Fixing the NFL, part 1

To anyone for whom it is not abundantly clear, I love the NFL. Love it.

I will not apologize for this love, but I will never deny what it is, and why I enjoy it. The NFL is the best sport in the world. No sport on earth takes strategy (or macro-strategy) and tactics (or micro-strategy) and marries them so successfully with wanton violence as well as professional football. It truly is the closest analog to war as it was fought before the days of firearms.

For someone who deplores machismo, jingoism, and materialistic tendencies, the NFL is my one capitulation to American excess. Nothing else perfectly capsulizes our culture this well. The NFL is SUVs and Big Macs, gun ownership and tax cuts, fake tits and shitty beer, it is entitlement issues and moral superiority.

The NFL satisfies the blood lust, love of spectacle, and unbridled desire for consumption that the more cultured among us like to keep in check because we realize doing so is necessary to maintain a functioning society. The NFL is the sociological equivalent of tilting your head back, tipping over a can of ReddiWip and spraying whip cream directly into your mouth. It's morally deplorable and undeniably glorious.

It manages to perfectly mix celebrity gossip with a concession towards self-aggrandizing rural superiority and the celebration of puritan attitudes of self denial and the embrace of backbreaking labor for its own sake. From toothless farmers to Madison Avenue socialites, people from every demographic and every walk of life worship in the same place on Sundays in the Fall: in front of our televisions.

The dawn of Sabermetirics has created a plain on which baseball can be enjoyed intellectually, and its perfect symmetry - so perfect that the time it takes a ball thrown from the mound to home and then from home to second varies by only tenths of a second from the time it takes for someone standing six feet off of first base to run and dive into second - makes even the spiritual enjoyment of baseball more than possible.

That such a genuinely genteel and zen like activity could ever be considered a pastime of a culture so obsessed with action and expressiveness speaks either of a culture so warped from what it once was, or of a theory inherently flawed from the outset.

The NFL is America's real pastime. Baseball is too slow, and too pastoral. Baseball is poetic, baseball is less a sport where athletic abilities are celebrated, but rather a game at which those who possess skill, rather than talent are the most successful.

The wistful ruminations of people like Ken Burns, Walt Whitman and George Will have elevated baseball to mythical status. While baseball no doubt deserves this lofty praise, all three of these men have bent over backwards to equate this game with course of the United States. Perhaps it is a reflection of their view of the country rather than their view of the sport that has pushed them so far off the mark. Comparing baseball to America is insulting to both baseball and America, for it truly is football that represents us as a people.

Somehow I love it all. Despite how much I may hate almost every one of the things the NFL stands for individually I cannot help but embrace it on the whole. It is so striking to watch the NFL and see all of society's flaws projected back at you. I fear not of turning into a flower as Narcissus did while I gaze at my own reflection for I know that I turned long ago, and never once have I considered looking back.

Yes, indeed, I love the NFL. Given this unconditional love, it may surprise many to learn that I believe the NFL is utterly broken, but I do, and parity is the culprit.

As we step into the off-season over the next several weeks, I intend to look at what parity means in the NFL, why it exists, and how to fix it by looking at ways to improve the schedule, the draft, and the salary cap.