The Comprehensive Illusion of Football (2015) | Hacker News Reader

The Comprehensive Illusion of Football (2015)

newyorker.com

19 pointskawera15 comments

"...there may be no activity that draws closer public scrutiny that the public knows less about"

I agree that this quote may be a bit hyperbolic given, say, politics and Hollywood. But otherwise, the article is spot on.

I played football through high school and what television repackages and sells is a manufactured narrative based on a tiny sliver of the game. I loved playing the game, and I enjoy watching games on TV. There is very little overlap in the way one engages with the sport between those two experiences.

While playing, and for years afterwards, I couldn't understand why people watched it on TV. Eventually, though, I started to understand and enjoy the TV version. Decades later, I read some pieces by Nate Jackson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nate_Jackson) which pulled me back into the player mindset and the thesis of this article was stark and obvious once again.

My favorite comparison of participatory sports vs spectator sports is with sex vs porn.

Either kind can be enjoyable, but what's most interesting for a spectator is often not what is most interesting when being inside the action. Hence the action tends to turn towards acting, showing off, and of course creative camera work.

Do you feel this has changed at all with the way games are broadcast? I feel like with the advent of HD and SkyCam, I spend more time analyzing the play calling and keeping track of what's going on in the trenches.

Do you mute the announcers? They're the ones constructing the narrative. And of course, the replays and camera angles are a huge part of the production too. So yes, it has changed with more technology: the virtual l.o.s. and 1st down lines, better slo-mo, more cameras. It's all part of the package to tell the story.

I think this article is a bit pretentious. The authors far flung similies create an air of moral smugness. Not a fan.

I am not a football fan, and I too just found the article hard to read...

Too wordy, too many tangents, get to your main thesis fast: why is football on TV a sleight of hand?

What's the answer?

Football on TV is just another reality show.

not sure I agree with a lot of points the major rule changes each year never seen that as a one a year viewer of the super bowl - if that was so the UK show would mention rule changes.

And NFL keeps some much older rules that it inherited from rugger that rugby has removed

And I never understood calling a written piece 'pretentious'. The word works fine for a person's personality, but a static written piece doesn't deserve this type of slight. For one, there are probably better ways of stating what's wrong with an essay. Perhaps it's muddled or off-mark but what makes the article more relevant today is that more and more people (especially parents) are realizing that football is far more dangerous than what we once thought. Its dangerous medically, and on the other side, its dangerous financially & politically. Football is an immense business and enjoys deep conservative roots and support (at least in the U.S.). Those concerned with the obvious head trauma implications brought on even by high school football will find themselves massively out-gunned by the deep seated football support system. This article is (partially) an outgrowth of these types of concerns and the concerns are real. Today many of our universities, especially in the South, are football teams (seeking new stadiums) attached to instructional institutions with starved library budgets. Maybe its nobody's fault, and just a circumstance of the market economy, but its a picture that needs to be exposed.

"Television has sought to make football more palatable to viewing audiences by magnifying the game’s balletic beauty and deëmphasizing the its brute concussive aggression."

Grammar error in the first photo caption...

Grammatical

(2015)

Thanks! Updated.

Sorry, didn't note that.

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