One mo’ ‘gin for my sin

Why Do Americans Love Football So Much? We Sinfully Love Violence

There are a lot of attractive things about the National Football League. It’s like a big-tent circus: The league gives fans dancing girls, gambling excitement, international sponsors to make the events seem important, animal mascots both costumed and real, the popular music of the day, slick adverts, celebrity participants and observers, and the latest technologically-advanced equipment to capture it all.

But the answer to the above question isn’t truly about any of those things, unless you are a child, a star watcher, or someone who chooses winners based on the colors on uniforms. Those things are like appetizers to the main course.

For the genuine football fan who watches because of the game itself, the sport is basically a lot of controlled activity that would be called a felony outside the stadium. Commentator Gary Danielsen used the word vicious several times during one November 2012 college game. One skilled man’s strength, will, and smarts, against another man, with the goal of unpretty physical domination. And that’s why people watch so much of it. If you are disagreeing right now, it’s possible that you are catastrophically desensitized, numb to all the violence and horror imagery and profanity in our world.

Man has a thirst for blood and conflict. To put it most simply, we are sinful by nature. We can deny this fact all we want. No one enjoys the concept of sin, but sin is the reason that you love football.

No one is saying violence is the ONLY reason you watch, nor even the most important. But the violence in football cannot be separated from whatever other components you like. You can’t take the cinnamon swirl from the middle of a bundt coffee cake.

Some people disagree with this notion, perhaps squeamish about thinking of people (especially themselves) that way–as violence-lovers, as people who enjoy the least common denominator. Perhaps they are believing that people are good creatures at heart, who make a few bad decisions. But the Bible has it right, as usual.

Going against all worldly wisdom, Jeremiah 17:9 declares, The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can understand it?

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Popular arguments against the violence theory include the simple appreciation of superior athletic ability, which of course applies to all high-level sports. There’s nothing quite like a receiver (or cornerback) leaping over a crowd for a fingertip catch, or a shifty running back escaping half of the other team on the way to a score. Even TV viewers feel a rush when the ball carrier breaks from the crowd and has speed to burn.

This points to another attractive quality of pro football: the game is like a chess match. In high school and college, there are more mismatches than serious fans would like. No matter how smart a ballplayer is, if he’s outclassed physically, he doesn’t stand a chance over the long haul.

In the NFL, players are the best of the best. On most days, opposing teams are deadlocked athletically. The coaches become more important. So there are some who believe that the execution of a plan, and the adjustments of the staff and players, are what attracts the American football fan.

These people claim that we watch football for its highbrow qualities–for the flawless, high-I.Q. two-minute drives by New England Patriot quarterback Tom Brady and coach Bill Belichick. Those who hold up the “cerebral” flag are partly correct, but finally wrong. You never see these types watching touch, flag, or Arena League football, all places where offensive precision is important.

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NFL’s Greatest Hits was cringe-worthy entertainment in its day, back when “VHS tape” was still part of our daily lexicon. These compilations live on through YouTube and top ten hits/tacklers lists on various sites, including the league’s! {edit: previously, there was a link to NFL.com here, but the site has removed the ‘greatest hits’ video in question. The films live on through various YouTube accounts.}

We get all respectable and solemn when a man is motionless on the grass, yet the league makes money off of the hit that put him there. It’s a difficult balance, glorifying the controlled rage on the field while facetiously hoping that no one gets hurt.

To profit off of such a collection of football hits would be politically incorrect today. But if the league brought the concept of Greatest Hits back to market, you bet your life that it would still sell well. Protestors aside, it would sell. Why? Because the average fan might enjoy the execution of a well-oiled machine, and he may marvel at the sight of world-class athletes doing their job. However, most watch for the most primal reason.

“I don’t care what color you are, what country you come from… we’re all human beings, and fighting is in our DNA,” Ultimate Fighting Championship president Dana White told Complex magazine in 2012.

The denials ignore what is so basic: Football allows grown, powerful men to assault each other legally. (Which is why Dana White’s mixed martial art fights are so popular.) If you did much of what we see on the field anywhere else, you’d be in handcuffs. Or maybe dead. Americans love that aspect of the game, no matter what any talking head, sports radio host, or league shill tells you.

The violence is somewhat regulated and sanitized for our viewing pleasure. But a wild tiger behind protective glass is still deadly. We know it, and we take pleasure in observing it.

