NFL
Posted: December 14, 2025 Filed under: sports Leave a comment
I’m with Rob: just a fan of the whole league.
JASON: Is any sport ever going to come close to NFL? No, it’s not. And here’s why. No other sport plays this many games at one time. At the NFL one o’clock time slot and the four o’clock time slot, you know you’re going to get so much action in the span of eight hours. It’s the greatest. That’s why everybody looks forward to it every single week. It’s all at the same time. I’m sitting in the stadium, and I’m trying to watch the game, and I’m also on my app watching YouTube TV, other games. I’m checking the scores on ESPN. I’m like, Dude, being a fan, you don’t know this yet because you’re still playing. Being a fan is fucking incredible. You can watch so much shit.
Travis: I’ve been a fan first. You’re acting like, I haven’t been a fan of this my entire fucking life.
Jason: You’re going to find out. You’re going to be seeing it a lot more when you’re fucking at the game at one o’clock and all this shit’s happening across the league and you’re fucking- That was at your fucking one o’clock games. All right, whatever. But you don’t appreciate it the same way until you’re done. You’re still so focused into the Chiefs. I still love the Eagles, but now I’m looking at more of everything happening across the league. One o’clock on Sunday is like, fucking, let’s go, baby. God damn, that’s a fun time to watch a football.
Travis: Power me up, man.
Doesn’t baseball play many games at the same time? No matter. The Kelce brothers, on their podcast, praising the NFL product. Their 1pm in 10am on the West Coast.
To this casual fan? The NFL is a fantastic product. Every catch is impressive. Every tackle. Every time a player stands up after getting drilled into the ground by 300 lbs of pure muscle. It’s compelling.
I only know it as TV, and it’s good TV. This NYT piece captures the effort, skill, money, thought and energy that goes into storytelling the NFL’s marquee Sunday Night Football broadcast.
Take away the NFL and broadcast television would be dead.
CBS said a record 57.2 million viewers tuned in for the Thanksgiving Day NFL match between the Dallas Cowboys and the Kansas City Chiefs, demonstrating again the sport’s popularity with US audiences.
from Bloomberg.
And then there’s college football! Where every game has meaning. A potential national champion can’t lose a single game without risk. And each broadcast is also a travel show about Gainesville, Tuscaloosa, Knoxville. There’s pageantry and 80,000 excited kids!
On an October Sunday Night Football broadcast (Lions/Chiefs) Chris Collinsworth said something like “well you know the season really starts at Thanksgiving…” was a funny thing to say. Why did I just watch this then? But I had, and I enjoyed it, because it was a tense battle of 70 odd extreme athletes with various skillsets, fighting and performing at the highest levels.
The American public has responded. TV is football:
Around 2015, with the release of the movie Concussion, came the peak of a moral panic about head injuries, CTE and the terrible human costs associated with getting smashed this much. These gladiator games. At least one NFL player was a straight up murderer, did that have anything to do with his banged up head? Maybe that was an unrelated matter (even worse?).
The problem hasn’t gone away. On a recent Thursday Night Football game, you could see Cowboys receiver Ceedee Lamb’s head hit the ground, and then he has an unsettling reaction that could be some kind of brain glitch. It’s distressing to watch.
The league has taken this seriously. The history of football is evolutions to keep it acceptably risky. Here’s a historical essay from Granta that reviews all that (didn’t realize Dwight Eisenhower played football against Jim Thorpe.)
We, the American people, accept some amount of possible lifetime damage to the players. After all, they accept it! They love it! We the people watching vote with our eyeballs. Give us our circus! The danger aspect might be part of why we like it. This is high risk!
Take the dark aspects of football and invert: is it possible this regulated controlled game and ritual might be a healthy release valve for deep, troubling urges in the American spirit? Without football, might all that gladiatorial energy, intensity and violence blow out in much more harmful ways?
Maybe believing that is just a way to rationalize my enjoyment.
I don’t even really have a team. When I was a kid I liked the Patriots so much I got Irving Friar’s autograph at training camp. I still root for the Patties, Drake Maye and Mike Vrabel are fun, but they don’t move my heart. Should I root for the Chargers? I like handsome Justin Herbert, son of Eugene Oregon and former Oregon star, who just won a game with a broken hand after Hart tipped the ball to Jefferson to beat the Eagles. (There was good drama when he was impatient about his postgame interview.)
Who’s playing doesn’t matter that much to me. Like John McCain I’d watch the bedwetters play the thumbsuckers. I like the acoustic quality, the sound of the broadcast, the rhythm of it. The announcers have gotten so good at finding and developing narratives, stories of personalities, characters, stakes.
I was watching UNLV play Boise State the other day in the Mountain West championship. I was struck by the quality of the color commentator, he could really lay out missed coverage, the nature of the plays, who screwed up what, intentions vs. execution. I looked it up and it was RGIII!
I found Bill Belichick’s book, The Art of Winning, to be not urgent to finish. Belichick’s central message of work hard, do your job, just isn’t that interesting to read about. It’s not hard to understand, it just takes discipline to execute every day. There aren’t enough anecdotes. Belichick, we know, can be really interesting on the details of football strategy and the history of the game. We know that he’s probably read every book on football strategy out there (see our review of Halberstam’s book on Belichick, Education of a Coach.) He could’ve made real contribution with a dense book of football knowledge, even if that doesn’t seem likely to be popular as a book on “winning.”
Pete Carroll’s book is fun, like drinking a fountain soda. Invigorating. Maybe I’m just more of a Pete Carroll type.
If Belichick wrote a book about his personal life, that was a true My Heart Laid Bare, I’d be first in line to buy the hardcover.
The job I want in the NFL is owner.
Now why didn’t Chuck Klosterman’s book about football come out in time for Christmas? I guess it’ll be out in time for the Super Bowl?
Helytimes 