Our complicated, messy love affair with the NFL

You can’t make people get it. There’s no intelligible way to explain to someone the unique, inescapable allure of the National Football League: Its incongruous ballet of athletic beauty and brutal violence, wrapped in a corporate bow. No matter how frustrating it gets, regardless of how often the NFL manages to sink lower, even as billionaire owners fleece local politicians and take local taxes to increase their wealth — every September we’re back for more.

There is nothing in the world like this maddening, infuriating, beautiful, and sublime game. Every sport has its incredible athletes and unforgettable moments, but there’s something that hits differently when it comes to the NFL’s ability to conjure nostalgia with a few simple words: The Catch, The Drive, The Minneapolis Miracle, The Immaculate Reception. We don’t just remember great players, but moments frozen in time that define a city and an era with one iconic moment. All executed by players honed to become single-purpose weapons unlike anything else in sports. Other team sports all have positions, but only football demands a complete transformation of the human body to become an archetype.

The NFL is a commitment. It will accept entry at various levels like a multi-level marketing scheme, but regardless of how deep you get, there will always be required sacrifices for the game. Sunday afternoons will be given to football over family gatherings. Monday nights will cause the TV to be locked to football. This sport we love is a centerpiece of Thanksgiving, it’s coming to take Christmas, and Super Bowl Sunday might as well be a holiday weekend in its own right. For five months even the most casual fans will be engrossed. For sickos (and yes, if you’re reading about football online, this includes you) it will dovetail into the combine, the draft, and free agency — extending our football addiction to 10 months a year.

The NFL is a religion. Circumstances oft credited to the non-denominational pantheon of “Football Gods,” there’s an inherent acceptance that what we see in games is often so unbelievable, so unpredictable that they have to be explained through intelligent design rather than random chaos. It’s impossible to comprehend that humans are capable of the feats of heroism and utter failure we see in games. It’s reached a point where us mere mortals try to make sense of it all, either by believing there are divine acts performed by our football pantheon, or subtly manipulated by forces pulling the strings behind the scenes. I often think about my priest at mass, imploring his church to devote their “time, talent, and treasures to God,” realizing that we give precisely those things to the NFL every season.

The NFL is beautiful. It’s easy to forget that. We so often get mired in the ugly side of the league, and for good cause. There’s never a shortage of players committing reprehensible acts off the field, the league unfairly doling out punishment in curious ways to boost commercial appeal, and it’s natural to become cynical about the sport as a whole. All that melts away, at least for a while, when children rush a training camp fence with pen in hand, desperate for a fleeting moment of interaction with one of their heroes. When a player bursts into tears upon being drafted, knowing they’ve changed the lives of their families forever. When two strangers with nothing in common but the color of their jerseys can spark up a conversation out of nothing and appear to be lifelong friends because of their shared interest.

The NFL is messy. Its goal is to separate us from as much money as possible and route that to the unfathomably wealthy. Distilled capitalism feigning as public works, as new stadiums and ventures threaten to rip the hearts out of a community unless its financial demands are met. Players who are given phenomenal opportunities to become our heroes, and ruin their bodies for fleeting enjoyment. The ever-present reality that with every big hit or ball jarred loose we’re also watching permanent damage take place to those we once held dear, and even if they aren’t injured, it’s only a matter of time before a beloved athlete becomes a cap liability to be tossed aside like an empty bag of chips.

The NFL is hope. An opportunity to see our team improve their station in hopes of achieving the ultimate goal that chisels them in history as the champions of this sport. It’s unattainable for all but one city, somewhere in the country, and they have no idea who it will be yet. Sure, we can posit that the Chiefs will be back, the Eagles will be contending, and the Bills have a chance to get over the hump — but really nobody has any idea. It’s all about hope. Cities, states and regions hanging their hopes on getting better, making the playoffs, perhaps even losing so badly they can find a player in the draft to change the trajectory of their team. Everything in this sport is about hoping for something. It could be as small as the top draft pick panning out, to a lofty goal like winning it all — but hope is the fish hook that keeps us on the line year after year, because no matter how hopeless things can look in other parts of our lives or the country, football is our little microcosm where the impossible can become reality.

The NFL will never be the same again. The aspirations of the shield are colonial, now casting its collective eye to Europe and the promise of new lands to conquer. We know expansion is coming, it cannot be stopped — and with it a host of issues the league isn’t prepared to deal with. It won’t happen this year, or even next — but soon you’ll be forced to wake up for football at 8 a.m. because your team is playing an away game in Germany, or we’ll debate the fairness of a team needing to head to London for a playoff game. The National Football League is hellbent on going international, and there’s nothing to stop it because there’s money to be made. Divisions will be re-aligned, conferences changed, and nobody knows where this will end. On some level it’s beautiful, because more people around the world get to experience the weekly addiction of football, but it’s also horrific as our obsessive pyramid scheme of a sport finds new hosts to evangelize it.

The NFL is here. It’s been a long wait since we saw players in pads facing off in games where every moment matters. The slingshot of anticipation has been cocked since February, and now it’s about to fire for 17 weeks of sporting contest that will dominate every second of discussion. Some of us will experience joy, most of us will realize exquisite pain, but for those 17 weeks we’ll have a chance to feel something and that’s the greatest gift of all. Nothing in this world is worse than apathy, and for all the complicated, messy facets of the NFL — we’re never apathetic to what happens on Sunday.

This is the sport we love. A bizarre, charming, convoluted mess that defines our year and has the ability to burn lifelong memories in our minds, good and bad, happy and sad. Now it’s 2023’s opportunity to make history.