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.

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.

Why the NFL's UK push is failing, and what the league should do about it. →

The NFL just decided to continue playing regular season games in London through at least 2016, and they’re looking to add a second game at Wembley Stadium every year — and in the run-up to this year’s UK game on Sunday, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell continues to talk about his hopes to give London a home team. Meanwhile, ticket sales for the Bears/Bucs game at Wembley are sluggish at best.

There are reasons why the NFL is struggling to make a UK expansion sustainable, but they’re not what you think. (The fact that they like soccer over there isn’t the key.) Go read this week’s Down And Distance column at CultureMap and learn what the NFL can do to build more interest in the game in England.

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.

Why It's Time For The NFL To Hire Some Lady Referees (And Maybe Announcers And Coaches, Too) →

“Challenges are about to get real emotional,” said one commenter on NBC’s ProFootballTalk.com; “But… but… but… there’s no crying in football!” another said, quoting a movie directed by a woman; “This just seems like a bad idea. Some player is going to say something that a guy would shrug off, but the female ref is going to take it to the league office as harassment,” still another predicted; “We all know most women base decisions on there[sic] emotions” seemed to be the summation of the viewpoints. It goes on like this for at least half of the 136 comments (as of Saturday night) on the post at PFT.

It’s a weird outrage, seemingly borne out of the same urge that Calvin had when he declared himself Dictator-For-Life of G.R.O.S.S. – like, can’t we have one thing that yucky girls aren’t allowed into? And most of the griping is a search for after-the-fact justification. Some of the comments on PFT hide behind a smokescreen of “what if a woman ref gets clobbered by a linebacker by mistake,” a concern that seems oddly placed, given that the current average age for a male NFL official is about 93. But mostly, it’s this declaration that women are too emotional, and will thus screw up the great game of football.

And that’s weird for a couple of reasons: First, we insist upon emotion when it comes to sports. At least half of the league, and the people who follow it, are still snickering at Jay Cutler for failing to make an appropriate frowny-face while sitting on the sideline after suffering a grade II MCL tear in the NFC Championship Game; meanwhile, when the U.S. Women’s soccer team lost a heartbreaking World Cup final to Japan in July, Hope Solo and Abby Wambach shed no tears, unlike Tim Tebow and LeBron James did after losing their respective championships.

There’s nothing shameful about LeBron or Tebow having a powerful emotional response to coming up short on something they’d dedicated their lives to achieving, but it betrays a basic hypocrisy: Not only do we demand that men in sports respond to things emotionally, but the available evidence suggests that there’s no reason to believe that women respond more emotionally on the field than men do. So what the hell, guys?

As promised, this week’s Down And Distance column is live at CultureMap. It’s about the NFL’s plan to hire some lady refs in the near future, the reaction to it, and why it’s past time for all major American sports to re-assess the roles they have available to women.

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