Fading Friday Night Lights?

    Now that football season is almost over, with my Patriots back in the New England Invitational, against the Seattle Seahawks next Sunday, and with high school football currently in the rear view mirror looking earnestly to next fall, I thought it might be a good time to raise a glass to all of my friends who played the gridiron game in high school. But first, a little history lesson! An old friend accused me of being verbose. I think it was meant kindly, but you never know! Anyway, I wouldn’t want to let her down. And away we go!

    In the ancien regime, people were famously divided into three classes: those who fight, those who pray, and those who work. That world was dissolved in a bubbling brew of revolution and Enlightenment ideals, which may be for the best, because I can’t say that serfdom particularly appeals to me. But sometimes it’s helpful to look back and consider which aspects of older societies are worth recovering. Here is one thing I admire about the ancien régime: its elites cultivated courage and toughness in their children. 

    There was a practical element to this, to be sure. Young aristocrats needed to be prepared for military command, because who else would lead the army in the event of an invasion? Elites always enjoy more than their share of comforts and privileges, which can make people soft and entitled. And what happens to societies whose leaders are soft and entitled? 

    Pre-modern elites understood themselves as the warrior class, entrusted with the protection and safety of society as a whole. That ethos, and the training it demanded, gave them at least some measure of protection against the “soft” vices: cowardice, dishonesty, petty cruelty…pickleball. I’m kidding… It laid a foundation for noblesse oblige, not just military service as such. Powerful people are at their worst when they feel free to throw their weight around, bullying and manipulating weaker parties. Warrior training helps to rein in that tendency. 

    Unfortunately, this attitude seems to be a thing of the past. Today, our elites work while the middle class fights. This subversion of the old system reflects both military and economic changes, along with a broader shift that prioritizes cognitive excellence over most others. Privileged young men today are likelier to find themselves leading a seminar or strategy session than a platoon. What do we lose, though, when we stop asking our most privileged classes to cultivate courage?  It’s an important question. And it leads us, naturally, and because I'm a dork...to the subject of football.

    Football is America’s most martial sport. It brings together brute force, high strategy, and meticulous coordination, blending the grit of military trenches with the grace and precision of a ballet. It is not hard to explain why Americans love it so much, as we have for over a century. Both professional and college football have, since the 1960s, captured larger audiences than any other sport, while high school football was and remains our most popular boys’ sport by wide margins. Much has been written over the last 15 years about declining participation, but those numbers are rising again. Football is unambiguously America’s favorite sport.

    Nevertheless, there have been some real demographic changes to the world of football. American boys still play it, but the privileged mostly do not. Participation has fallen significantly among the sons of the wealthy and educated, the same demographics that have largely given up on military service. Football culture still holds strong in some regions, especially in the South, but in general, the affluent and educated are steering their sons away from it, while the poor and middle-class continue to play. At one time, we positively expected to see the town’s Fortunate Son (handsome, intelligent, and privileged) lining up under center for the snap. Today he’s likelier to swim, play tennis, go out for lacrosse or golf, run cross country, and/or carrying a trombone or STEM-themed textbooks through the halls instead of a playbook. Elite brains are too precious to risk on the gridiron.

    It’s an awkward cultural shift. Football is still beloved in this country, but periodically a harrowing injury (such as Damar Hamlin’s dramatic on-field collapse in 2023) inspires a fresh bout of soul-searching as the affluent agonize over the ethical implications of enjoying a sport they won’t let their own kids play. It is inevitable, perhaps, that we would end up here as our most elite classes increasingly experience football as televised entertainment, not a part of community life. To the spectators at a high school game, those boys are representing the community, our sons, and a little platoon of warriors. It’s part of the cultural and moral fabric of America. But if the NFL is mainly spectacle, just a slightly-tamer version of the ancient gladiatorial contest, then it does seem wrong to enjoy it, and perhaps exploitative to allow the less fortunate to play it for our amusement.

    Football probably is not going anywhere, but it’s hard to be quite sure. Our elites have shown an unfortunate willingness to impose their views on the entire nation, regardless of what anyone else thinks. But if football is canceled, how do we save American boys from becoming spineless wimps? At this hour of the day, it’s hard to see what could possibly replace the gridiron as a civilizational mainstay, the American training ground, our most vaunted cultural tutorial in the value of discipline, teamwork, strategy, self-sacrifice, and sheer physical courage. It is inconceivable that our thinking classes could design something equally good, let alone persuade their fellow Americans to like it. 

    I don’t mean to be too hard on America’s elites. The truth is, I understand completely why so many steer their sons away from playing football. It can be brutal. The risks are real, even if sometimes exaggerated by hyperbolic haters. And if (like me) you come from a family of degree-toting poindexters, football quite possibly is not the activity where your kids seem likeliest to excel. (I mean, c’mon…I only lasted two years!) We’ve left the ancien régime well behind us. Silver souls are uncommon in the egghead classes. 

    A sober “safety check” is not what this essay is about, but from a concussion standpoint, it is worth noting that high school football is not much more dangerous than girls’ soccer, a sport almost no one wants to cancel. Nevertheless, football feels far more wrong, perhaps especially, to mothers. My very own mother experienced this, even as someone who loved football for many years before her oldest son began his brief career. Logging hours in her and my step-father's living room, sipping a drink while she armchair-quarterbacked every game that was televised, did not prepare her for the first experience of seeing her own first-born thrown to the turf by someone much bigger than he is. Oh, the pain!

    It might feel different for a person who grew up immersed in “Friday Night Lights” culture. I can’t say for sure. But I do know there is a huge difference between rooting for distant celebrities and watching the same activity involving kids you know. Talking to my mother all these years later about it, those first few games, her entire brain seemed to be screaming in protest. “What are we, barbarians? How can this be fine?” If it’s your son getting sacked after a gorgeous spiral for a touchdown (see what I did there?), the emotions may be more complicated. Part of you is proud. Another part is in shock. Who is that guy? 

