Football

by Chuck Klosterman

A hilarious but nonetheless groundbreaking contribution to the argument about which force shapes American life the most. For two kinds of audiences—those who know it’s football and those who are about to find out.

Chuck Klosterman—New York Times bestselling cultural critic, journalist, and, yes, football psychotic—did not write this book to help you deepen your appreciation of football, or to be that person at a party, or to make better bets, or validate your preexisting views, positive or negative. Football does in fact do all of these things, but only as steps on the path to the commanding heights.

Cultural theorists talk about hyperobjects—phenomena that bulk so large in the world that their true dimensions are hidden in plain sight. In 2023, 93 of the 100 most-watched programs on American television were pro football games. The most-watched non-football game, the Oscars, landed at 40. Number 39 was a meaningless game between the Indianapolis Colts and the Jacksonville Jaguars. This is not an anomaly. And in no other country does one sport have such a chokehold. No, not even soccer in Brazil. Odder still, when you break down the time spent in live action in a three-hour game, the average is eleven minutes. It’s as if 95 percent of The Fast and The Furious was spent pumping gas.

Chuck Klosterman gets to the bottom of it. He takes us to Texas, from the religion of high school ball to America’s Team [sic] and its uncanny impact on a young boy in North Dakota named Chuck. He looks at the greatness question, and the gambling question(s), and the symbolic caricature of the coach. He explains the eerie perfection of the marriage between this sport and television that reveals so much about its popularity and how we experience reality. He even conjures a looming extinction event for football. It’s not what you think.

A century ago, Yale’s legendary coach Walter Camp wrote his unified theory of the game. He called it Football. Chuck Klosterman has given us a new Camp for the new age.

Genres: Sports, Nonfiction, Audiobook, Football, History, Essays, Humor

304 pages, Hardcover

First published January 20, 2026

About the author

Charles John Klosterman is an American author and essayist whose work focuses on American popular culture. He has been a columnist for Esquire and ESPN.com and wrote "The Ethicist" column for The New York Times Magazine. He was awarded the ASCAP Deems Taylor award for music criticism in 2002.

Reviews

[Scott Rhee]

Anybody who knows me well, knows that I have always had a deep loathing for football. It used to be a lot stronger than it is now. I feel like I've gone beyond deep pathological hatred to a point where I don't even really think about it at all. I've become completely indifferent to football, which I can only hope is a more healthy reaction.



So, it may come as a huge surprise that I just finished reading an entire book about football, entitled, simply, "Football". One may wonder why I did this.

The simple answer is because it was written by Chuck Klosterman. Indeed, this is the only reason I picked this book up. If it had been written by anybody else in the world, I would have walked by it on the library shelf without giving it a single thought. Klosterman, however, is a writer that I trust, so I figured, even if it's a book about a subject I care nothing about, there is probably something worth reading in it.

I was, of course, absolutely right.

This is not a normal book about football. In fact, it's not really about the sport so much as how much the sport has impacted, influenced, and ingratiated itself into the American milieu. Basic takeaway: Football is America, and America is football, and Klosterman---despite the fact that he is an uber-fan---feels that this isn't necessarily a good thing.


Jim Thorpe

There is a lot of intellectualizing about football in this book, as only Klosterman can intellectualize. For example, there is a chapter in which Klosterman ranks the top ten best players of all time, going back to the 1920s, when football wasn't nearly as popular, to today. One might think this would just be a simple chapter of short biographical sketches of great players and what made them great. It is that, but it also becomes an examination of how different the sport has changed over the decades and how Jim Thorpe---a legendary Native American player from the 1920s who helped found the NFL---couldn't really hold a candle to, say, Tom Brady---arguably considered to be the best modern-day player. Partly this is because the game has evolved to a point where the needs of the sport requires certain genetic and biological strengths that players prior to the 1970s didn't, and couldn't, possess. Football players today are literal giants of brute strength, and the game has helped breed them that way.


