How to Be a Football Fan
In which I proclaim my undying love for sportswriter Jon Bois
1.
The Super Bowl was last night!
As I write this, it’s not over, but it might as well be. The Philadelphia Eagles took an early lead and then just kept expanding it. Probably most of America prefers this outcome, and I guess I do too. Once the Lions were knocked out, though, I mostly lost interest. And I suppose I didn’t have a very active interest even before then.
But I have always had an interest in criticizing other people’s interests and how they’re expressed, so here we go:
How should you be a football fan?
Well, actually, first we need to ask whether you should be one at all.
There are lots of reasons to say you shouldn’t be. The horrible inhumaneness of it all, for one. The idea that we’re paying lots of strong grown men millions of dollars to slam into each other as hard as possible, to develop debilitating traumatic injuries that kill them prematurely.
A certain segment of America, and most of the developed world, is pretty swayed by arguments like these.
Take, for example, that bastion of liberal American snot, The Atlantic. They’ve been publishing, for nine years now, an annual photojournalism piece called “Superb Owl Sunday.”
Of course, I can’t help but give it up for the wordplay. It was sitting right in there all along! And none of us noticed it! How clever of them! And the pictures really are beautiful. Owls are strange and awesome creatures, and it’s difficult not to be swayed by their majesty.
But come on. It’s not Superb Owl Sunday, it’s Super Bowl Sunday. This has the same energy as “oh, I’m not so into sportsball games,” a despicable sentence I’ve uttered more times than I’m comfortable admitting. Basically, it’s the sort of thing that lost us the election. Middle America loves “sportsball,” and so do the lower-class urban centers where Trump made his biggest gains. Being a dick about popular things just to feel superior is not a good political strategy, nor a great social one.
If you were too offended by the horrific spectacle of football to really enjoy Super Bowl Sunday (I sympathize, trust me), take this xkcd as inspiration to still act decently, and try to stomach (heh) your outrage in the future:
And, if you’re open to becoming a football fan in any capacity, let me tell you how to do it the right way.
2.
The first step is not doing it the wrong way.
This is the version of football fandom you’ll probably associate with the right wing, or what
might call Low Human Capital.It’s epitomized by former punter and spray-tan aficionado Pat McAfee, who hosts the Pat McAfee Show (abbreviated, hilariously, as PMS):
He is, as the kids say, a major douchebag.
His show is mean-spirited and stupid, mostly. Other sports personalities seem to regard him as a bully rather than a serious commentator, much less journalist.
Of course, he has mass appeal. Tons of adoring fans, and now probably more power than the network that gave him a chance, ESPN. Sort of the Joe Rogan of the sports world. And there was initially some hope that he could bring a new energy to an increasingly stuffy—and increasingly marginal—industry. But it just didn’t pan out. From award-winning sports journalist
:When ESPN made a bet on Pat McAfee I celebrated the move. I thought he would bring good opinions, fun energy, and make the network better. Instead he’s turned into a low-grade school-yard bully.
Pat McAfee’s style of football enjoyment is probably the most widespread. He likes big hits because they look like they hurt. He was immediately skeptical of new safety-focused targeting rules in college football. He’s in it for the cruelty and the danger, and unapologetically so.
This is gross, and you should be grossed out by it. Wanting to see human suffering for its own sake is a reprehensible thing on any good moral theory. It’s not virtuous or beneficent or anything. Just gross.
You and I can do better.
3.
The opposite extreme from Pat McAfee is exemplified by
.Guys like Silver are into football and basketball and especially baseball, because they see sports as a great opportunity to do lots of math. It’s just another game of poker to them (and so is politics).
I’m less inherently grossed out by this. I only worry that sports as reduced to numbers loses its luster for most people. Then again, Moneyball was a huge commercial success! Certainly there’s enough of an audience for all this that huge data repositories like Sports Reference have stayed alive for decades now—eternity, in internet terms.
Still, Silver will never have the same kind of audience as Pat McAfee. It’s football fandom by Elite Human Capital and for Elite Human Capital. No attempt at crossover relatability, just numbers, numbers, numbers.
