Tag: Chuck Klosterman

The NFL is Perfect! The NFL is Doomed! 

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Chuck Klosterman and I grew up on football, the Notre Americano, the United States, and NFL version. As such, the two of us are about as far from objective as two people can be on a discussion about football. Chuck Klosterman spends a majority of his book Football celebrating the NFL’s era of almost uncontested dominance, and I smiled and nodded throughout his walk down memory lane. The NFL was and is so dominant that most of us thought their reign would pretty much last forever, but as Football points out, nothing lasts forever.  

We both grew up thinking the NFL was the perfect league running the perfect sport, but I did that comparing it to baseball in the Major Leagues and basketball in the NBA. Klosterman takes his thesis in another direction, comparing it to the other most prominent football league in North America, the Canadian Football League (CFL).

My obsession with the NFL is so myopic that I never even considered the idea that someone might think there is a better professional football league out there. If we were to make the argument that the NFL is perfect though, we would have to use some comparative analysis, and there is only one other league of professional football worth including in such an argument, the CFL. Before we attempt to compare the two, I must confess that I’ve never made it through an entire CFL game. I’ve watched it for the novelty and to watch some of my favorite college football stars who didn’t make it to the NFL. Once the novelty wore off, and I watched those players a couple of times, I flipped the channel. I did not watch enough CFL to establish an informed opinion of the league. Thus, it’s impossible for me to imagine the flip side: a Canadian watching enough NFL to develop an informed opinion on the NFL and walking away with the thought that the CFL game is superior. My myopia on this is the very definition of subjectivity though.

There are BIG reasons that I think the NFL is superior. The iconography the NFL game, its teams, and its players have achieved is not only nationwide, intercontinental, and worldwide. The CFL has never and will never match the NFL in popularity, and I don’t think I need to qualify that statement. What percentage of Parisians are aware of the Cowboys, the Chiefs, or the Jets? That number might be lower than I think, but number would be so much higher than those aware of the Argonauts, the Alouettes, and the Stampeders that it wouldn’t be an interesting survey. How many Londoners know the names Tom Brady, Patrick Mahomes, and Peyton Manning when compared to Nathan Rourke, Andrew Harris and Justin McInnis? Some could characterize my opinion as subjective, as I watched those elite college athletes mature into NFL stars, but I don’t think it’s subjective to say that the NFL is the go-to place for elite athletes in football. If you argue that point, you’ll have to provide me a ratio of elite college athletes in football who chose to play in the CFL over the NFL, when the NFL wanted them. After that argument is over, you’ll also have to give me a ratio for the number of elite athletes, in their prime, who have left the NFL for the CFL, and when you come up with that insignificant number, I’ll provide the number of CFL stars who have left the CFL for the NFL, when they NFL decided to give them a shot at making an NFL roster. Even if we include suspended NFL players, those in contract disputes, or the attempts aging players have made to revive their career in the CFL, the number of elite athletes who want to play and stay in the NFL for as long as they can is an argument no CFL fan would enter with a straight face.

Even with all that, the primary reason to watch the NFL over the CFL is that to get a first down in football, the NFL provides its teams four downs (chances or tries) and the CFL provides three, and four downs provides more drama.

“Ok,” you, the dispassionate observer might say, “if four is more dramatic than three, wouldn’t five downs be more dramatic?” To paraphrase Klosterman, five downs would probably feel like too many and three feels like it’s not enough. “Four just feels perfect,” Klosterman writes. I agree, because four downs allows for more incremental progressions, or a running game. The CFL’s three-down pass-oriented game almost makes the running game unnecessary and even strategically unwise.

Casual football fans routinely complain that the running game “Is the boring part.” Those of us who grew up in the 80s and 90s, heard this from our friends in Nebraska who hated the Cornhuskers in college football and loved the Joe Montana-led 49ers.

Those who didn’t grow up in Nebraska have no idea how tough it was to maintain allegiance to the Huskers in the 80s and 90s. We were teenagers and early twenty-somethings during this era, and when you’re in that demographic, you don’t like what everyone else does. My teenage friends, and the kids I wanted to befriend, loathed the Huskers, because their dads, teachers, uncles, and everyone else they knew loved the Huskers. It was deemed “uncool” to like the Huskers. We had a teacher ask the class “Who is a Husker fan?” I was the only one who raised his hand. 

The kids I knew also hated them, even after they won national championships, because running the ball was so boring. I watched the same 49er games they did, and I knew that a twelve-yard pass play was sexier than a twelve-yard running play, but I never made the leap with them to the 49ers. I never considered the running game boring, and I still don’t. 

Their the type who say that if the NFL wants to be more popular, they should do everything they can to create a climate in which NFL teams pass more, if not all the time. As a football fanatic, I disagree that running plays are boring, but if I am going to provide an objective perspective, I must admit that a twelve-yard pass play is sexier than a twelve-yard running play. Also, the NFL’s Competition Committee (NFLCC) has made strides in various rules to try to make the passing game more prominent.

