Some Ideas about Football That Are So Crazy They Just Might Work
A Special Super Bowl Post
If there’s one thing that unites us, it’s football. Heck, I am such a Coastal Liberal that I don’t even live in the US, and yet I love football too (and no, not the European kind). Every year, the NFL accounts for the vast majority of the 100 most-watched broadcasts (in 2022 it was 82 of 100, and in 2021 it was 75, for example). Football is important. It entertains us, provides the perfect excuse for throwing a party, gives us something to talk about with friends and strangers, and unleashes our creativity. As just one example, check out this amusing explanation for Stefon Diggs’s miraculous reception that led to the Vikings’s victory over the Saints in the 2018 NFC playoffs:
This Sunday, I invite readers to consider some of my ideas about football—in between watching the game, laughing at the commercials, noshing on snacks, and trash-talking with friends and family, of course. These ideas may seem crackpot at first, but in fact they just attempt to treat football like other aspects of American life—and some aspects of American life a bit more like football. After all, what’s more American than football?
Pay NCAA Division I Football Players
Thanks to the efforts of such people as the civil rights historian Taylor Branch (in this excellent article, from 2011), our country is beginning to confront the injustice in how we (don’t) compensate college football players. It is farcical to argue that football scholarships are adequate payment; according to a recent survey, nearly a quarter of Division I athletes have experienced food insecurity, and 14 percent face homelessness. Practice and game schedules are so grueling and time-consuming that, with the rare exception of geniuses like Richard Sherman, players are not able to get a useful education. And, because all athletic scholarships are awarded year-to-year, players can be cut off and left with nothing if they are injured or are put on academic probation—injuries and probation that, it bears mentioning, were caused by playing football. The ingratitude is shameful.
NCAA Division I football players generate enormous wealth for their universities and the surrounding communities, and they should be paid accordingly.1 In the NFL and NBA, about half of the total income from games and broadcasts goes to player salaries. If NCAA Division I players were paid according to the same rule, the average annual salary for Division I football players would be $360,000, and quarterbacks would make around $2.4 million. (You can find these figures here.) An NCAA rule change in 2020 now allows athletes to receive compensation when universities use their name and/or image on products. This is a good start. Now, college football players should be allowed to get endorsement deals and be paid a salary too. Let’s admit that they are in fact professional athletes, and that it is only just to allow them to share in the extraordinary wealth they are creating for other people.
Institute Real Penalties for Unnecessary Roughness
Football is a dangerous sport, and some good proposed solutions for the problem of concussion include banning “collision sports” for kids under age fourteen, mandating that school teams employ “a certified athletic trainer educated in concussion recognition and management,” and requiring that a doctor or EMT be present at high school games. These changes would be expensive for school districts, but it seems only fair that the taxpayers who enjoy and profit from high school football should pay for some of the costs of their entertainment, which are currently being borne only by the players and their loved ones.
It is great that we have started a conversation about the problem of concussion. Next, we should address the problem of unnecessary roughness. Currently, the penalties for unnecessary roughness range from in-game penalties to temporary suspensions and fines. This is not nearly enough of a deterrent, given that players, when encouraged toward gratuitous violence, could permanently injure or even kill people. From 2009–11, the New Orleans Saints notoriously had a bounty system that gave financial rewards to players for injuring players on opposing teams. In the 2009 NFC Championship game, Saints players tackled Minnesota quarterback Brett Favre and hit him below the knees, injuring his ankle and preventing him from being able to play. In part because of this behavior the Saints won the game and went on to win the Super Bowl that year.
The NFL fined the Saints $500,000 and suspended four players, three coaches, and the general manager, but the suspensions were later overturned. Besides, the Super Bowl win was a couple of orders of magnitude more valuable than such a paltry fine. These minor penalties, far from shutting down bounty systems, encourage them by putting an affordable price on them. Teams might decide that these low fines are tacit permission to injure other players2 if cheating in this way can give them a shot at the Super Bowl. In fact it is an open secret that bounty systems continue on some teams to this day.
