Gossip makes the NFL. Where will it all go if we have no season?
The NFL is the most popular sport in America, and many people attribute its popularity to the uber-masculine, gladiatorial nature of the game, a construct in which men batter one another within acceptable parameters of regulated violence. But considering the average game consists of only 11 minutes of action and teams only play once a week, shouldn’t we attribute more of the NFL’s success to what fans and the media spend the majority of the week doing? Namely, gossiping about the NFL?
Gossiping is traditionally considered a frivolous, feminine activity and beneath the consideration of men who fashion themselves as bread-winning hunters who have no time to speculate about the personal lives of people outside their immediate families. But put a handful of talking heads together in April, tell them to examine the sometimes lurid details of countless people’s pasts and to ruminate about their futures, and what do you have? An episode of The View or the three-day NFL Draft?
Yes, at the NFL Draft grown men sit around a table and dissect the measurements (number of times lifting 225 pounds versus bust and waist sizes, for the most part) of young, strapping men who won’t play meaningful games for another five months. This is simply the pinnacle of off-season NFL gossip. And people say women talk? The ratio of time that men spend talking about football versus playing football shames the ratio of time women spend talking about shoes versus actually wearing them.
Sundays in the fall are built around football in this country, a reality I’ve often found mildly depressing. Not because I dislike football (I love it), but because the specter of school or work looms so close.
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The limited number of NFL games per season ratchets up the importance of each contest, with each win or loss capable of wildly swinging a team’s fortunes. And this feeds the drama, gives added life to sports talk radio and any number of talking-head shows on ESPN and elsewhere. If the Jets are facing the Patriots on Sunday, the lead-up is six days of speculation and gossip, at least among the media and fans, who are chiefly responsible for the sport’s popularity. Rex Ryan said what about Tom Brady? And Tom Brady said he hates the Jets? Well, tell him we hate him more! And we’re gonna show him on Sunday! And so the games themselves become akin to a highly anticipated confrontation in a high school cafeteria. But what if there are no games? What if there’s a lockout that carries into the regular season? Well, if you know there’s not going to be a confrontation, if you know that wave is never going to break and roll back, then your interest in gossip is inevitably going to ebb.
Sundays in the fall are built around football in this country, a reality I’ve often found mildly depressing. Not because I dislike football (I love it), but because the specter of school or work looms so close. That’s why those Monday Night Football commercials that ask, “Is it Monday yet?” have always struck me as inane. I know it’s a marketing angle, but don’t remind me that Monday sucks. I know it sucks. And telling me there’s a football game that night doesn’t alleviate my dark thoughts. If anything, it makes me more depressed. I’ve always been surprised that this ad campaign didn’t die a premature death in a focus group. Then again, maybe it causes people to drink more alcohol, and so works as a suitable tie-in with the NFL’s other business partners.
Have you been following the ups and downs of the NFL labor situation? If so, bully for you. The permutations of the ongoing situation are complicated and annoying, i.e., boring and of little interest to me. Sitting on a bar stool talking to friends about the quarterback competition in San Francisco or Carolina? Sure, I’ll gossip like a grandmother in a sewing circle, because those opinions will eventually be put to the test—when Cam Newton becomes a worse incarnation of Vince Young (my own two cents) or Alex Smith finally proves to all you haters that he was worthy of being picked number one overall (the two cents of Smith and, well, that’s probably about it). But talk without action is just talk, a revelation, I know.
The NFL prides itself on man-against-man competition, it markets itself around collisions and violence. But at base the popularity of the league is built around gossip, a supposedly feminine pastime that will quickly dissipate without those climactic confrontations in the cafeteria.
—Photo AP/David Duprey