As I wrote, I haven’t watch a CFL game, but I attended an Arena Football League (AFL) game. The AFL passes the ball 70% of the time, and the NFL passes the ball 53.3% of the time. I didn’t know that stat when I attended this game, and I didn’t spot the huge difference for the first couple of quarters. I just considered it a fast paced game that was actually pretty exciting to watch at first. As the game progressed, the game lost some of its sex appeal, and I didn’t know why, because I wasn’t looking for it. Somewhere around the fourth quarter, it dawned on me that exciting, sexy plays lose their definition when they occur an overwhelming percentage of the time. The running game is the ebb to the flow of the passing game. Their relationship is intertwined with one another, as one strategically sets up the other and vice versa. When I attended the AFL game, I was excited to attend an AFL game, and I was bored about 50% of the way through it. There was just too much passing involved. The CFL is a passing game, largely because they only have three downs to secure a first down, and that, in my opinion, is the primary reason it will never be as popular as the NFL.

Klosterman’s book also illustrates the NFL provides the superior game, because the CFL has the rouge. I must confess ignorance here, as I never heard of the CFL’s rouge before reading this section in Klosterman’s Football. The rationale behind the rouge, in my humble opinion, is to give the most boring play in football, the punt, some excitement. The rouge allows for a point to be awarded if a punt, field goal attempt, or kickoff ends up with the ball landing in the touchdown area with no return by the opposing team. The rule discourages teams from simply kneeling or letting the ball fall into the end zone. The CFL believes this promotes excitement, strategy, and field position battles, especially in close games. I must award some theoretical points in this scenario, because I imagine that it might add some small parcel of anticipation amid the otherwise depressing fact that my team is conceding that they cannot secure a first down by punting. Other than that, the rouge just feels like a gimmick that the CFL developed to compete with the NFL, even though it was first implemented over 160 years ago. In my independent research on the rouge, I learned that there have been regular season games decided by a last-second, walk-off rouge, and I also learned that there was a rouge-only game in which Montreal beat Ottawa 1-0. To try to achieve some level of objectivity, I must admit that it’s an interesting quirk, but if my favorite team won a game by a rouge, I can’t imagine it providing so much satisfaction that I would celebrate it. I would categorize it as a win for my team and never talk about the details of it ever again.

Another distinction is that while the NFL only allows eleven players on either side of the line of scrimmage, the CFL has twelve. My initial reaction is that this would lead to a crowded appearance, but the CFL adopted a wider and longer field. If it’s wider, longer, and more populated with players, does that make it better or more popular? The NFL draws more viewers within the nation of Canada than the CFL does.

The only rule I see that favors the CFL is motion toward the line of scrimmage before the snap. The NFL’s Competition Committee states that it provides too much advantage to the offense, and I understand that, but they’ve passed so many rules that favor the offense that I don’t understand why they never passed this one.  I’m sure if I dug deep, I could find other reasons, but this is the only CFL rule I wish the NFL would adopt.

The CFL’s play clock is 20 seconds as opposed to the NFL’s 40 on most plays. This allows for a quicker pace, of course, but again, we go to the drama. Whether the typical fan sees it or not, there’s a lot of pre-snap drama that affects the pace of the game. Watching AFL, CFL, and NFL, you see the drama and the pace that favors the NFL game.

NFL purists still complain about the relatively recent rules the NFL Competition Committee put in place to promote more offense and more passing in the game. The rules committee also inserted rules for player protection, particularly the QB, and most NFL fanatics loathe them, but when comparing them to CFL rules, the NFL still provides the superior product. As I wrote, I’ve never watched a CFL game, but I imagine that watching one would tell me how perfect the allowances and limitations the NFL rules are.

The NFL is Doomed 

“The NFL is doomed!” was author Chuck Klosterman’s pitch to get us to buy his book Football. It worked on me, but I am such a Klosterman fan that I would probably purchase a cook book from him. He writes that the NFL’s implosion will not happen today, tomorrow, or within a couple of years. It will happen decades from now, long after our generation goes down.

The sociopolitical theory Klosterman posits for the NFL’s downfall is that there are so many elements of football that we do not want for our culture. He lists a variety of elements of football that we could label political in nature, and he concludes each element with the sentence, “This is not what we want.” We apparently do not want a violent sport, a sport exclusive to male participants that is only loved in the U.S. He also writes that football does not reject toxic masculinity, celebrates the ability to ignore pain and injury, rewards domination of the weak, shuns individuality and identity, and it is authoritarian and militaristic, and hierarchically controlled, with objective outcomes.

“This is not what we want,” Mr. Klosterman asks after listing each characteristic of football. My question to Mr. Klosterman apes a question my uncle used to ask us when we’d say “we” when talking about sports, politics, or any other element of life for which we developed an affiliation of some sort.

“We really need a touchdown here,” we’d whisper while watching our favorite NFL team on TV, for example.

“Who’s we?” my uncle would ask with a mischievous smile on his face. “What do you have a mouse in your pocket?” That joke wasn’t funny. It wasn’t funny when he first said it, and it grew exceedingly less funny the more often he said it. We could classify it as somewhat, sort of clever, in an excessively obnoxious vein, but it was never, ever funny. I think a few of us may have smiled when we first heard him say it, but I don’t think anyone ever laughed. Check that, he laughed. Based on the fact that he said it so often, he obviously considered it one of the most successful rhetorical parries ever created, but if he learned how to read focused groups, he might have discontinued this line of questioning. I don’t think anyone ever thought it was as poignant or provocative as he did either, but his decades-long replies did have one unfunny point, ‘Who do you think you are when you’re dropping your we on us? Who do you claim to represent here?’ 

