americans who don't like football

somewhat rarely among english people i've kinda grown to like the nfl, possibly thanks to hd which adds more than to any other sport imho, but it is obviously inimical to many civilized/bourgie/liberal values what with the militarist paratext and general sense of it being conceived by and for violent fat people

in what constituencies is it acceptable or preferable to dislike football?

its mostly chicks and weenies who roll their eyes at it (which isn't the same as just not being interested in it)

hater ass baby chickens.

There really isn't an outspoken anti-football wing in America (that I know of). If anything, people who don't like or know much about football typically admit their preference with some guilt e.g. "it's just not my thing, I'm sorry." or "I just don't get it :-( ."

it's pretty boring, lowest amount of action per minute of overall duration, everyone automatically assumes you give a shit about it, the talk revolving around it never ends and overwhelms talk about sports I do care about (my fault for continuing to listen to talk radio and watch espn, i suppose)

and I should mention that I once stumbled on a TigerBeat from the 1980s in storage, and along with learning that Alyssa Milano once had her own teen advice column, I discovered, in an interview with the band, that the lead dude from a-ha is a big NFL fan. That was his big piece of humanizing trivia for the teenage girls of America. It's a piece of trivia I don't think I'll ever forget.

xpost

football's ok to me and i sometimes like watching it on tv but sometimes it's just too much. not the sport, just how much ppl care about it i guess. also yeah it's slow.

I grew up strongly disliking football. Moved to the UK and got into soccer in a serious way. Moved back to the US for a bit and got into college football, but only because all my friends would make a big fuss with bbq and beer and all that. It's an enjoyable enough game in doses, but they would spend all of Saturday watching whatever game was on, waiting for Bama to start. I can handle one, but I lose interest beyond that.

Watching the Super Bowl on the BBC was interesting, if only because there were absolutely no adverts. I still think it's shocking they make the commentators plug Grey's Anatomy or the Big Bang Theory or whatever.

also, in a Southern high school, most of the non-jocks (band nerds, indie kids, goths etc...) all hate football. and with good reason.

IMO people use "not liking football" as more as some kind of elitism, ie that they wouldn't dare partake in such sophomoric drivel (even though they often don't realize how complex the game truly is).

I supposed you could say it's sports rockism

so how would someone who honestly and nonpretentiously doesn't like football convey that dislike?

I'll preface to say I didn't mean everybody that dislikes football is like that, or even most. there are just a lot of people I know who just like to brag about not liking football.

honestly as said upthread, they usually just say they "don't get it".

they probably wouldn't express it IRL. Why bother? (xpost)

that seems fair

yea there aren't really "anti-football" rallies here ora nything

also, in a Southern high school, most of the non-jocks (band nerds, indie kids, goths etc...) all hate football. and with good reason.

― Freddy 'The Wonder Chicken' (Gukbe), Friday, March 5, 2010 7:53 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

i dunno about with good reason, i think it's mostly about differentiating yourself from a certain crowd, a certain image. something people don't realize about jocks, *especially* football players, is that a lot of them are p dorky and uncool. you think those 300 lb linemen are swimming in pussy? my free safety used to play warhammer fantasy with our strong safety and CB.

I love football.

you think those 300 lb linemen are swimming in pussy?

that'd have to be one wide snatch

haha

Disliking it for the culture around can often be elitist nonsense. I think there are justifiable reasons to dislike it as a game. The stop-start nature can be annoying (especially with all the damn ads and the incessant stat spewing), and there's a feeling that aside from the quarterback and maybe a wide receiver or running back, the players don't do very much beyond their stated roles. The real skill and complexity seems to come from the coaches and their systems and playmaking. Compared to something like soccer, it is a little lacking imo.

re: high school. there's a degree of defining yourself in certain circles, but it isn't envious dorks striving for popularity. the culture around southern high school football is atrocious, and the double standards people have to deal with on a day-to-day basis because they aren't on the football team are hideous.

My wife HATES football, and is quite outspoken about it. She is also outspoken about pretty much everything else, too, so this is par for her.

"DEATH TO FOOTBALL!"

i actually love football but the last two years have been so involved with extracurricular activities that I've had to shove it to the backburner a bit....

didn't really 'get' football when growing up but have come to appreciate it now. am surprised at how short games actually are, it's like, two drives and the quarter's over.

football between two bad teams is pretty unwatchable though

aside from the quarterback and maybe a wide receiver or running back, the players don't do very much beyond their stated roles.

I don't really know what you mean by this, but I don't think it's true.

I grew up playing hockey, football was too slow and start-stoppy and I just never got into it. Also the nuances and the tactics of the game are beyond me.

I guess I mean that there's very little room for creativity from a lot of the less heralded positions. Once a play goes, it goes.

