American Football Apologetics
This short essay is for the education and entertainment of football fans and haters alike. It is a defense and celebration of American football, a game that embodies Americana like no other, on the occasion of its highest holiday.
Super Bowl Sunday is a holiday in the ancient sense. A communal celebration. A tournament. A feast day. The Super Bowl spread is as unique as Thanksgiving’s—wings, dips, fried potatoes of all varieties. Guests bring their own dishes to add to the potluck, with their own unique twists—fried chicken buckets, buffalo dip, loaded baked potato skins.
Like a harvest festival, it is the culmination of a season. Just as farmers alone do not celebrate the harvest, but the whole community joins them, so too is Super Bowl Sunday not merely for the players or fans of the thirty-two football franchises. It’s for all of us who can find something to love about this big, loud, violent, pious, loving, ambitious country of ours.
My dad—an immigrant from Poland, moving to Chicago during the 1980s—loved Chicago Bears football, and now I do too. But not at first. As a skinny nerd, sports were not my thing, not until college. But before I found the game interesting, I found Super Bowl Sunday interesting. I remember exactly how it happened: I was eight years old, and I saw a KFC commercial. Fried chicken, buttered corn, biscuits, mac n’ cheese. A Super Bowl feast. I begged my parents to order some for the game. They didn’t need much persuading. It became a family tradition.
Like America, football has fallen under harsh criticism over the past several decades. Its inherent violence feels problematic. The league’s patriotic displays and the players’ overt Christian faith feel non-inclusive. The commercialization feels cringe.
And, for those who watch only one game of football per year, the game itself feels needlessly complex. The rules are indecipherable. The game seems to make no damn sense.
In this way, too, it is quintessential Americana. Football, at every level of abstraction, emulates America.
The rules of American football, like American law and social norms, evolve in response to intense competitive pressure. Consider a small example.
The players line up on either side of the ball, establishing the line of scrimmage. If a defensive player jumps across the line before play begins, he is offsides—a penalty of five yards. This creates an incentive for an offensive player to flinch before the snap, to draw the defensive player offsides for a free five yards. So a new penalty is created to close the loophole: a false start, which occurs when “an offensive player who has assumed a set position moves in such a way as to simulate the start of a play,” to quote the official NFL rulebook. But this creates an incentive for the defensive player (who is free to move) to trigger an involuntary flinch in the offensive linemen. So another new penalty is created, the neutral zone infraction, defined as when “a defender enters the neutral zone prior to the snap, causing the offensive player(s) in close proximity (including a T-Formation Quarterback) to react (move) immediately to protect himself.”
(Section 18, Article 1 of the NFL rulebook defines the line of scrimmage as “the vertical plane of the yard line that passes through the forward point of the ball after it has been made ready for play,” and Article 2 defines the neutral zone as “the space between the forward and backward points of the ball (planes) and extends to the sidelines.” Now you know.)
Similarly, the question of what constitutes a “catch” has been litigated and re-litigated for nearly one-hundred years. Today, a receiver must (1) control the ball, (2) get two feet down, and (3) survive “a football move” or contact with the ground without the ball shifting. What is “control”? What is a “football move”? Excellent questions. The league spent years trying to answer it. During the 2010s, there were nationally televised games in which no one—not the referees, not the broadcasters, not the rules experts brought on specifically to explain the rules—could agree on whether a catch had occurred.
This is exactly how American law evolves under rule of law and due process norms. A rules committee (Congress) articulates a rule, actors within a competitive environment (you, me, and the corporations) adjust their behavior and try to eke out advantages, competition adjusts and the rules are rebalanced when some advantages are deemed unfair, and a class of rules experts (referees in football, lawyers in America) interpret and enforce the rules. When judgment calls are completely inescapable (like what constitutes a “football move” under the NFL rulebook or what constitutes “reasonableness” under American law), the officials involved still try their damndest to come up with a rule that looks and sounds fair, an acknowledgment of two core American values: the reverence of rules and the rejection of arbitrariness.
Fun fact: the comparison is literal—almost all NFL referees, who work part-time, are attorneys in their professional lives. Just like in America, lawyers have outsized influence over the state of play. There’s even an appeals process: head coaches can throw a red challenge flag, resulting in a “booth review” by appellate referees that can be escalated even further to officials in the NFL offices in New York, who act as a kind of Supreme Court during games.
The legalistic scaffolding is important because American football is, quite literally, a simulation of hand-to-hand tribal warfare. Without it, this is just a brawl.