Silver will dip his toes into run-of-the-mill sportswriting—see his recent piece on some spicy NBA news I really don’t understand—but he’ll never achieve the popularity that people like Bill Simmons will have talking about the same events.
We need a middleground. Some hero, clad in fashionable and shiny armor, but with a brain capable of algebra. Who can redeem us? Who can show us the light?
4.
Enter Jon Bois.
The first thing to note is that Bois looks to me eerily like a mash-up of Silver and McAfee’s faces:
Jon Bois was a college dropout, and started out as a blogger while working at Radioshack.
At some point, his writing career took off and he landed a gig as an editor at SB Nation, which has always been a sort of quirky home for the sports world’s most interesting people. It was very much corporately intertwined with the early Vox, to give you some idea.
Bois began work on his masterpiece, 17776, in 2016. It took him about a year to finish, and its multimedia awesomeness required SB Nation to invent new tools to be able to host it.
It’s a huge and beautiful work of science fiction futurism, but about football. If you ever have a half-dozen hours to kill, and especially if you’re running a fever, I can’t recommend it enough.
I’m watching Futurama right now, and its vision of the future is annoying as hell. But Bois is incredibly consistent. The world of 17776 is exactly as distant and absurd as it should be—but its subjects are still people. They’re sympathetic and motivated and beautiful.
Fundamentally, it’s just a really good read. It’s about the values hidden deep in the game of football. The values that make it conceivable for it still to exist in a transhumanist, nanotech-enriched society of 15,000 years hence. If you want to understand how to love football in the deepest, truest way—read 17776.
Of course, Bois, everlasting genius that he is, didn’t stop there. For one, there’s a direct sequel—20020—which, in all honesty, I haven’t made it through yet. I’m waiting for my next fever to get the full impact of it.
And he’s done a couple more notable projects over the years. By far the best of them is Chart Party.
5.
When I was younger, I was into football in something closer to the Pat McAfee way. I would watch the NFL RedZone channel—a dizzying broadcast of all the most exciting moments of every game—each Sunday afternoon. And then, to be sure I hadn’t missed anything, I’d trawl through Youtube for extended highlight reels on Monday.
Of course, I was also watching various extremely-nerdy math videos on Youtube (Parker Square, anyone?), and eventually the algorithm found me the perfect mix: Chart Party.
I still remember how thrilled I felt watching my first video from the series: “What if Barry Bonds had played without a baseball bat?” As it turns out, he would’ve still been very, very good. Like better than anyone else. Only Barry Bonds with a baseball bat could’ve outperformed Barry Bonds without one.
How is that possible? Watch the video. It’s worth your time, I’m not gonna explain it all to you here. Between the bespoke animations, the inventive charts, and the soothing timbre of Bois’ narration, the twelve minutes fly by and leave you wanting more. Much more.
Luckily, Bois has more for you. I finished off all the Chart Parties of the time and got off Youtube for a few years. But when I went back, at the top of my recommended page sat a newer, longer installation: “The search for the saddest punt in the world.” I know it sounds sarcastic, but I’m not joking: the hour just flies by.
Bois knows exactly why football exists and why people like it. He fuses the human with the statistical flawlessly, every time. Each Chart Party is a masterpiece.
Jon Bois is a national treasure. To be a good football fan is, in the end, very simple—just be a Jon Bois fan.
Lukethoughts
(Lucas was a bit dodgier with his thoughts this time, and once I got him to share, he was a bit more cryptic than usual. Still, enjoy.)
“Super Bowl was so boring and uninteresting and btw I’m saying this as its happening” (Ed. note: Can’t disagree in the slightest. Blowouts are no fun, even when they happen to the most deserving asshole teams.)
“Everything is so expensive I want to die, take me to my home costco” (Ed. note: This sentence has some real “Let’s eat grandma” energy. Not totally sure what Luke’s complaint was, I suggested he buy some Campbell’s soup, but was rebuffed.)
“My gas only cost $29 today so I’m a happy man” (Ed. note: Gas prices have been lower, but I wouldn’t necessarily expect it to last. Canada tariffs could really screw us over here.)
