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way lower. Like 0.02. I mean, you know, it's like, there's like a, there's a, maybe a million kids
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playing in high school and then you have a couple thousand playing in college and, uh, you know,
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a small number, whatever, you know, roster size, you know, times 32 in the NFL, you know, if you
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include the practice squads, you got some people in Canada and that's it. It is not a universal
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experience in any way. You know, it's exclusionary by design. Yeah. So, I mean, what, maybe we'll get to
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this through our conversation, but like first blush, why do you think so many people like watching
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football if they've never played football? And it's this kind of complex game that, I mean,
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even talk about, there's not a lot of action in it. I mean, it's action packed, but there's a lot
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of standing around walking between downs while the, the chains get moved. I mean, okay. So this is
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the mysterious thing. Okay. I'd mentioned earlier, like, you know, if football was being invented now,
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we would see its exclusionary nature as a detriment. An even greater detriment would be seen during like
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the theoretical pitch meeting. If we're trying to all come up with new ideas for sports is if
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someone were to say, well, you know, in a three hour game, there's actually 11 minutes of action.
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It was this kind of famous wall street journal article where they did research on all these NFL
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games. And they realized that the average three hour NFL football telecast involves 11 minutes of
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activity. Now on paper, that just seems insane. If someone said, Hey, I made a three hour movie,
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but actually there's only things happening in 11 minutes of it. People be like, what is that?
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Like that's the antithesis of what entertainment is. But what is strange is that the way those 11
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minutes are broken down into these little bursts of activity with these gaps in between, where you
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can think about what you saw, you can think about what you're going to see next, and you can think
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about whatever you want, even if it's divorced from the game you're experiencing. That is part of
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like almost the magical quality of football as a television enterprise. Like it doesn't seem like
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what we should watch, but it is. And the evidence of that is overwhelming.
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You mentioned television. Okay. Football is a television enterprise. This is one of your main
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theses in the book. It's this line. I loved it. I have a friend who's a media theory professor here
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at the University of Tulsa. He loved it. The line is this. You said, football is a purely mediated
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experience, even when there is no media involved. What do you mean by that?
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Oh, yeah. Okay. So that's the key point to this, this whole idea. So, okay. So football is invented
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a little bit after the Civil War. And, you know, the reason for this, it's arguable, but there's
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this sort of built-in belief that there were people in the wake of the Civil War who was like,
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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
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of came up with this sport of football. Now, whether or not that's exactly true or partially
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true, it doesn't really matter. Regardless, for the next 70 or 80 years, football evolves into
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something that's kind of close to what we imagine now. And then it intersects with the inception of
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television. And by chance, no one made this happen. It just worked out this way. Football is the
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perfect product for the television experience. And television is the perfect vessel for showing
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what football is. No one has ever constructed a better TV experience than the way football worked
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out accidentally. And it kind of begins with the kind of famous championship game between the Colts
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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.
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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
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relationship to television is really the driving force between how it has become this kind of
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cultural monolith. Our understanding of football is through the TV experience, even for people like you
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and I who have played. Like if someone were to say to you, like, imagine a football game.
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I am guessing the first thing you imagined was the way it looks on television, even though you've
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played it, that you almost imagine that shot from that midfield, you know, where you can't really see
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depth and the game is being played horizontal across the screen. You can't even see the free safety.
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It's not even the ideal way to see it if you really care. But it is the way we understand it.
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And then this is part of the reason why I really think that in some ways, football is the perfect
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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?
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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.
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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
00:22:05.100
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
00:24:05.580
stupid TV timeouts. It wasn't like a timeout because like the team needed a timeout. It was
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.
00:26:49.780
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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
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
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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
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