For decades, our country’s love of football has crossed political, socioeconomic, and generational lines.

And by “football,” I mean the game played on a gridiron with a prolate spheroid inflated leather ball. The athletic contest that requires gladiatorial equipment to protect the players from gruesome injuries. The sport where the players incur gruesome injuries anyway when they’re hit by people in gladiatorial equipment. The spectacle that’s played in North America and literally nowhere else…except of course when we trot it overseas to play in front of wide-eyed people with no earthly clue as to what is happening on the field. The game George Will once perfectly described as “violence punctuated by committee meetings.” Continue reading →