Football

Sports media can’t stop complaining about Louisiana State University’s new head football coach, Lane Kiffin. A cliché tells us what’s really going on here: they hate him cause they ain’t him.   Kiffin spent the last five years resurrecting Ole Miss’s once-mediocre football program. The Rebels are currently 11-1, ranked sixth in the AP poll and have almost certainly secured a playoff spot. But that didn’t stop Kiffin this morning from getting on a plane bound for the swampy fields of Baton Rouge, home of the most attractive coaching vacancy in a year filled with big openings.“After a lot of prayer and time spent with family, I made the difficult decision to accept the head coaching position at LSU,” Kiffin said in a statement.

Until this week, NFL RedZone stood alone as an untainted representation of hyper fandom in the sports television arena, in the midst of what Cory Doctorow labeled the "enshittification" of everything. The channel, exclusive to NFL Sundays, promised every highlight, every score and what narrator and host Scott Hanson branded “seven hours of commercial-free football”. For the multitude of Americans who lacked the funds to pay for all the games on Sunday Ticket, or an at-home assemblage of televisions to create their own octo-box, RedZone was the perfect compliment to your main game – a running second screen of every big play, with the fantasy and gambling information to boot.

The most famous cheerleaders in the National Football League once belonged to the Dallas Cowboys. Both fans and haters of the Texas stars affectionately referred to the busty, well-coiffed, smiling gals as “America’s sweethearts.” Today, America’s most-talked-about sweetheart is . . . a man. This week, the Minnesota Vikings announced its new cheer squad on Instagram in a video that quickly went viral. In it, a young male cheerleader sashays in the middle of a dance group accompanying a caption that reads, “The next generation of cheer has arrived.” Shortly after, another male cheerleader said he also was joining the squad.  They sure stirred up the crowd. Twitter fingers went flying faster than a back handspring.

In The Spectator’s lengthy sit-down interview with President Trump earlier this year, 45 teased the idea that the return of Washington’s NFL franchise to the Robert F. Kennedy stadium site could be a legacy level achievement in his second term. He also implied a willingness to step in to take over the situation if the DC council failed to approve a stadium deal.

A pair of announcements by the National Football League in collaboration with Washington, DC has local citizens more excited than ever about football’s future in the capital city – but it’s also attracting opposition that stands to create a YIMBY versus NIMBY showdown on the left on the biggest national stage.  For YIMBY futurists on the left, whether you’re talking about Ezra Klein’s and Derek Thompson’s abundance agenda or Matt Yglesias’s dreams of a billion Americans, the possibility on offer by the NFL and the Washington Commanders seems ideal to achieve great things for the city.

It’s easy to not quite get the Super Bowl. What exactly is it: a sporting event, a music show, a fashion parade for the world’s coolest pair of shades, a new version of the Chippendales with the hunks wearing tight trousers and skid lids? Or, in its latest incarnation, a chance for the world’s most frenetic lawmaker to sink his last putt in a round of golf with Tiger Woods, board Air Force One and say: "Fly me to New Orleans." Or is it a chance to watch several vast and amiable black guys bulging out of their suits and bantering away about a possible three-peat, while Trombone Shorty plays a touching version of "America the Beautiful" and an announcer calls for a moment’s silence to mark the importance of "faith, family and football"?

On Black Friday, I attended a Friendsgiving party where I watched the Chiefs-Raiders game with a friend who is a die-hard Chiefs fan. I’m a Bills fan, and I detest the Chiefs and their legions of bandwagon fans with every fiber of my being. Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes endorses seemingly every product in America, and I do my best to boycott them all. Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce and his insufferable girlfriend, Taylor Swift, are just as unavoidable, and being forced to watch her gleeful celebrations of Chiefs touchdowns is arguably even more unpleasant than listening to her favorite politician, Kamala Harris, wax poetic about the passage of time.

During his 2022 Senate campaign, former NFL running back Herschel Walker said he graduated from the University of Georgia with a degree in criminal justice. Like many things said during the campaign, however, this turned out not to be true: Walker had dropped out his junior year to pursue professional football. But now the NFL star is back in class.  Walker first registered for summer classes at UGA last year after losing his Senate race, and according to a recent post on #redcupgeorgia, he’s still hitting the books. A picture from the account shows the sixty-two-year old Senate hopeful turned student sitting in a classroom surrounded by his much younger peers.  https://twitter.com/bluestein/status/1782512683742310550?

Fans of the NFL’s thirty-two teams don’t agree on much. You’ll get a broad range of opinions on who the best and worst teams are, who should be the league MVP, who should be the first pick in the next draft and a host of other football questions. But there is broad agreement on one thing: NFL officiating stinks worse than maggot-infested roadkill and the league has no plan to fix it. PolitiFact might brand me a conspiracy theorist for this opinion, but, like many other football fans who think their teams never get the pivotal calls, I’m pretty sure the league is committed to preventing my beloved Buffalo Bills from ever winning the Super Bowl. Take one game we played against the Eagles this year, for example.

America’s soccer supernova is always just around the next corner, but Rebecca Lowe, who anchors NBC’s coverage of the Premier League in the United States, recalls a few corners already turned. “When I stood in LA in the rain at four in the morning and there were 5,000 people lining up to come in and join us,” she said, referencing one of NBC’s “FanFest” watch parties in 2021, “I was like, ‘Oh yeah, this has not only made it, but this is not going anywhere. This is only getting bigger.’ And there are not many things in this country that can get bigger.” It sure seems like there are more red-blooded Americans patrolling our streets in Arsenal and Liverpool shirts these days.