I used to give zero shits about football.
I mean, I grew up playing sports, from baseball and basketball to tennis and Tae kwon do, but no one ever taught me football. My high school didn't have a football team. I heard it in the background sometimes, at my dad's house or on Thanksgiving, but again--no one ever explained it to me, so all I had were the stereotypes and an outsider's glance at what seemed to be mindless titans demonstrating elementary physics with their bodies down a field while a bunch of lunatics in the stands screeched and roared and screamed in bad drag.
Well, this is my mea culpa. I was wrong. Football does indeed offer good physics lessons and there are lunatics and the drag is terrible, but football is freaking awesome.
How can you NOT know about football? some people ask.
I assumed my dad taught me nothing because it was a sport I couldn't play, which was true as a girl growing up in the 80s (and still true most places). When I asked him about it, though, he said I just didn't show any interest. I imagine this is true, since the sports I grew up loving were the sports he played with me.
I don't know how many times we walked through Oakland's caged-in causeway over the freeway from BART to the Coliseum for afternoon A's games. Several that I can recall. I learned baseball when I was old enough to hold a wiffle bat. We played catch, threw hoops. As an adult, I developed a love for the elegant excitement of hockey (another story entirely).
But football? As a young girl it seemed like a haven of deeply embedded masculinity I couldn't penetrate, all the yelling and shouting and tackling and hitting, complicated rules that disguise themselves in choreographed violence by giant men who puff and preen and snarl at victory and opposition both. It was another language I didn't understand that no one ever explained. This isn't to deride masculinity, but a bunch of grown-ass men flexing and screaming like cave trolls is intimidating to a little girl. Just sayin'.
Why the hell should I listen to you?
You don't have to do a damn thing. There is a fuck-ton I don't know about football, but I am eager to learn and invite all civil and respectful corrections and lessons from anyone anywhere always.
As someone with an outsider's view, though, I sometimes ask and think of things that people who know the sport do not, either because it seems obvious due to whatever the statistical analyses combined with the horoscope from 1970 divided by the Vegas line predicts or because I think of things in a greater context before I think of them in a football context. Football isn't automatic to me.
Most of what I have to say is probably the same as everyone else on every other THIS BRONCO'S GOT AN OPINION blog, but there are broader issues and questions that irk, intrigue, excite, and flummox me about football and the industry that runs along its sidelines. Some of this will probably piss people off, and some of it probably should.
(Full-ish Disclosure: I am an uberFeminist. I cuss a lot. I'm a nerd and an atheist and too liberal for the Democratic party, but I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, so, well, obviously. None of these are mutually exclusive to football, however, despite how aghast some of my California friends might be at my recent interest.)
Why Denver??
I get asked this most of all—how does a girl from SF living in Oregon become a Broncos fan?
In short, I learned football watching the Broncos. My good friend who grew up a true-(orange-and-)blue Broncos fan is locked up in Texas, and he started asking me to call games on the phone. Living as I do in this weird vortex between the AFC and NFC West, I get more Broncos games on TV than my buddy in East Texas, but damn...I sucked.
I had no idea what I was looking at.
"Uhhh, the big dude threw the ball to the tall dude and he ran and then got knocked over by a bigger dude." And that was eloquent. Most of the time I just made noises. "Oooooh!" "Eeek!" "GAH!" etc.
This was the Trevor Siemian season for the Broncos. I'd watch the games when they were on, but I couldn't answer any of my friend's questions: how does the defense look? Is Siemian clutch? Is the O-line doing its job? WTF ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT??
I started asking questions—lots and lots of questions. I watched All or Nothing and Last Chance U and QB1 and those A Football Life marathons on the NFL Network and, of course, Hard Knocks. I watched old games when they came on and all the films about football I could find. I watched the 2018 draft and when last year's preseason started, I watched that, too.
I felt like I was cramming for a test, trying to make up for a lifetime of ignorance about something that seemed, at times, aggressively inaccessible. Then a funny thing happened: this little dude wearing #30 was exploding down the field with the ball, and I kept telling my friend, "This Lindsay kid is special." I think he doubted my credibility, since, well, I had none, but I was insistent. Phillip Lindsay became my first football hero.
