Why Football Matters with Chuck Klosterman

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2:13Welcome to NFL Daily, where we are always excited to talk about a new great football book. My guest today, doing something a little different after this holiday weekend, is to welcome in Chuck Klosterman. I'm a longtime fan. He is the best-selling author of a new book, Football, that's like right in my background, but also the author of a gang of books, Sex, Drug, and Cocoa Puffs, which I really enjoy, the 90s, Fargo, Rock City, a couple of novels including Downtown Owl. But Chuck, you're here because you wrote a book about football. And let's start there. I feel like we need more good current books about football.

2:56Like why don't we have more current books about football? Well, it's funny you mention that because when I brought up the idea of writing this book, the publisher was not exactly enthusiastic based on the concept that football books don't succeed but there is this cliche i guess maybe it's not even cliche maybe it's true that in sports journalism sports writing if you want something to be successful you want to use a game with the smallest possible ball so there's lots of books about golf okay There's actually a lot of books and lots of writing about tennis, some about baseball. But as you move up, it kind of dwindles off.

3:40I don't know why that relationship exists, but it certainly seems to. And, you know, not only is a football a medium-sized ball, it's a very oddly shaped ball. Perhaps that plays a role. But I agree. There are less, I think there are less good books or great books about football because the understanding of the game does sort of, I guess, repel maybe the casual fan to some degree. I mean, like, you know, if you read an interesting football book, it tends very, I mean, this one doesn't, but they often really get into the X's and O's and things. And I don't know if that's as, uh, um, as, you know, as, as reader friendly, maybe as some other games, but, uh, but you know, I, I, it doesn't really affect my, what I do.

4:28So, yeah, they, I, I wonder about that. Cause it's one of the reasons I, when I started working in football and it wasn't my favorite sport growing up. And then I realized, you know, starting to cover it. I like to cover it. And you, you start your book really with this point of like, there was the biggest gap I thought between the people. that cover it and the people and the coaches that play it, which for someone going to work in, I thought was exciting. Like you're, you're trying to build that gap. There's almost like a need for someone to understand it as well as possible. But even then I have a limit as someone who never played, never coached to understand it.

5:05You point out, it's just unique among our sports and just so few people have played it. You played like a different version of it growing up. I think, what was it? Six man football? I played nine man. Nine-man football. Six-man is a little crazy. Six-man is like, you know, I write about six-man because that's like, you know, central to Texas and all that, you know, for real small schools. In the Midwest, if you have a small enrollment, you know, a rural school, you play nine-man. Nine-man is an attempt really to simulate what happens in 11-man football. The goal of nine-man football is to look exactly like 11-man football.

5:39The calls are very similar. They're basically on offense. You're removing the offensive tackles and playing with a too tight end set. So it's still a five man line and a defense. You pull out the corners. So the strong safety usually covers the wide out and you have a free safety. But if you didn't know any better, if you were just kind of, just kind of glancing by a field, it might seem a tad empty, but it would look the same. You say you've never played football at all. So that's really, I'm curious about this. so just the idea of things like oh um the way the backs are numbered with the way holes are numbered how did you acquire that note like well i was there was there some text that you read as a young man or or did you know it's like because there's a whole sort of interior semantic language of football that i feel is really hard to sort of understand unless you had some personal a small amount of personal experience yeah i did had a horrible strategy which was read every football book possible and so i actually do think like football literature is underrated you write about i think that would be the best strategy wouldn't it well it helped me learn about the game and i think the new thinking man's guide to football by paul zimmerman by dr z like those those are like the tomes where i think you do start to understand the sport and you understand the history and i i actually want to do an episode this summer of just like the greatest football bucks ever because there are many but in terms of like the x's and o's like i tried to read finding the winning edge by bill walsh and like how do you but i i only think you get so much to me you just learn by watching it over and over and listening to smart people but i always am impressed by the people like a ben solak is at espn he's a guy who does a great job breaking down x's and he didn't play football and he does understand it on that glanular level i just accept that there's a difference but also a lot of the people like the people i work with at nfl network they understand x's o's incredibly but they don't pay attention to the game nearly as closely as i do anyways and so that that can make up a lot of ground but i always just accept that there are a lot of things i will never understand about what happens on a play-to-play basis well you know like that bill Walsh book, for example, in a, you know, I think at the, at the center of that book, he's really writing that book for other coaches.

