The NFL Experience, America, and Pam Oliver

1. The National Football League is more American than America. Really. NFL football represents the best and worst that our culture has to offer. Fast-paced collisions between freakishly large humans, fireworks literal and figurative, beer and heart-attack inducing culinary fare, lots of loud music and people screaming, foul language, soaring hubris, and lots of fat people squeezed into mass-produced jerseys. America, f--k yeah!

There are plenty of things to nitpick the NFL for, but when it comes down to it, a live game delivers an experience like none other in sports. Maybe soccer matches one-up our passion, but I’ll stack up the sensory experience of a football game--standing among 80,000 rabid fans, fighter jets screaming over our heads, fireworks shooting from the edge of the stadium, and players going apeshit on the field below--against that of any soccer match in the world. We see your plastic horns and raise you some effin fireworks, Euros.