Obligatory Superbowl Post

I used to watch a lot of soccer and other sports like that which showcases a bowstring – now I still watch around World Cup time, but my sports watching now seems limited to a once every four year extavaganza limited to however long it takes the South American teams to be eliminated, or, if there’s an interesting European player like Bergkamp out there, however long it takes for his team to drop out.

The Superbowl is on now. I’m not watching. I don’t have much interest in football. But I have some thoughts about football. They’ve been kicking around my head for a long time – so long, in fact, that it may be they’re not original and I actually read them somewhere. So if I’m plagiarizing someone’s idea, my apologies – its inadvertent. My thoughts center around the idea that football is the quintessential American sport. A few features of football that make it the quintessential American sport:

1. Everyone on the team is a specialist
2. The people on the field don’t resemble people you see in normal life
3. The action lasts only a few seconds at a time
4. The action is repeated over and over, from a zillion angles
5. Marketing is more important what actually happens on the field
6. There is an insane number of rules, some quite technical
7. In the end, the call made by the referees is often the most important thing in deciding who wins
8. Somone gets sued for something silly. This year (I’m too lazy to hunt for links right now), some megachurches were told to cancel their Superbowl parties by the NFL, which was concerned that it would drive down Nielsen ratings
9. There’s a lot of beer drinking involved