8:02And you see this a lot with like books that are written by coaches, you know, there's some, some, you know, Gus Malzahn books and stuff he wrote, or at least took part of an high school or whatever. And they're really like, um, uh, essentially manuals for the coach, you know, for another coach, for a guy who's trying to kind of put a scheme together. Then they're like, well, you know, you have a daily podcast. So you're really tied into sort of the narrative news of like transactions um injuries what's happening what is sort of where we think it's going right now and then there's sort of like what this book i think is closer to is just probably in some ways the abstraction of football and by saying that i can hear imagine someone listening to this being like that sounds terrible but what i mean by that is it's like Like, like, I think that, you know, football plays a very unique and special role, not just in the world of sports, but in the world of American society, the way the American society operates.

9:03It's, there's so many things about it that separate it from all the other games, not just its popularity, but maybe the reasons that popularity happened. And so it is it is kind of it's a hard needle to thread in some ways, because there's a certain kind of person. And I can imagine him being like this podcast listener to this is like, I want to read about football and learn something I did not know yesterday. Like, I want to know something about, you know, I, you know, about Shell's own coverage that I didn't understand. And there's another kind of person who's like, well, I like football because everyone does.

9:37It's on every weekend. I'm on my office, you know, fantasy league or whatever. It's hard to find that sort of middle groove between the person who watches football because it's inescapable and the person who looks at football basically as something that is only valuable to them if they almost understand it in like a clinical, almost medical way. Right. And I think there's some people that just want to follow it almost as a soap opera, a storyline that they can understand. Like I would include my parents in this category on the most basic level. And yet they're they're massive fans, but they're not among you.

10:14Give the numbers out like one million people play high school football. That turns to 80 ,000 in college, like a twenty seven hundred as a pro. And it did get me thinking just how few people really do understand it. And for our listeners, by the way, I'm not I'm having Chuck on because I want his book has done great. It was a best selling book. It's still it's still selling. But I want people to read books that come out currently about football because I want more of them as a reader. One thing I know, like there were a lot of great football books back in the 70s, 80s, you know, especially in the 60s, 70s that really got inside the game.

10:47And you just don't see as many of them anymore. You wrote about Friday Night Lights. Did you did you reread that? And that's part of like a bigger Texas football chapter. But it does still kind of stand out to me as as the best of of its kind. Well, OK, if someone asked me just like, what's the best football book of all time? I think my reflexive answer would be Friday Night Lights. And I think it's a kind of a common answer. But what's tricky about it, of course, is that what is the big compliment people give about Friday Night Lights? Oh, it's not really about football. Like football is the center of the story, but it's really about socioeconomics.

11:25It's really about race. It's really about sort of the experience of growing up somewhere where the entire community is dictated by this game. these guys who play high school football in this town then like going to play college football you know and it just feels empty to them because like even you know being at texas a &m doesn't feel like it did in high school or whatever it's all these strange things um so that that's you know it there is a lot of football in that book but so often in sports writing and sports journalism in general the goal seems to be to transcend the genre right to somehow go beyond that um i think what you're talking about is the uh the kind of the complexity or the lack of books that are really about football that it's not an attempt to use football to describe some other thing it's like this is what the thing is and it's tough because of the just intense level of complexity that is possible like there's almost no ceiling to how deep into the weeds you can get on these things And I think a lot of times writers struggle with like, well, okay, who am I talking to with this?

12:33Am I only talking to offensive coordinators now when I write this section? But I know what you're saying. Yeah. I mean, one of those books was, I mean, I read Bill Belichick's dad's book, Football Scouting Methods. That one's helped to try to understand it. When you think of Texas football, though, you kind of talked about that dynamic of that the afterword of that book, Friday Night Lights, sticks with you more than anything else because it's a little sad almost about the players that that was like the peak of their life. and what that made me think. And I don't know if this aspect is in other parts of high school sports or whatever, but their experience almost mirrors professional football.