Bounty systems, and indeed any encouragement of unnecessary roughness from coaches, managers, team owners, or even other players, are dangerous and unsportsmanlike. The NFL needs to definitively eliminate excessive violence in the game and return to ideals of good sportsmanship, as exemplified by so many of the players. To accomplish this goal, the NFL ought to institute automatic season bans for unnecessary roughness, and, in egregious cases, lifetime bans. And I would go further: Coaches and other management personnel who bribe players to assault other players should face criminal penalties. It is a crime when mafia dons or drug dealers hire goons to beat people up; it ought to be a crime in football too.
Make Highbrow Art More Like Football
Why do people like football? Well, because it’s entertaining, duh. But why is it entertaining? One reason is that the networks make it easy to follow the game. We enjoy things more when we understand what is going on. The game moves in one direction (and, thrillingly, when there’s an interception, abruptly back the other way), from left to right or right to left. After an important play, the cameras show us the player and the announcers explain what happened. There are frequent replays, sometimes in slow motion. And, since 1998, networks put in a yellow first-down line and a blue line of scrimmage to give viewers a visual signal for how far the team needs to move the ball to get the first down. (Here is a great explanation of how the technology works—it is an impressive achievement!)
Another reason that American football is fun is that we are not required to power through the whole game uninterrupted. Between timeouts, commercial breaks, and halftime, we have plenty of time to tank up on beer and (relatedly) run to the bathroom, talk with our friends, or, if you’re me, knit. The game doesn’t demand superhuman powers of concentration. And viewers who aren’t sports fans can still hang out with their friends and enjoy the ads, tiny creative masterpieces that make us laugh and touch our hearts.
Highbrow art could learn a lot from the NFL. Theater directors have already figured out that to get audiences to come see Shakespeare and other challenging works, they need to intersperse the speeches with spectacle and to make the plays comprehensible, fun, and funny. But in most cases art museums and classical music groups have yet to get the memo. Football’s rules aren’t obvious to the layperson, so the NFL explains them. Similarly, if you haven’t received an education in classical music and visual art, these arts can be intimidating, confusing, and kind of boring.3
I am full of ideas for how classical music and art museums could be more like football. For example, a concert announcer could give the audience a bit of background about the composer and the work and help them know what to listen for in the piece. Or how about an instant replay in music, where audiences can hear a challenging piece (or just a section) for a second time? (I have been to a couple of concerts in Switzerland where they did this. I was taken aback at first, but now I think it’s a great idea, especially for works the audience has never heard before.) Or what if museums gave educational tours not just to school kids but also to adults, to share stories about the artists and help people know what to look for in paintings and sculpture?4
And just as football broadcasts break up the game with commentary and commercials, it would be terrific if the fine arts were less of a forced march and more of a festival. Many venues in Europe allow us to bring our drinks into the concert hall instead of quaffing them down during intermission, a practice that could be adopted in the US. Concerts could be shorter, or the music could be accompanied by film or dance. Harry Potter concerts, Videogames Live, and silent films with live accompaniment always sell out quickly, and if traditional orchestras were to add visual media to their concerts, I suspect that new audiences would come.
Art museums, for their part, could adopt a couple of ideas from the Zentrum Paul Klee, our local museum. On selected days, the Zentrum brings in dancers to perform among the paintings and sculptures. We follow the dancers around as they travel through the exhibition and perform their interpretation of selected works. The Zentrum also sets up tables with blocks and an overhead projector, so that people can make their own works and see them projected on the walls. Or here’s an idea I came up with: Sometimes museums’ high admission price can make us feel obligated to see every durn thing to get our money’s worth. This can be a deterrent, especially if we lack time or enthusiasm for that much art at one time. Wouldn’t it be cool for museums to offer discounted, “taster” passes for people who just wanted to pop in and visit a few favorite works before meeting a friend for lunch at the museum cafe?
Make Superbowl Sunday (Observed) a Federal Holiday
I love holidays and think we need more of them. The Super Bowl is an American celebration of togetherness and fun. Plus it is a huge boost to our economy. Football also helps us to be better people and kinder to each other. As someone once said, football is a war where nobody dies. We are tribal creatures, and it is much better for our country when we channel our tendency to be hostile to the out group toward football teams rather than against each other. Speaking of which, let’s take a poll!
