Football is over and Peyton Manning is the story: Does Eli pass the Matt Ryan test →

The idea that the NFL is a passing league isn’t a new one, but the inequity between the two conferences has never been clearer. The three best passers in the NFL are all playing in the NFC, and the relative dearth of talent at the position in the AFC is the reason that Vegas has the conference as a 3-point underdog in next year’s Super Bowl already.

Here’s a way to determine whether a team has a decent quarterback in place or not — let’s call it The Matt Ryan Test. Matt Ryan, the Atlanta Falcons quarterback, is an above-average player whose best years are still ahead of him, but he’s unlikely to ever be confused with Joe Montana or Johnny Unitas — the very definition of “decent.” The Matt Ryan Test is this: If you’d trade your team’s quarterback for Matt Ryan in an even exchange, then your team doesn’t have a decent quarterback in place.

In the AFC, only a handful of team’s pass the Ryan Test — the Patriots, the Chargers, the Steelers, and the Texans are the only teams with a starter in place who’s at least as good as Matt Ryan. There’d be serious conversations in Oakland and Cincinnati about it, and regardless of what Broncos fans think, John Elway would have Tim Tebow stuffed in a suitcase before the Falcons hung up the phone.

As football season comes to a close, so too does my Culturemap football column, Down And Distance enter its offseason. Thanks to everybody who read it and wrote in, except for those who threatened me for pointing out that Ben Roethlisberger has been credibly accused of rape more than once (fuck y’all!) and give this last column a read!

We introduce the concept of The Matt Ryan Test, speculate about what the speculation surrounding Peyton Manning will be like (boners swordfights around the ESPN offices!), and lament the fact that during the rest of the primary season, there will be no easy football metaphors to reach for, leaving us woefully restricted to comparing the candidates to baseball and basketball players until things heat up as the 2012 NFL season kicks off…

Seriously, though, getting to write a weekly column where I wrote about football as a social, political, and cultural force through which we view ourselves as Americans has been a dream project of mine for a very long time, and I had so much fun doing it that I am apparently right now typing a weird acceptance speech on Tumblr. But thanks, sincerely, to the people who read it and wanted to talk about it with me, and especially to Culturemap for saying yes to a kind of weird idea (when they were just launching, no less) that they knew would take half a year to complete. This was so much fun for me, seriously.

Rating the storytelling potential of the four possible Super Bowl matchups →

The New Orleans Saints are done, and Drew Brees’ absurd year of disrespect from the sports establishment — dude had the best year of any quarterback probably ever and was an afterthought in MVP discussions — will likely last for another season. The Green Bay Packers — the NFL’s most dominant force — were clobbered by the New York Giants so convincingly, and with their offense sputtering so badly, that you could practically hear Brett Favre furiously masturbating throughout the fourth quarter all the way in Texas…

…and even Tim friggin’ Tebow, the blue-and-orange messiah, was utterly exposed by a merciless Tom Brady with hate in his heart, determined to make the kid go from looking like Moses to looking like Job.

Yeah, those are the stories we are done with. Oh, you’ll hear Tebow’s name plenty, and up in Wisconsin the “what the hell just happened” posts will be penned by bloggers with their foam cheeseheads still jauntily askew from the tailgate party for the next two weeks. But if there is one thing that the NFL has in common with the political world and the broader American culture, it is that it forgets quickly what it cared about deeply only weeks earlier.

Tim Tebow is a punchline for the next few months, at least, and the Discount Double-Check commercials will make grown men from Fon Du Lac tear up until the start of free agency — and all that matters now is what becomes of the teams who are still in this thing.

I’ve tried this year through the Down And Distance column at Culturemap to offer a type of sportswriting that’s a bit more thoughtful, conscious, engaged-in-the-larger-world, and culturally aware than most. Except this week, where it’s all immature jokes, masturbation gags, Ron Paul slights, and mean-spirited personal attacks on Boston sports fans.

Sometimes, you just have to say fuck it.

The playoffs versus the primaries: At least the NFL requires you to be good before you can win →

[W]hile parity rules in the NFL, random arbitrariness isn’t usually the way things work: losers, typically, are exposed as losers in the playoffs. The football-watching establishment may be nearly as bored with the long-presumed favorites in Green Bay as the Republican base is with Mitt Romney, but that boredom doesn’t mean that they’ll randomly select the St. Louis Rams — the football equivalent to Rick Santorum — to advance in the playoffs just because it’d be kinda neat.

Which is the point: America, especially in the conservative worldview, likes to see itself as a pure meritocracy. “Jim Abbott,” they like to say, indicating that hard work and determination are enough to make anyone a success. But the Republican primaries, whoever ultimately wins them, indicate something else. You don’t necessarily need to be good in order to win. In the end, it looks like a tight three-way that resulted in Santorum — but that doesn’t make him a winner. It only makes him the person who did less badly than everybody else, because someone — statistically speaking — had to.

