Of course, some people (like my husband, posting above) never found football boring, even before color and instant replay.

Soccer isn’t called the beautiful game for nothing. Don’t be a hater.

To witness the dramatic difference between the NFL and other sports like basketball, hockey and soccer, simpy watch a high school or small college game on TV and compare it to the professional version. The dramatic gap is HUGE in football, but less so in those other sports.

To me, the beauty of football is the orchestrated, dynamic nature of the action, lots of complex individual actions melding together to create a collective result. It was this high-speed geometry more than violence that first attracted me to the game–on the over-the-air, black-and-white signal I grew up watching the violence was too blurry to be explicit.

NFL films did romanticize and glamorize the game. The Wagnerian scripts used in the 1970s, the oracular voice of John Facenda, and most importantly, the brilliant choices for musical scores, provided an imagined backdrop even when watching live action. In my opinion, the more recent NFL Films work is not as compelling in terms of content. It also plays less of a role in marketing the game because of the plethora of competing NFL content.

This is an astonishingly parochial, American attitude, and globally a minority viewpoint. It is also a huge reason we are bogged down in Iraq — we are playing football, they are playing soccer, and they are winning.