Footballese, the Most American Vernacular
On Sunday, the Washington Commanders and the Indianapolis Colts—two football teams with low expectations and capable but wobbly quarterbacks, both already seeking a fresh wind of momentum only four weeks into the still budding N.F.L. season—played each other in London. It happens all the time now: two teams take one for the larger team that is the league, acting as particularly muscular missionaries, spreading abroad—across oceans and time zones and sacrificing resources of time and sleep—the gospel and the culture of American football. It took the Declaration of Independence and a grisly war to shake off the chains of British rule; maybe now, the implicit reasoning behind this exercise in diplomacy goes, it’ll take only a few touchdowns and some bright uniforms to reverse the Colonial situation for good. The game’s an excuse to plant a flag and claim new territory, if only in the mind and, especially, on TV.
During the second quarter of the game, with the Colts up 7–6 (they’d go on to win 30–13), a sideline reporter for ESPN offered a bizarre detail to the game-watching public. Over the summer, the Commanders’ coach, Dan Quinn, dreaming up ways to make his staff more impervious to pressure, enlisted the help of the intelligence establishment of the United States. “He turned to some people in his back yard: the F.B.I. and the C.I.A.,” the reporter said breezily. “He said he had a clandestine meeting with them to talk about ‘stress inoculation’—how to introduce stress so that they’re able to handle stressful situations. And they gave him some tips and tricks, and he’s been using it for his coördinators.” The coaches, thrown a battery of “unscripted” situations to puzzle through like stoic G-men, had taken avidly to the exercises, reportedly grateful for the training.
This very serious spy-play hadn’t, apparently, been enough to win the game for the Commanders, but, still, it felt comically apt. Football—besides being one of our more ubiquitous and unrestrained national entertainments—has also become one of the rare arenas in American life where highly specialized language can flourish without censure. Express an opinion about art in public? You’re yucking somebody’s yum, and, if you’re not careful, you’ll get yelled off your soapbox and into a lonely bin labelled “Pretentious,” or worse. If a scientist stands behind a lectern and gets in the weeds about, say, food safety, she’d better watch out for a pelting of tomatoes from an impatient crowd. Talking about the necessity of “inoculation” from deadly disease? Not so cool: the Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is on the case, ready to recommend sauerkraut or sunlight instead of the jab. Use the same term in connection with the mental vagaries of a gladiatorial spectacle? We’re listening.
Just as our national-defense establishment’s alphabet soup of lethal agencies gets little pushback for its engagements with jargon—its often opaque talk of “threat levels” and “terrorist cells” and the many “bright lines” at whose thresholds diplomacy must end and violence begin—football fans have come to tolerate, and even crave, a surprisingly high level of nerdy, insidery talk. During the same game, after a false start called on the Commanders’ offense, one of the commentators, the former Philadelphia Eagles center Jason Kelce (now, it must be acknowledged, the lucky brother-in-law to Taylor Swift), explained why the chemistry between a backup quarterback and the big guy snapping him the ball might be a bit off kilter. “Yeah, whenever a backup quarterback comes in, everybody’s cadence is a little bit different,” he said, leaning emphatically on that vividly musical noun. It was an art-critical observation, poetic but also obviously true. You could almost imagine some future philharmonic’s misadventures in timing—between, say, the string section and the booming bevy of timpani holding down the back row—being described with such precision on a broadcast beamed out to millions.
Kelce wasn’t all precision, though. He did an impressive job in the color-commentary booth as a relative newbie in the role, but he did make a blunder tied to football’s fluid lexicon: he called the Commanders by their verboten former name, the Redskins. He and his fellow-commentators had shown up for work already worried about this precise slipup, as it turned out. “Yeah, the three of us had a little gentlemen’s bet who would be first,” said the play-by-play announcer Dave Pasch. Later on, in the fourth quarter, after an errant pass was batted upward and, eventually, into the hands of an offensive lineman, Kelce, ever the ambassador for his undersung position, was full of primal delight. “That never happens!” he shouted, his giddy energy transporting him far beyond his previous focus on technique.
