No, I’m not kidding.  The US football season is wrapping up with its usual bang: two playoff games this weekend, then the Super Bowl two weeks later.  So if you’ve never checked it out, this might be a time.

So, in the spirit of philosophical discussion, let’s start with some reasons you might not want to watch American football.

— “I don’t consume media about team sports.  The exploitation and commodification of the players, the hysteria of the fans, the endless advertisements, the disgusting late-capitalist excess generally, all appall me.”

Okay so 1) this is a perfectly defensible and legitimate philosophical position, and 2) you can stop reading now.  I’m trying to explain to a bunch of white meat fans why beef is actually pretty great, and you’re a vegetarian.  Nothing wrong with being a vegetarian, it’s great, but this post isn’t for you.

— “It’s complicated.”

It really isn’t.  The basic concept is dirt simple.  You’re trying to move the ball up the field.  You get four tries to move the ball ten yards from where you started.  Fail and you lose the ball.  Bam.  Yes, the details get fractally complex, but that’s true of almost all sports. 

If you can understand the offsides rule in soccer, you can understand American football.  If you can understand cricket… come on.

— “It’s stop and go!  As soon as the action starts, it stops!”

Feature, not bug.  Sports like basketball, soccer or hockey are constant-action.  Baseball, cricket and football are interrupted-action.  But football is better, because football is deeply iterative in a way that baseball or cricket really aren’t.  Every play depends on every previous play.  Every play changes every future play.  The time between plays gives you, the watcher, time to curse, applaud, and then analyze or second guess what’s going to happen next.

— “It’s an American thing!”

This is not really football’s fault.  It’s kind of stuck in a bad equilibrium: it’s perceived as so very American that it’s quite difficult for it to break out of being American.  That said, there are a couple of German football leagues, and it looks like the sport is starting to catch on in Europe generally.

(I’ve said for years that if it weren’t so “American”, football would be a perfect fit for Russians: it combines strength and toughness with cool-headed chess-playing strategy.  Certainly the few Russians I’ve met who follow it, follow it hard.)   (Oddly, they’re mostly Eagles fans.  No idea.)

— “It’s a brutal sport that does lasting damage to bodies and brains!”

Okay, so this is a palpable hit.  Football /is/ very hard on the body, and it /does/ lead to an increased probability of long-term health problems and — most horribly — cognitive issues.  That’s no small thing.

Philosophically, this gets into some deep waters fast.  It’s statistical, most players are fine!  Yeah, so it’s okay to brain-damage players if it’s just a few?  The players are informed and accept the risks!  Oh?  Most players start between ages 12 and 16; you’re going to tell me a middle schooler can thoughtfully evaluate long-term risk?  Etc., etc., etcetera.  The arguments are fractal, and I won’t rehash them here.  I acknowledge their strength, and I respect people who decide they can’t watch football because of the health / injury issue.

That said, two points.  One, there’s lots of stuff that’s objectively as bad or worse than football.  Jai alai, boxing, calcio storico, MMA, BMX cycling and motocross are all significantly more dangerous.  Ice hockey and lacrosse are statistically just about as bad.  Dear old rugby is less bad, but not by much.

Two, pretty much all sports run a risk, and a lot of them are riskier than you’d think — i.e., skiing and (especially) snowboarding are much more dangerous than most people care to know.  And there’s increasing evidence that even the beautiful game of soccer can cause long-term cognitive damage, because — quelle surprise! — heading thousands of high-velocity soccer balls over a decade or two isn’t actually good for your brain.  If you only want to watch stuff where there’s little or no danger of injury to the athletes, well, you’re basically talking table tennis and golf.  

Okay, then… why should you watch American football?

1)  It’s an extremely intelligent game.

I am not remotely kidding.  Football is probably the most strategically deep game of any major sport.  The rules are designed to encourage it!  Meanwhile, teams are unusually equal in terms of quality of players — see below — so they must rely on cleverness to win.

Football is regularly compared to chess, and that’s fair.  But really it’s more of a high-speed physical game of rock-paper-scissors.  The core of it is correctly guessing the other side’s play.  If you can do that consistently, you’ll win.  If not — and if they guess your plays consistently — you will lose.  And like all guessing games, it immediately becomes recursive (if he knows I know he’ll call a blitz, he won’t call a blitz, except he’ll also know that I know he knows, which means he will) and involves bluffing and deceit.

And not only is it a very smart game, it’s smart on a sliding scale.  That is, once you have a basic familiarity you can grasp the big strategies and understand what’s happening.  But as you learn more, you’ll understand more, and you’ll see the little fractal side-strategies — the operational and tactical levels, if you like.  It rewards attention no matter how much or little you know.  

A big part of the fun of watching it is trying to outguess the guys on the field.  “Armchair quarterback” and “Monday morning quarterback” are American idioms for a reason.  It’s also why football fans are perhaps the most likely to yell at a screen.  “He knew you were going to call a blitz!  Why did you call a blitz?”

2)  It’s an unusually balanced game.

It’s not possible for a Saudi billionaire or Russian oligarch to buy victory by throwing money at it.  That’s because the NFL has a complex set of systems — everything from salary caps to the draft — to ensure that teams have roughly equal access to quality players.  So when teams win or lose, they do it because of draft choices, coaching, strategy, and intangibles like locker room culture and team spirit.

Dynasties are relatively rare in football, and it’s been 20 years since anyone repeated a Super Bowl victory.  There are teams that stay bad for years on end — ask a long-suffering Cleveland Browns fan — but they’re relatively rare.  And upset wins and Cinderella stories are more common than in most sports.  As the saying goes, on any given day, any NFL team can beat any other NFL team.  It’s almost true.

3) There’s not a lot of garbage time.

Garbage time starts when one team is so far ahead that there’s not much point in watching the rest of the game.  This can happen in any sport, but it’s rarer in football, because surprise swings and fourth-quarter comebacks are more common.   A team down by 10 points still has about a 20% chance of winning.  A team down by 17 points (three scores, roughly comparable to being down 0-3 in soccer) still has about a 6% chance of winning.   It’s the rock-paper-scissors thing:  by the second half, a competent team has had a chance to spot the patterns, crack the code, and come up with a counter.

4) Every game counts.

There are 38 matches in a Premiere League season.  English First Class cricket, 36 matches. NBA basketball, 82 games; NHL hockey, same. Baseball, 162 games, basically about one a day.

NFL football has just 17 games per year.  

Each game is its own mini-campaign.  Each game has its own story.  And each game /matters/.  Losing a single game in football is like losing five basketball games or eight baseball games, all at once.  If you’ve ever wondered why a football fan in your life was so weirdly mopey some Monday mornings?  This is why.

5)  It’s so goddamn beautiful sometimes.

Yes, every sport has beautiful moments.  But football is a violent sport of sudden wild action. So when the seeming chaos on the field suddenly crystallizes into order, it’s just that much more striking.  The pass connects.  The defense swings two linemen like a door, and suddenly the quarterback falls.  The blockers move just so, and a lane is opened, and the runner is through, heading for daylight.  The defense guesses correctly, the cornerback picks the ball out the air, interception.  

If you aren’t interested in opera then it’s just a bunch of people in silly costumes singing in foreign languages.  If you do understand, it can break your heart.  Football is like that, except you don’t need to learn chord progressions or study Italian.  Once you understand what you’re seeing, watching Patrick Mahomes is like watching Mozart.  It’s like watching Mozart if Mozart had to finish his piece before three big guys threw him out of a window.

I could go on, but this is long enough already.  So, TLDR: American football is actually pretty great, and you should give it a chance.  Failing that, perhaps this gives at least some idea why some people in your life may love it so much.