Compared to something like soccer, it is a little lacking imo.

ha ha, I find football easier to decode than soccer

I don't agree with that at all.

dammit....xpost. I meant I didn't agree that there's a lack of creativity at the other positions, not that I didn't agree with your statement dyao :)

there have been a lot of navelgazing sports threads recently

There is a lot of reading and reacting though. And the individual cogs creating a super efficient machine is one of the most beautiful aspects of football.

xpost

My only hesitation about football is that it is a very violent game and takes a serious physical toll on many who play it.

I don't dislike football, but I can take it or leave it. As sports go, I'd rather watch baseball or basketball. Which is weird, because my parents and my sister are all big football fans. And all for different teams: Dad's is the Giants, Mom's is the Dolphins, and sister's is the Steelers.

Now, Div I college football, I actively dislike.

something people don't realize about jocks, *especially* football players, is that a lot of them are p dorky and uncool.

ha yeah there was hardly any of the high school-movie-style stratification at my school and it could probably be traced to how shitty our football tradition was. played so much mario kart w/ most of those dudes. i used to watch football and i still like it well enough i just made the choice to not spend time on sports other than the nba, wastes too much of my time as it is. and as granny said, everyone seems to put football ahead of other sports so you gotta wait til february to get into bball w/ them (and for nba to get regular sunday tv games), "is it over yet" sets in pretty quick for me

soccer is tactically complex, but it's also much more obvious when players display a certain amount of special skill, which for me makes it seem more accessible. xposts.

I'm not saying that there isn't creativity, it just isn't obvious to the casual viewer.

ie, cornerback is one of the most difficult positions to play (even if you remove the rules that are offense-friendly from the equation). in zone defense they have to interpret the situation and decide when to drop off of the receiver and let the safety pick him up. in man to man coverage they have to be able to read and anticipate the receiver's movement, and have awareness of where the ball is, and in addition, on running plays they have to be in the right position in case the d-line and linebackers let the back get past him.

that's just cornerback. won't get into the linebackers dual roles!

I know that. but it's hardly soccer, is it?

skill in soccer = doing that thing where they shuffle their legs over the ball really fast from left to right and right to left without making the ball do anything

:D

when i said 'it's hardly soccer', i mean in that it can be obvious to the casual viewer.

there's a feeling that aside from the quarterback and maybe a wide receiver or running back, the players don't do very much beyond their stated roles.

yeah this is really, really, really not true

it just isn't obvious to the casual viewer.

okay this is true

i have to be honest, though, when I first watched soccer I just thought it was a bunch of people kicking a ball around. I think the perception goes both ways.

(I'm not a huge soccer fan, but I've grown to enjoy it and know that my initial interpretation isn't true...)

I still think it's hilarious that britishers call football 'handegg'

ILX: Smashing barriers between football codes since however long ago

if football were named what actually happened it'd be called "semi-homoerotic injury ball"

xxp that's "armored handegg"

or "armoured" sry

the isolation of playmaking largely to a single player (qb) could be seen as an advantage of american football, and it does more closely mirror other forms of social organization in that respect

seems as if a lot of people are excluded and/or contemptuous of football from high school onwards

if football were named what actually happened it'd be called "semi-homoerotic injury ball"

and ilx wd be the heterogeneous overeducated anglosopheric kvetchnbitch society but language doesn't work like that

hey guys, you wanna go toss around the ol' handegg

lemonball

oh yeah, the 'authenticity' argument also throws up all that 'tradition' shit.

i will not complain if i go through the rest of my life without hearing the name 'Paul The Bear Bryant'.

Tampa Bay is as recent as an eight-track player. Jacksonville is the only 'recent' franchise in Florida, and Florida couldn't care less about them.

Miami were Florida's babies back when it was just them. IMO Florida shouldn't have more than one team. (meaning Bucs and Jags move please).

actually though Tampa Bay gets the most support of all of the pro teams.

Love Tampa. Hate Glazer.

I think the 'authenticity' argument comes from the players not being paid, like their love for their school over the soulless franchise

players not being paid - that itself doesn't matter that much imo - players can't get traded, so your favorite player isn't gonna be playing for your least favorite team next year. everyone's a franchise player = fans can be dedicated to a team of people and not just a jersey.

Can't blame Florida for being meh about their pro teams...between Shula's Dolphins in the 70's and the Hurricanes in the 80's (before they imploded), pretty hard to get anything to raise an eyebrow in the pros.

LOL @ "Tampa Bay is as recent as an eight-track player.