I was in. I believed.
So that's why Broncos.
Wait, Danielle...football? Seriously?!
Yup. I know, I know—without any understanding, even rudimentary, football looks mindless and sometimes horrific, but it is much more intelligent and strategic than I ever imagined. I became intrigued by the often years-long planning that goes into crafting teams, the combination of different talents with different leadership and the surprising stab at parity that defies capitalist common sense.
It is a long-view game, despite all the mantras of "one game at a time" etc. It's the long view to draft someone in the 1st or 2nd round with no plans to play him for months, even years. The salary cap is anti-capitalist because it is saying that the market of football teams is inherently uneven and requires regulation to create some sense of fairness, which should pay off in the long run as it helps the sport remain truly competitive.
I used to roll my eyes; I used to dismiss football fans with the assumed superiority of someone who can at least recognize the spectacle for what it is, but I had no idea what I was seeing. I am not alone in this. For some people, football simply symbolizes the toxic combination of marketing and celebrity and male violence for sport awash in hundreds of millions, or billions, of dollars.
I get this view, but it is wrong. All of those aspects are indeed part of football, but it is also so much more than those perceptions. It is teamwork and leadership and a grand game of chess played by men in prime physical condition wearing skin-tight everything (I'll objectify if I want to). It is a clash of personalities, a massive industry unto itself, where high drama plays out both in the headlines and on the field.
Ultimately, football is a story—multiple stories running parallel and tangential, over and through and across one another, some stretching back a hundred years and others springing up and dying out in a few days. But to read a story, you need to know its language, and to learn the language you have to give it a chance. For me, it's been well worth it.
For everyone else with a friend critical or ignorant of the game, don't blame them. Be a pal, a friend, an educator, an envoy, and teach someone in your life about football. Answer their questions; don't be a dick about it, and show your love for the game by sharing it. That's what I plan to do.
I mean, I grew up playing sports, from baseball and basketball to tennis and Tae kwon do, but no one ever taught me football. My high school didn't have a football team. I heard it in the background sometimes, at my dad's house or on Thanksgiving, but again--no one ever explained it to me, so all I had were the stereotypes and an outsider's glance at what seemed to be mindless titans demonstrating elementary physics with their bodies down a field while a bunch of lunatics in the stands screeched and roared and screamed in bad drag.
Well, this is my mea culpa. I was wrong. Football does indeed offer good physics lessons and there are lunatics and the drag is terrible, but football is freaking awesome.
How can you NOT know about football? some people ask.
I assumed my dad taught me nothing because it was a sport I couldn't play, which was true as a girl growing up in the 80s (and still true most places). When I asked him about it, though, he said I just didn't show any interest. I imagine this is true, since the sports I grew up loving were the sports he played with me.
I don't know how many times we walked through Oakland's caged-in causeway over the freeway from BART to the Coliseum for afternoon A's games. Several that I can recall. I learned baseball when I was old enough to hold a wiffle bat. We played catch, threw hoops. As an adult, I developed a love for the elegant excitement of hockey (another story entirely).
But football? As a young girl it seemed like a haven of deeply embedded masculinity I couldn't penetrate, all the yelling and shouting and tackling and hitting, complicated rules that disguise themselves in choreographed violence by giant men who puff and preen and snarl at victory and opposition both. It was another language I didn't understand that no one ever explained. This isn't to deride masculinity, but a bunch of grown-ass men flexing and screaming like cave trolls is intimidating to a little girl. Just sayin'.
Why the hell should I listen to you?
You don't have to do a damn thing. There is a fuck-ton I don't know about football, but I am eager to learn and invite all civil and respectful corrections and lessons from anyone anywhere always.
As someone with an outsider's view, though, I sometimes ask and think of things that people who know the sport do not, either because it seems obvious due to whatever the statistical analyses combined with the horoscope from 1970 divided by the Vegas line predicts or because I think of things in a greater context before I think of them in a football context. Football isn't automatic to me.
