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FiveHourMarathon  Listen to Pierre  2yr ago (text post)   1899 thread views

MONDAY MORNING MOTTErBack SPORTS THREAD

I know there are some other sports fans on here, and I thought a discussion thread might be fun, and Monday is the natural day coming after the weekend football (both varieties) games and without a side thread scheduled. What's going on with your favorite teams/players/etc? What fun media controversies in the microcosm of sports can tell us something about the broader world? What culture war bullshit do you want to discuss in a sporting context?

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I used to sneer at "sportsball" as a teenager but started to enjoy casually watching games in college. I have a college football and NFL team that I follow and I'll occasionally watch a baseball game.

What I still don't understand is how people keep up with all of the names of the coaches, the players, the interpersonal drama between them, scores, etc. When I watch a game with someone and they ask me what team I follow and I say $NFL_TEAM_NAME, I sometimes get a response like "Oh man how about that thing with your QB last week during that press conference? And do you think John Doe is going to play again this season after that epididymis injury? What do you think of Coach Fillintheblank getting fired? And what about his replacement Coach Newguy?" And I just shrug and say I don't follow them that closely.

Do some people just read sports news all the time and relish all the drama? Seems like the male version of those women who are really into what the royal family is up to. Baseball stat nerds at least make sense to me, but I don't understand the drama people at all. Maybe there's more to it than that?

Edit: Thanks for all the awesome responses. I think I have a better understanding of the appeal now.

I like to have sports talk radio playing in the car when I drive, and it usually ends up covering some of that kind of stuff. The rest I get by looking at sports subreddits for a few minutes when I wake up.

Lol, so....

First, I think there is definitely a "male version of those women who are really into what the royal family is up to" element at play here. Especially the 5-6 slot on ESPN (Around the Horn especially, and to a somewhat lesser extent Pardon the Interruption). Back in my 20s, I watched these shows basically every day. At a certain point it occurred to me how much of these show revolved around 'Is he right to be angry?', 'Is he getting the respect he deserves?', etc, and those shows started to lose their appeal (also somewhat around the time I had kids), and it started to seem like a dumb way to spend an hour of my life every day, I rarely watch those some these days. (There's a fairly entertaining Wait But Why illustration about this - https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/newspaper1.png from an entertaining blog post https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/03/sports-fans-sports-fans.html)

Second, I think there's an element of 'knowing all the names', that isn't necessarily 'royals for guys', but actually about appreciating the depth of the game we're watching. In its current form, sports isn't nameless interchangeable robots carrying out various operations. If you have a team you follow, whether 1 particular guy is playing QB vs another particular guy playing QB is going to make a big difference for how your team does. To varying degrees, that's true up and down the lineup and includes the coaching staff.

Maybe somewhat similarly, there seem to be a lot people who really get into music in a way I don't really understand. I play various music stations when I'm driving around, there are songs that I find catchy and enjoy, but that tends to be the extent of my engagement with it. There seem to be a collection of people who take their favorite bands very seriously, its seems as if they make their musical tastes a major part of their personal identity. For the most part that seems.... fine, but they're definitely experiencing music and a different level of intensity than I am.

I suspect your experience of sports is similar to my experience of music, which, all in all, is fine, different strokes for different folks.

[Its interesting that you mention being a teenager as when you sneered at "sportsball", I think that's probably the timeframe in which I was most into knowing the different names. If you're actually interested in the mechanics of it, my parents at various times got me subscriptions to Sports Illustrated and The Sporting News as birthday presents, they both came weekly, I read them cover to cover, I never threw them out (they're probably still at my parent's house), when I was bored in my room, I would re-read old issues. It's hard to estimate how much of my life I spent doing this, maybe 5+ hours a week from age 9-18 or so??? Idk, I have a fairly deep reservoir of sports names from a certain era. I don't follow it nearly as closely now that I've gotten older.]

