1) Integration of blacks and whites into NFL and NBA destroyed the myth of white superiority.
2) Integration of blacks and whites on sports teams fostered better race relations

3) Allowed minorities to go to college on a sports scholarship which they might not have been able to afford otherwise.
4) Allowed minorities to get out of poverty by earning a lot more money in the NFL or NBA in the 60′s and 70′s, when job opportunities were
hard to come by.
5) once these minority athletes had money, they now could afford to send their children to college
regardless of their athletic skill, freeing their children to become doctors and lawyers.
6) Watching sports can take us away from the drudgery of everyday life.
7) Watch “Remember The Titans” then you’ll understand why sports are meaningfull.

Bravo on an exceptionally prescient post. This post put almost everything I hate about the sport and its cultural relevance to America into words, except one obvious angle – football as a means of social control.

Surely you have noticed the arcane statistics, intellectual arguments, and sense of history that football fans endlessly discuss and consider about football, on sports talk radio, the internet, with friends and family. The sport is a safe outlet for pent up, working class rage and frustration. If they did not have this game to pour their intellectual faculties, energies, and emotional frustrations into, we might have something that looks like a pre-NFL era America – a working class that fought tooth and nail for decent wages, rights, and a more humane working environment for about 50 years until distractions like football, coupled with an intense propaganda campaign by business, sapped their energies and focus.

Unless you think it is actually meaningful to say “America fuckin’
kicks ass!” or “I hate Amerikkka”. For sure much of what I can say can
be as easily paraphrased by the latter statement as a Dystopia song,
but y’all need some schooling on fucking football here, not one on
advanced techniques in hyperbole.

Just like the concept of America, the concept of American Football is
too complex to be covered by a single coherent opinion. I am strongly
resisting the urge to spew endless metaphor between the two. We’ll see
how long that lasts.

This one minute almost completely sums it up:

First we have a sweet diving touchdown reception, a fine example of
that 5% of football that is the actual sport. Next we have an awesome
touchdown celebration, where he pulls a planted cell phone out of the
goal post and calls his mom, a move that cost him $30,000. SNL
couldn’t parody football as well as it parodies itself. Finally we
have the blatant hypocrisy of the commentators enjoying the
celebration while spewing conversative law and order bullshit all over
it.

Don’t forget what else football has given us:

The Ickey Shuffle

The Super Bowl Shuffle: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJNC3dgreaU

The Boz (I’m from Seattle): http://images.google.com/images?q=the+boz

And best of all Chad Johnson. Excerpt from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchdown_celebration:

Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver Chad Johnson had a number of original
celebrations in the 2005 season. After a touchdown early in the year
against the Chicago Bears, he performed his version of the
“riverdance”. In one game against the Indianapolis Colts, he knelt
down on one knee and pretended to propose to a Bengals cheerleader,
who accepted the mock gesture. After he had been fined several weeks
in a row for excessive celebrations, Johnson celebrated his next
touchdown by holding up a sign that read “Dear NFL, Please don’t fine
me AGAIN!!!!!!” (and was subsequently fined $10,000 by the NFL). Other
celebrations included performing CPR on the football, picking up a
pylon in the end zone and using it to ‘putt’ the football into an
imaginary golf hole then pumping his fist in a loose imitation of
Tiger Woods (for which he was fined $5,000), doing an Irish jig, and
even went so far as to do the Chicken Dance. Before one game, he wore
a nameplate that said “Ocho Cinco”, and was fined by the NFL (Chad
Johnson legally changed his surname to Ochocinco in 2008).

Let’s just give football the benefit of the doubt on this one that the
cheerleader accepted the proposal because she realized Chad Johnson is
completely brilliant rather than because she is a yes/sex object.

Soccer celebrations, as described at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goal_celebration, deserve credit for
tending to be more politically relevant, hence reason #1 football
deserves respect: football is unmatched in its ability to blend near
pro-wrestling level theatrics and self-parody with a real competitive
sport.

At the same time, football is the chess of sports. The rules are
numerous and subtle, and the strategy even more so. What other game
has had such a celebrated technical commentator as John Madden? He’s
giving us a new engineering blueprint every minute. Reason #2 football
deserves respect: it takes serious brain power to make it all
work. There are almost as many coaches as positions. I looked up the
top salaries at my old university once, and it was like this:

1. Football head coach
2. Intercollegiate athletic director
3. President of the school
4. Offensive coordinator for football
5. Defensive coordinator for football
6. Some academic or medical department head

Now I’m not one to claim salaries have anything to do with importance
or skill, but it often does mean something when people who are fairly
anonymous and very technical (the coordinators) make almost as much as
the corresponding public face (head coach).

Once you learn the rules, which really isn’t that bad, the relatively
long breaks between plays make sense as you start thinking of all the
possible plays that could do down. Only 11 minutes of action? Who
cares? Watch a soccer game, and 87 out of 90 minutes are completely
forgettable and boring. In summary, judging it purely as a sport, it
is definitely a big-budget, baroque sport, but one at least as capable
of impressive athleticism and strategy as any other.

Why is football considered violent? It’s not the sport itself. One can
reasonably claim the overall architecture of football to be modeled
after war, but so is Risk, and who would seriously claim Risk to be
violent on those grounds. As for the actual contact sport aspect of
football, compare soccer and football. People hit harder in football
but they have pads. People are carried out on stretchers probably
about equally. Soccer is the sport where you see players actively
trying to injure other players, not football. Look to hockey for
ritualized fighting or basketball for the more spontaneous variety.
What makes football so macho and “violent” is the big-budget
advertising and big-budget commentary. That should be fairly obvious.
Reason #1 football sucks big time: the corporate culture surrounding
it.

Why is football considered misogynist? Again, it’s nothing the players
on the field do. If they anything they make it look like a thespian
party. Again, reason #1 football sucks big time: the corporate culture
surrounding it. I’m blaming cheerleaders on this too.

What would make football and sports in general awesome on TV? If you
had multiple channels of audio to choose from to go along with the
same video, and the viewer could mix them as desired. You could cut
out the annoying commentators that jump at every slightly abnormal
occurrence to espouse right-wing values of obedience and
conformity. And by the way, nobody does that better than the baseball
commentator for The Seattle Mariners, Rick Rizzs. It would be great if
you could hear the actual grunts and such of players on the field
(they actually half-assedly did this for a bit but it was too raw and
awesome for the kids). You could opt for some foreign-soccer style
sparse commentary. Technologically, this is not a big deal. They’ve
already gone way beyond this with their lines of scrimmage and first
down overlayed onto the field. The big deal is that advertisers lose
some control over THEIR viewers.

On the topic of Jewishness, American football is also so central to the American-Christian ethos that it also excludes all other religions. There are three times a year when my non-adherence to the Christian paradigm are apparent: Christmas, Easter, and Superbowl Sunday. There is not a Jew I know that is seriously into football. Basketball is a veritable past time, and everyone knows a Mensch or two with season tickets to the NBA. Baseball can also be the touchstone of the East Coast Jew. But Football? Never.

American football is the ultimate source of homogeneity. You have to be white, American, straight, male, and Christian to “get” football. Black people can be athletes, but they’re ultimately pawns to the American football juggernaut. American football doesn’t even recruit from anywhere but America. Fuck, even hockey — the other violent sport — and tennis — the past time of the ultra-wealthy — is more diverse than American football.