Apropos of nothing really, just came to mind: My father in-law was semi-pro in college (UoP Tigers, reprazent!)...roomed with Raiders coach Tom Flores, lined up against Len Dawson. He has great stories. Loves college ball to this day, will watch any game no matter who's playing...even though he can hardly walk now from all the hits & cortisone shots he took back in the day, you know he misses the game a lot. Watching the games is like a lifeline. He will only grudgingly watch NFL. He hates the celebrating, that they get paid so much and act like jackasses most of the time.

no, the fact that "it's not about money" is really important to a lot of the pro-college anti-NFL folk xpost

everyone's a franchise player = fans can be dedicated to a team of people and not just a jersey.

...for a couple of years, at least

if anyone thinks college football is 'not about money' they don't know very much about college football

yea I agree with Gukbe. I once found this tosser's really funny Yahoo Group where he claimed the XFL was superior to the NFL because people played for the love of the game, there were no fair catches, and people didn't "heebie jeebie" dance in the end zone after touchdowns.

...which is fairly ridic, because I went to an XFL game, and it was much more of a product than the NFL has ever been. Phony scripted halftime shows, semi-scripted 'in game interviews', not to mention quarter after quarter of horrible football. I think I saw more arrests at that game than tackles.

yeah the fact that the xfl sucked despite all those things is kinda amazing

http://perfunction.typepad.com/perfunction/images/2008/09/11/rimshot.jpg

if anyone thinks college football is 'not about money' they don't know very much about college football

it's just the disconnect between what you know and your loyalty to your team. my friend is a Crimson Tide superfan, and I made the comment once that the Alabama program is just like any other program, and the players were just like any other players in that they get perks and are your average guys who made it through sports etc... and he got really upset going about how Saban is very strict and they have honor and blah blah blah.

he does know a fuckton about strategy and tactics though.

i'm not that much into college football b/c my college's football team sucked when i attended, and i just don't have the time to watch the zillions of college teams on Saturdays (esp. i don't really give a shit about almost any of them). i don't mind watching the game itself if/when i can, i just don't have any real emotional investment in any team (except for my own college's team [which got good long after i graduated] and maybe Penn State [which was the only good college team anywhere near where i grew up]).

100% correlation between Americans who don't like football & Americans who think English accents are "cute"

It's frightening how otm that is...

yeah i also don't dig how football is more about coaches' strategery than players' creativity and skill. or at least more tilted towards that than other sports. and also how you're pretty much fucked if you're weak at just a single position ie quarterback. like a game show where the final round counts for so much that it makes all the other rounds meaningless.

cuz there's none of that in other sports....

and also how you're pretty much fucked if you're weak at just a single position ie quarterback.

unless you have a defense?

there's more of it in football. baseball, you're pretty dependent on pitching, but it's easier to overcome poor pitching w/a bunch of sluggers and/or speed than poor quarterbacking in football. basketball, a team may be dependent on 1 or 2 stars but the position those stars play differs from team to team.

you have to have an AMAZING defense to make up for a shitty quarterback, a la '05 Bears, 2000s Ravens.

can a good system turn a bad quarterback good?

in college

yeah in the nfl it's really not possible

I'm not a big football guy but that was the impression that I got from the intro to the blind side, that parcells was able to turn mediocre quarterbacks great because of his west coast offense

parcells not walsh?

my bad, it was walsh lol

parcells is the defense guy right?

lol

yeah, i think that you mean Bill Walsh not Bill Parcells (who very famously back in the day slammed the 49ers West Coast offense and whose Giants teams were the antithesis of a West Coast offense (e.g., hard-ass defense and smash-mouth offense)). and if you are thinking of Bill Walsh, i dunno why you'd think that either Joe Montana or Steve Young were mediocre.

xpost

guys, this all makes much more sense if you read the intro to the blind side

it doesn't help that both of them are named 'bill' which is also the name of an american football franchise (the buffalo 'bills')

anyway from what I remember the basic argument was this:

-walsh's system emphasized the width of the field as much as the length of the field
-he concentrated on timing, and on having his receiver run lots of pre-set routes
-the majority of passes would be short passes thrown horizontally, thus a quarterback didn't need to have a cannon to do well in his system
-montana/young's success might be argued to be as much due to walsh's system as due to their own personal qualities
-he listed examples of no-name qb's who briefly thrived in walsh's system despite being unspectacular in all respects previously (this was before montana joined the team)

hope I didn't spoil it for you

iirc walsh explained his preference for offense by saying that you can succeed with lesser personnel if you scheme and strategize carefully, whereas with defense you excel by just having the best personnel, which he found boring - i don't necessarily buy that but it is revealing about the mentality of a 'genius' coach

i understand what granny's saying about the dependence on one position, but at the same time i don't think there's a team sport in the world - that i know of - where the team concept is as important as it is in football. the difficulty of differentiating one player's contributions from another is incredible, it might even be impossible - whereas in something like baseball, it's pretty easy to zero in on and quantify exactly how much one player helps or hurts his team.