On Sunday, most of us will be staying up late to watch the big game. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we turned Monday into a national holiday called Super Bowl Sunday (Observed)? Instead of getting up early to go to work, everyone could sleep in, stumble into the kitchen around noon and eat leftovers for brunch, and get together over drinks with friends in the afternoon to discuss the game and watch the top Super Bowl commercials on YouTube.
You may be objecting that we have too many holidays in winter already—New Year’s Day, Martin Luther King Day, Presidents’ Day. Well, many European countries have a week off in mid-February so everyone can go skiing.5 If Europeans can declare a holiday just for skiing, we Americans ought to have a few Mondays off in the winter to commemorate what is best about our country. On MLK Day we would celebrate the courage of those who sacrificed to make our country live up to its ideals; on Presidents’ Day we would honor the leaders who established our country as a democracy and then held that democracy together; and on Super Bowl Sunday (Observed) we would remind ourselves that there is more that unites than divides us, and that conflict doesn’t have to be catastrophic.
Award This Year’s MVP to the Medical Professionals Who Saved Damar Hamlin’s Life
I love Patrick Mahomes as much as the next person and will not be sorry in the likely event that he is awarded the MVP. But the game’s true most valuable players are the EMTs, trainers, doctors, and other medical professionals who performed the miracle of bringing Damar Hamlin quite literally back from the dead and who are now working to restore him to full health. Yes, it is important that our country is united and entertained, but the expertise, hard work, patience, and cool heads of these medical professionals are more important still and are exactly the qualities our country most needs. I would love to see these heroes honored not only by Bills fans, but at the Super Bowl too.
How about you, readers? What do you think of these ideas? And are you rooting for Kansas City or Philadelphia? Or are you more interested in the ads and halftime show? Please share your thoughts in the comments!
The Tidbit
Minnesota’s Purple People Eaters (i.e. the Vikings) may never win the Super Bowl, but in 2007, Minnesota’s Purple One (i.e. Prince) performed the greatest Super Bowl Halftime Show of all time, in the pouring rain. According to legend,
producer Don Mischer called up Prince to tell him he’d probably have to perform his halftime show in the middle of a torrential downpour. “I want you to know it’s raining,” Mischer said. “Are you OK?” Prince had a very simple response: “Can you make it rain harder?”
The NFL isn’t allowing me to put the video of the show into this article, but you can watch it here. Purple Rain is at the 8:30 mark. Let’s all sing along!
The same goes for Division I basketball players. True, basketball doesn’t expose players to the same risk of injury as football, but it makes a comparably large profit, and so these players should be paid too.
In fact fines that are intended to discourage a bad behavior often wind up encouraging it. A famous example is day care centers that imposed fines for late pickups, only to discover that more parents picked up their kids late after the fines were instituted than before. The parents treated the fines as permission to leave their kids at daycare for a low cost.
I actually ran into this issue when I was a teacher. To encourage students to turn in their papers on time, I told them that they would lose a third of a letter grade for each day the paper was late. Many of my students, figuring this was a small price to pay for getting an extra day to work on their papers, turned in their next paper late! (I changed the policy.)
I am a veteran of decades of piano and voice lessons and took music history as a college elective, and yet even I have been known to find some classical concerts to be a slog. (I agree with Mark Twain when he says, “The music of Wagner is better than it sounds.”) How much more incomprehensible and unappealing must these concerts be to people without a background in music? This issue will be the subject of a future post.
I know this idea would work because my mother-in-law developed a wonderful and popular program to teach visual literacy to Head Start moms. She made DC’s free museums fun and accessible to families who had never visited them before.
This is not a joke! Those Europeans sure do know how to live, don’t they?
The museum taster pass is a brilliant idea!
Sir Henry Wood had ideas about popularising classical music too - his idea was to play in a public park where people could just promenade around, hence "The Proms". I think it was his collaborators who also introduced concerts in halls where you could bring in your own food and drink (and smoke) to attract a wider audience., as well as selling tickets more cheaply than the usual rates.
A while back the BBC had a service where when you watched the Proms on TV, you could turn on an alternative subtitle-like view where it explained background information about the music and the composer - in a much more chatty than stuffy way - and I really enjoyed watching that.