How ‘American Football’ Won Me Over

I f you had told me when I was 18 years old — or, for that matter, when I was 28 years old — that, by the time I hit 38, I would spend a good chunk of my summers counting down the days to the football season, I would have looked at you as if you had summarily sprouted a tail.

As a child, I absorbed by osmosis the English disdain for “American football,” and I retained that disdain long after I’d moved to the United States. Baseball made sense to me immediately. Hockey was at least comprehensible. But football? As recently as 2016, I can remember telling my parents that it was “a silly game.”

For reasons that have now grown unclear to me, the people of England regard football with contempt. They don’t understand it, and, worse, they don’t want to understand it. They are confused by the lines on the field, and by the forward passes, and by the play clock, and by the long breaks for commercials, and by the rolling substitutions, and by the fact that there are different players on the offense and the defense. To them American football is a frivolous bastardization of rugby. In the year 2000, a massively viral “Letter to Americans” (often misattributed to John Cleese) proposed that rugby was a little like American football, but without the “stopping for a rest every twenty seconds or wearing full Kevlar body armour like nancies.” As a kid, I thought this was extremely funny — and extremely true.

I was wrong.

American football is, without a shadow of a doubt, the most entertaining, most sophisticated, most exhilarating sport ever conceived by man. And, far from being dumb or simple or needlessly showy, it is complex in ways that an uninterested viewer cannot comprehend. The rules of soccer become clear within seconds of one’s watching a game. Baseball, too, has a largely self-evident form. But football? Football takes time, patience, and work. If you parachuted me into the coach’s role in a professional soccer or baseball game, I’d be able to do the job — albeit embarrassingly badly. In those sports, I’d be able to see who was playing well and who wasn’t, where the team was weak, where the holes were in the defense, when a pitcher was going off the boil, and so forth. If, by contrast, you parachuted me into the coach’s role in a professional football game, I wouldn’t have a clue. Maybe — maybe — I could manage the clock. But, beyond that, I’d be lost. Outside of a few odd rules — offside in soccer, the ground-rule double in baseball — you can learn those sports simply by following the ball. Football, not so much.

This will sound pretentious, no doubt, but the comparison that I usually draw when explaining why it took me so long to get into football is with opera. When you hear opera for the first time, it’s overwhelming. There are 22 people on the stage, they’re all singing different words — at the same time, and often in an adversarial manner — and, from a seat far up in the rafters, you’re expected to make sense of it as a coherent whole. Which you can’t, because, at first, it’s just chaos. The orchestra is doing one thing; the chorus is doing something else; the soloists are running back and forth, arguing and cooperating and switching their affects on a dime. And, to make matters worse, it’s all in a language you don’t speak: “Cinque . . .  dieci . . . venti . . . trenta . . . trentasei . . . quarantatre . . .”

But, if you stick at it, it starts to make sense. As your ears grow accustomed to the soundscape, you pick out a line here, a plot point there, and an exchange over in the corner, until, eventually, you are able to prevent yourself from following the loudest person on the stage and to watch the whole thing develop on aggregate.

That’s football. As a newcomer, it was downright impossible for me to grasp. Prior to the snap, there is stillness, and then BANG! — an explosion of activity that, looking for the ball, I could not fathom. A couple of seconds would elapse, everyone would run around, bodies would go flying in every direction, the announcer would say something like, “I think that one’s coming back, Terry — there’s a flag for holding,” and I’d think . . . sorry, what? And then, because what had happened was apparently clear to everyone except me, the broadcast would switch away from the game and show a commercial for Doritos. For years — including, I will happily admit, after I had decided to become a fan — I sat through football games with friends and family, trying desperately to understand what was going on and failing every time. Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t even pick it up by eavesdropping. What I needed was for someone to recite the rules and customs throughout the game on every single play for six months without interruption. What I got was men talking to each other about how they were “a bit worried about the efficacy of the offensive line in Cover 2 situations.”

But then, one day, my persistence paid off and it all just clicked. As I can remember where I was when I was first able to listen to Don Giovanni and separate out all the melodic lines in my mind, so I can remember where I was when I realized that I was able to un-focus my eyes, widen my field of vision, and watch a football play unfurl in its totality. I was at a friend’s house, drinking and watching the Jaguars lose, and, out of the blue, I heard myself say, “How many times are they going to let the Colts run that screen before they adjust?”

What was it that Archimedes shouted when he jumped out of the bath?

Don’t misunderstand me: I’m no NFL expert, and I likely never will be. My friends still understand the game better than I do. They know terms I’ve never heard of, anticipate developments that I do not, and have a wealth of experience that I lack. But, dammit, I can at least keep up.

One day, 15 hours, 52 seconds to go . . .