Some drastic and growing percentage of the N.F.L.’s most invested fans are engaged in some form of gambling around the edges of the sport. Besides the now almost fusty annual ritual of playing fantasy football, sundry smartphone apps offer opportunities to bet on minute aspects of each game: the score, the spread, a quarterback’s yardage, the number of times some back or receiver will make it to the painted promised land of the end zone. Maybe this is why serious language is in such high demand. If your money’s on the line, maybe you want to hear from a grownup, even if part of the pleasure of watching the game is to achieve a momentary state of childlike escape.
Listen, for instance, to Mina Kimes, the sharp and often very funny ESPN personality—one of my favorites. Casually and in a spirit of real but rigorous fun, like a particularly charismatic management consultant, she’s always tossing off sparkling insights about the subtler workings of football technique. Talking on a recent episode of her podcast, “The Mina Kimes Show Featuring Lenny,” about the Kansas City Chiefs’ hot start to the season, she launched into a disquisition on the quarterback Patrick Mahomes’s new success running play-action—a fake run that often sets up a successful pass. Historically, she said, “That’s just not been Patrick Mahomes.” She could have been wearing a lab coat and goggles, rhapsodizing over the discovery of some new genetic mutation:
There was something thrilling about this highly informed short monologue—perhaps it was the fact that Kimes never once considered explaining (as I, just a paragraph ago, have sheepishly done) what the hell play-action is, or why not being “under center” would make it hard to pull off. The slang term for employing and interpreting lingo like Kimes’s is “ball knowledge.” There’s a heartening respect for the intelligence of the audience in this pocket of the media. If you don’t know, after all, you’ll probably look it up. If you’re searching for organic, largely unquestioned, even aspirational intellectualism in American public life, here it is. The public intellectual of the future won’t be wearing tweed or a button-down collar—the new uniform involves a coach’s headset, or the pancake makeup from the greenroom of some sports network.
Pete Hegseth, who persists in his insistence on being called the Secretary of War, recently issued a broadside in his first “State of the Force” address. He was purportedly offering an update on the health of the U.S. military, but really just stringing together statements like this: “We are no longer the Woke Department or the Weak Department. Simple translation of that: No fatties. No trannies. No beardos. No weirdos. No wimps. No radicals.” In keeping with his downwardly mobile, former-high-school-bully vibe, he might as well have added “no nerds” to the list.
But the human urge toward weird and disproportionately intense tunnelling toward understanding—the urge to gather and share knowledge, wherever it gleams—is hard to suppress. Play the tough guy if you want, but under your nose some fresh exercise in radical dorkery is stealthily blooming.
Here’s one such specimen: the former Pittsburgh Steelers coach Mike Tomlin has recently become a member of the football commentariat. He’s good at the job—he speaks fluent footballese, which might someday become the real national language of the U.S. and the territories it captures one international jaunt at a time. He’s admirably candid, too—recently he criticized the late-game coaching of the Dallas Cowboys, even though the norm is for former coaches to keep a respectful silence about the misdeeds of their colleagues still in the trenches.
Curiously, though, Tomlin—perhaps unburdened by having left his long-held coaching duties—has also revealed his inner nerd. In a recent YouTube video titled “ROOFTOPS, PENTHOUSES, AND URBAN LIVING,” he showed off a city he’d constructed, brick by brick, over the past twelve years or so, in the video game Minecraft. He’d lovingly appointed each apartment in his skyscrapers with highly detailed interior-design features—one building’s rooms were built around a huge, florid fish tank. The views from his digital balconies? Sublime. On X, Tomlin’s son Mason issued a tweet about the dedication the project had required: “Bro I used to come home sometimes and my PlayStation would just be gone. And I wasn’t in trouble,” he wrote.
In the video, giving viewers a tour of his grand creation like a latter-day Robert Moses, Tomlin seems blissed out, like the keeper of some ancient wisdom. “For whatever reason,” he says,
At its best, football is fun to watch because it is the product of minds like Tomlin’s: exact, obsessive, inexhaustible. And it comes across the airwaves clothed in language fit to gesture toward—if not fully grasp—its complexity. Tomlin sounded, refreshingly, like what his life at the center of the sport has trained him to be: an expert. ♦