Most of what I have to say is probably the same as everyone else on every other THIS BRONCO'S GOT AN OPINION blog, but there are broader issues and questions that irk, intrigue, excite, and flummox me about football and the industry that runs along its sidelines. Some of this will probably piss people off, and some of it probably should.
(Full-ish Disclosure: I am an uberFeminist. I cuss a lot. I'm a nerd and an atheist and too liberal for the Democratic party, but I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, so, well, obviously. None of these are mutually exclusive to football, however, despite how aghast some of my California friends might be at my recent interest.)
Why Denver??
I get asked this most of all—how does a girl from SF living in Oregon become a Broncos fan?
In short, I learned football watching the Broncos. My good friend who grew up a true-(orange-and-)blue Broncos fan is locked up in Texas, and he started asking me to call games on the phone. Living as I do in this weird vortex between the AFC and NFC West, I get more Broncos games on TV than my buddy in East Texas, but damn...I sucked.
I had no idea what I was looking at.
"Uhhh, the big dude threw the ball to the tall dude and he ran and then got knocked over by a bigger dude." And that was eloquent. Most of the time I just made noises. "Oooooh!" "Eeek!" "GAH!" etc.
This was the Trevor Siemian season for the Broncos. I'd watch the games when they were on, but I couldn't answer any of my friend's questions: how does the defense look? Is Siemian clutch? Is the O-line doing its job? WTF ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT??
I started asking questions—lots and lots of questions. I watched All or Nothing and Last Chance U and QB1 and those A Football Life marathons on the NFL Network and, of course, Hard Knocks. I watched old games when they came on and all the films about football I could find. I watched the 2018 draft and when last year's preseason started, I watched that, too.
I felt like I was cramming for a test, trying to make up for a lifetime of ignorance about something that seemed, at times, aggressively inaccessible. Then a funny thing happened: this little dude wearing #30 was exploding down the field with the ball, and I kept telling my friend, "This Lindsay kid is special." I think he doubted my credibility, since, well, I had none, but I was insistent. Phillip Lindsay became my first football hero.
I was in. I believed.
So that's why Broncos.
Wait, Danielle...football? Seriously?!
Yup. I know, I know—without any understanding, even rudimentary, football looks mindless and sometimes horrific, but it is much more intelligent and strategic than I ever imagined. I became intrigued by the often years-long planning that goes into crafting teams, the combination of different talents with different leadership and the surprising stab at parity that defies capitalist common sense.
It is a long-view game, despite all the mantras of "one game at a time" etc. It's the long view to draft someone in the 1st or 2nd round with no plans to play him for months, even years. The salary cap is anti-capitalist because it is saying that the market of football teams is inherently uneven and requires regulation to create some sense of fairness, which should pay off in the long run as it helps the sport remain truly competitive.
I used to roll my eyes; I used to dismiss football fans with the assumed superiority of someone who can at least recognize the spectacle for what it is, but I had no idea what I was seeing. I am not alone in this. For some people, football simply symbolizes the toxic combination of marketing and celebrity and male violence for sport awash in hundreds of millions, or billions, of dollars.
I get this view, but it is wrong. All of those aspects are indeed part of football, but it is also so much more than those perceptions. It is teamwork and leadership and a grand game of chess played by men in prime physical condition wearing skin-tight everything (I'll objectify if I want to). It is a clash of personalities, a massive industry unto itself, where high drama plays out both in the headlines and on the field.
Ultimately, football is a story—multiple stories running parallel and tangential, over and through and across one another, some stretching back a hundred years and others springing up and dying out in a few days. But to read a story, you need to know its language, and to learn the language you have to give it a chance. For me, it's been well worth it.
For everyone else with a friend critical or ignorant of the game, don't blame them. Be a pal, a friend, an educator, an envoy, and teach someone in your life about football. Answer their questions; don't be a dick about it, and show your love for the game by sharing it. That's what I plan to do.
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