13:20Like professional players always say they experience some sort of death when their career ends. And the high school players, like that is the peak for some of them, you write about, of their entire lives. They don't get the financial benefits, but they kind of get all of the other benefits of just meaning and adulation and attention and something bigger than yourself. And then it's just over. Did you like experience any of that from from your football experience playing or just writing about it? How do you think about that? I mean, I, you know, I came from rural North Dakota, much like you. I mean, you know, football is my favorite sport to consume.

14:04As a player, I cared about basketball more. So I didn't really have this thing like these kids did in Texas. But what you mentioned is it's an intriguing thing. I mean, OK, the NFL level, you say like these guys experience a kind of death when they retire. And, you know, part of that is because to become the person who gets in that position, you have to have sort of this all consuming drive that's impossible to turn off simply because you realize your body is starting to deteriorate. You know, it's like their whole life has sort of been about like, well, if there's 40 guys on this team, I need to be the best guy on this team.

14:39Oh, now I'm in high school. Now I got to be the best player in the region. I go to college. I need to get drafted, all these things. The thing that drives them is the impossible thing to stop. And you see guys going on too long. And we almost talk like it's embarrassing for them. But like in their mind, it's embarrassing to stop. They've never had a point in their life where it happened. The high school situation is different because obviously it is finite. When I played high school football, you know, we had a good team. We won the state title when I was a sophomore, but there was never this idea that somehow this was the pinnacle of my life or that these memories I had would be the defining memories of my life.

15:20Now, maybe paradoxically, a lot of those things are the things I remember about my life, but I never viewed it as sort of like, oh, now it's all over. You know, now this is over. I think guys at the college level might in some ways have one of the weirdest experiences because assuming they don't go to play professional football, you know, they spend sort of this period of your life when for most people, I don't know where you went to college, But I'm guessing I'm just guessing that your memories of college are like pretty positive and pretty fun. And like the relationships you had are like maybe some of the similar relationships you have now.

15:57And it was maybe the first time you were an adult, but you were still a young person. Whereas the college football player essentially has now a real job where they're getting paid. And college now is just sort of like a just an institution that has no meaning, except that this is where I go to practice and play games or whatever. So when that ends for them, they're like a full on adult, like they're a 23 or 24 year old person. They're supposed to live now. And they'd spend all this time thinking of really just one thing that is a simulation of reality. yeah i i went to tulane so you know we're enjoying the nl iel era but uh but i also um yeah enjoyed myself quite a bit in college in a way that would like never uh be able to replicate you you talked about like that i i love the chapter on texas if it wasn't clear and yeah the book goes and it hits everything that's that's what i like about it it's football like right now you talk about where gambling is that you talk about college football um you know at at some point i think who did you compare it was uh brian kelly to a character on little house in the prairie so that like a character from an old lord eagle wild book yes that is true i'm just saying you're not going to find that uh in in any other in any other books um you you grew up though like a big Staubach fan and you talk in that Texas chapter about like the Cowboys kind of in general.

17:32I do feel like Staubach, you have that in common with Bill Belichick, that you're a monster Staubach fan who I feel like is a little lost to the average fan history right now, just as like the guy and also a legitimately like great quarterback, one of the greatest quarterbacks ever. So I wanted to give you the chance to just like talk Stavak and make the case for Stavak as someone so vital to the history of the game. Well, I appreciate you doing that. OK, so like Billichek's thing was different because his dad was at. So Billichek would like throw the football with Stavak and like run patterns and stuff while he was there.

18:07Like he has a it's a little easier. I mean, for me, you know, OK, it's a strange thing because when I'm born in 1972, Roger was already 30. like he really does in many ways belong to the generation that predates me but i got into football at a young age and you know he was just to me he was sort of what a person was supposed to be like i mean every quality he possesses a football player but also sort of it's just sort of like a person living in the world it was it it's kind of seemed like one of these things that we're used to feeling are too good to be true okay like there's no one who's really like this or whatever.

