Why can't I quit the NFL?
Thoughts on the sport after a brutal Monday Night Football game
I don’t care about the NFL anymore.
That’s what I tell myself and others. I concern myself mostly with baseball and soccer, like a gentleman. But like a good American troglodyte I watched every minute of last Monday’s game between the Baltimore Ravens and Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
I watched Mike Evans’ hamstring seize like an unoiled engine and Chris Godwin’s ankle spin like a weather vane. I saw very little football. A friend—(shoutout Rayambe Ferambe)—sent me an Instagram post by SportsBall that diagrammed the three-hour and four-minute broadcast. The ball was in play just 9% of the time. The rest was stoppages (66%) or commercials/intermissions (25%). I’ve also watched every game of my Philadelphia Eagles, who are the football equivalent of Bill Lumbergh—far less inspiring, effective, and commanding than they think they are. (Fire Siriani.)
The NFL’s TV product is more boring than ever; it should be illegal to subject viewers to two hours and forty-five minutes of SUV ads and game replays. It’s more expensive than ever; that’s what happens when you forget to unsubscribe from Sunday Ticket and are charged $300. The game is also as violent as ever. So what gives? Why am I still watching and contributing to a league that I resent? There’s something about the NFL that is undeniable, and I think I finally put my finger on it.
When MLB’s average game time exceeded three hours in the 2010s it became The Problem with the sport and the prism through which it was viewed. Diehards like me had to justify our fandom. Casual fans were either attracted to or turned off by the slow pace of play. Critics anointed football as the true national pastime, the game that held people’s attention. If affordable housing was discussed and written about as much as the demise of baseball was, then we would have solved homelessness years ago.
MLB responded by instituting the pitch timer, the single greatest sports rule change of my lifetime. Baseball today is lively and entertaining and sometimes too fast, with an average game time just over two-and-a-half hours. There are only so many Bud Lattes I can drink if the pitcher is dealing. In this way, baseball has returned to its urban roots, which I’ve written about many times.
Meanwhile, the NFL’s average time of game has exceeded three hours this entire millennium, and the ball is in play the fewest minutes of all major sports. Where’s the national discourse? Where are the think pieces? Where are the casual fans demanding to be liberated from a TV show that is mostly grown men standing around on a field? Instead, the NFL is more popular and lucrative than ever.
(I’m not a conspiracist, but if I was, then my cause would be debunking NFL viewership statistics. According to The Athletic, regular season games this year are averaging 17 to 18 million viewers. Name them! Out yourself! Who is watching the Cleveland Browns play the Jacksonville Jaguars???? And why?)
My theory is this: the NFL is the suburbs, and the embodiment of the suburbs is the stroad.
A stroad is designed for maximum vehicle throughput—the “road” part—at the same time as it incorporates the services and commerce of a typical urban street. In other words, a stroad tries to move cars as fast as possible while it also tries to provide for human needs. Everyone knows what a stroad is even if they’ve never heard the term. It’s those thoroughfares with speed limits somewhere between 30 and 65 mph that are lined by big box stores and strip malls and punctuated by lighted intersections. These intersections are usually veins connecting car-oriented communities to the main artery. My native New Jersey is one giant stroad.
Because cars have to stop at intersections, whose light intervals are long to accommodate the traffic levels, the average speed is low, even if everyone floors it between lights. And because driving is the only viable transportation mode on stroads, the adjacent businesses must dedicate much of their land to parking lots. It’s a horribly inefficient transportation design, to speak nothing of the environmental and social impacts.
This basically explains an NFL game. Players wear protective gear (the car) so that they can go fast during the play (green light), then they stand around waiting for the next time to go fast (the red light). Just like drivers at a stoplight, football fans poke at their phones between plays. And as any American motorists knows, stroads provide some of the ugliest, most visually uninteresting driving. Being inefficient and boring are related.
Admittedly, this metaphor is pretty strained and offered tongue-in-cheek, but I do think the NFL and suburbs are unified in an idea, since the suburbs are more a state of mind than a geographic place or type. Downtown San Diego, with its wide streets and apartments built on top of parking garages, is essentially a suburb, whereas many “suburbs” are more urban than the cities they orbit.
There is a ton of research on the psychology of driving (“carbrain”), the opposition to development (“NIMBYism”), and the consumerist preference for space (“being dumb”—why anyone would want to spend time mowing a lawn is beyond my comprehension). But I consider the psychology of American suburbanism as having:
Belligerent individualism - E.g. “Get off my lawn!” Chill. That’s not even your grass. It emerged on this planet 100 million years ago.
Spatial privilege - E.g. redlining.
“Monumental” way of thinking - E.g. Every distinct land use has its place: homes go here, shopping goes there, etc.
Perverse conception of safety - E.g. The irony of people retreating from the city is that they take the danger with them: it’s the cars.
To me, it’s an anesthetized way of living, a liminal material state that protects against the uncomfortable parts of life but also synthesizes the great parts. Put another way, we insulate ourselves from what makes us insecure. Our beating our chests, whether that’s on our patios or at a political rally, is an expression of that. It’s pure bravado.
And each of these characteristics are projected into the national story and character, which then percolates into the culture, including sports, and most of all into football. Baseball is everyday life, as I’ve written, but football wants to transcend or even escape it. I guess my not being able to quit football is my trying to figure out why it, and we, feel that’s necessary.
After the Eagles lost one of their three consecutive NFC championship games in the 2000s, I piled my Philly gear in the middle of my bedroom, crawled into bed, and cried. My mom peeked her head in and, rather than console me and tell me that there’s always next season, she asked if I was starting a bonfire, laughed at her own joke, and left. (Shoutout single mothers who give no f—s.)
Twenty years later, I follow the NFL with a condescending disinterest. I’m better than this, I tell myself and others. Then I fire up Sunday Ticket, monitor my three fantasy football teams, take potshots at my buddies who are stuck with the New York Giants, and read all the analysis on Monday mornings.
I don’t care about the NFL anymore.
I'm a troglodyte as well. I've watched every Rams game for the past 5 years and wouldn't think of missing one, but holy shit the commercials can be infuriating at times. It's especially annoying during political season. Ugh.
This was an enjoyable and well-thought-out read. I like when people get deeper and metaphorical and this was right up my alley. Bravo!