Leave it to Chuck Klosterman to get to the heart of why Americans are addicted to football.
The longtime pop culture writer, author and frequent Bill Simmons Podcast guest is set to release a new book called “Football” and joined Simmons to espouse his theories on why the sport has become not only America’s national pastime but also its dominant entertainment product and cultural touchstone.
While Klosterman acknowledges all the usual reasons — the limited inventory of games, the popularity of high school and college football, the physicality — he credits the majority of the sport’s dominance to how it plays on television. In fact, Klosterman makes the argument, in the Simmons interview and seemingly in the forthcoming book, that football is actually the best television show of all time.
“No one looked at television and thought, ‘This will be the perfect machine to broadcast football,'” Klosterman explained on The Bill Simmons Podcast this week.
“An incredible coincidence happened, (which) is that football is better experienced through television. And television, for a whole variety of semiotic reasons, the best thing it can do is show you a football game. The way it’s designed, the way the passive experience of watching television works, it’s just ideal for football. And this is why football became the thing that it did. It’s this enforced marriage to television that ended up being the best possible thing for both sides of the equation.”
Klosterman also cited a popular idea among football’s detractors, that the on-field play amounts to barely more than 10 minutes of action over the course of a three-plus hour game.
Certainly a strange data point, but one that Klosterman believes ultimately serves to make watching football even better.
“As it turns out, 11 minutes is the perfect amount,” Klosterman argued.
“Football has this accidental upside, which is super-intense, hyper-action in a small window of time,” he said. “Maybe seven seconds. And then there’s this time where you can think about what you saw, what’s coming next. Maybe the analyst will describe what we actually saw in a way that we couldn’t comprehend … or you can think about something else. You can talk to somebody about something.”
The most unusual argument Klosterman made on the Simmons podcast is that the production choices on football broadcasts also entrance us into loving the sport even more. Klosterman’s theory is that TV’s struggle to capture the full breadth of a football field and the action taking place lead to an “internal, psychological tension” for viewers.
The energy and the mystery of a football game and all its micro outcomes make the sport, in Klosterman’s eyes, “the best thing television has ever been built with.”
“The main view you will have in a football game most of the time will not show you all the players. You will not be able to see the free safeties. When a quarterback drops back to throw the ball, you will have a moment where you will have no idea if the guy is open or covered,” he said.
“These things that seem like they should be problems actually create this internal, psychological tension that makes the experience so enriching. I really believe that football, the reason it is the best thing television has ever been built with, is because even a bad football game is weirdly watchable in a way that isn’t true for other sports.”
Based upon the conversation with Simmons, this take only takes us through the early part of the book. Klosterman’s broader purpose with “Football” is to explain how he could see the sport’s chokehold on American life fracturing.
Talking with Simmons, Klosterman theorizes about the evolving broadcast landscape, the efficacy of commercials, and the broader evaporation of all content into background noise. The author believes that in 40 years, we might talk about football the way we do jazz music, its peak a distant memory.
The prediction may not come true, but Klosterman clearly has a great handle on why football is so intoxicating, so it’s hard to bet against any of his thoughts about the sport.
About Brendon Kleen
Brendon is a Media Commentary staff writer at Awful Announcing. He has also covered basketball and sports business at Front Office Sports, SB Nation, Uproxx and more.