yeah, a lot of people have trotted out the where-would-montana-have-been-without-walsh argument (and vice versa) - it's an unanswerable question because, again, it's impossible to view their contributions to the team as discrete entities, they're too tied up in one another. i will say that plenty of teams have run west coast offenses with mediocre QBs and struggled mightily doing so, and that the league eventually 'figured out' the WCO which is partly why literally no teams run it anymore (at the same time, every team utilizes at least SOME west coast concepts in their offenses - that's its real legacy, the dissemination of passing concepts), and it should also be pointed out that there was a lot more to the success of the Niners and Walsh than just the WCO

that is true, but is just another reason why I don't like the sport. the highlights in football are awesome, amazing, all that, but it's actually pretty rare for a player to get to demonstrate his world-class athleticism in a way that jumps out of the screen at you, y'know?. if someone like devin hester, who is supremely talented at running around and past people who are trying to tackle him--a skill that you'd think would be extremely valuable for a football player!--is unable to really make much of a consistent impact on the game, that's a sport that is too constraining.

xpost

i think i'd prefer an offshoot sport that is nothing but punts/punt returns

There's a great essay by David Reisman on the development of American football, how the sports mutated from soccer to rugby and then finally to American football.

http://www.jstor.org/pss/3031463

hahah I was thinking earlier that the best part of a football game is the punt return

"Football, in its earliest English form, was called Dane's Head and it was played in the tenth and eleventh centuries as a contest in kicking a ball between towns. The legend is that the first ball was a skull, and only later a cow's bladder. In some cases, the goals were the towns themselves, so that a team entering a village might have pushed the ball several miles en route. King Henry II proscribed the game, on the ground that it interfered with archery practice. Played in Dublin even after the ban, football did not become respectable until James I reinstated it. The reason was perhaps less ideological than practical: firearms had made the art of bowmanship obsolete.

During the following century, football as played by British schoolboys became formalized, but did not change its fundamental pattern of forceful kicking. In 1823, Ellis of Rugby made the mistake of picking up the ball and running towards the goal. All concerned thought it was a mistake: Ellis was sheepish, his captain apologetic. The mistake turned into innovation when it was decided that a running rule might make for an interesting game..."

xpost

that is true, but is just another reason why I don't like the sport. the highlights in football are awesome, amazing, all that, but it's actually pretty rare for a player to get to demonstrate his world-class athleticism in a way that jumps out of the screen at you, y'know?. if someone like devin hester, who is supremely talented at running around and past people who are trying to tackle him--a skill that you'd think would be extremely valuable for a football player!--is unable to really make much of a consistent impact on the game, that's a sport that is too constraining.

― hope this helps (Granny Dainger), Saturday, March 6, 2010 1:04 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

ya, i know what you're saying. it's funny you'd mention hester tho, cuz he's a great example of a single player hoarding most of the credit for work that his teammates did. when he was having those two amazing seasons, he was playing on a historically great special teams unit - the blocking on many of his returns was just eye-poppingly good. he was still a sensational player, an all-time great, but even on something as basic as a punt return you aren't really seeing one guy making a difference.

Exactly! Honestly, that was the 'there is no spoon' realization that turned me into a spaz about football. Once I started seeing what everyone *else* was doing, and not just the dude running/throwing the ball, I was all O_O this game RULES!

The history of American football is a long process of removing the word "foot" from the name of the sport. When soccer-style kickers from Europe rose to prominence in the late '60s/early '70s the league reacted by moving the goal posts back ten yards to make it harder for these guys to score. And the penalty for missing a field goal was made more harsh. Classic case of xenophobia.

no, they moved the goal posts back because the soccer style kickers were ruthlessly efficient in a way that the sport had never seen before. the drama of the field goal attempt was being drained away. was it xenophobia when the league moved kickoffs to 35 from 40, and then later to 30 from 35? they saw that guys were kicking too many touchbacks and the sport suffered for it, that's all.

I used to hate football, but then I gambled on it and it was pretty thrilling, but then I stopped and now don't care, except for weird things I find out every now and then that everyone takes for granted. For example, it's mind boggling to me that football in general has better gender integration than baseball.

but even on something as basic as a punt return you aren't really seeing one guy making a difference.

I don't know about that. Def agree that their special teams unit as a whole was awesome, but him as the returner vs a mediocre-to-good returner was the difference between 6pts and getting the ball up to mid-field. Do you remember Rocket Ismail when he was at Notre Dame? I have no idea how good their ST unit was, but you can't tell me that his consistently insane returns were mainly due to good blocking. I just wish that type of talent had more of an outlet for expression in the NFL.

ha i always thought it was cause they finally realized it was retarded to have the goalposts in the middle of the endzone, particularly with the prevalence of the forward pass.