I have this half-baked theory that November 13, 1993, was a turning point in football history.
Fighting Irish fans will remember that as an exultant day. A win over Florida State propelled Notre Dame to No. 1, a status the program had become accustomed to at the height of the Lou Holtz era.
What happened the next week also became an indelible memory. That deflating loss to Boston College foreshadowed a future unlike anything Notre Dame had known in its hundred-odd years of football to that point.
For that breathlessly hyped Florida State game, ESPN’s six-year-old College GameDay aired from Heritage Hall inside the Joyce Center, the pregame show’s first on-site broadcast. Only fitting that the Fighting Irish, the undisputed grand dame of college football as we knew it, would host such a momentous occasion. But claims to that mantle would be contested like never before as the national television cameras widened their focus.
GameDay’s touring road show soon trained its klieg lights on Tuscaloosa and Eugene, Ann Arbor and Lincoln, State College and Norman, nationalizing interest in a sport built on regional identities. Each Saturday became a showcase for the host school, but also for the sport as a whole, wrapping into a single broadcast all the hot takes and human interest a college football fan could handle.
The primary local effect was that Notre Dame would no longer be the only collegiate team of coast-to-coast consequence. College football had started to pursue a destiny manifested in a Big Ten that today sprawls from Maryland to Oregon and an Atlantic Coast Conference that reaches the Pacific. The breathtaking breadth of that evolution might’ve been unforeseeable on November 13, 1993, but in retrospect, that moment feels to me like the big bang of the fast-expanding modern football universe.
In professional football, 1993 was a transformative year, too. The NFL instituted unrestricted free agency for players, restructuring the economics of a game that had not yet swallowed the country whole, but would soon consume a disproportionate share of the lucrative sports media market. Back then, baseball’s World Series still commanded better head-to-head TV ratings than midseason NFL matchups.
That changed in 2010, when an ordinary October Sunday night game between New Orleans and Pittsburgh drew more viewers in the same primetime slot than Texas and San Francisco attracted for Game 4 of the World Series. With only a few exceptions, that has been the ratings rule ever since. So far this decade, NFL regular-season games have attracted 5 million more viewers on average than the typical World Series game — this despite two consecutive championships for the dynastic, major-market Los Angeles Dodgers, who boast a modern-day Babe Ruth (maybe better) in Shohei Ohtani.
Then this: The first round of the NFL Draft — in which reading names from a podium is the main action — routinely beats NBA playoff games for total eyeballs. Back in 2010, the draft’s TV audience more than doubled that of the high-stakes pro basketball games played the same night. Last year, some 350,000 people attended the draft in person. That’s more than three times the population of the host city, Green Bay, Wisconsin.
As for college sports, I’ll cherry-pick this stat: The 2024 First Responder Bowl between Texas State and North Texas suffered a nearly 40 percent ratings decline from the previous year. That still amounted to an average of 1.7 million viewers, at least half-a-million more than a bunch of regular-season NBA games that week.
All this leads to one irrefutable conclusion: Football has become America’s national pastime.
That’s hardly a revelation. Football’s a big deal? Thanks for the insight.
Here’s the thing, though: The sport’s ascendance says something about us — as a culture, as a country — that reflects larger changes in public life over the past half century. The bicentennial summer of 1976 belonged to Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine of Johnny Bench and Joe Morgan. Baseball still occupied the center of the American athletic consciousness.
George Will liked it that way. The political commentator and baseball bard waxed on about the sport’s relationship to the national character in a 1994 Ken Burns documentary. A win-some-lose-some game, played every day, with outcomes decided on the smallest of incremental differences — that, to Will, aligned baseball with our very system of government. “It’s a game that you can’t like if winning’s everything,” he said, “and democracy’s that way, too.”
Football, in Will’s estimation, showcased the worst aspects of American life: “violence, punctuated by committee meetings.” A great line, but juuuust a bit outside of the trajectory of public opinion.
Baseball’s languid tempo was already falling behind the accelerating pace of modern life. With a pitch clock and other rules changes in recent years, the sport’s leaders have attempted — successfully — to rev up games, but the stigma of “boring” does not wash off easily.
