Football is a blurry-fast, rough game in which twenty-two players, obscured by armor and masks, zoom around before slamming together in shapeless protoplasmic scrums. It also, somewhat remarkably, works very well on television. But football on television is an entity unto itself: the comprehensive illusion of football, far from the full picture. As a result, there may be no activity that draws closer public scrutiny that the public knows less about.
Having all but lived with a group of N.F.L. coaches from 2011 to 2012 in an attempt to better understand the professional game, I am often asked what I can see in the flow of events when I watch a game on TV that I couldn’t see before. The answer is far less than you might imagine, and for reasons that speak to the nature of the sport and its relationship with TV.
An activity ideally suited to the medium, football’s popularity flourished at a time, the nineteen-sixties, when television, too, was coming of age. In the next decade, ABC’s “Monday Night Football” became appointment viewing, in large part because the three-men-in-a-booth broadcast team of Howard Cosell, “Dandy” Don Meredith, and Frank Gifford narrated not so much sport as drama. What usually drives drama is character development, accumulating humanistic detail. But the sensibility of football is self-effacing, with players taught to conform by deferring to the group. Emphasizing that huddled temperament, the N.F.L. permits scant press access to players and coaches. And average careers in the Not-For-Long N.F.L. are brief, less than four years. All this has always made it challenging for fans to feel close to the participants.
Bill Polian, the former general manager of the Indianapolis Colts who now is an analyst for ESPN, says that Cosell, Meredith, and Gifford turned football into “a spectacle and a television show rather than an athletic event.” While baseball broadcasters partner with viewers, who want to imagine the slow unfolding of something they know intimately well, football broadcasters interpret everything, so viewers needn’t think—only react. “TV is perfect for this incoherent game,” the documentary filmmaker Ken Burns says. “It’s this perverse American Noh drama they’ve convinced us we can make sense of. The game on TV is sleight of hand.” Burns says that even though he has no idea what’s going on, he’s a football “addict,” who watches games while texting missives to his best friend like “Did you see that?” and “What happened?” Today the journalists who get the most access from N.F.L. teams are the broadcasters, who watch practices and have extended conferences with coaches and significant players. And why not? They’re putting on a show together.
Another source of confusion is that football annually reimagines itself with rule changes. N.F.L. teams meet with league officials for off-season rules briefings, yet rare is the player—or coach, even—who knows them all. Pity Eli Manning, the quarterback of the New York Giants, who, in a recent fourth quarter, became addled by the laws of the game clock and inadvertently left the Dallas Cowboys time for a game-winning drive. Pity the fan confronting a world where “illegal procedure” is no longer a specific infraction, but a category of infractions that includes many forms of misdemeanor.
Potentially even more confounding for the Sunday viewer is the sport’s commitment to secret stratagems. Everything that takes place during games has been meticulously plotted and rehearsed at teams’ bunkered facilities. The closed society speaks a private language; football jargon changes from team to team. Much of a football player’s day takes place in a classroom, where he learns the playbook—a volume as thick as a John le Carré novel, and just as preoccupied with deception. The eventual “game plan” is made of opponent-appropriate selections from the playbook that are distributed on a “call sheet,” the list of formations and plays that offensive and defensive coordinators communicate by radio to players before the snap. (If you watch football, you’ve seen the sheets: they look like Mondrian paintings and tend to be held close to the face by play callers to prevent opposition lip-reading.) Thus games unfold according to scripts that nobody but team personnel ever sees. In contrast to baseball, which thrived because it was transparent and familiar, football is all about distance.
Televised football’s triumph was to make something fundamentally remote seem close at hand. Thinking about how it succeeded brings Raymond Chandler to mind. When Howard Hawks began preparing to film Chandler’s greatest crime novel, “The Big Sleep,” the director found himself unable to follow the novel’s succession of plot points. So, famously, Hawks wired Chandler to ask who killed the chauffeur. Chandler said he had no idea. The foremost thrill of Chandler is how vivid it feels—the mood, atmosphere, and tone. Readers enter an overcast world where the pleasure of the thoughts and sentences is so intensely gratifying that nobody much cares about the granular details.
