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FiveHourMarathon  You can get anything here except red ink  1yr ago (text post)   1656 thread views

MONDAY MORNING MOTTErBack SPORTS THREAD

I know there are some other sports fans on here, and I thought a discussion thread might be fun, and Monday is the natural day coming after the weekend football (both varieties) games and without a side thread scheduled. What's going on with your favorite teams/players/etc? What fun media controversies in the microcosm of sports can tell us something about the broader world? What culture war bullshit do you want to discuss in a sporting context?

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I used to sneer at "sportsball" as a teenager but started to enjoy casually watching games in college. I have a college football and NFL team that I follow and I'll occasionally watch a baseball game.

What I still don't understand is how people keep up with all of the names of the coaches, the players, the interpersonal drama between them, scores, etc. When I watch a game with someone and they ask me what team I follow and I say $NFL_TEAM_NAME, I sometimes get a response like "Oh man how about that thing with your QB last week during that press conference? And do you think John Doe is going to play again this season after that epididymis injury? What do you think of Coach Fillintheblank getting fired? And what about his replacement Coach Newguy?" And I just shrug and say I don't follow them that closely.

Do some people just read sports news all the time and relish all the drama? Seems like the male version of those women who are really into what the royal family is up to. Baseball stat nerds at least make sense to me, but I don't understand the drama people at all. Maybe there's more to it than that?

Edit: Thanks for all the awesome responses. I think I have a better understanding of the appeal now.

Do some people just read sports news all the time and relish all the drama? Seems like the male version of those women who are really into what the royal family is up to.

You have it. In the US, the NFL/NBA is reality TV for guys, and they memorize all the names like fantasy nerds will know that Tyrion's squire Podrick is of House Payne in Game of Thrones.

Quite a lot of the audience consumes the NBA through highlights and headlines, and even with the NFL, they tend to spend more time gossiping about it and listening to sports talk shows. The games are secondary. An alien could infer a lot about humans from this. Reality TV shows with the most female audience tend to be about relationships, secrets, and betrayal, while sports on the other hand are about competition, dominance, the sweetness of victory and the agony of defeat — really engaging to dudes.

NFL gameplay is, fundamentally, a slot machine. You watch the reels spin (the players line up, the quarterback is accepting the snap), they begin to slow, suggesting a possible outcome (a receiver breaks open, the pass rush is closing in), and finally you experience either euphoria, mild pleasure, or annoyance depending on the outcome. (Touchdown, the pass is complete, interception.) This tickles the lizard brain pleasantly enough, but it wouldn't command the spare attention of guys for five straight months without the drama.

What excites sports fans most is when a famous player wildly underperforms or overperforms expectations. Probably the three most energizing sporting events of the last twenty years were when Eli Manning and Nick Foles (two mediocre quarterbacks) beat Tom Brady in the Super Bowl. Two of those games were quite tedious slogs to watch, but they sent the sports talk world and watercoolers across the nation into a frenzy. Guys just love the narratives, the basking in glory or wallowing in humiliation.

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