Football is not played continuously, but in a series of plays. On each play, the offense’s goal is to conquer more of the defense’s territory—literally, to claim their land. The offense scores when they have covered all 100 yards of the field of play, claiming 100% of the opponent’s territory. The game satisfies a deep desire to see your tribe vanquish another tribe. Boxing and mixed martial arts implicate related impulses, but homo sapiens is a social creature—watching armies battle, investing yourself in the victory of your people over their people, is something else entirely. Football is the civilized expression of that primal need.
When I moved away from my hometown of Chicago, this is the aspect of football that soothed my homesickness—my tribe, my boys, fighting to defend my hometown’s honor against the rival invaders. For many Americans, especially in college football towns, in the colder northern cities of the Rust Belt and Midwest, and in any town in Texas, this civilized celebration of tribalism is a huge part of the appeal.
American football is played at four levels simultaneously. In a sense, it is four games in one, each reflecting a different competitive elements of American life—enterprise versus enterprise, individual versus individual, strategic contests and tactical ones.
At the highest level, franchises compete against each other as corporations in a capitalist economy. Front offices must construct rosters under financial constraints—an owner’s willingness to pay, a league-enforced salary cap, the competitive dynamics of the free agent labor market. Though this may not seem like a game, the massive popularity of Fantasy Football proves otherwise. Fantasy Football is literally a front office simulator: players construct rosters, make trades, and negotiate amid changing market conditions (real-world player demotions or injuries change fantasy player values overnight.)
Down a level, you have the strategic contest between head coaches and between offensive and defensive coordinators. A battle of executives. Head coaches construct game plans on a week-by-week basis depending on the opponent. One coach might determine that an extra-aggressive defensive strategy against this week’s skittish rookie quarterback is preferable to their traditional conservative game plan, and his opponent might counter with extra blockers and a prioritized running game. The coordinators—the people actually calling the plays—then figure out how to execute. The massive popularity of the Madden NFL video game franchise is built around this level of the game.
Down one more level, you have the archetype of the American leader: the on-field general, the quarterback. The QB is the most important position in professional sports. The quality of the quarterback’s play is more impactful on a team’s performance than any other position in any major sport. But like a CEO or union boss, he cannot do it alone. He relies on his protectors, the offensive line, as unsung heroes. And he relies on his skill players—receivers and running backs—to do as they’re told, to improvise when necessary, and to know when to do which. The QB may get all the attention, but every one of them will tell you its a team game.
The chess match at this level is between the quarterback and the defensive captain. Quarterbacks learn to diagnose defensive schemes before the play is called, adjusting protections and even overriding the coordinator’s plays. The strategy may be set from above, but the person on the ground has to read the room and adapt in real time, in seconds, with 300-pound consequences for being wrong.
When the play is executed, it is a coordinated dance. The timing that quarterbacks develop with their receivers is not unlike Olympic-level synchronized swimming. The QB will throw to a spot on the field often before the receiver has even turned back toward him. Other receivers will run routes specifically to be in position to block defenders within one second of the anticipated catch. And defensive players the size of refrigerators will be throwing their bodies at 15 miles per hour to disrupt the orchestration.
Finally, at the individual level, we see the true spirit of American competitiveness. All eleven players on each side mirror each other in one-on-one combat. Tactical advantages, the unique results of each individual battle, are decisive.
Offensive linemen, essentially America’s sumo wrestlers, are immovable objects defending their field general from defensive ends and blitzing linebackers, giants trained to overpower the offensive linemen within fractions of a second. Running backs are human-sized bowling balls accelerating into the mass of bodies at the line of scrimmage, stopped by the defense’s sumo warriors, the run-stopping defensive tackles, some of whom may be the largest men in human history.
Wide receivers are tall, lanky, and inhumanly fast. The refrigerator-sized linebackers trade speed to reach that size, so they cannot hope to catch an elite receiver—that job is reserved for cornerbacks and safeties, players optimized for disruption and fast-twitch hand skills. There’s a mental and emotional component to individual combat, too—wide receivers, who score most of the touchdowns, are notorious divas, so cornerbacks tend to be the most prolific trash-talkers on the field. Games have been won and lost by competitors going on tilt, throwing a punch in frustration, penalizing their team fifteen yards in crucial moments.
Different fans focus on different levels, but appreciating all four reveals the true beauty of football, how coordination and chaos interact in a game of inches with hometown glory and millions of dollars on the line.
America is the land of freedom and the rule of law, of equality and competition, in a deeply diverse and multi-layered society. A deeply, unapologetically human society. American football is its perfect mirror—commercials, celebrity, violence, spectacle, all of it.
So, whether you love football, hate it, or merely tolerate it on one Sunday a year—enjoy your feast.
Happy Super Bowl Sunday!