When I ask who is we, some might guess that I’m accusing Klosterman of political proselytizing, but I’m not necessarily doing so. I’m suggesting that Klosterman is citing group thought when he says ‘we’, but it’s his group’s thought, or the group he knows. Without putting extensive thought into it, I can come up with three ‘we’s of group thought. My we and Klosterman’s we might parallel each other for some distance, but we perpendicular at a certain point. The difference between our similarities and differences are nowhere near the definitions of the ‘we’s that exists within the two sides of my extended family. I realize that’s anecdotal evidence, but that’s kind of the point. If we travel outside my family into the greater variations of we known throughout the country, we find that the country is not only bifurcated on ‘we’s, or trifurcated, it’s absolutely balkanized on so many topics. As one of my friends who was born and raised abroad, and has lived in several states throughout his adult life said, “The United States is almost, almost fifty different countries.” The country is so balkanized on so many subjects Klosterman discusses that I can’t believe he has the confidence, the temerity, and some might say the audacity to write ‘we’ in this manner. Time will bear this out, but Klosterman’s suggestion that his definition of we is more in touch than mine, or the two sides of my family, or those living in this balkanized country just wreaks of subjectivity. 

The much stronger argument Chuck Klosterman should’ve made is that the young ‘uns just aren’t watching football anymore. When I first heard his doomsayer “The NFL is doomed!” marketing pitch for Football, I thought this would be the crux of his argument. And I dreaded reading it, because I didn’t want to read that viewpoint backed or bolstered by analysis, data, and other facts. I read through Football, the book, as I would a horror novel, thinking that that big bad monster was coming, but it never did. If I wrote this book, this argument would be my final death knell, if I thought the end of the NFL was coming. I would approach my analysis from a ‘they’ viewpoint, as opposed to the ‘we’ however. My anecdotal information comes from the young adults around me defining my ‘they’, and the theys I know are very close to entering that key demographic, aged 25-49 that Klosterman admits set trends even though they don’t have any money. When they watch the NFL, or college football, and they don’t very often, they do so with passing interest and little in the way of “we-like” loyalties. They’re in and out of even the most crucial games, and they don’t even bother watching what they consider irrelevant regular season games. When they do watch anything under the football heading, it’s typically a YouTube broadcast that focuses on highlight packages. 

To bolster my point that the NFL is doomed, I would cite a story on a news program that had a 60 Minutes format. It had three separate and distinct stories in the manner that news program does, and one of the stories focused on the Super Bowl of gamers. I considered the story relatively irrelevant, but I asked my twenty something nephew about it, and he lit up. He began talking about the game they played in this Super Bowl of gamers, and he spoke about the individual who led his team to victory in the manner I would Peyton Manning and John Elway. I listened to my nephew’s extensive knowledge and enthusiasm for the game and the individual gamer with a lump in my throat, knowing that my beloved NFL was doomed. 

My nephew also reinforced the idea I had that we’re not only bifurcated or trifurcated, but balkanized, almost as balkanized as we were back in the Theodore Roosevelt administration 1901-1909, when there was no TV, no movies, about 9,000 motor cars in the country, and an overwhelming majority of the American public never traveled thirty miles away from their homes throughout their entire life. Citizens who called Roosevelt president, in their present tense, had print if they could afford books, newspapers, and various other periodicals in common, but that was about it. We had Buggs Bunny, Happy Days, Cheers, Frasier and Seinfeld, and we had the NFL throughout. Some of us say we watched the same shows, because we had three channels, but we had cable. The distinction we know now is that almost every show on cable sucked. We watched major broadcast shows, because they had all of the talented writers and stars, and when we went to work the next day, we talked about those shows with everyone else who watched them. We referred to these conversations as water cooler talk, and the generation that Klosterman and I share can now look back on that era as a very special time. We all shared a cultural zeitgeist, a collective consciousness, a shared cultural literacy, or to put it simply ‘a shared cultural common ground’. However we phrase it, we had those very special connections with a wide swath of the people we talked to for a long time in our lives, and now that it appears over, it almost feels like an hourglass type of timeline that will never be duplicated. The citizens in the Roosevelt administration had little-to-nothing in common in the early 20th century, because they had little in the way of travel or technology, and at the beginning of the 21st century we have little-to-nothing in common because, it could be argued, that we have so much technology that our definitions of entertainment are so fractured or splintered that we’re not reading, watching, or listening to any of the same things anymore. 

This spells doom for the NFL in the sense that it will no longer be the King Kong/Godzilla cultural behemoth of ratings dominance in future generations. When I write that, your next logical question would be, ‘Ok, well, what’s going to replace it?’ Nothing and everything. I know that’s a cop-out answer, but when we talk to those nearing the key demo, we learn that they don’t watch something. They watch everything. ‘Who’s your favorite influencer on YouTube?’ we ask them. They tell us that they don’t really have one. ‘Ok. What’s your favorite type of program, theme, or subject matter that you watch?’ First off, they’ll tell you that they don’t necessarily watch things on YouTube, Netflix, or any other streaming service. They have no loyalties in that regard. They also don’t have a type of program, theme or subject matter. Some of them will come up with something in the face of our disbelief, but if we ask them the same question a month later that will likely change. The final answer we walk away with is they don’t have a focus, and they never really thought about that fact until we asked that question.

