why do you like football?

over the thanksgiving weekend my wife noticed that i was watching a lot of football. she's not one of those anti-football or anti-sports wives who is against her husband watching sports, but she has no interest in watching any sport except tennis. occasionally though, she'll watch with me. so this time she asked me why i like watching football and i had a tough time articulating what i like about it. i could write 10,000 words on why i love baseball but i'm not entirely sure what i like about football. so what do you like about football?

 

Nothing.

What I hate about football (NFL in particular) is that it's just too much -- too much hype, too much pre-game nonsense, too much in-game histrionics, too much everything ... and in the end, not nearly the amount of drama as baseball.

I hate that ESPN has essentially turned into the NFL Network. Sit through (or at least try to sit through) PTI or Around the Horn, and literally 90 percent of the subjects are football-related. Give me a break.

And I hate the fact that just about every player in the NFL is on some sort of performanc-enhancing drug (whether it's HGH, steroids or things we don't know about yet), and yet baseball constantly takes the brunt when it comes to steroid talk.

That's what I hate about football.

 

Anyone who hates football hates America.

 

It's the total rush sport par excellence. Total commitment, total everything. It was a blast to play at the teeny-tiny high school level and it's been a blast to watch since I was six years old, which was some time ago. It's hard, brutal, deplorable, and glorious.

 

The guys have better butts than baseball players

OK, now the honest reason. It's simply more exciting. My ADD self is easily bored by baseball, esp. on TV.

 

Intensity. The pure intensity of it. That's why I love watching it from the sideline.

 

At least the baseball down time is real, though, and not forced upon us by the networks. They go to commercial between innings and pitching changes. Fair enough. Not before a kickoff and after a kickoff, where you get like 20 seconds of action during 10 minutes of real time. Almost interminable at times.

 

Gambling.

 

Men, we're hard-wired to be hunter/gatherers, and that often involved physical activity and conflict. But for the most part now we don't hunt, we don't gather (except on the occasional run to Quik Trip). So we have to satisfy that hard-wired need in other ways, and apparently we've found that watching football is a substitute.

Women? No idea.

 

I don't know. I grew up in a family of women and they all hated it with a passion.

 

I played, so I enjoy it on that level, but mostly it's the merging of brawn and brains. There are countless collisions all over the field, and how those players got in position to make those collisions is fascinating. Of course, I would have liked the game a lot better if we threw it as much as they do now. :

 

That about sums it up for me.