Superbowl Sociology and What It Means for the Human Species

The Patriots are 18-1; a man hides his face against my shoulder, because the world had suddenly become too much to bear.

A few seconds ago, I was trying to eat two chicken drumsticks at the same time, so you can imagine how dignified I must look. And yet I am the calm center of an emotional hurricane. It is mind boggling that this has come to pass.

Last week, people were ecstatic, people were depressed. People were vindictive and gloating, people were defensive and drinking to forget. I can’t say that this was a unique situation. Much the same scene was taking place all across the country, as people celebrated and mourned the particular ending of a particular game. A game which, for my taste, involved way too many “good game” pats to way too many plump buttocks encased in metallic tights.

As a mental exercise, I have hypothetically divided the world into two groups:

Group A consists of people who do not care about the Superbowl. This group encompasses the majority of the planet’s population. So obviously, Group B is comprised of people that do care about the Superbowl. Group B doesn’t understand Group A terribly well (statistical analysis would probably show that this has something to do with the divorce rate, but that’s a different issue altogether).

I can’t fit myself into either group. I’ll watch some games, but I can’t claim to care too much on the whole.

I think professional baseball is the recourse of twinkie-guzzling porkers with the predictable jock mentality, but none of the talent or athleticism required to play any of the good sports. Football has too much down-time… plus, I’m not-so-secretly afraid of anybody with both the mass and mentality of a deranged killer whale.

I envy basketball players for their smug, casual tallness, and nobody ever listens to my theories on why Steve Nash is the ultimate expression of communism and/or the human spirit. I watch hockey for the exact same reasons I was good at Mortal Kombat as a kid: a childish, whimsical fascination with the utterly gross.

Simply put, I don’t have the proper emotional or intellectual equipment to be a proper sports fan. So, my primary interests in the Superbowl were a) eating until I herniated, and b) watching emotions run high. Mission accomplished.

But why did I see the things I saw? Decades-old friends began to snipe at each other like drunken divorcees in front of a baby sitter. Everyone examined each play for scientific evidence as to why supporting the other team meant that you’re a bitch. People discussed each others’ mothers at length.

It was all entirely unprecedented. And while I’m the kind of person that enjoys this sort of social chaos, I’m also the sort that wants to understand it.

I’ll put this premise forward, and you can take it or leave it: American football is a stupid sport. It’s not any more or less stupid than any other sport, but it is undeniably stupid. It is a sport of hyper-manly proto-men capable of lifting or eating entire SUV’s. It is a sport of men that spend the majority of their day sprinting, squat thrusting, hopping through tires, and then gulping down bovine growth hormone milkshakes. And it is a sport where some of the earth’s most physically powerful men use a complex system of rules to play professional grab-ass.

These men are not from the city you claim to love, and they are much to busy emptying buffets or eating puppies for protein to care where you spent the first six years of your life. If football once represented the spirit of true competition, it is now an arms race of energy bars and signing bonuses. If it once celebrated manliness, it now pays out dividends for being feral – but still celebrating a touchdown with emotional leg-humping.

Heartbreaking as it may be, if we accept the points I’ve outlined above, then it makes little sense to care about the Superbowl, and even less to make it the most watched event on television. So, the question I’m asking is the same one that has been asked by theorists and many lucid women for decades: why get so bothered by the whole affair?

And the answer, I feel, is that sense has nothing to do with it. We don’t view sports rationally in practice, and we shouldn’t. The entirety of sports-fandom only exists in the absence of logic, in a world where feelings are allowed to roam free and occasionally butt heads, like bison.

People just want something to care about. We love to anticipate, and we can’t help but hope, even when that hope is entirely baseless, utterly arbitrary. The original BoSox fans were rooting for David when he bonked Goliath with a rock and pretty much cemented his signing bonus with the Almighty. People want to want, and then they want their wants gratified. Football builds a want for an entire season, brings it to a climax, and then pretty much finishes this sexual metaphor in one of two entirely predictable ways.

Sports are a sustainable, self-renewing source of emotional investiture.

Do you know what this says about us as a species? We are bored. We might have come a long way, baby, but somewhere between inventing the wheel and developing Viagra, we just gave up.

It’s tough to care when you don’t really have to. Back when starving hunters were dragging half-cooked haunches of mastodon back to the cave dwelling, there just wasn’t time for a pre-season draft. In the pre-penicillin days, the best medicine was prayer and leeches. For all you knew, not caring about something in the right way would get you a dose of the plague, or at least a good stoning. But now? Now we’ve won. Now we have to manufacture concern.

I’m OK with that. It is what it is.

I’m much happier watching football than I ever would have been during the Spanish Inquisition or the Ice Age. And at least sports will never be affected by writers’ strikes.