Anytime we deal with high-minded questions such as is the NFL doomed, we feel compelled to come up with high-minded answers that lead our loyal readers to the notion that they got their money’s worth. I loved the first half of Football, as I loved the walk down memory lane, but I didn’t really connect with the ‘we’ answers in the second half. I write that, because I remember when the ‘they’s wanted to be a ‘we’ with me. They cared what I thought, wanted to learn from me, and they copied much of what I did, because they used me to define what adulthood meant, and if I might go bold, I think they considered me so cool that they thought it would be cool if I considered them a ‘we’. They tried to watch the shows I watched, they watched the sports I watched, and they even cheered on the NFL teams I cheered on. Those days are over, all of them. They now have their own identities, and their free will. They don’t care what my ‘we’s think, what Chuck Klosterman’s ‘we’s think, or anyone else’s from our generation. They’re going to do what we did and form their own ‘we’. I don’t think their definition of “we” will spell doom for the NFL, but I do think the NFL’s seemingly permanent engraving atop the highest peak of the Mount Olympus of the entertainment world will start to chink, decay and rot away when they take over, as they watch nothing and everything. And if the NFL were to call me and hire me as a consultant on the future that’s what I would tell them they should fear the most. If they then asked me how they could combat that, I would have to confess that I have no idea.

The 11 Minutes of Action in the NFL

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There are 11 minutes of action in the average National Football League (NFL) game, according to a 2010 Wall Street Journal (WSJ) stopwatch study conducted by Stuart Silverstein. Silverstein started the stopwatch at the snap of the ball and stopped it at the tackle of the ball carrier. I know what you’re thinking, “11 minutes? C’mon! I know all about the delays inherent in the modern game, but 11 minutes? You’re going to have to back that up.”

I don’t keep a ledger on the complaints I’ve had about delays in the NFL game throughout the course of my life, but my family would probably characterize that number with a sigh or a groan. Even in the most frustrating moments, I never thought about how few moments of action actually occur in an average 3 hour and 12 minute NFL telecast. If you’re approaching this from a static level, based on the number of complaints you’ve listed over the years, you might say, “11 minutes seems about right” in the most cynical tone possible. Now, remove yourself from your “Nothing shocks me” mindset and view this in a more objective frame. If the average NFL game lasts 3 hours and 12 minutes, and 3 hours and 12 minutes equals 192 minutes, we spend 181 minutes waiting for something to happen in every NFL game we watch. No matter how we spin it, that’s a lot of sitting on furniture, staring at the TV blankly, and waiting for the snap of the ball. The only thing I can come up with is that we spend so much time thinking about what could or should happen that we don’t really notice how long it took to happen, or should I say we do and we don’t.  

Those who are not stunned by that 11 minute figure, are likely casual fans who enjoy going to other peoples’ houses for a gathering, the party, or the event status that football games have become in our lives. They’re people who enjoy all of the talking that happens between moments of action more than the game. If we drill down to the nuts and bolts of their fandom, they’d probably admit they like the team, but they don’t like like them. They enjoy watching them win, because it’s always fun to be part of a communal celebration, but they’re not devastated when the team loses. They say things like, “Well, at least it was a good game,” as if this were a television drama that didn’t end well but was nonetheless entertaining. They’re probably the type who leave their friend’s house laughing, they drive home, put the kids to bed, and kiss the wife, and slip into bed without ever thinking about that game again. They have such a healthy relationship between football and life that they can enjoy football game gatherings for what they are, and they spend most of those 181 minutes of inaction chatting it up, eating, drinking, and having a merry, old time. The NFL game is background noise for them, and they check in on the score every once in a while.

“What’s the score?” my dad would ask, stepping into the living room. We’d tell him, and he’d go back to doing whatever he was doing. That used to drive us nuts. He didn’t care about the game, the logistics, the nuances, or any of the smaller moments that defined winning or losing. He just wanted to know the score. As much as he claimed to like football, it was a passing interest to him. As I grew older I realized he was more emblematic of the average, casual NFL fan than I was. I also realized his relationship to football was far more healthy than mine.

Similar to my dad, most average, casual fans don’t understand why any team, college or pro, doesn’t throw a bomb on every play. When Notre Dame had Raghib Ismail “The Rocket,” on their team, my dad didn’t understand why The Irish didn’t just throw the ball to him every time. As myopic as that sounds, it’s a good question that just about every casual fan asks when they see an athlete who appears so superior to the other athletes on the field that it appears that he can do whatever he wants on the field.

Author Chuck Klosterman answers this decades-old question in his book Football, by quoting a track and field coach who, when asked why track and field isn’t more popular in America, said, “Track has a problem. The fastest guy always wins.” After 2007, Usain Bolt won approximately 95% of the individual 100m/200m finals in the Olympics and World Championship races he ran in between 2008 and 2016. There are variables such as reaction time, start technique, lane conditions, etc., that can lead to an upset, but there are no strategies Bolt’s opponents can legally employ to slow him down. There are no counter-veiling forces in track, no defense, so the fastest guy almost always wins. 

“I get that they need to keep the defense guessing with the occasional run, but why do they always run right up the middle?” Julie Ann asked Andrew. “That’s where most of the defenders are. Why don’t they run around the side?”

“To further fool the defense,” Andrew, the football enthusiast, explains. “A run up the middle better sets up the play-action fake and pulls the linebackers forward a step or two to open up the middle of the field.” 

“So, it’s a wasted play?” she asks. “It’s a play to set up another play? Boring!”

