Football Programs: Iceberg Theory

As we plunge headlong into the latter half of the American Football season (did anyone see the Canadian SuperBowl? me neither), I must admit to being attracted to the sport more in theory than in actual experience. Unless you have a really deep geographic loyalty to a team, or money placed on the outcome, or family members to cheer against, the average televised football game -- 22 grown men in saturated colors and fiberfoam padding chasing each other around a graphing calculator made of grass -- is pretty bland indeed, unless one considers what isn't being shown on the screen. The tell-tale sign is the use of the term "football program" indicative that the game being played behind the sidelines is far more important than the Spartan passion play waging its way across three hours on the field.

Unlike a straightforwardly primitive sport like, say, distance running, football is something akin to a joint military maneuver, requiring untold amounts of planning, logistics, strategy, reconnaissance, support personnel, communication (verbal, non-verbal, telecomm, intuitive), PR, media ploys, recruiting, biomedical engineering, materials science, etc. before a single kick-off can take place. My question is this: why not show this on TV as well?

One argument, of course, could be realism. The TV broadcast attempts to capture the reality of being at a game, while ingoring the hidden forces which everything seen on the field in the first place. But this purported "realism" -- already on thin ice with the advent of multiple camera angles, instant reply, and onscreen stats -- came to a crashing finality with the inception of the digitally-superimposed line of scrimmage, the noosphere's final deathblow to the hegemony of the bones-n-muscle biosphere. The yellow line is the leak in the facade of the Real, the symptom of the vast iceberg of politics, economics, technology, and sheer numerology lying just below the surface of the 100-yard green.

So why stop at the yellow line? I'm advocating a complete re-thinking of the way football is presented: I want to see ALL of the competing forces -- on-field and off -- interacting all at once on my projection monitor. Let's see the play-by-play in the sports medicine trenches, let's get a molecule's-eye view of the damage being done to the muscles of a player being tackled, let's see the climatological effects of so much heat and sweat, onscreen variables debating the chemo-cognitive effects of hometown morale, virtual reality blimp tours of nearby clouds, the pigment-traced travails of sewage leaving the restrooms, the terrorized flights of worms from the playing field's surface, the stock quotes of each padding manufacturer, the estimates of gambling-fueled Mafia territory gains, the success of players vis-a-vis sideline fans in seducing opposing team cheerleaders, biological surveys of game-time vomit explusion, lines of force leading from uniform production floor to blitzed quarterback tackle....

Then, maybe, I'll watch a game.

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