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Informative Essay: What Makes Football So Popular?

1245 Words5 Pages

Football is one of America’s most favorite pastimes and each year hundreds of millions of Americans come together to watch a major sporting event, the Super Bowl. During the 2017 Super Bowl alone, there were an average of 111 million viewers. This number increases slightly almost every year and over the period of 50 years the numbers have sky rocketed from 51 million viewers to 111 million viewers. But the real question is what makes football so popular? Football like cockfighting, reflects a hierarchical model of authority: coaches, quarterbacks and coordinators control every play. Football is about masterful strategies, specialized roles, strict lines of authority, but most importantly, football is a violent and aggressive game of chasing and …show more content…

The average male football player is 6 feet tall and weighs around 245 pounds chases and tackles players on the opposing teams. Spectators revel when watching this type of contact. The sport may seem so enticing to the spectators because of the potential violence that can ensue as the players rabidly chase each other. The idea of chasing one another resonates with us because of our instinct of fight or flight. To a viewer, this is the ultimate form of entertainment. In the text, Geertz discusses the fact that the Balinese use cockfighting as a method of displaying their animalistic characteristics without doing it themselves. The Balinese use the cocks as a proxy to display their hidden animalistic nature. They treat their cocks to the same degree that they would treat themselves and they even describe men how they would describe cocks. In football, viewers watch the football players to distract them from the world around them. It is the only way that they can indulge in violence without being looked down upon. This is because it is socially unacceptable to act in a violent manner, but in watching football people can project all their aggressive behavior without

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