“It’s strategic,” Andrew admits. “If they gain 6-7 yards on that first down run play it opens up a number of possibilities for the next play, but if all a team does is go for the big plays, the defense will adjust, and they’ll execute their plan to stop the big plays. Defenses employ numerous methods to compensate for exceptional athleticism, so an offensive coordinator has to put in some “boring”plays, as you call them, to mess with the defensive coordinator’s mind.”

A run up the middle is widely viewed by casual fans, like Julie Ann, as the little plays of the game, or “The boring part.” Andrew, the enthusiast, knows a little more about the chess match between coordinators, but he’ll likely never be able to explain that intricacies of the game, as he understands them — on a level just a couple notches above rudimentary– to a casual fan like Julie Ann. If Andrew cannot explain the intricacies of football on a conversational level, it might expose the fact that he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, or if he can, Julie will likely dismiss his long, intricate explanation with an, “Uh huh, BORING!” 

If Julie Ann is a decent example of the average, casual NFL fan, she doesn’t pay attention to an overwhelming amount of the 65-70 plays in the average NFL game. She’ll probably talk through an overwhelming number of those plays. Yet, Julie Ann is a fan, and she does enjoy watching these games, but her attention drifts until the high-leverage plays that add to her team’s Win Probability with crucial, clutch, and dagger-inducing plays. Analysts suggest that there are typically 5-10 game-changing plays per game. Andrew might suggest that is far too high, and that most NFL games are decided, or swung, on 3-4 plays at most. For the sake of consistency, we’ll stick with the analysts findings, and we’ll go with the median and say that there are an average of 7.5 noteworthy “Pay attention” plays per game that are instrumental in wins and losses. If each play last an average of four seconds, then Julie Ann, the casual fan, will want to pay attention to approximately 30 seconds of each 3 hour and 12 minute NFL game, if she wants to sound like an informed fan. 

As popular as the NFL is, surveys find that 26% to 46% characterize themselves as casual fans, and NFL enthusiasts, or avid fans, defined through daily engagement of some sort, list at approximately 21% to 36%. If these numbers hold in their workplace, when Julie Ann and Andrew return to work the next day to describe the game for all of their co-workers who missed the game, they’ll probably sound equally informed, even though Julie Ann only paid attention to the most crucial 30 seconds of that game, and Andrew, the avid enthusiast, focused intently on the 11 minutes of action.

“You guys don’t understand the game,” Andrew might say to those who think Julie Ann offered a wrap-up as complete as his, and he might be right, but his audience either won’t notice the difference, or they won’t care. The latter is illustrated by the coverage the average sports’ network, newspaper, internet page, and/or sports radio attributes to that game. There are exceptions, of course, there are always exceptions, but most of their coverage will focus on the 30 most crucial seconds of the game Julie Ann discussed. In my experience 30 seconds might even a bit of an exaggeration, as most post-game television broadcasts limit their highlight packages to about half of those 30 seconds, and fill the rest with graphics and analysis of those 15 seconds. Julie Ann didn’t watch the game as intently as Andrew, and she doesn’t care to know how the “BORING!” plays influence and pave the way for the exciting ones, but she remembers the exciting plays, and she might even watch some of the thousands of hours devoted to those 15 seconds, and she reads expert analysis on the hundreds of articles on the internet, until she sits next Andrew at a family gathering and sounds just as knowledgeable as the more enthusiastic fan who knows how various intangibles can affect an outcome.

Andrew’s love of the NFL game is pure and sincere, so on one level he doesn’t care what anyone thinks, but on another level, we all want some recognition for the accumulated knowledge of anything we’ve acquired. Yet, Andrew will consider it unfair that everyone considers Julie Ann just as knowledgeable football as he is, until he eventually runs into a fanatic who is as enthusiastic about football as he is. This conversation might start great, as we all love meeting someone who can appreciate the game on our level, but that appreciation will eventually go one of three ways. The best possible outcome for the future friendship between Andrew and his fellow fanatic will play out if their girlfriends stop their conversation with a “No football conversations.” At that point, all four will laugh and Andrew and the fanatic will secretly harbor mutual respect for one another, but if they are allowed to explore the topic with one another, it will either turn into a duel of knowledge with no winners, or both will walk away from the conversation characterizing the other as an NFL nerd without recognizing that the other sounds exactly like them to disinterested parties. 

 Football vs. Baseball

The WSJ did not conduct a similar stopwatch study on basketball and hockey, since it is generally accepted that the games in the National Basketball Association (NBA) have 48 minutes of action in an average 2.5 hour game, and the National Hockey League (NHL) match has 60 minutes of action in an average 2.5 hour game. Save for various breaks, the ball/puck is almost always in motion in those sports, so conducting a stopwatch study would be relatively obvious. The WSJ did conduct a similar study on the average Major League Baseball (MLB) game, however, and they found that the average baseball game has 17 minutes and 58 seconds of action in a game that is now an average of 2 hours and 36 minutes long. Punching these numbers into the system, football has an action-to-total-time ratio of approximately 5.7%, and baseball has an action-to-total-time ratio of approximately 11.5%. So, to those who find baseball games in the MLB boring, they actually have a greater, slightly more than double, action ratio than the NFL. We could debate the definition of action, in qualitative vs. quantitative terms, but the numbers don’t lie.