So, I filed this week’s Down And Distance last night before Romney pulled off his decisive eight (8) vote victory after every precinct reported. Still, the point seems to be more or less intact (though I’ll lose the super mature Santorum pun) — this is as arbitrary a primary season as has happened in my lifetime, to say the least. While it’d have been hugely unexpected for something as competitive and fascinating as ‘08 to occur a second time, especially with an incumbent as one of the guys in the race — but geez. This makes the loser class of ‘04, which at least had a clear narrative (outsider obviously torpedoed by establishment in favor of their favored Massachusetts empty suit), seem positively high-concept.

You have to assume that, if the primary season had lasted just another 2-3 weeks, and the Santorum surge had been pushed against by some negative ads, the 75.4% who’ll never vote for Romney would have ended up giving Huntsman some love. This isn’t really even anybody but Romney, it’s anybody but everybody, and that’s not how America is designed. Or, at least, not how America sees itself working.

The playoffs are how we wish America worked. The primaries are how it is at its most depressing. That’s never been more clear than this year.

So, I got a lot of hate mail yesterday. →

It’s weird — I don’t usually get hate mail. Negative comments? Those I get like crazy. I’ve had pseudonymous people on the Internet publicly declare that I am stupid/retarded/fat/gay/black?/racist/etc in response to things that I’ve written loads of times, but this is the first time that a bunch of people independently took it upon themselves to email me to let me know how much of those above things I am.

In any case: This was a response to this week’s Down And Distance column for CultureMap, which talked about Ben Roethlisberger. The emails, naturally, were from Steelers fans who felt like I was picking on their guy unfairly, since it’s been over a year since the last time he was accused of raping anybody.

I will admit that it’s not the freshest of topics, but that’s why I wanted to re-visit it. Because while I am certainly aware that 20 months are an eternity in football-time, I bet it doesn’t seem like several lifetimes ago to the young woman in Milledgeville, Georgia who offered horrifying details to the police (who, hah, posed for pictures with the QB when they got there) about what Roethlisberger did after he had her cornered. That’s part of the point.

The other part of it is that the dude gets to just go and play football now, 20 months later, after a Super Bowl appearance and a few stressful weeks with a publicist have rehabilitated his image. And we will watch, and when we do, we should remember who we’re watching, and what role our enthusiasm for watching played in the fact that he avoided prosecution.

But the article isn’t some you shouldn’t root for the Steelers guilt trip. And that’s why I’m so surprised by the angry emails. Because I know how it is. You were a Steelers fan long before Ben Roethlisberger joined the team. There is an emotional connection to the black and yellow colors and the uniform that is very real and very significant, and I don’t think that people should feel like they have to give that up in order to be a good person — that is not productive. It doesn’t work that way. And ultimately, it’s got nothing really to do with the Steelers. They’re just the team that drafted Roethlisberger. Whatever team he ended up on, they’d be the bad guys. It’s a thing that all of us who care about football share responsibility for.

So I also didn’t propose that we should stop caring about football, because the problem isn’t football, either. Ben Roethlisberger could have played baseball, and people would have argued that the women were lying; the police would still have posed for pictures and called the one in Georgia a drunk fucking bitch; the investigation still would have been dropped because she still wouldn’t have wanted her name in the news. That’d be true if he played baseball, or played in a killer band, or starred in movies, or ran for office. The culture that values Famous, Important Dudes more than the women that they may have raped, is bigger than football.

So what I proposed in the article that got me a couple dozen hate emails was really just a gesture, inspired by the #10ForTebow thing a couple weeks ago: put your money where your mouth is, and prove that you care about the women who may have been raped by the people that our participation in this culture has helped empower. If you want to watch Ben Roethlisberger play football — whether he’s throwing touchdowns and you’re thrilled, or interceptions and you’re rooting against him for whatever reasons — then every time he scores, or tosses a pick, donate $10 to RAINN. Pay for your interest in what he’s doing on the field by offering support to the women who nobody’s cheering for. It doesn’t solve the problem, but at least it says that they’re not forgotten.

And apparently that sentiment is still so upsetting to dudes — not a single letter or comment from a lady! — that they felt the need to fill my inbox with shit about how much I suck for suggesting it.

Cautionary Tales from Ndamakung Suh and the 2011 Detroit Lions →

The alacrity with which the Detroit Lions went from the year’s feel-good story to one of the most unappealing teams in sports ought to provide a lesson worth learning for anyone for whom public opinion matters. In this week’s Down and Distance column, I explore what things there are to learn from the Lions.

What the Cowboys win, the Penn State riots and the Occupy movement all have in common →

For people in State College, Pennsylvania, [the need to form adult emotional connections is filled by] Penn State football. And as that very powerful emotional force spent nearly fifty years getting tied up with Joe Paterno, you can get an inkling of how people at Penn State weren’t demonstrating because they don’t give a shit about child rape – they were demonstrating because their church was under attack. It was a reaction to a threat. That sort of lizard-brain impulse doesn’t change just because that threat was 100% justified, and maybe ought to end with criminal prosecution.