I think there’s a difference between being interested in the sport one degree removed from the object level (knowing players, following trades/injuries/coach changes etc.) and the reality TV/drama aspect. The former is similar to any media-consumption type of hobby, even more highbrow ones. You are [viewing art/listening to music/reading a book/watching a movie] and if you are really interested you might read about the [artist/musician/author/actor] and read reviews or analysis of the [book/song/movie]. I don’t know what you would call this but I wouldn’t exactly call it drama.

On the other hand, you are right that there is a reality tv aspect that has become a lot more popular in the Twitter era, particular among the NBA fandom. Discussing what players tweeted, or discussing what media figures said about the players tweets. things like that are 100% reality TV for men and I can’t stand it.

I think that your comparison to royal drama/celebrities misses the gambling and fantasy sports angle. Gambling and fantasy sports are key separators that provide large industries and dedicated audiences. Most other forms of entertainment/celebrity voyeurism don’t have similar marketplaces and monetary angles (though I’ll note that there have been (mostly unsuccessful) attempts to extend fantasy sports to movies/celebrities).

Seems like the male version of those women who are really into what the royal family is up to.

It's exactly that. Though I'd add that people who are super knowledgable about KiwiFarms or Gamergate or 4chan Patois or the latest outrage bait on the internet are probably at best a sidegrade; as are some interests that I practice myself. Is the guy yapping about Urban Meyer's playbook choices because he listens to Barstool sports podcasts all day really any worse off than someone who listens to Blocked and Reported and can wax rhapsodic about whatever train drama is big on Twitter?

In Dodgeball the ESPN 8 "The Ocho" joke lands because that was ESPN when I was 9 or 10 years old, just always showing sports even if they were pretty stupid sports. The talk segments have grown while the live sports segments have shrunk seemingly every year since then. More gossip, more offseason drama for the NBA/NFL, less professional bowling and strongman, and less hockey and baseball. You could probably tie this into a broad cultural femeninization if you wanted to, with men being ever more interested in gossip and less interested in the action, or to trying to attract female viewers. But there's a chicken and egg thing to your observation of it: do these guys talk about this stuff because they are interested in it naturally, or are they interested in it because when they listen to sports podcasts/radio and watch ESPN it gets presented to them?

Do some people just read sports news all the time and relish all the drama? Seems like the male version of those women who are really into what the royal family is up to.

You have it. In the US, the NFL/NBA is reality TV for guys, and they memorize all the names like fantasy nerds will know that Tyrion's squire Podrick is of House Payne in Game of Thrones.

Quite a lot of the audience consumes the NBA through highlights and headlines, and even with the NFL, they tend to spend more time gossiping about it and listening to sports talk shows. The games are secondary. An alien could infer a lot about humans from this. Reality TV shows with the most female audience tend to be about relationships, secrets, and betrayal, while sports on the other hand are about competition, dominance, the sweetness of victory and the agony of defeat — really engaging to dudes.

NFL gameplay is, fundamentally, a slot machine. You watch the reels spin (the players line up, the quarterback is accepting the snap), they begin to slow, suggesting a possible outcome (a receiver breaks open, the pass rush is closing in), and finally you experience either euphoria, mild pleasure, or annoyance depending on the outcome. (Touchdown, the pass is complete, interception.) This tickles the lizard brain pleasantly enough, but it wouldn't command the spare attention of guys for five straight months without the drama.

What excites sports fans most is when a famous player wildly underperforms or overperforms expectations. Probably the three most energizing sporting events of the last twenty years were when Eli Manning and Nick Foles (two mediocre quarterbacks) beat Tom Brady in the Super Bowl. Two of those games were quite tedious slogs to watch, but they sent the sports talk world and watercoolers across the nation into a frenzy. Guys just love the narratives, the basking in glory or wallowing in humiliation.

Do some people just read sports news all the time and relish all the drama?

Yes- and twitter/youtube/all the pre-and-post game analysis shows.

Seems like the male version of those women who are really into what the royal family is up to.

This is exactly the right analogy! Very similar dynamics.

But you're also right that the rise in stats (speaking re Soccer-ball anyway) has led to less and less emphasis on the drama and more and more on arguing about tactics/teams/players from this pseudo-scientific perspective. It's weird.

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