More NFL, and Klosterman on books

Chuck Klosterman was on Bill Simmons podcast, talking about his new book about football:

When that book Abundance came out last year, okay, now that seems like a book I would read, right? I never did read it, although I completely informed about it because I heard it on podcast nine different times. Sometimes I think that the way things work now is you write a non-fiction book and maybe 150,000 people read it, but most people experience it through this, through these ancillary moments of people discussing the book. I understand that there are people listening to this podcast who I think would be prime people to buy this, and they probably won’t. They’ll be like, I just I don’t buy books anymore. It’s really hard to sell books to men, particularly. So if you want to talk about specifics of the book, that’s fine. I don’t mind.

At first what Klosterman had to say was similar to our own recent post about the popularity of the NFL. But then Klosterman kept going, and showed why he’s one of the world’s best take-havers:

One thing that’s often mentioned, particularly by people who don’t like football, is a very famous Wall Street Journal article from 2011, where these guys studied these pro football games and they were like, Do you know in a three-hour telecast of an NFL game, there’s 11 minutes of action? You’re sitting there for three hours and there’s 11 minutes of action. Now, if somebody was inventing football right now for the first time, there was no way that would get through the pitch meeting. If they said this is a three-hour sport and there’s actually about 11 minutes of action, people would say, That’s insane. No one’s going to sit through that. Nobody wants that. That’s a huge flaw. But it’s not a flaw. As it turns out, 11 minutes is the perfect amount. Because these things you’re talking about, they happen in between play. Phase. Football has this accidental upside, which is super intense, hyper-action in this small window of time, maybe seven seconds. And then there’s This time when you can think about what you saw, what you will see next, what was the meaning of that? Maybe the analyst will describe what we actually saw in a way that we couldn’t comprehend.

Or maybe I’ll hate the analyst and think he’s an idiot. Sure. Either way, I win.

Or you can think about something else. You can talk to somebody about something that’s not involved with the actual football game, or you can talk about the football game. This experience, which seems like it should be a mistake. It should be a mistake that’s something that lasts that long has that little amount of action. This That is one of these things that… It’s one of the many counterintuitive things about football, in that the TV experience is great despite the fact that it would never get through a focus group. The fact that somebody said, The main view you will have in a football game, most of the time, will not show you all the players. You will not be able to see the free safeties. When the quarterback drops back and throws the ball, you will have a moment where you will have no idea if the guy is open or covered. These things that seem like they should be problems actually create this internal psychological tension that makes this experience so enriching. I really believe that football, the reason that it is the best thing television has ever been built with, is because even a bad football game is weirdly watchable in a way that isn’t true about other things.