What’s a little strange is that football isn’t exactly in a rush. Games last at least as long on the gridiron as they do on the diamond. Action happens in intermittent bursts of a few seconds at a time with the teams still huddling for their committee meetings in between.
Why not hockey? Or soccer? Those perpetual-motion sports have pockets of popularity across the country, but they’re niche by comparison, as if an attention tariff has been imposed on them as imported products. Constant flow is their paradoxical glitch: the extended, trained focus necessary to appreciate the games asks too much of modern attention spans. An ill-timed bathroom break or beer run or buzzing phone and — goal! — the moment’s gone.
So how has the game the rest of the world knows as “American football” come to nestle itself so deep into our national consciousness? I have half-baked theories about that, too.
One involves the sport’s unique combination of aggression and agility. Any given play has the potential to produce a tooth-loosening collision worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster or a display of graceful athleticism akin to ballet. Often both in the same instant. Transfixing stuff.
Other sports possess those characteristics to varying degrees, but none as concentrated as the bracing belts football delivers in shot-glass quantities. The game pauses just long enough between plays for everyone watching to weigh in on what just happened, to revisit with awe or anger in multiangled slo-mo, to reset for the next one.
Both the nature of football and its pace fit neatly into our tech-captured minds. It’s the TikTok of sports. Watch a play. Like or comment. Scroll on.
The seasonal cadence taps into a similar dynamic. Even though football’s inexorable popularity has bled into routine weeknight games, each team plays no more than once a week, most still on Saturdays and Sundays. Then we spend the time in between arguing, parsing highlights and speculating about what’s to come — ample fertilizing manure for talk shows and internet message boards.
Counterintuitive as it sounds, other sports play too often. The outcome of any given game matters too little, the schedule is too crowded to gin up the life-giving oxygen all sports need: hype. A casual fan can’t keep up. Interest then remains stubbornly regional, the city hall and statehouse of the sports world, important in local terms but drowned out in the noise of national conversation and controversy.
Our once-upon-a-pastime baseball, basketball and hockey suffer from those structural disadvantages. Like American manufacturing, they’re still robust industries full of workaday professionals producing at high levels for loyal customers, but they have long since ceded their claims to cultural and economic hegemony. The ebb and flow of their seasons and daily thrum of competition demand patience, an even-keeled awareness that no given outcome means too much. These have not been widely appreciated public virtues for some time.
George Will equated the systemic limits of the democratic process with the inherent checks-and-balances of baseball, “a game that you can’t like if winning’s everything.” The modern American infatuation with football flips that formulation like a safety upending a leaping wide receiver.
Vince Lombardi, whose name adorns the Super Bowl trophy, put it this way: “Winning isn’t everything, but it’s the only thing,” the legendary Green Bay Packers coach said. “In our business, there is no second place. Either you’re first or you’re last.”
In retrospect, Lombardi came to regret that statement. He wished he had emphasized that he didn’t mean the final score, but the individual effort toward that end, whatever the outcome. Give your all, and you’ve won.
Our cultural relationship to Lombardi’s words tracks far more with the folk interpretation than with his clarification, on the gridiron and off. Football mirrors our all-or-nothing national mood. And with apologies to Will, it’s the sport that best embodies American democracy as it’s now practiced with its zero-sum passions.
If the give-and-take of dealmaking once defined governing — like the art of the sacrifice bunt — now it’s the exercise of raw power against unrelenting resistance. Who’s on offense and defense depends on which way the volatile electoral winds blow, but the constant is a political tush push.
Debate has come to mean something closer to open conflict than sober deliberation. Compromise? For suckers. We have plenty to say, but little interest in listening.
Football and the culture it feeds on have given us a dialogue-dousing expression to punctuate this phenomenon. Victory offers the privilege of dismissing the opposition with one winning-is-the-only-thing word that the internet has elevated to the height of rhetoric:
Scoreboard.
Jason Kelly is editor of this magazine.