Tom Brady

There is also another chapter devoted to Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE). This degenerative brain disease is caused by repeated head trauma and causes severe depression, aggressive behavior, and dementia. Sadly, there is no way to diagnose the disease, and it is only detectable after death. Of 376 NFL players who have died over the years, 345 of them were posthumously diagnosed with CTE. For years, the NFL denied the existence of the disease and/or campaigned to downplay or eliminate the media attention about it. Doctors and scientists are learning more about it with every new case. Klosterman raises the question, then, about the future of the sport and whether players should continue playing a sport that could eventually, literally, kill them.


The 2015 film "Concussion" starring Will Smith was the true story of Dr. Bennet Omalu, who "discovered" the connection between repetitive high-impact head trauma in NFL players with the disease CTE. While some critics complained that some liberties were taken with depictions of real-life characters, the film received kudos by neurologists for its accurate portrayal of the science.

In fact, the book concludes with a fascinating hypothetical about the future of football. Klosterman believes that in a hundred years, the sport---due to extremely plausible financial, economic, and socio-political reasons---will no longer exist as we know it today. It certainly won't be played with the vigor or interest it is today. It will, of course, be referenced in history books and in movies, but only as a bygone pastime of the 20th- and 21st- century. Future people will wonder what 21st-century people saw in the barbaric sport. Klosterman, of course, is saddened by this prospect, but he realizes that it is inevitable and appropriate.

Regardless of whether you love, hate, or are indifferent to the sport, "Football" is a great thought-provoking and entertaining book, and it's worth reading.

[Scott]

"Football was not designed to control people, or to even become popular; that's just how things worked out, mostly due to how it looked on television. And while watching football on TV is a form of distraction, the purpose is not to stop people from thinking about important things. Just as often, it allows people to unconsciously consider concepts that would be too hard to otherwise contemplate [.] What happens in a hapless Thursday night game between the Colts and Broncos is not important to this world. It might not even be important to the people of Indianapolis and Denver, or even to the players on the teams. But it can still be enriching to a random person watching on TV, and not because of what they see. What they see barely matters - what matters is how they see it." -- on pages 38-39

Author Klosterman - that Midwesterner who specializes in pop-cultural essays with intellectual turns and twists - turns his attention to America's most popular sport with his latest collection of musings, the prosaically titled Football. While I find him to be hit-or-miss - I really enjoyed and would recommend his Fargo Rock City and/or Killing Yourself to Live, but found a few of the other books to be lacking - this one was often pretty good, smoothly mixing history of the rugged game with various opinions (of course) and projections / possibilities for its future. Topics covered include how football steadily rushed ahead of baseball, boxing, and horse racing (all of which held the mantle at one point in the 20th century) to become the premiere sport in the U.S. and synonymous with Saturday and Sunday afternoons, its involvement in gambling (whether Vegas-styled odds or simply a workplace's fantasy league), a discussion and ranking of the GOATs (which smartly is more than just a dry list of names littered with stats, and includes stars like Jim Thorpe, Red Grange, Jim Brown, Joe Montana, and Tom Brady), and how CTEs and other serious of crippling injuries may eventually sound a death knell for the sport. Laced with his usual humor, Klosterman writes as a lifelong sports fan BUT also smartly takes care to present information in an accessible manner for fair-weather pigskin readers.

[Nathan Shuherk]

Getting the granular musings about why the monoculture only exists now through football is both fascinating and largely unsettling. Klosterman is brilliant, sometimes wrong, and always grasping with the “why’s” of it all through really resonate “how’s” that meander about through memoirs and history. It’s a book that doesn’t have the answers, and we’re all the better for that. Regardless of how much you like or know about football, I think this would be the exact book for readers that love thinking more than learning.

[Jake]

No one who doesn't already read sports books will believe me about this, but I genuinely believe this is a great book both for people who adore and abhor football alike. Klosterman often takes such an interesting, out of left field approach that it frequently feels like a book entitled Football is about almost anything else. A part of me wishes this was twice as long.

[Daniel Montague]

P.50: When I insist that football explains America, it’s not a compliment or an insult to either. It means only that both have improved and advanced at the same time, in the same way, in a manner that almost never feels good. Because once something becomes what you want, it can only get worse.