In the WSJ study of baseball, conducted by David Biderman (on baseball) versus the Stuart Silverstein study (on football), they defined the moments of action in baseball to include pitches, plays, and any ball movement. So, in the battle between America’s Pastime, and America’s favorite sport, baseball proves to be the more active sport.

When we break the 192 minutes of the average game down, the truth starts to reveal itself. The average NFL game consists of approximately 63 minutes of commercial breaks, so when watching the average NFL game, roughly 25-33% of our time is spent in a commercial break, according to multiple studies and analysis conducted by WSJ and FiveThirtyEight reports. NFL teams also have a 40-second play clock after most plays, but a 25-second play clock after administrative stoppages, and most NFL teams, on average, snap the ball at the 20-second point. This is the finding, but when I watch games, it seems to me, most NFL teams snap the ball in the single digits. I know there are moments and strategies that call for a hurry-up offense that moves the average, but I’m still surprised at the 20-second average. This finding suggests the NFL fan spends about half of the in-game moments waiting, in anticipatory glory, for the ball to be snapped. Most teams use at least two time outs per half, and the modern NFL viewer at home must endure countless replays, explanations of penalties, the time necessary for trainers to help the injured leave the field, and various other delays in which referees don’t force a team to use a time out. We break all these delays down, and 11 minutes actually starts to make more sense.  

The Third Spinning Wheel

The overarching question is how did a sport that consists of so many breaks, and so few moments of actual action, become the unquestioned, indisputable most popular sport in America? Author Chuck Klosterman offers many interesting theories and conclusions in his latest book, Football, save for one: Anticipation. He touches on the idea of anticipation being a possible element in the game’s popularity, but he doesn’t explore it sufficiently in my opinion. 

There’s only one thing we might love more than action, the anticipation of that action. How many times are we up on the edge of our seat waiting for that game-winning play, only to have our team hand the ball off, up the middle, for a three-yard gain? “Boring!” Julie Ann might say, because she was expecting that crucial play to happen there, but we could say it only heightens the suspense and anticipation for her. When this happens, we know the clock is dwindling, and we might say something like, “C’mon! Let’s go!” as the suspense heightens. At this point, few are sitting when the ball carrier flips the ball to the ref, and the team hurries back to the line. In the next play, the quarterback fakes the ball to the running back (play-action), and he delivers the dagger by sending the ball over the middle to the tight-end for a twenty-four-yard touchdown. This is the only place, right here, where Andrew’s knowledge comes into play. He might have sounded like a football nerd when he tried to explain the need to run the ball up the middle earlier, and no one will laud him for correctly predicting this play tomorrow at work, but when those linebackers stepped up to stop what they feared might be another run up the middle, they accidentally opened a hole behind them that the tight-end stepped into to catch the game-winning touchdown, and Andrew, the enthusiast looked like a genius for predicting how their team would win.

We can all break down the action of the NFL to 11 minutes, or 30 seconds of crucial action, but one of the reasons the NFL and college football sit atop TV ratings is that the nature of the game leads to a greater sense of anticipation than any other sport. We could also say that football’s low action-to-total-time ratio of approximately 5.7%, compared to baseball’s ratio of approximately 11.5%, leads to more anticipation and a greater sense of excitement when the payoff finally happens. It’s the NFL’s third spinning wheel.

The psychological power of anticipation has led most casinos to adopt what they call the third spinning wheel. It’s no secret that slot machines are the primary money maker for most casinos, but according to Medium.com, slot machines account for 70% of a casino’s revenue. That seems unreasonably high, but the stats back it up. The question is how did casinos make those machines so incredibly addictive? Those of us who’ve dropped play money into slot machines take notice when the first big money maker stops in the first slot, but when that second money maker seductively slides into the second slot, something happens to us. Everything about slot machines are engineered for dramatic effect. The actual outcome was determined the moment we hit the spin button via a Random Number Generator, and our chance of actually winning was determined by the minimum payout percentages set by various state gaming commissions, or tribal compacts. These compacts and commissions say nothing about how casinos can manipulate emotions however, and casinos take advantage of this by having the first “jackpot!” stop in the first slot almost immediately after we press spin, the second jackpot can take approximately 2-3 seconds, but it’s that third one that is deliberately delayed to induce prolonged anticipation. It can take up to five seconds to stop. What happens to us in those five seconds? How many dreams and aspirations can occur in five seconds? 

“I was SO close!” we complain to our friends. “Look at that,” we say, pointing to the two big money makers followed by the taunting cherry in the three hole. We had three-to-five orchestrated seconds of watching that third wheel spin in which we realized that all of our unreasonable dreams could come true. What we don’t know is that those three-to-five seconds are the result of the psychological research casinos commission to maximize our sense of anticipation. They do that with an orchestrated near-miss, or the “I was SO close!” moment that leads to maximum engagement from the customer. We think our machine is ready to pop, and we’re not about to let some other slot player come in and take over, because we’ve paid our dues watching nothing happen for as long as we think it takes for a machine to pay off. Those of us who play slots don’t take into account how much time and money casinos have put into understanding us better. We don’t know that they’ve found how much impact that third-spinning wheel has on us. They’ve determined that if they provide us too many near-misses, they can reduce the impact of the third-spinning wheel (translation: we’ll figure it out). They’ve also found that too few of them often makes our near-misses less effective (translation: we’ll get bored). Their expensive, ever-changing, and ever-adapting research has found that if they give us a third-spinning wheel 30% of the time, that’s the Goldilocks number to manipulate our minds and maximize our engagement. They’ve also found that being “SO close!” to winning is actually more exciting than winning, depending on how much we win of course. It’s all about the power of anticipation. 

