Football Will Save The World

Washington Football Team vs Tampa Bay Buccaneers at FedEx Field, Landover, Maryland, January 9, 2021 Photo by All-Pro Reels, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

“Football will save the world,” is what I told my mother on a phone call sometime in the early Summer of 2020. We had recently shifted from the eye-opening show of force by law enforcement and public health officials over drive through Easter services to the even more eye-opening latitude given to violent protests and riots that flouted all concept of ‘lockdown’ or ‘social distancing’ in the wake of George Floyd’s death in police custody. The fear that society was crumbling did not feel entirely unreasonable.

I had recently moved from Florida to a home about a half hour from my parents in West Virginia to be closer to the rest of my family during the pandemic. The rise of civil unrest, the most embittered election cycle of my memory, and the constant burden of isolation and frustration born out of both Covid lockdown and Covid inconsistency, all had me genuinely worried about a broader social collapse, if it were not for one thing.

“Football will save the world.”

On March 11th, 2020, the NBA suspended its season. On March 12th, MLB did the same. But the day I became certain that football would save society from collapse was on March 16th – when the National Football League announced that the NFL draft would proceed as scheduled, that free agency would begin virtually and that, other than postponing team activities, the league year would essentially go on as scheduled.

As summer wore on, buildings burned, crowds yelled, masks accumulated in grocery store parking lots, and previously delayed sports returned, but out ahead was the steady certainty that football was coming back. I cannot say for certain whether the NFL’s firm certainty to have its season emboldened the SEC, ACC, and Big XII to proceed with their season, but certainly proceeding led the Big Ten and Pac 12 to hastily return as well. That big blue and white NFL shield was gradually pulsing confidence and normalcy into society with the promise of a day of distraction every week.

When football did finally return, nobody could pretend it was a “normal” scene. For one, in most states, the home franchises could not have fans in attendance even if so inclined, and where they could there were far fewer than normal. Eerie cardboard cutouts were stacked into endzone seats behind the uprights. The product was different, but it was also the same. In a way this was just an extreme extension of changes to the on-field product over a few seasons due to increased attention to social justice causes by the league and players, and even to what extent it was off-putting it was also peripheral.

The NFL’s 2021 season was not “normal”, but it was complete. They were successfully able to follow their chosen Covid protocols and as needed successfully reschedule and get in every planned regular season game. When we went through cancelled Halloween plans, there was football. When we went through an election with no settled result for the rest of that week, there was football before and football after. When we had weeks of escalating tension over accused election fraud and fantastical claims about who would control the government, there football was.

No, football did not prevent any of these things. Could not have. But I submit that football made them bearable in a way they might not have been if every Sunday (or Saturday) were just another day for people to stew in their political anger over the election, over Covid, over the damage to the economy, or their own isolation.

Imagine if we had not had that outlet this year of all years? Where else would we put so much of our stress and pride and tribalistic impulses without these fictional wars every week? It may feel wrong but look back at how bad things got during 2020 and the first weeks of 2021 and think of how much worse it could have been.

On Sunday, Feb 7th, the NFL’s world championship will be decided. Either Tom Brady will win his seventh and his Buccaneers second in their own stadium, or Patrick Mahomes will win his second and be firmly on course to become the Brady for a new generation. And it will not have an asterisk on the season or feel like a footnote to sports history.

And we will be able to look back and see that we got the sharpest edges beveled off the past five months because nearly a year ago, the most popular sport in the country made the commitment to move forward, to be the one normal thing we got to have. Our passion for our pastimes may have kept our patience to preserve society, for one more season anyway.