“Western was robbed” a random old man in a luxury vehicle felt compelled to yell at me as I was jogging/walking on Atlantic Blvd gasping for breathe in the humid morning air, on September 5th, the Sunday after a controversial play the previous night by my favorite team (Go Blue!) whose shirt I was wearing. This geriatric gentleman (which I use loosely) stopped, rolled down his passenger window of his Caddy or Lincoln and figured it made sense to voice his displeasure at a stinking, sweaty rando (me). But who I am to act all high and mighty after all the vile words I spewed at the television set, as the pixelated players moved hither and thither or more damning, did not?

This work from the pied piper of pop culture, Chuck Klosterman, despite its many proclamations and prognostications, is happy to approach the topic of football from less of an emotional or even scientific base. Having religiously read him when he wrote for Grantland and later on The Ringer, I knew what to expect from him and I was not disappointed. Whether he posits on the decline and subsequent demise of football into a niche sport in the future, debates on the GOAT of football and how it has evolved through the years, notes his peccadillos when playing college football video games (NCAA 2014) or his childhood adoration of Roger Staubach he is highly persuasive and more importantly entertaining. While the way he approaches and compartmentalizes things would drive me up the wall in person, in written form it works. It also helps that he is well aware of his idiosyncrasies. Overall, this book is 3.5 stars rounded up for its edutainment value and for activating the rational side of my brain, instead of the lizard part that is most often employed when dealing with sports, especially football.

[Colby Grant]

I struggled to give this book a star rating. Like most Klosterman books, some essays genuinely interested me, some felt laughably dumb, and others landed as fairly obvious observations dressed up as insight. But that inconsistency is also kind of the point—and the reason I keep reading him. His writing feels like late-night dorm room conversations: half-baked, occasionally sharp, and mostly valuable as a catalyst for better conversations. It wasn’t a bad book. It also wasn’t that good.

[Liam Bodlak]

My favorite writer currently doing it. Klosterman possesses a rare combination of knowing ball (I've watched multiple hours of football every weekend since I was like eight and I learned a few things about the game reading this) and being willing to go down intellectual rabbit holes (nobody is better at forcing Bill Simmons out of his comfort zone on his own show). I will say there are points where he chases his own tail (there's a bit about the metric system near the end of the book that just felt sort of pedantic) but I think he's earned that right given his previous body of work. Would recommend for anyone who even tangentially cares about football.

[LPosse1 Larry]

Is Football Doomed? A Thoughtful but Uneven Ride

I just finished Football by Chuck Klosterman, and like most of his work, it’s smart, funny, and definitely thought-provoking — though not always a perfect landing for me.

Klosterman takes on America’s most popular sport and examines it through his familiar lens as a kind of pop-culture philosopher. He guides readers through a wide range of football topics — cultural, historical, and personal — always circling the big question hovering over the book: Is football doomed?

As expected, there are plenty of classic Klosterman “aha” moments mixed with a few laugh-out-loud observations. I especially enjoyed the offbeat detours — including discussions about Jim Thorpe, the uniqueness of football’s structure, and even the long history of the Grey Cup. Those unexpected angles are where Klosterman shines.

One of the more compelling sections is his exploration of Colin Kaepernick and what his story reveals about football’s place in American culture. Klosterman has a knack for taking everyday sports conversations and elevating them into broader cultural arguments — like listening to a really sharp friend hold court at a bar.

For me, this book also hit on a personal level. I played college football, have coached youth and high school football, and all of my sons have played the game. Two of my sons have even worked for the Chicago Bears! Football has been woven into the fabric of my life for decades — Friday nights, Saturday afternoons, Sunday rituals. I love the game deeply.

Because of that, I’m not sure I buy that football is doomed anytime soon. But I do recognize the strength of Klosterman’s argument — particularly around rising costs, participation decline, and very real safety concerns surrounding the sport. Those issues are impossible to ignore, and he lays them out in a way that makes you pause, even if you ultimately push back.

That said, the book can feel like it’s trying a little too hard at times. Some arguments stretch thin, and a few chapters drift into overanalysis that didn’t always hold my attention. I found myself wishing certain sections were tighter and more direct.

And for the record — no, I did not give the book only three stars because of its lack of Chicago Bears coverage. Though I wouldn’t have complained about a few more pages there either!

Still, even when I wasn’t fully buying the premise, I appreciated the questions Klosterman was asking. He presents strong ideas and backs them with solid reasoning — even if I didn’t always agree with where he landed.