Unlike slot machines in casinos, the game of football is not coordinated to capitalize on our love of anticipation, but the nature of the game lends itself to maximized anticipatory enjoyment.  

As with the other side of the casinos psychological research, basketball and hockey have so much action going on that it can diminish the drama of most plays. There’s so much action going on that when an incredibly exciting play finally happens, we often have to rewind the broadcast to see what just happened, because we accidentally tuned the game out for a while. As Klosterman writes, we love action movies, but some action movies actually have too much action, and we accidentally tune out some of the action scenes that led to the big whopper, final conflict. Klosterman also alludes to the idea that football, and its 11 minutes of action, also incidentally provide talking time between moments of action, which makes it an excellent sport for group settings such as family and friendly get-togethers. On that note, I know baseball provides more moments of action, according to the WSJ study, but I find myself talking to friends so often during baseball games that by the time the action finally takes place, I’m so absorbed in the conversation that I completely lose track of the game. (This might be a problem inherent in the game of baseball for another conversation.) 

The NFL will probably never change its formula, because why would they? They’re the king of the hill, top of the heap, and they can charge advertisers pretty much whatever they want. That formula has tested the patience of even the most enthusiastic fan, as most of us hate commercials, the delays now inherent in the review process, and all of the other delays the game now provides, but I found three glorious letters that freed me from my pain, D,V, and R. It’s not foolproof, as some of our friends will text us incidental hints or outright revelations (no matter how often we tell them not to), and we’ll have to be the type who can watch a game knowing it’s already over (some weirdly cannot do this). If we can overcome those low hurdles, we’ll be able to watch most games break-free if we give them a head start of between 50-90 minutes. I usually go high-end, so I don’t have to endure sideline reporters and any banter between the play-by-play broadcaster and the analyst. The DVR also frees me from the time it takes for a referee to review a reviewable play, discuss that review with his fellow referees, and administer the effect of his findings (expedited reviews have cut down on this process, but it’s still not enough for me). Thanks to the VCR, and now the DVR, I haven’t watched an NFL game live (save for those at get-togethers) for decades, because I know those in charge of the most popular game, in the United States anyway, are not going to change, because why would they? I also disagree with Chuck Klosterman’s thesis that the NFL is doomed. Unless something unforeseen happens, I predict its dominance will almost surely continue for generations beyond the point that my generation assumes the temperature, generally between 50-55 degrees Fahrenheit, that maggots anticipate.

Klosterman’s The 90’s: A Book. A Word Salad.

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“What’s historically distinctive about the [Generation] X era is the overwhelming equivocation toward its own marginalization,” Chuck Klosterman writes in his book The 90’s: A Book. We understand Klosterman’s point, but we would write it another way. We would write that the art of equivocation may have led to Generation X’s marginalization. As evidence of this, Klosterman then writes, “The things uninformed people said about who Gen Xers supposedly were often felt reductionist and flawed, but still worthy of examination and not entirely wrong.” 

No one in my inner circle said anything bold in the 90’s. There were exceptions of course. We called them the “say anything” crowd, because they’d say anything. The rest of us were either scared, or conditioned, to qualify, equivocate, or obfuscate the meaning of everything we said to try to jam our thoughts into every square hole before us. We edited our thoughts in real time, so that no one could accuse us of generalizing. I talked to other generations, and they didn’t worry about generalizing, stereotyping, or any other accusation our crowd could dream up. They said bold things, and they could back them up, some of the times. Some of their opinions were controversial, and some of them weren’t. Some of their opinions were wrong, and some of them weren’t. They didn’t care. They weren’t afraid to share. They’d say anything. How do they get away with that, we wondered.  

Someone accused me of generalizing once, as if it were the ultimate condemnation of my assessment. By that time, we were all sick of the accusation. Being so careful became tedious after a while. I turned to my accuser and said, “I am generalizing, because I find this to be generally true.” She was shocked, presumably because no one ever fought back against her charge. Had she pressed me, I would’ve added, ‘When we generalize, we say things we believe are generally true. If something is true 50.0001% of the time, it is generally true, in general, and that is a generalization.’ “There are no absolutes,” the absolutes crowd say. We might try to argue that line, but the idea they loft is because something is not 100% true 100% of the time, then we should not discuss it until we qualify it to make considerations for the 49.9999% times it might not be true. How does anyone think, talk, or formulate conversation if they’re worried that some statement doesn’t account for the 23.1% of the population to which it doesn’t apply? You don’t. You sit back, in marginalized and intimidated corners to allow the unintimidated to continue unencumbered. The fear of condemnation leads us to say things like, “reductionist and flawed, but still worthy of examination and not entirely wrong.” We enjoyed saying such things initially, as it led to some level of “intellectual status”, but we eventually discovered how discombobulating and tedious it could become.      

2) “The most compelling aspect of The Gen X Reader is not what the writers got right or wrong, but the intensity of their search for meaning,” Chuck Klosterman writes of Douglas Rushkoff’s compilation of essays Gen X Reader (an anthology devoted to dissecting Douglas Copeland’s book Generation X). 