Clearly, we are a violence-loving culture. We own about one gun per person in the United States. Our homicides and assaults lead the entire world. Our political leaders and citizens are largely okay with the fact that the military has been in action somewhere, almost since the nation’s birth. We quietly endorse the rape, murder and torture of foreigners everywhere. We call the wicked policing “patriotism” and “pre-emptive.”

Hollywood is considered a national treasure, though it produces sickening levels of violent, worldview-altering films and music. Literally thousands of studies have shown that a lifetime of watching violence will surely condition a person–it won’t necessarily cause an outburst, but the outburst is more likely… and so is the shoulder-shrugging acceptance of seeing someone become a victim of violence. That debate is over. We are almost as likely to record the violence on our phones as help the injured.

John 7:7

⁷ The world cannot hate you; but me it hateth, because I testify of it, that the works thereof are evil.

This all leads back to the football field. The football fan like big hits. He likes when the television camera can capture that sound of shoulder pads and helmets crunching together. Or when a player’s run is interrupted by a brick wall of opponents. All of our mouths make that familiar O of awe when we see this.

The fanatic is fascinated when an ankle rolls like cooked spaghetti, and when a QB’s face ripples like pudding as his head whiplashes from a strike to the sternum. So that fan should just own up to those emotions. Enjoying violence is sin.

Football owes Teddy Roosevelt a great debt, for once he helped save the game from being outlawed.

The gridiron season of 1905, when he was the twenty-sixth President of the United States, exacted a frightful toll of human life: thirty-two players were killed on football fields. This aroused the wrath of a nation, and in press, pulpit, and public hall, the game was attacked as a brutal sport. Thirty state legislatures introduced bills to make football a crime.

It was then that Teddy Roosevelt came to the game’s rescue. He summoned all the important college officials for a conference at the White House. Strongly and vigorously, he pleaded with the college presidents and noted educators, that college football was a game worth playing, worth improving and worth saving. Under his sponsorship was organized what is today the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Rules were formulated to eliminate rough playing that caused unnecessary injuries and death on the gridiron. And from then on football grew and prospered as a popular sport.

The strangest part of Teddy Roosevelt’s interest and timely intervention to save the game from being outlawed in the United States, was that he never had played football and personally had no liking for the game. [emphasis mine]

From “Sports Shorts” by Mac Davis, Grosset & Dunlap Edition, 1968.

Sounds familiar? And you thought we were so “progressive” and “evolved” these days…

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The current race to reduce above the collar tackles, supposedly to protect the players’ heads, is proof that violence is the main reason for the NFL’s rise to “America’s Game” status. Don’t believe for a second that the league is genuinely (personally) worried about the players, when they make “player safety” rule changes. These gestures are designed to massage the conscience for today–and to build a levee against a future tsunami of injury-related lawsuits.

Penalties for defenseless hits, launching and a widening cushion around quarterbacks have changed the game. Kickoffs have been adjusted. Brady’s 2008 injury led to a “knee rule,” which seemed to give him and other elite QBs instant sway with the referees. You’d see Brady in subsequent seasons, leaping off the ground to complain about late hits, and the lobbying worked.

These scale backs made defenses gun-shy, which in turn has contributed to all of the recent QB success. Translation: In aiming for player safety, the NFL also opened up the field for the offense. More scoring makes the casual watcher more interested.

Two birds with one stone. That’s where the efficient scoring teams flourish. If football were boxing, it’s the equivalent of making the defense pound a six pack before Round 1. Quarterback records have been getting shattered (see Drew Brees and Peyton Manning), and it may not be because young play callers are getting better and smarter.

There’s even an opinion floating around that today’s ultra-connected society helps upcoming QBs process information more quickly than in the past. Never mind that much of the “info-tainment” we receive from mainstream media is distorted; what apparently matters is that these young men are processing the lies and half-truths very quickly. No–the success is partly due to the game being tailored to them, through numerous concessions to offense, over the last decade or so.

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The point is that the rule changes are arbitrary. ESPN ‘heads and others drank the Kool-Aid with nary a second thought: Protect the players’ heads! The NFL is just trying to cover itself from future lawsuits. This is predictable behavior, because they’re a business, just as the players are corporations too, to an extent. So as a business, the idea that the league is looking out for player safety is ludicrous; the athletes are commodities.