Final thought: Not Klosterman’s best in my book, but still an engaging, conversation-starting read for football fans — especially those of us who love the game enough to wrestle with its future.

[Stetson]

Klosterman is a heavyweight in the realm of cultural criticism, where he opines mostly on middlebrow or popular forms of culture like rock music. He has a sharp sense of what's relevant and why and writes in a meta-analytical and semi-ironic style that appeals to those with a cultural consciousness nurtured by the nineties (Klosterman has also written The Nineties).

Here, he's turned his attention to football, where he somewhat provocatively asks readers to imagine a time when football is no longer at the top of the vaunted pantheon of American professional sports, a judgement largely based on its dominance of live broadcast viewership, a dominance that extends beyond the pros to the collegiate level. In 2025, for example, 92 to 96 of the top 100 most-watched broadcasts were a football game. Klosterman argues, both implicitly and explicitly, that football's cultural hegemony is doomed because he believes its essences is misaligned with the trajectory of America's cultural ethos and that the material factors that contribute to its dominance will shift unfavorably overtime. Eventually, it will lose footing that it cannot recover.

Although I think Klosterman's claim will at some point be true—nothing lasts forever—I think the decline will be explained by material factors. Football's dominance is in no small part explained by its presence on Network TV, which is the same system that built and sustained the American monoculture. As technological developments in telecom like cable and the internet emerged, the content of the American mainstream—late night comedy, news, scripted TV—was diluted by competition and sheer abundance. Football's supply and distribution remains carefully titrated and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Klosterman, of course, recognizes these factors, but he should have engaged them more directly. He doesn't tell us what he foresees for Network TV. It will eventually become obsolete, replaced by streaming, and we're in the early days of this, but it also looks like there is retrenchment back toward bundling models. Will we ever escape the standard parameter of linear TV? I'm not confident about what direction this will go, and Klosterman didn't find it relevant enough to his claim.

Instead, Klosterman highlights something interesting about the character of football, which he ties to its origins; it is a violent, militaristic game. He thinks the America is becoming more liberal over time, meaning more egalitarian and pacifistic, and that this long-run trend will eventually undercut football's popularity. He doesn't do a deep dive into the youth football statistics or go overboard on the physical risks of football (though he does touch on this conceptually), instead, he gestured to a kind of antiquated teleology of the Obama years. This is amusing given that part of his pitch about the decline of football is the aphorism that "past results are no guarantee of future returns." The trouble with this is that such ideas overlook human nature, which is largely unchanged on timescales that matter to phenomena of interest to cultural critics. Klosterman has always had a weakness for ceding space to youthful ideas, though in this case he's giving too much credence to the Millennial echoes of 60s New Left Boomerism, which have both already shown their age.

Anyway, I don't think one needs to be invested in Klosterman's thesis about the far-off doom of American football to enjoy the book. The work is also a hybrid of memoir and sports analysis. Klosterman feels it is necessary to established credibility with readers that he indeed has a real passion for football. This is mainly demonstrated in a confessional chapter about his obsession with Roger Staubach, a phenomenon he connects to the football culture of Texas, the Dallas Cowboys as "America's Team," and reflections in fiction about football, specifically Friday Night Lights. Klosterman also unearths some other football curiosities, including quirky iterations of the canonical game, such as the 6-man and Canadian varieties. This is interwoven with a somewhat pat history of the development of the game, including a simulated GOAT debate (mostly an argument about why cross-era comparisons are erroneous but we still have to make a decision), the establishment and importance of the four down architecture, the shift of play-calling duties from the QB to the head coach, the role of race, and how 7-on-7 concepts revolutionized the passing game.

There is a lot in the book that is delivered concisely and effectively even though Klosterman's style is heavy on digressions and sometimes seems to have wandered off topic. He always finds a way home, and he often finds clever angles on familiar topics. In this way, the book is a good conversation starter and would probably be the best title to actually anchor an all-male book club around, quite a rarity in this respect.

[Benoit Lelièvre]

Of course I wouldn't give anything less than five stars to a new Chuck Klosterman book.