18:49Well, he retires. I think I'm in second grade. I got beat by the Rams in the playoffs and he had a ton of concussions and was already older because he'd been in Vietnam and all that. So he retires. So to some people, it's very strange. My hero or whatever is this person who I only watched a handful of times. But I mean, I really am of the belief that it's weird for an adult man to have a hero like even if they do heroic things like we're not i don't like to use that word now you need a hero when you're eight and who your hero is when your age is kind of your hero for life so that's uh that's just like roger starback is still i guess my hero if you're gonna call that but i just what what makes me so happy but like you say a little bit lost to two people well that's almost every player right like it's hard to think of the guys to really stay interestingly you know there people used to sometimes compare and contrast Staback with Joe Namath um not just because they were both great quarterbacks ones in the AFL ones in the NFL but you know one was sort of a playboy and sort of like a kind of countercultural idea big kind of mutt chops and Staback is you know crew cut clean cut you know Catholic all of these things.

20:09I do suspect that the name Joe Namath is more familiar to a young football fan now than the name Roger Staubach. I think that by associating himself with the counterculture, that tends to be what the media likes to sort of go back and sort of reinvestigate later. It's like when we look at the history of the NFL, very often the names that come up are the very greatest players and the players who somehow sort of bucked authority or added something new that hadn't been seen before um that they maybe their entry in the league had some kind of racial connotation or all these things you know that's kind of how we work in reverse and i i don't know if if this will happen to stavak as much it's you know i i think you could certainly argue that he was the best quarterback of the 70s i mean there are other names you can throw in there but i think that would be you can certainly meant he'd be a candidate.

21:08But, you know, like, you know, the best running back of the seventies was okay. Simpson. I don't know if we're going to talk about his career. You know, it's like some, sometimes things just change. I don't, I, I don't, it's, it's amazing and, and, and sort of intriguing why some people get remembered and other guys don't. Yeah. And, and Stalbuck should be, I mean, you're right. He, he probably was the greatest quarterback of the seventies. People thought that back then when you're making those lists of like the greatest quarterback like he might have been on top and because football is always getting better like at the time people thought maybe he's the greatest quarterback of all time Johnny Unitas had that title for a while then Joe Montana had it for a while and now no one even kind of when people make the list no one even puts Montana in the top five anymore you made the argument it was intriguing that Jim Thorpe is the greatest football player of all time partly just because when he was doing all the Jim Thorpe's things that he was doing, that's when the sport was sort of being created and he was doing it at a level and athleticism that we don't have proof for.

22:13But ultimately was like, you can't really replicate it now. It almost be like if, if Shohei Otani was dropped into 1930s football and just did everything. Yeah. I mean, that, that thing about Jim Thorpe really is an argument about the idea or the word great or greatness more so because the fact of the matter is the way physiology changes technology changes the fact that we always can use the past as a way to get further the greatest player of all time is always going to be whoever is the greatest player right now if we're talking literally who's the best person on the field the actual skills like you You know, in 20 years from now, who's ever the best player in the NFL 20 years from now will have been sort of that's the furthest any football player would have went athletically.

23:03But that's not how you can think about these things. I mean, it doesn't make sense. It's kind of a meaningless designation if it can change and evolve that easily. It's got to be sort of against the person's peers. and more importantly it has to be the first elite rendering of greatness that still appears or applies to the most modern version and some of the early things that Jim Thorpe did because that was sort of the you know the building block of the games 11 on 11 touchdowns are six first downs are 10 it's wasn't the modern game the way we think of it but in many ways it had all the rudiments of what football is.

23:43And when you see someone running a football now, carrying a football in the open field, breaking tackles and all of these things, you are in some ways seeing Jim Thorpe. You're seeing the residue of that because he was the first player who was really in that many ways perceived as this is the best football player who ever lived. There are guys before him that you could have said that about, but that's kind of where it begins, you know? And, and I just, I don't know you know there's a section in that essay where i kind of make a comparison to the beatles i talk about the idea of the beatles greatness and you know how this can kind of be applied to jim thorpe that could have been reversed it could have been an entire essay about the beatles with one paragraph about jim thorpe but i would read that too i am thinking of the the part because you talked about growing up you know a cowboys fan and you you were on the other side of the catch.

