Wednesday Night Football

Obviously, that follow-up post on Wikileaks never came.  But let's face it, if you aren't caught up by now, there's not much I can do about that.  So we're moving on to something a little less dramatic.

I speak, of course, of football.

I've been playing Madden 11 basically non-stop for the past few days now.  It's not because of the strategic elements that sucked me in to Civilization V, or the world depth that keeps me playing Oblivion and Fallout 3.  No, the game isn't all that great.  It's a football game, plain and simple.  It does one thing, and it does it pretty well (though other reviews would disagree with even that point), but this is not a game that has much appeal outside a certain audience--football fans.  An audience that I, somehow, am a part of.

When I mention the game, or football in general, the reaction is almost always that I "don't seem like the type" to be into football.  And I'm not into football.  I've never drafted a fantasy team and I have no idea what the advantages to a 3-4 defense are (or even what the explicit definition of a 3-4 defense is), but I enjoy it.  I end up watching more than I intend to every Sunday.  I have conversations about how Matt Flynn has a lot of talent for such an inexperienced quarterback and debates about whether the Vikings were ruined from the start trying to push all their talent into key players and neglecting to really balance their team.  And the truth is, even I think I'm not the type.

Football isn't inherently different than any other sport--people pay too much to watch athletes who are paid too much and sports media plays up the drama to keep everyone watching.  It's overcomplicated.  More importantly, if my team (that would be the Packers) wins, it does not in any way affect my life.  But I keep watching.  And now, I keep playing Madden.

As it turns out, I'm not the first one to notice this phenomenon.  I stumbled on to an essay Chuck Klosterman about football, which you can (and should, although it's pretty long) read here.  Basically, he points out that football isn't like other sports.  It's constantly expanding, and it doesn't need to leave the sport to do it.  Football tends to be ahead of the curve when adopting new tech, new trends in playcalling are constantly evolving, and even with the drama (Favre) that reporters eat up, it's the game that sells tickets and subscriptions to the NFL network. 

He almost goes as far to say that football is intellectual.  There's more going on than fans and non-fans care to admit.  And though I want to agree with him, if only to make myself feel better, there's also the possibility that the NFL media machine is simply too pervasive; it's supposed to seem important, and we fall for it every time.  I'd like to think there's more to it than that, though.  I remember watching football as a kid and only really understanding that the object was to get to the other end, and that making it past the CG yellow line was a good thing.  I didn't understand the point of running straight up the field into a mass of defenders because I only saw it as something that failed--when it succeeded, it looked to me like a different play altogether.  I didn't understand how a few yard gain could be a positive thing or why every quarterback didn't go the gunslinger route and throw bombs into the end zone whenever they could.

But at some point (maybe around the same time I started getting into the Madden series) I started really watching and picking up on a little more.  Eventually, I was able to have actual conversations with my dad after games, whereas before I only really knew if we had won or lost and didn't know why certain plays would upset him.  Learning the details granted me access to a club I thought belonged only to adults and jocks and the common ground of watching an NFL game has helped lead a conversation multiple times.  Maybe that's at the core of any sport.  Who knows?

At any rate.  Maybe Klosterman's right and football really is something unique and interesting that's drawn me in with surprising complexity and subtlety.  Or maybe it's just my outlet of choice to watch guys beat up on each other.  Either way, for reasons that escape my contemplation, I'm going to keep playing Madden and sweating it in overtime 21-21 before being way too excited about running an interception in for a touchdown.  And then on Sunday, I'll watch real people do it and be either strangely happy or strangely upset because the Packers did or didn't stay in the playoffs.  Life is weird.