    The rational mind can make sense of these visceral responses. Of course it is discomfiting to see kids you’ve known for years, classified in your mind as “vulnerable beings who need my protection,” playing tackle football. In cultural-civilizational terms, this game is a true anachronism, genuinely shocking in its raw physicality. I mean, in what other socially approved context do modern people act like this? Parents have spent years teaching their kids that it’s wrong to push and shove, and really wrong to throw people to the ground, and suddenly they’re being actively instructed in how to do those things. It’s jarring. No matter what you think on a rational level, a parent can feel a lot of mixed emotions when a coach says, “proud of his progress, we’re going to start him next week!” or “I think we might try him at running back!” “Wonderful. He’ll be thrilled.” And the parents immediately go fill that Xanax prescription.

    For those earliest games, my mother found herself occasionally glancing over at the coaches, processing a certain cognitive dissonance as she considered how responsible and decent-seeming they seemed when filing into church on Sunday. And yet, these men had deliberately taught all these nice kids to behave in such a way. I emphasize once again that Mom already loved football at this point! She understood what the boys were doing; I think she had just become accustomed to thinking of football players in the same class as stunt men or rescue swimmers. It’s impressive, but Don’t Try This At Home! 

    So she, and many other moms, are familiar with all those uncomfortable feelings. Were they exposing a problem with football though, or with my mom and the culture it produced? In a culture (or sub-culture) that has forgotten the value of toughness, football may just feel wrong to a certain sort of person. But that’s revealing our characteristic defect, not the sport’s.

    In conversations on this subject, skeptical parents have often suggested that the goods we associate with football (discipline, teamwork, physical toughness, self-sacrifice, and courage) are indeed important, but that it would simply be better to instill them in another (safer?) way. That sounds reasonable. But how do we do it? Obviously football is not the only possible “school of toughness,” but it could be the only one still robustly in business in cities and towns across America. Some days, I honestly think it is. 

    What other things do boys do today that draw together those same goods? It’s particularly hard to think of other activities (apart perhaps from other gritty team sports, such as hockey or lacrosse) that combine the “toughness” component with “self-sacrifice and teamwork.” Individual sports or outdoor wilderness challenges might involve real exertion and perseverance, but they tend to be heavily managed experiences in which kids jump through hoops their elders have set for them, usually in pursuit of a personal prize or credential. There’s an unscripted, “touching grass” element to football that those activities simply lack, along with high levels of cooperation and mutual trust. Even looking at other team sports, which surely have their own excellences, I know none quite like football in which boys literally count on one another to “have each other’s backs.” Everyone appreciates prudent modifications in helmets and pads, that help to mitigate the risks. Past a certain point, though, it just isn’t possible to make safety an absolute priority while also instilling courage, sacrifice, and grit.

    It means something to put your very body on the line for someone else. Soldiers know this. Moms know this. Don’t we want our boys to learn it too? 

    The truth is, we probably couldn’t invent football today. It comes from a time when gentlemen still liked to hunt and shoot together, and considered it normal to see their sons in military uniform. The first football matches were played by the well-to-do young gentlemen of Princeton, Rutgers, Columbia, and Yale, who would beat the hell out of each other on the gridiron before joining together for a “handsome dinner,” a posh multi-course meal. They were elites! These were America’s Best and Brightest (and richest)! But in those days, elites still remembered the Duke of Wellington and his “fields of Eton.” 

    We can’t recover that era, but we can make good use of the traditions we have inherited. We can expose our sons to football, and permit them to play, if they dare.

    To be clear, I don’t mean to suggest that all young men must play high school football to have a successful life. I’m not an idiot. As I said, my career was brief when I realized that basketball was much more civilized and safe; especially if you hated the cold, like I did! Not everyone can, and some who try won’t succeed, which is fine. Failure can be instructive too, and I personally think it might be quite beneficial for more of our high-level influencers to have memories of being benched or cut because other boys were bigger, stronger, or tougher than they were. Must nerds always be vengeful? Considering how warmly the modern world has smiled upon us, it might behoove us to be a bit more magnanimous, cultivating less-natural-to-us excellences as we can and appreciating others’ where we cannot. 

    What’s important is that the real value of football is appreciated, even or especially for boys who might not immediately be drawn to contact sports. Anecdotally, I have found that youth football coaches overwhelmingly know the score here; they recognize they are making men on the gridiron, not just players. Their job involves much more than just drills and playbooks, and they’re very aware of this. It’s foolish indeed to undervalue that kind of mentorship for our sons, especially in a time when American boys seem to be struggling mightily with what we might call “vices of weakness.” 

    And trust me, they are struggling. Young men today are lazy, undisciplined, antisocial. They’re incredibly safe by historical standards, and yet they remain anxious and risk-averse, sometimes to the point of pathology. In the dark hallways of the manosphere, it’s clear that young men have an overpowering sense that manhood has been stolen from them, and they’re bitter about it, though they can’t explain with any clarity what has been lost. Surrounded to a historically unprecedented degree by choice and opportunity, they struggle to find the motivation to do even the things that have been considered normal for almost all men everywhere: work, get married, have children. Even sex is a “maybe” for men today. I cannot believe I even had to type that sentence! 

    Against that backdrop, football’s more unsettling characteristics (the ones that make moms wince) start looking more and more like a feature and not a bug. Concussions can be scary, but how do we balance that against another kind of hazard: the soft tyranny of low expectations that seems to be swallowing our boys like quicksand?

    Perhaps it is time to take at least a few pages from the ancien régime, where elites were trained to fight. In football, America’s most martial sport, they still can. Game on.

Write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com