football -- 3/27/2026

27 Mar 2026

football -- 3/27/2026

0 COMMENTS

Today's selection -- from Football by Chuck Klosterman. “The difference between an informed fan and a casual fan is the ability to see order within disorder”:

“Dave Hickey's 'The Heresy of Zone Defense' ranks among the finest essays ever written about any sport. Using a memorable reverse layup by hoop legend Julius Erving as a proxy, Hickey (an art critic) argues that the rules of basketball (and almost anything else) should not attempt to govern, but to liberate. Hickey believed official regulations and unofficial conventions should always be designed to foster freedom, and that any directive fostering the opposite should be altered. His outlook on basketball intertwines with a larger conviction that what's beautiful and electrifying about any activity is its extemporaneous nature, conveyed through the creativity of its participants. This view, first published in 1995, has become the standard position for basketball essentialists.”

"'Basketball, unlike football with its prescribed routes, is an improvisational game, similar to jazz,' the former NBA coach Phil Jackson wrote in his 2004 memoir, and that's a reasonable way to appreciate the genius of Dr. J or Kobe Bryant or Nikola Jokić. It's an idealization of basketball at its imaginative apex, and it's how most people prefer to think about the aesthetics of sports. We watch a game to watch its players, so the normal wish is to grant those players the maximum amount of freedom. The irony is that the more this thinking has become normative, the more every American sport--with the exception of one aberrant outlier--has evolved away from its central identity, diminishing its symbolic stature. The aberration is football. Football flourishes by making freedom impossible.”

The football field at The Dome at America's Center in St. Louis as seen from behind one end zone.

“Every sport involves some level of strategic control, and the more you understand that sport, the more that control becomes visible. Ice hockey appears anarchic and random to a person who rarely watches it, but once that person learns that something called a wheel breakout exists, he or she can suddenly recognize when it happens in real time. The difference between an informed fan and a casual fan is the ability to see order within disorder; it's nonsensically satisfying to locate the levers of control--we're trained to view as suffocating and unfun. What makes football different is that the control is so ingrained and pervasive that we stop thinking about it as control. Instead, we understand it as the game's natural state, and any moment of true improvisation becomes a transfixing exception. This has been true since its earliest days, personified by the influence of Walter Camp, the so-called Father of American Football. A player and coach at Yale near the end of the nineteenth century, Camp was the driving force and central architect behind how the rules of football were constructed. A mainstay at the rule-making meetings for the fledgling Intercollegiate Football Association, he doggedly pushed for a logic-based approach, continually trying to negate any element of chance from how football games were decided. It was Camp who came up with the modern system of downs and the scoring framework, and it was Camp who decided that 11 players per side was the correct number of participants. Camp was so obsessed with the laws of football that the stress eventually killed him; he died in a hotel room in 1925, having traveled to New York to attend yet. another rule-related meeting. If Camp were alive today, he'd be delighted by how many of his rules are still relevant to the contemporary version of football. But he'd be even more pleased--and possibly dumbfounded--by the depth to which his scientific approach has infiltrated every facet of the game. Camp's quasi-rationalist philosophy is not merely the foundation for how football is officiated and scored. Camp's philosophy is the spiritual principle for how football is played, how it is understood, and how it is controlled.”

“Describing how NFL football transpires on a play-by-play basis is like trying to explain the incremental mechanics of a nuclear reactor. The levels of editing are so unlike every other sport that there's a tendency to talk around it, almost as if what's transpiring on the field were somehow a surprise to everyone involved. But there are few surprises in football, and when there are, it usually means someone fucked up. The most elementary of plays--a handoff to the tailback, running between the right tackle and the tight end--is the final manifestation of a decision made by an offensive coordinator sitting in a glass booth hundreds of feet above the field, relayed to the sideline over a landline phone, and transmitted into the wireless headset of the quarterback. The description of the play is converted into a code, decrypted with the assistance of the QB's laminated wristband. The quarterback can then run the play or call an audible, depending on how the defense is aligned (a calculation made by the opposing team's defensive coordinator, generally operating from the sideline but receiving real-time tactical data from a different assistant watching in a different glass booth). Whom each lineman blocks is dictated by the defensive configuration, with every foreseeable scenario rehearsed in practice hundreds of times. The decision to run the tailback off-tackle is an extension of the overall game plan, built from hours of film study and predictive analytics. The play call is rooted in a conceptual philosophy, and the players involved have often been acquired because their skill set matches that philosophy.”

“Does that sound needlessly convoluted? If so, here's the insane part: My explanation in the previous paragraph is so oversimplified that it doesn't reflect a sliver of how stage-managed the process truly is. It's not that basketball is jazz and football is anti-jazz, or that basketball is jazz and football is prog rock. It's more that basketball aspires to jazz and football aspires to petroleum engineering. Which, I am fully aware, sounds terrible. Dave Hickey would see this concentration of control as the worst thing about football, in terms of its humanity, and that every dehumanizing aspect of football culture originates from this connection to hierarchical control. But if that is indeed the case, there's almost no need to further explain why football is so metaphorically important to society. There is no need to dissect why so many working-class Americans relate to a game built on executive control, or why the institution of football has managed to prosper in an era when public faith in all other forms of institutional power has declined. Don't see the problem as a problem. See the problem as evidence of meaning.”