Eating the Dinosaur by Chuck Klosterman

Author:Chuck Klosterman
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Pop Arts, Literary Collections, Social Science, USA, 20th Century, Sports & Recreation, Sports, Sociology, Essays, Literary essays, Social aspects, Popular Culture & Media: General Interest, Pop Culture, Economics, United States, Sociology of Sports, Business & Economics, History, Consumption (Economics), Popular Culture - General, Popular Culture, General
ISBN: 9781416544210
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2010-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

4 As of this morning, I am one of only forty million Americans who receive the NFL Network in their living room. This is less than the number of Americans who get BBC America, the Golf Channel, or VH1 Classic. The NFL Network has only existed for five years. However, I can tell it’s going to succeed. I can tell by the sheer amount of time I end up watching it during the day, even when the network is doing nothing except repeating and promoting the same information I didn’t need to know yesterday. Because of the NFL Network, I’ve been convinced to consume information about issues I previously saw as ridiculous. I (now) watch the NFL draft combine every spring. I am (now) acutely aware of what’s happening in the off-season owners’ meetings. One night in July, I watched the Seattle Seahawks work on a seven-on-seven passing drill for forty minutes. I wouldn’t classify any of these things as phenomena I care about, but they are things I still watch, particularly when they compete against other pre-recorded TV shows that don’t feel like news, despite the fact that the Seahawks’ seven-on-seven passing drill isn’t “news” any more than Panda Nursery.

What the NFL has realized is that they have no better marketing tool than the game itself. Every other sport tries to fool us. Baseball sells itself as some kind of timeless, historical pastime that acts as the bridge to a better era of American life, an argument that now seems beyond preposterous. The NBA tries to create synergy with anything that might engage youth culture (hip-hop, abstract primordial competition, nostalgia for the 1980s, the word “amazing,” Hurricane Katrina, etc.). NASCAR connects itself to red state contrarianism. Soccer aligns itself with forward-thinking globalists who enjoy fandom more than sports. But football only uses football. They are the product they sell. Unlike David Stern’s failed vision for the NBA, the NFL Network does not try to expand its empire by pushing the sport toward nonchalant audiences with transitory interest; it never tries to trick anybody into watching something they don’t already like. Instead, the NFL Network’s goal is to enliven its base. It solely tries to (a) make football essential to people, and (b) make football more essential to those who are already invested. The casual fan does not matter. In essence, the NFL Network works exactly like FOX News: It stays on message and invents talking points for its core constituency to absorb. If Donovan McNabb is temporarily benched for Kevin Kolb during week ten of the season, that decision is turned into a collection of questions for football people to ponder until Sunday. How will McNabb react? Is his career at a crossroads? Has Eagles coach Andy Reid lost control of his offense? How will this impact your fantasy team? These are the ideas football fans are supposed to talk about during the run-up to week eleven, and the NFL Network ensures that those debates will be part of the public discourse.

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