Football is better than any sport you can come up with. Which is to say: football is the best sport.
This is my thesis.
You don’t have to believe me just because I say so. Let me explain myself, and surely—if you have any sense at all—you will be persuaded.
To be a truly good football player you need to have all the facets of raw athleticism: you need to be fast. You need to be strong. You need to be big. You need to be quick.
Point being: football is the perfect index of athletic makeup in its most fundamental terms.
To be good at football you also need to have certain psychological aspects to your personality. You need to be unafraid, willing to put your body in uncomfortable and even dangerous positions. You need to be aggressive. You need to be willing to inflict pain on your opponent.
(You’re saying to yourself now: a person who is good at football is kind of a badass [can I say this here?], no? Answer: yes. A person who is good at football is most definitely [if I can say this] a badass.)
But, to me, the best thing about football isn’t what you need to be. It’s what you don’t have to do.
Football is almost entirely not skill-based. This means you can play even if you haven’t spent innumerable hours working on hyper-specific, arbitrary skills. Sometimes I see you LAX
numbskulls bouncing balls off a wall with your ridiculous sticks. Or you basketball guys
dribbling and shooting in the gym like senseless automatons. Or you soccer players vacuously
shuffling the ball around with your feet, real clever and whatnot.
“What’s wrong with these guys?” I ask myself. “Wasting away the very bloom of youth doing weird dumb stuff so they can be good at these strange inconsequential games.”
Here’s my impression of all y’all who play sports that aren’t football:
“Hey everybody! It’s me, not-football-playing guy! Everyone tells me life is precious but
obviously I don’t believe them because I’m out here wasting time doing all kinds of worthless
drills that have nothing to do with real life and hoping that it’s, like, all worth it for no apparent
reason, or something!”
Ridiculous!
When I showed up to my first football practice my coach didn’t ask me to do something random and stupid. He didn’t say, “Bussen, before I can put you on the field, please demonstrate your ability to do something as capricious as balancing a balloon on your head or juggling knives.”
If he had, I would have left. And with justification.
Instead, what he told me to do was to run. And I already knew how to do that because I was already a human kid.
If I didn’t have the ball, he said, I should run really fast over to where the guy with the ball was, and then I should smash him down to the ground.
Simple enough.
If I had the ball, he told me, I should run—again, everyone already knows how to do this—and if someone tried to smash me into the ground, I should just not fall down and keep running to where I was supposed to go.
Fine. Got it. Will do.
That’s it! That’s basically how football is played!
So there’s my argument.
But let’s analyze hockey for a representative illustration of the absurdity of sports that aren’t football:
In hockey you have to learn, like, a ton of things. You have to learn how to skate around in small circles and backward even, I think. You have to learn to use your weird stick to make the puck go around and to certain places really fast and quick. If you want to score a goal you have to be able to smoosh the puck at the small areas where the goalie isn’t.
Learning to do all this takes—and I’m assuming here, since I’ve got a life I’m trying to live and have not ever wasted even a second of my time on any of this pointless, worthless stuff—a lot of practice.
Q: So why do it?
A: There’s no good reason.
Football rules because you can be a good football player and not waste your life away drilling inane and arbitrary stuff like kicking around a ball real good, or bouncing a ball real good on the floor up and down, or pitching a ball real good and twisty at a guy who’s standing there with a bat.
Mostly you just run around and smash into people, which is fun and easy.
Football is better because it rules, and if you play you’re pretty cool and because you get to play without wasting your life away doing weird drills like some kind of chump.
Football is better. Football is best.