So often in the arts, the catalyst for innovation is limitation, and that was certainly the way with football. Football works so well on television—and now, also, on cell phones and laptops—because the gridiron on which the game is played conforms so readily to a screen. (This is also true for basketball courts and hockey rinks, but those spaces are smaller and more cluttered with players, and the games played on those surfaces don’t stop, clear, and reset after every play, as football does.) The dimensions of the screen organize elements that might otherwise feel chaotic. That each play involves too many men to follow becomes less important when a viewer is tasked simply with tracking the ball. Telescoping the real-time game with such clarity is impossible, which is why coaches, when asked about specific plays immediately after games, often sound like Chandler confessing to Hawks, as they explain that they won’t have any idea what just happened until they get a look at the game film.
“Before modern TV, it must have felt more abstractly gladiatorial,” Richard Linklater, the filmmaker, who was himself a Texas high school quarterback, says. We were discussing the way that these days, on television, you can impart personalities to the players and coaches on the screen. The N.F.L. has wired participants for sound and improved its broadcasts’ camera angles and photograph definition. Camera operators pan the field and sidelines for raw reactions. The emotion fans tend to feel most keenly is outrage, and, following along, producers have lately specialized in conveying assorted shades of indignation. We think of Giants coach Tom Coughlin as a man perpetually aggrieved and consider Buffalo Bills coach Rex Ryan a puerile teen-ager—after all, that’s how they behave in our homes. Of course, both men are far more complex. “Once you can see their eyes, everything changes, and you think you know them,” Linklater says. “TV does that—that powerful, possessory bond with the audience. The public might fawn over actors they know from movies, but if they know you from television, they act like they’re a relative. They really think they have access, and they almost consume them.”
Part of football’s appeal is the violence, which gives it the feeling of a real-life action movie. But the violence has always been risky for TV, as well as for the players. Long before there was any public controversy concerning the long-term effects of football-related blows to the head, TV sought to make the game more palatable by magnifying its balletic beauty and deëmphasizing the brute concussive aggression of the hitting. One of the game’s most notorious collisions took place on “Monday Night Football” in 1985, when Giants linebacker Lawrence Taylor sacked Washington Redskins quarterback Joe Theismann. The reverse camera angle revealed Theismann suffering a grotesque compound leg fracture. That was too much reality for family television. In the decades since then, much to the dismay of defensive coaches, the most revealing football rules changes have put restraints on contact and otherwise eased the task of completing passes. Part of this is that America loves touchdowns, and another piece of it is that passing looks prettier on TV. But concerning ourselves with the graceful choreographies of receivers and defensive backs also relieved us of the unsettling responsibility for witnessing what’s going down off-camera.
To see the full truth of a football game, you’d have to enter an N.F.L. facility on Monday morning and watch the game film along with the coaches. Coaching film has no audio and is shot from end zone and sideline angles at sufficient depth that coaches can see what all twenty-two players are doing. Football involves large, fast men navigating a limited patch of land over and over again, with a map designed for each one of these brief excursions. The coaches have made the maps, and they spend their film sessions scrutinizing every player’s every movement, assessing what worked, what didn’t, and why. This is where I saw how many small elements of design go into big plays. The best I ever encountered at analyzing game tape was Mike Pettine, who is now the head coach of the Cleveland Browns. It’s testament to the game’s difficulty that last Monday, Pettine, who prizes discipline and intelligence in football players, suffered through game film featuring twelve Browns penalties and five Browns turnovers in the team’s loss to the Jets.
After I learned how to listen to them, I always found those Monday coaching seminars completely absorbing: they are the inner tale of the battle. “Coaching tape, it’s a different world,” Bill Polian says. “Watching TV as a spectator, you’re caught up in the weekly narrative, whether you have a bet on the game, whether you’re playing fantasy. Coaching tape is the reality of the game.” He explains that the two experiences are the difference between observing someone fly an airplane from a comfortable seat, and knowing what the pilots know—the flight plan, what’s on the gauges, the effect of air and atmosphere, the technical details of an intricate operation.
To me, it’s the difference between Tom Brady and Ernie Adams. Brady, the quarterback of the New England Patriots, is a stunningly effective exponent of the game’s most important position, and he possesses the good looks of a television actor. Otherwise, though, Brady seems fairly bland. Adams is the New England Patriots’ in-house master of strategies, a mysterious figure obscured by sunglasses and low cap brims whose insights into the game are legendary, though nobody except his boss, the Patriots’ hooded head coach, Bill Belichick, can say what they are. You can easily imagine Adams as a literary character; less so in pixels. Yet, in a sense, TV has increased Adams’ value. As TV made the games so public and so popular, the situation only emphasized what was required to win them: privacy.