I can easily quantify my enjoyment of the big dog's writing, but the challenge here is to qualify it. Football did not make me want to watch more football, but it made me concede that it's of considerable importance beyond the confines of the sport itself in American culture. While I couldn't relate to the more specific historical reflection, I did to the cultural consideration on the importance and interests of sports in the abstract. There's notably an essay at the end about the inverted socioeconomic logic of why football is called football and why football is called soccer in the US that was both clever and personal. Klosterman always keeps the most personal stuff for the end of his books.

But self-examination is what I responded to the most, I believe. Although it's clear from reading this book that Chuck Klosterman loves football and doesn't plan to stop watching it for as long as he breathes, a lot of Football is about why America loves such a violent, idiosyncratic and culturally conservative sport. So when people review this book and say "this is for people who either love or hate football", this is what they're talking about. The loving, but thoroughly cerebral analysis of this extreme devotion to a sport only Americans could love the way they do from concussions to the patriarchy of coaching by the way of racial prejudice, there's a thorough gut check of American identity that's being operated here without any political judgement. That always been Klosterman's biggest strength. Talking about something without talking about it.

I will probably read this book several times and own it in different formats like I did with the others and I invite you to do the same on the basis that it's a great idea to use a cultural proxy to have a pleasant and detached conversation on topic you're now demanded to urgently side on. Chuck Klosterman's still got it.

[Marianne Carman]

Did not finish, only got 30 pages in. The author was so pretentious I had to stop, he was like a snarky boy who thought he was really smart.

[Mike]

There's some good stuff here, but the way this guy presents arguments is exhausting. Parody: "There are three reasons this is true. The first is factual, the second is cultural, and the third is epistemological. Now maybe you are thinking, and you might be right to think (I could even agree with you), that once the factual argument is presented the heuristic loop closes. You would be right. And wrong. And that's why this is so important. And why it isn't."

[Jack Bobo]

This is awesome and has tided me over as I wait out the last sweltering summer days without football.

Some stand out quotes:

“It's not that basketball is jazz and football is anti-jazz, or that basketball is jazz and football is prog rock. It's more that basketball aspires to jazz and football aspires to petroleum engineering. Which, I am fully aware, sounds terrible.”

“The role Friday Night Lights has played in the collective conception of Texas culture is akin to the role Jaws has played in the collective conception of shark attacks.”

“Americans don't need to care about track, because we have football. Football is applied track and field.
Football is track, but with purpose and drama and an unreliable narrator disguised as an oblong leather spheroid.”

“It is my assumption that if Belichick or Saban were to read this book, they would find it facile, inaccurate, and a waste of time. I'd disagree with that analysis, but I can't lie: Such a reaction would make me respect them more.”

“Football is fragile. It's a collision sport played by massive men, but its internal structure is brittle. Certain conditions can't be altered, and if they are, the whole thing shatters into something unrecognizable.
Canada did its best, but Canada fucked up. And now the Canadians just have to live with it….. I love the people of Canada. They are self-deprecating, well informed, and open to drinking in the afternoon.”

[Jim]

The arguments in the essays are a mixed bag, but you don’t read a Klosterman book for the arguments, you read it to hear Klosterman make the arguments.

His keystone essay on the inevitable end of the popularity of football (fifty or so years from now by his calculations) is pretty compelling. His argument is that small fractures in the culture caused by factors like CTE-wary parents will leave football without the momentum it needs to keep going when the television advertising bubble eventually pops.

But I will be dead by then.

[Emily]

Imagine your annoying uncle “explain” a game you watch 50 times a year

[Brandon]

I'm not a football fan. The only part of the Superbowl broadcast I watched this year was the halftime show. I'm a diehard hockey fan (Go Leafs Go!) and I've dabbled in baseball (especially during the Blue Jays run to the World Series last fall), but the only football I really enjoy is the fictionalized version I've seen in movies or as window dressing for a small-town crime novel (The Prophet).

That said, I would literally read/listen to anything Chuck Klosterman writes, so I absolutely loved this. His breakdown as to why football is the only sport that is specifically catered to television as well as his essay explaining why football itself is ultimately doomed truly captured my imagination.

Great stuff.

[William Mattes]

this is a series of essays about football from a (mostly) cultural perspective. it centers around why football is popular, why it won’t be one day, and what it says about us that it is popular. they should teach it schools before it’s too late.