24:40So, you know, that that's who the 49ers beat in that game. And it's devastating. And the Cowboys actually get the ball back briefly, but but they lose that game. And that's a that's a moment that I think a lot of readers can identify with that. There's maybe like one game as a kid where you realize, oh, this can really hurt you. It's fresh on my mind because my son just went through that in the playoffs last year. He has become a Houston Texans fan for no particular reason other than he just likes CJ Stroud and that loss that they had to the Patriots for some reason like sent him into a devastated state that like it made me wonder and it's kind of what I think about with with my job in general it's like why why do we want it so much why do we want it so much as a kid why do like why do why do we care so much did you have you ever gotten to any bottom of that question well I mean that's that's a pretty existential question like why it matters so much there is something about being a kid i mean that loss in 19 i guess it's been 82 81 season when dallas lost to the 49ers you know it was like you know uh that game changed me as a person like it's weird to it to say it but it did i mean i was in fourth grade and you know i you know roger was gone but i love danny white now and all this and since that game i don't think i've ever been able to i know i haven't i've never been able to invest myself into any team the way i did at that age like i just i can't care as much it doesn't matter who's playing it doesn't matter what they represent it doesn't matter where i live it's never going to be like that okay and i i think that like uh you know in a way that sort of makes me a little sad i think some people are able to hang on to that but it's odd because when you see an adult just that shattered by a loss it there's something a little unseemly about it or strange it's like you know pathetic yeah yeah uh you almost but it's just a hard thing you know it's like whether you're talking about, you know, sports or music or film or, you know, relationships you had, and you think back to the first one that really mattered in any of those things.

27:09You'd like to tell yourself that like, well, okay, well, that was, I was young and that happened. And then, you know, everyone later became more and more important, but in some ways, it's always the first one that matters most because that sort of creates your understanding or the framework for what these feelings mean. You know, I think that, you know, when I watch that, like, I don't know what I thought when that game started. Like, did I think that like, oh, Dallas is going to win, even though they're on the road. Or if I thought like, I deserve this somehow, or like San Francisco sort of struggled for a bunch of years.

27:40They can't be that good. I don't know what it was, but all I know is that after that game, it just sort of been like, well, boy, I still love this sport. I wish I didn't almost. Like, I almost wished I didn't care. I feel that way now. I do too. It feels strange to me how important football is to me. Like, I'm almost, I mean, I hate to use the word ashamed, but it's like I don't, I spend my entire autumn trying to avoid things so that I can stay home to like watch like a like a Mac game like Toledo playing you know North Illinois I don't even know why I don't know I just want to see it I all if I just always want to see it in a way that seems to make me feel as though anything else can be pushed to the side and I just I don't know it's a it's a it's a the one thing I guess is good about living in the U.S.

28:40is it's acceptable to be this way like we accept to be obsessed about football it's okay it's totally fine I mean I I feel like I'd want you know when it's football okay well that's work but I I do feel ashamed about like when the Celtics make me that sad that I'm not over that yeah I think your reaction to that football game the catch it was my reaction more to my first breakup I then I won't let myself get that emotionally invested but but sports I still will the Boston Celtics I still will let myself get that emotionally invested you know because so so are you is basketball your favorite sport and football is your job and is that no I love I love football the most but I don't feel as emotionally connect I like different teams I like different stories I am a Patriots fan but it doesn't hit me the same way because it's been work for so long also maybe just because I've gotten to see them win so much and I don't I don't really know in a way that like the basketball experience is more just I feel like a pure fandom it's the one team that for some for whatever reason has has like maintained that childish feeling I wonder did you when you're writing though like making it your job for a minute change your relationship to to staying home and watching you know well it did a little it did a little bit although not maybe in the way you think like part of it while i was writing the book it i i almost felt like you know what if uh what if something changes about football so dramatically that i have to like completely reinvent my thinking about something like what if i'm watching a game and someone does die on the field or like honestly a lot of what has happened with college football complicates my writing about the college game because when i think about college football when i you know i i actually am once one of these people who prefers the college games the pro game you know that that when i think about what i love about college football it does a lot of it was illusionary like some of the things were fake but like you could accept you could live with that illusion like we would pretend and now all that pretending is done now college football is just semi-pro professional football there's just no there's you know play it's and it kind of it was odd because at times like you know i wanted to write about college football at times and everybody'd be like well well this just now seemed like nostalgia because essentially what I'll be describing is something that doesn't and cannot exist anymore.

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