Of course, owners and the league office needs functioning star players to keep the money train rolling. In that way, one could argue that they “care.” But to the men whose salaries match or exceed even the players, the athletes’ safety is a bonus, at best. For the NFL, it’s We’ve got to keep the most exciting skill players more healthy and on the field… not We’re concerned about what this game does long-term to the entire body. The second question will pop up soon.

Think about it: why aren’t some knee and lower leg hits penalized (other than on a QB)? Brian Urlacher raised this question during the 2012 season. Commonly the answer is that the head is so very valuable. A logical reply. So… therefore it doesn’t matter if a former player is unable to move, and it’s okay if his body is broken from years of punishment, as long as he can lie there able to cogitate with 10% more coherence because he took a few less concussive shots? This is straight hypocrisy.

Notice how, no matter if a hit was or wasn’t “legal”, or the player was or wasn’t just injured, the networks show the most vicious college and pro tackles from eight different angles. Meanwhile, the game commentators cluck and bite their lower lip, leaking empathy… Today’s cameras allow slow-motion by the millisecond and in stunning detail. No one is going to get up for a beverage when Adrian Peterson’s knee is being shredded and recorded at hummingbird wing-capturing speeds.

Matthew 6:22-23

²² The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.

²³ But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!

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One radio ‘head believes we prefer the 45-42 type of score; thus, we don’t watch football for its brutality. “You wanna protect your star players,”  he says. “The number one jersey sellers, for every team in this league? Almost all offensive players. Highest rated games? When you have two star quarterbacks. We don’t watch for defense; we watch for offense.”

Somehow he equates defensive 13-10 struggles with more violence. He must be watching different games than the rest of us. Since when does a lot of scoring mean that no one is getting dirty, in every sense of the word?

How many football players have admitted on record to pulling out all the stops? (Hmm, pretty much every one of them.) They’re not trying to, you know, hurt a guy… not permanently… just, sorta maybe kinda take him out… I mean, slow him down a gear. Put him in his place. Let him know what time it is. Get an edge… Not one former player ever said, “We eased up physically because both teams were scoring so often.” A blowout game might lessen the intensity; an elite offensive shootout wouldn’t.

What do defensive players and sports experts always say about elite offenses? “Gotta put some hits on them. Gotta make them uncomfortable.” Then people want to gather and pray after the game to The Man Upstairs, who is not the God of the Holy Bible. If you have any biblical discernment, you already know this without need for debate.

Remember the Saints blasting Brett Favre in the 2009 NFC title game? The excessive roughness of the Saints throughout the game was noted in the varied media broadcasts at the time, says Wikipedia. Minnesota and New Orleans scored more than a few offensive TDs on that day. Despite lots of turnovers, the game was no defensive wrestling match. Score: 31-28.

“I’m for eliminating violence (from the game),” says the radio host quoted above. This is simply not possible… not as football is currently designed.

This host occasionally takes time to defend the football fan’s love for the game: “It’s not about the violence! It’s about the performance, the adjustments and strategy, the application of a plan…”

But he is invested in protecting his job (talking about the nation’s most popular sport twelve months a year), and in stirring the pot of public discourse, so we must take his opinions with a grain of salt. Because you can get all of those other things watching a master chef create and coordinate a five-course meal.

Sure, fans like fast-break football more. But the linemen are usually at war no matter the score. And knockout hits happen in offensive shoot-outs, too. Most games that we watch, a few guys get carted off. Now start adding up all the games you’ve ever seen.

Seattle Seahawk Sidney Rice concussed against Chicago Bears

We like violence, in many forms. Our best media controllers make violence glossy and presentable. We try to make football civilized, but it’s still a lust for blood. The people who deny this are either dupes (they are clueless, having no idea what makes up the human heart) or traitors (they’re aware that humans are sinful and bloodthirsty by nature, and benefit in some way, i.e., they are employed within the media talking head consortium, by not mentioning the truth). And we haven’t even touched on the fact that idolatry of other people is wrong.

Joe Namath, appearing on CNN’s Piers Morgan in December 2012, summed it best with one sentence (paraphrased): “The human body wasn’t meant to take the punishment that the game of football dishes out.” The human body–not just the head.

This is not a call to outlaw the precious game, or make former and incapacitated players into victims when they chose to sacrifice their bodies for money and adrenaline. It is simply a call for reason. We need to stop denying the violent nature of football… and the wicked hearts of its fans.