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FiveHourMarathon  You can get anything here except red ink  1yr ago (text post)   1658 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.

Lol, so....

First, I think there is definitely a "male version of those women who are really into what the royal family is up to" element at play here. Especially the 5-6 slot on ESPN (Around the Horn especially, and to a somewhat lesser extent Pardon the Interruption). Back in my 20s, I watched these shows basically every day. At a certain point it occurred to me how much of these show revolved around 'Is he right to be angry?', 'Is he getting the respect he deserves?', etc, and those shows started to lose their appeal (also somewhat around the time I had kids), and it started to seem like a dumb way to spend an hour of my life every day, I rarely watch those some these days. (There's a fairly entertaining Wait But Why illustration about this - https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/newspaper1.png from an entertaining blog post https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/03/sports-fans-sports-fans.html)

Second, I think there's an element of 'knowing all the names', that isn't necessarily 'royals for guys', but actually about appreciating the depth of the game we're watching. In its current form, sports isn't nameless interchangeable robots carrying out various operations. If you have a team you follow, whether 1 particular guy is playing QB vs another particular guy playing QB is going to make a big difference for how your team does. To varying degrees, that's true up and down the lineup and includes the coaching staff.

Maybe somewhat similarly, there seem to be a lot people who really get into music in a way I don't really understand. I play various music stations when I'm driving around, there are songs that I find catchy and enjoy, but that tends to be the extent of my engagement with it. There seem to be a collection of people who take their favorite bands very seriously, its seems as if they make their musical tastes a major part of their personal identity. For the most part that seems.... fine, but they're definitely experiencing music and a different level of intensity than I am.

I suspect your experience of sports is similar to my experience of music, which, all in all, is fine, different strokes for different folks.

[Its interesting that you mention being a teenager as when you sneered at "sportsball", I think that's probably the timeframe in which I was most into knowing the different names. If you're actually interested in the mechanics of it, my parents at various times got me subscriptions to Sports Illustrated and The Sporting News as birthday presents, they both came weekly, I read them cover to cover, I never threw them out (they're probably still at my parent's house), when I was bored in my room, I would re-read old issues. It's hard to estimate how much of my life I spent doing this, maybe 5+ hours a week from age 9-18 or so??? Idk, I have a fairly deep reservoir of sports names from a certain era. I don't follow it nearly as closely now that I've gotten older.]

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