In this week’s Down And Distance, there are some things to say about Penn State and UC-Davis, and how our culture has created a dearth of opportunities to form meaningful emotional bonds to anything outside of our families as adults. That’s a need that we desperately find ways to meet, and it’s at the core of what you saw when the kids in State College flipped over a van in response to Joe Paterno’s firing; it’s also why the Occupy movement is only getting stronger because it has no simple, easy-to-state goals.

Give it a read.

Is Tim Tebow the messiah for the American Culture War? →

People who want to believe that Christians are oppressed in America love to talk about the fact that football people don’t take Tim Tebow seriously, and use that as proof that there’s an anti-Christian bias in a country made up of 76% Christians, hah. Meanwhile, football people point to the fact that his play in the NFL has been more or less objectively terrible for the vast majority of the time that he’s been on the field.

So what happened yesterday, when Tebow — playing the worst game a starting NFL quarterback may have ever played for the first 3 quarters and ten minutes — somehow managed to lead the Broncos to the unlikeliest of comebacks in a game they were down 15-0 in with three minutes on the clock is only going to divide people on his prospects even further.

And when that happens, you end up with Tebow-the-stand-in-for-the-Culture-War (which fits nicely with the fact that Tebow seems fairly comfortable being on the right-hand side of that fight). People who don’t think he’s a good quarterback can point to 55 minutes of atrocious play and prove that he’s not NFL caliber; people who think that those people are godless, anti-Christian bigots can point to the fact that he won the game and insist that they’re trying to steal Christmas. And nobody wins.

Last thoughts on Al Davis: the American speed addiction and the NFL →

Americans are obsessed with things that go fast. Al Davis, as quintessential an American as we’ve seen, was one of them, and he brought that obsession to football. In the process, he transformed the game into something that reflected American culture in a way few other things do. There are a lot of reasons football overtook baseball as our most popular sport, but most of them have to do with speed, and no one understood the importance of speed better than Al Davis.

My CultureMap column this week isn’t exactly an obituary for Davis — it’s more of a tribute to the things he understood about the game, and by extension America, that no one else figured out. Give it a read.

The fix is in: Fake injuries, weird calls, and the #occupywallstreet demonstrations →

Americans have long been a people who distrust certain institutions. The Tea Party gained so much traction so quickly because don’t trust the government and politicians are liars is a golden oldie in the American character, and the classics never go out of style. A lack of faith in business and corporations, meanwhile, is more the stuff of Michael Moore movies and Noam Chomsky pamphlets—which makes the coverage that the #occupywallstreet demonstration is getting fairly remarkable. But for that to extend to the NFL, in ways that go beyond sore loser-isms and SpyGate complaints into the sort of world-weary, everybody does it cynicism that’s usually reserved for politics and lawyers? That’s something else.

I was at a bar last night to watch the game between the Cowboys and the team from Washington DC, and every time someone came over to the table we were sitting at, the conversation seemed to tilt toward the Johnny Knox punt return touchdown that was called back on a phantom holding penalty — and the fact that by negating the TD, the Packers were able to cover the spread.

In this week’s Down And Distance, the topic is the fact that so many people are suspicious that maybe a few NFL refs are on the take, and what that has to do with the national mood in the wake of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. Give it a read.

Next Man Up: The NFL, Game Of Thrones, and Peyton Manning's head on a spike →

Football sustains its popularity because it’s keen to devour its own history. Baseball is too often crushed under the weight of it, where every shattered record makes lovers of the game mopey, since at least the debate around whether Roger Maris’ name should come with an asterisk, on to gripes about how Barry Bonds is no Hank Aaron.

In basketball, that scene in Bad Teacher where Jason Segal berates a middle schooler who wants to argue LeBron versus Michael Jordan exemplifies something that keeps younger generations from feeling like they can truly own the game. It’s been almost a decade since that guy laced up his sneakers, yet basketball shoes are still called “Jordans.” And, geez, look at boxing, which slides further and further into irrelevance because it insists that the sport’s legends can never be replaced, making it impossible to believe that what’s happening now even matters.

But football? The all-time greats are just part of the last generation’s drama, and the game changes so quickly that you can’t even compare from one era to the next. In football, the history informs the present, it doesn’t oppress it. The last generation’s heroes are this generation’s in-studio commentators, big-upping the guys on the field today.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ve probably seen me mention Down And Distance, my weekly column for CultureMap. It’s about football in the broad context — how the game reflects American culture, and how American culture reflects the game — and now that the regular season has started, there’s plenty to write about.

This one is about the way that the NFL fits into our cultural appetite for stories, in ways that other sports don’t, and how much more clearly we can see that after the star of the show, Indianapolis Colts quarterback Peyton Manning, had a neck surgery that put his short- and long-term futures in doubt.

I’m quite pleased with how this came out — give it a read, and share/Digg/”like”/Tweet it, if you like it.