[Abbey]

It’s really easy to write off football as problematic and doomed to fail when you aren’t a sports person. It was really interesting to read about the game and its flaws from someone who loves it.

The author acknowledges his own bias and the impossibility of the task he set for himself with this book, but I appreciate him trying. I wasn’t fully satisfied with the chapter about race, particularly being a bit dismissive of police violence, but he also acknowledged his limitation here. I think he was trying to walk the neutral line, given the audience, which I don’t like but understand from a sales perspective I guess.

I think this would be an interesting read for any football fan. I also think the football bubble will eventually burst, and that will be a sad day. But I’ll wear green and gold every Sunday (or Monday, or Thursday, or Saturday) regardless.

[Dalton Rains]

serious question: do people now write books just so that they have something to talk about in podcasts?

[Ron Wroblewski]

I have been a football follower all of my life. I played high school football and was on a team while in the Marine corps. but I learned a lot from this book. I especially like learning about the players lives that I didn't know about including the coaches. I agree with his theory that football has gone too far and is too expensive. I don't agree with paying college athletes and the wages for the NFL are ridiculous. I believe football will out grow itself and people will get fed up with paying higher and higher fees and advertisers will back away because nobody watches the advertisements including those on the super bowl. there's barely a good ad on unlike earlier years. when you look forward to the advertisements. a definite read for football fans.

[Penny]

Klosterman will always be the man. Some of his points are spot on. Some might be totally wrong. But the dude thinks in unique ways and makes you feel like you're having a late-at-night, at-the bar style argument with smart people. I particularly enjoyed the chapters on race and CTE, and the semantic debate of "greatness" when talking about Jim Thorpe (or any innovator like The Beatles) vs. everyone who comes after. GOAT status requires the pioneering sense of doing something no one ever thought possible before, not incremental improvements on previous great achievements. Another interesting theory explored was about the eventual downfall of football. Some day the only people who will have ever played football will have done so professionally, similar to horse-racing.

[Jason Weber]

Book 7 of 2026.

4.25 stars

There are some writers that I will automatically read regardless of the topic, and Chuck Klosterman is one of them!

Chuck tackles (see what I did there! lol) Football like only Chuck can.

He covers varying aspects of the game.
If you like Klosterman’s stuff and Football, then this book is a must read!

[alicia]

Interesting read about football and if you're into the sport, you will like this. I did feel like it wasn't very well organized and went all over the place. It had some personal anecdotes and then some stats and research but it kind of all flowed together and abruptly would switch topics. Definitely needed smoother transitions or more organized groupings of topics within the book. The other big gripe I had which almost made me give this a lower rating is that the author felt confused about his audience. This is a deep cuts book about football. A casual is not really going to enjoy this. Not to typecast but there is usually a type of person who enjoys football, namely, it skews heavily male. Some of the references and comparisons they were trying to make were like something football related vs like a very niche Taylor song or some other female skewing culture zeitgeist moment (sorry it’s vague because my book highlights aren't loading!). It was weird and happened often and I couldn't imagine the average reader crossing over to know both references that were being discussed.

[Elan DeCarlo]

The problem with having listened to Chuck Klosterman for dozens of podcast hours is that he’s been working on this book for years and these ideas aren’t novel.

[Michael Reilly]

I argued my way through this book. It was great fun.

This is the most thoughtful book about football. Klosterman wrestles with questions like, what will people think of football in fifty years? or would football be better if there were five or three downs to get a first down? or should players have the freedom to play football no matter how dangerous we learn it is?

Klosterman gets at these questions with his special mix of personal stories, ruminations on games he has seen, consideration of large philosophical questions, history and just quirky things to consider. Sometimes he tips into nerdy abstract talk as in, "The rise of football is the epiphenomenal result of how America works, though not in the way we typically insinuate." or "If there's no universal path to self-actualization, a path must be creatively forged by every individual, and anything that exists can be transformed into a vessel of meaning.".

Other times he has great fun dragging in stuff from all over the place. Looking under "C" in the index we get Catholicism, "Call of Duty", James Carville, "Cheers", Noam Chomsky, "Citizen Kane", Eric Clapton, Cocoa-Cola, colonialism, comic books, and The Book of Corinthians in the Bible. It is great fun following him down these paths.

