It’s been a football-themed weekend – American football,
that is. Superbowl is coming up (this year it will be in the new Cowboys
Stadium in Arlington – visible from my hotel room on the 7th floor)
– and we’re in the middle of playoffs. Superbowl is big. As well as athletes
and fans, it is expected that 15,000 prostitutes will descend on the area.
A little background, perhaps, would be
helpful. There are two “conferences” in American pro football (similar to
“divisions” in the UK) – the AFC (American Football Conference) and the NFC
(National Football Conference). Each conference contains 16 teams, and during
the year, they play each other within their own conference. At the end of the
year, the playoffs establish the best team in each conference, and the two
winners play each other in the Superbowl.
The pro football teams are populated almost exclusively from
the best college team players, and this, of course, means that college football
is big money. The annual NFL draft, when the NFL teams select from eligible
college players, is a huge, nationally reported, event.
The weekend is football-themed because there’s also a lot of
college football activity locally – Texas A&M, the Aggies, played LSU,
Louisiana State University, at the Cowboys Stadium; and the hotel is full of
teams of cheerleaders from high schools across the country, competing in the
National Cheerleaders Association championships. This is one of the things I
like about football: a high school not only has a football team, but supporting
cheerleaders and a marching band. It’s not only the “jocks” that can achieve.
An NFL football team (that is, in both conferences, 32
teams) obviously needs “understudies” for each position. If it’s possible to
associate any cerebral activity with football, then the position of quarterback
is possibly the most cerebral. For an important position like this, there are
typically 3 players on the team. A statistic you won’t see quoted very often is
that, out of the 96 quarterbacks on the 2010 roster, exactly 8 are black. This
is a little on the low side, given that blacks constitute 12.4% of the
population. Just another example of the many dual standards that exists this
side of the pond – “racial equality” is sacrosanct, but football is even more
so.
But I shouldn’t be negative – it is, after all, only a game.
Which is why I wonder why they get paid so much …
