Football: Flying high, like Icarus

Another football season is upon us. Once again it promises to be bigger and better than the one that preceded it. No doubt TV ratings and game attendance figures will be up — yet again.

Today there is no doubt that football, not baseball, is our national pastime. The only debate that remains is the relative supremacy of the college or pro version of the game.

Toss in high school gridiron contests and the country is about to be awash in football from Thursdays through Mondays between now and Thanksgiving. Then things really get serious, what with conference championship games, the interminable bowl season and those ever-expandable NFL playoffs.

Once again, the country is set for a five-month run of almost nonstop football. The only difference between this year and last is that this year promises to be bigger and better than last year, which was bigger and better than the year before that, which was …

And so it goes — except that some day this won't be the case. Will that day finally arrive in 2014? And if so, will it signal a longer-term trend? If you happen to be a football aficionado, not to mention an NFL owner/coach/player/fan, there are troubling signs in the soon-to-be crisp fall air.

Some of the signs concern the nature of the game itself. And some don't. As players continue to get bigger and better, not to mention stronger and faster, can the violence of the game be maintained and yet contained? If so, will the game gradually lose its appeal? And if not, will the game wither or perhaps even implode, courtesy of an increasing decline in the player pipeline and an increasing cascade of injury-related lawsuits?

Then there is the game as spectacle. Will the excesses that accompany the football scene eventually become so excessive as to provoke a counterreaction, perhaps even a countercultural reaction? Something like this has to happen sooner or later, perhaps even sooner rather than later.

This very process may soon be given an assist by the fate and future role of the country at large. If baseball was the perfect game for a pastoral and essentially peaceful America, and if football has been the game that mirrors an industrial and periodically warlike America, what will be the game for an America that is both post-pastoral and post-industrial? It certainly won't be baseball, and it likely won't be football.

An America that retreats from the world may possibly be peaceful, but it won't be pastoral; hence baseball is unlikely to regain its once-hallowed standing. Alternatively, an America on a permanent war footing will not be peaceful and may not even need to be industrial; hence football might well become increasingly irrelevant.

There was a time when football was thought to be an ideal substitute for war and actual preparation for a career in corporate America. Better to have been a schoolboy cog in a machine before facing a working lifetime as a cog in another machine. And better to be a warrior who vicariously conquers an enemy, as well as enemy territory, than to be a warrior fighting in a real war.

At this point in our history football serves as an escape for "cogs" of all sorts. Can it be sustained as not much more than that? Time will tell.

At some future point in our history our need for real warriors could drastically reduce our interest in — and commitment to — warriors of the gridiron variety. Is that point on the near or far horizon? Time will tell.