I had some serious disagreements with him. Jim Thorpe was not the greatest football player of all time. On of my pet theories is that arguments about the GOAT are always really arguments about what do you mean by the GOAT. For example, in the NBA, if we say the goal of the game is to score points so the GOAT is the one who is best at that, then Chamberlain is the GOAT. If we say the goal is to contribute the most to winning the most championships, the GOAT is Russell. The argument is about, what do we mean by Goat?

Klosterman starts by saying that a GOAT in any field is the one who first establishes what greatness is like. The Beatles in pop music or Citizen Kane in movies. The problem is that his choice for GOAT didn't do that in the NFL.

Jim Thorpe was the greatest American athlete. He was a great hall of fame football player, but he didn't change or revolutionize the game in any great way. Running backs didn't change their style because of Thorpe. No new schemes or plays were introduced because of him. He was the most famous NFL player of his day because of the Olympics and many of his contemporaries said that he the best player in the NFL for most of his career, but he was not the GOAT.

Tom Brady is, of course, the NFL Goat. Klosterman's GOAT definition doesn't work for NFL players. They don't revolutionize the game in the NFL. Coaches do. Paul Brown, Sid Gilliam or Bill Walsh, for examples, changed the game the way no player has. In the NFL the Goat should be the player who contributed the most to winning the most Championships. That is Tom Brady.

It is also worth mentioning that, as far as I can tell, Thorpe's NFL stats were not GOAT level impressive. The stats from the 1920s are scant but the Football Hall of Fame site says that he played 52 games in the NFL, and he scored 6 rushing TDs and 4 passing TDs. To give some context, Jim Brown played 118 games. He scored 106 rushing TDs and 20 receiving TDs. Thorpe's college numbers were unprecedented. He scored 53 TDs in 44 games as well as being the best kicker in football. His NFL numbers, as far as I can tell, were very good but not close to GOAT level.

I disagreed with Klosterman on several of his other theories but each time his case was entertainingly and well made. He says many things that make me stop and think.

"Describing how the NFL transpires on a play-by-play basis is like trying to explain the incremental mechanics of a nuclear reactor." or

Watching an NFL game because your fantasy football future depends on what numbers a single player gets is "like eating a seven-course meal and only paying attention to how much paprika was added to the potatoes." or

"Football is a chaotic replication of bureaucratic life. Life is a means for watching football (so that our bureaucratic life can be better understood.)."

I agreed with Klosterman more than I disagreed and I enjoyed arguing with him when I didn't.

I was moved by a personal story he tells near the end of the book. Klosterman was 12 in 1984 when he saw the 1984 Flutie -Phelan pass in the BC-Miami game in his living room with his father. I was thirty and I saw it at home. My father called me seconds after the play. Klosterman and I will never forget the play because of what it showed us about our fathers.

[Jon Krippe]

High-grade anthropology from a man whose most important qualification is his self-described "psychosis" about this sport. His depth of knowledge would be off-putting if he lacked his extremely relatable self-awareness. He spends a lot of time on seemingly random details, but every sidebar is necessary to deliver an incisive conclusion. A must-read for anyone even a little curious about why football is the way that it is.

[Matt Woodward]

Klosterman is a friendly voice as he has been a guest on the bill simmons podcast for the last 20 years or so. He is nothing if not quirky. He loves music and fits the Portland vibe, but he loves football and has some interesting takes.

[Kevin Grady]

I really liked the start of this book but at the end of the day, it fails to add anything new to the broader discourse of footballs impact in the US. Everything discussed, while interesting, are all topic people have talked about for years.

[Corey Davis]

love philosophy, love football, love thinking way too hard & getting into the weeds of everything <333

[Campbell Andrews]

Probably 25% of this book makes little-to-no sense. But that doesn’t matter, because I couldn’t read so much as a page or even a paragraph without smiling — if I wasn’t laughing! Though I often disagree and I find his arguments induce in me more questions than conclusions, I never fail to delight in reading Chuck Klosterman. I’m only sad that it’s over.

p.s. even the acknowledgments here are priceless, not to be missed!