If all theory is autobiography, and all analysis is self-analysis, Klosterman reveals his raison d’etre in that sentence. If he did this to himself, in a public park, in the state of Alabama, they would probably ring him up on at least a half-dozen misdemeanors. 

3) “[The book Gen X Reader is] a fossilized example of how understanding the present cannot be achieved until the present has become the past,” Klosterman further writes. 

What? 

He writes, “Times, change, because that’s what they do.”  

In another space, on another subject, Klosterman asks, “Now … were these assessments accurate?” He answers: (Yes.) (No.) (Sometimes.)” 

The first thing that comes to mind when reading these particular lines is, the only person who might be more exhausted in a conversation with Chuck Klosterman, other than the audience to his conversation, is Chuck Klosterman himself. Those unfamiliar with Klosterman’s style might think he is trying to add words to fluff his word count, or they might think he’s trying too hard to be inclusive or sound intelligent. Those of us who read his books, listen to his podcast, and/or watch interviews with him know this is Chuck Klosterman. It’s the way he writes, and it’s the way he talks.  

I tried to come up with an assessment of these particular elements of Klosterman’s writing. “Word Salad,” I whispered. What’s a word salad? Wikipedia defines word salad thusly: “A word salad, or schizophasia, is a “confused or unintelligible mixture of seemingly random words and phrases”, most often used to describe a symptom of a neurological or mental disorder.” This is not Chuck Klosterman in total. He is very intelligent and insightful, but he has moments.

I recommend just about every book he has authored. Klosterman’s writing is not a word salad in this sense, but some of his sentences contain iceberg lettuce. I love iceberg lettuce. I always have. I love it as much as I do Chuck Klosterman’s work. After decades of eating the leaves, I found out that iceberg lettuce has little nutritional value. It provides vitamin A and K, and some fiber, and it has a high-water count, but compared to other lettuce leaves it is very low in nutritional value. 

Many Klosterman essays have living lettuce, oak leaf lettuce, and other leaves with nutrients, but he adds black olives. “You can never have too many black olives,” his writing says. Yes, we can. Then he adds far too much cheese, a half-pound of bacon bits, and everyone knows you don’t need that many cucumbers and croutons to make a salad, but Klosterman wants to make sure readers get value for their money.     

4) One interesting insight Klosterman writes that aligns with thoughts I’ve explored is: “[Older generations] perceive the updated versions of themselves as either softer or lazier (or both). These categorizations tend to be accurate. But that’s positive. That’s progress. If a society improves, the experience of growing up in that society should be less taxing and more comfortable; if technology advances and efficiency increases, emerging generations should rationally expect to work less. If new kids aren’t soft and lazy, something has gone wrong.” 

For most of my life I wanted others to consider me weird, strange, or just plain different. Whatever I achieved in this regard, it wasn’t enough. I wanted more. I wanted it all. I never realized what an enviable position this was, and I had no idea that it was an offshoot of my dad’s ability (financially and otherwise) that led me to a varying degree of certitude that I belong. My dad grew up in a location just south of the “other side” of the tracks. He grew up, and spent the entirety of his adulthood, trying to fit in. A portion of my desire to engage the minds of the weird, so that I might become one, could have been borne through rebellion to my dad’s obsessive desire to have others consider he and his son’s normal, but I now think he laid a foundation of norms at my feet by raising me in a normal climate that I desperately tried to escape. 

5) Klosterman also has a unique gift for making seemingly irrelevant (to me anyway) events in history cultural touchstones that either influenced, changed, or revolutionized the culture. Klosterman writes that Nelson Mandela going from jail to the Nobel Peace Prize and then to the presidency of South Africa as “the most momentous global event of the nineties.” Klosterman lists the cultural influence as initiating the art of the conspiracy theory, as conspiracy theories suggested Mandela died in a prison cell. I don’t know if Klosterman ran around in different circles, or if he is attempting to rewrite his past and assign his thoughts greater significance, but I don’t know anyone, personally, who ever talked about Nelson Mandela in the 90’s.  

6) Klosterman is a few years younger than me, and we share some similarities in our background, so when he writes what he considers the cultural touchstones of the last sixty years, I’m intimately familiar with almost everything he discusses save for one: Reality Bites. I was that Blockbuster guy we now see in retrospective videos of a guy who stood in their aisles far, FAR too often, in the 90’s, trying to find something unique and entertaining, but I never selected Reality Bites. To read Klosterman, the idea that someone who paid a ton of attention to the culture, through entertainment venues, the idea that a man my age never saw this movie is his equivalent of an American never hearing the name Babe Ruth. This isn’t the first time, and I’m sure it won’t be the last he writes of this movie, as he believes it either captured the narrative of the 90’s in America, better than any other movie, or drove it. I wouldn’t know, because I never saw it.  

Regardless what I’ve said above, I respect Mr. Chuck Klosterman. I think he’s an excellent writer, and a challenging intellect. When one of his books come out, I’m one of the first in the intangible line to pick it up. If anyone thinks I’m too negative, or cynical, I am. Whenever my friends and I would walk out of a quality movie, we would dissect it, and we were always negative and cynical. We would criticize the acting, the plot, elements of the dialogue, and anything else we could think up. If the movie just sucked, we didn’t waste any more of our lives on it. We just said, “Well, that sucked!” The great ones were the ones we picked apart. Our conversations went something like this: “I hated it when he did that!” “Oh, I know it. What about that time he did this?” “Great movie though.” “Yeah, it was.”