American football, like all politics, is war by other means. Quite literally, American college students (men) invented the game in 1869, stressed about having “missed out” on serving in the Civil War. It was part of a decades-long freakout about masculinity associated with, variously, the 1879 economic panic, the closing of the frontier and new adventures in off-shore colonialism, the industrial revolution, labor organizing, Reconstruction and the (re)installation of racist terror, waves of immigration, and women’s agitating for rights, including the right to vote, and, of course, ideas of gender and social equality threaded through left-wing organizing and practice gaining momentum through the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. 

Amidst all that, American football developed primarily on elite college campuses, causing the kind of player injuries—and deaths—the sport is again known for today. After news reports in 1905 detailed 19 casualties and 138 hospitalizations, Progressive Era reformers sought to ban the sport against the wishes of men who attended elite colleges. The next year, President Theodore Roosevelt struck a compromise between the reformers and the men that included changing the rules to allow players to toss— “pass”—the ball in addition to carrying it. 

It took a hundred years—an entire century—for the better strategy to become the default. Why did it take so long to change the playbook? What economic and cultural pressures kept football power players from discarding obsolete methods and rebuilding their game?

Like the Democratic Party, the NFL is suffused with and exacerbates American racism. It is driven by profit and committed to a legacy of past glory, which leads it to enforce a deference to tradition and authority, double-down on risk aversion, and, thus, squelch new approaches. Peeking inside the weird, monopolistic world that is the National Football League to see how the passing game finally came to the fore can offer embattled leftists some lessons for our own conflicts inside the weird, monopolistic world that is the Democratic Party.

 

THE BASICS

 

American football is a game in which one team tries to score points by moving an oblong ball to one end of the field. The object of the game is to score more points than the opposing team. Each team is made up of two halves: one that tries to score (offense) and one that tries to stop the other team from scoring (defense). There are two main ways to move the ball. There is running, in which you hold the ball in your arms and try to carry it toward the goal while the opposing team’s players run at you to try to stop you. And there is passing, in which you toss the ball to another player. (There are also circumstances when players kick the ball, not relevant here.) 

The National Football League is the institutional home of nearly all professional football teams, which are owned by individuals (or groups of individuals) as franchises. Somewhat like the Democratic Party is a coalitional space for people with a variety of sometimes-overlapping concerns, the NFL coordinates the contests amongst the franchises. Each team (there are 32) competes to be one of two facing off at the Super Bowl, which, unlike American political conventions, is one of the most-watched television programs on Earth. 

Of course, football players do throw the ball. Part of what makes the sport great for television are those dramatic, multi-yard throws, over the heads of the scrumming players hopefully into the hands of a teammate. But that’s not the passing game—that’s still the running game. This is because, in football, if your team can’t move the ball towards your goal at least ten yards over four attempts (“downs”), you forfeit your possession of the ball, and the other team gets the chance to try to move the ball in the opposite direction—toward their goal, which means, when it’s your turn again, the ball is even further from where you want it to go. 

So those long passes you’re probably imagining are, according to football tradition, set up by the runs. The runs are the “ground game”—parallel to volunteers knocking on doors, clutching a script and a leaflet. The quarterback spiraling the ball? A candidate campaign stop, with the celebrities, the lines, the merch. Like those events, the showy tosses rely on workaday labor. In football terms, that means a guy holding the ball in his arms and running, while huge individuals hurl themselves at him and into each other to try to stop the guy with the ball. Over and over again, to, occasionally, set up that pass. The running game concentrates all the players in a small space on the field, and once the ball is in motion, they form a huge human pile at the line of scrimmage. That smash of humans is the war-reenactment deep in the game’s DNA.

The passing game is about gaining yards—that is, moving the ball down the field toward your goal—by, well, throwing the ball. Instead of players running at each other around a single point, they fan out. The offense is trying to catch the ball. The defense is also trying to catch the ball (an interception) or, failing that, prevent the catch, or, failing that, at least chase down and stop the person with the ball before he gets too far. 

There are several advantages to the passing game. The passing game is safer for the majority of players, primarily because a smaller number of people pile on top of each other. It’s better for television, because balls sailing through the air are picturesque, and watching players chase each other around gives the viewer more to look at and to track.  It opens up the scrum and takes advantage of the size of the field, which gives the offense more options, and more options makes for more interesting football. The passing game also speeds things up, because it relies less on the huddle, so there are just fewer stops in what is an exceptionally choppy sport. It’s better for teams, because the strategy can be learned and refined, and depends less on the specific talent of any given individual—promoting team cohesion and stability, as players cycle on and off. 

 

THE PASSING GAME’S FIRST PASS

 

The rulers of turn-of-the-last-century football were the coaches at prestigious higher education institutions—Princeton, Harvard, Rutgers, Army, Navy—and they eschewed the passing game despite the danger of running the ball. The cause of the danger is not hard to understand: the large, powerful individuals running at each other, often at top speed, in an attempt to topple the other to the ground, can cause serious injuries. 

Nonetheless, this physical clash is fundamental to the sport’s purpose as a “ritual reenactment of war,” as writer Diane Roberts called it—observing that every North-South college matchup was a contained Civil War battle do-over. The vibe continues with team names like Rebels (University of Mississippi). Even after the 1906 rule changes—designed to make the game less lethal, “but not on too lady-like a basis,” as Roosevelt explained—football coaches avoided the pass as insufficiently tough. Facing off and running at one another was proof of one’s courage and manliness. 

The men in charge of the game maintained the dominance of the running game by ignoring the periodic success of upstart teams that passed. This strategy of ignoring the obvious predates the formation of the NFL in 1920. 

The Carlisle Indian School was the flagship boarding school that indoctrinated Indigenous people in settler ways, such as the English language, Christianity, waged labor, and sports, all to, in the words of the school’s founder, “Kill the Indian, save the man.” Coach Pop Warner and star Jim Thorpe played the most creative football—the team is credited with the spiral pass, among other inventions. Instead of relying on the standard advantage of player size, Carlisle used their smarts and their speed, mixing in long passes, short ones, and fake-outs. With this kind of gameplay, Carlisle won the biggest upsets in collegiate sports, embarrassing University of Chicago, Harvard, Penn, and other top teams. They faced racism when they lost, and racism when they won. One Carlisle player recounted, “When the white man won it was always a battle. When we won it was a massacre.”[1] After all, as Sally Jenkins notes in her history of the Carlisle team, “As audience and participants understood, the gridiron was a training tool to prepare the best-bred young men to wield power.”[2] 

Despite being bested by Indigenous people playing a far superior strategy, the old-school footballers waited them out, relying on racism to dismiss Carlisle’s talent and inventiveness. Professional football began as teams sponsored by employers, and organized itself into a league in 1920, in the wake of WWI, the flu pandemic, and amidst the first Red Scare—in which, like all subsequent rightwing retaliatory periods, gender and racial moral panic is a feature, not a bug. The passing game thus fits into a wider pattern of upper-class white men successfully delaying necessary changes that, enacted, would benefit everyone, including themselves.  And so, for the first fifty years of professional football, the sport remained less popular than baseball, and while play style evolved it remained firmly rooted in the running game, biding its time as a proto-neoliberal sport, waiting for its time to shine. 

 

AMERICAN FOOTBALL—A NEOLIBERAL SPORT FOR A NEOLIBERAL ERA

 

In 1972, American football overtook baseball as the most popular sport in the country—the year after the US had its first trade deficit in almost eighty years, a real signal of the economic paradigm shift in motion. While the “hallmarks of neoliberalism,” as Perry Anderson helpfully lists them—“privatization of services and industries; reduction of corporate and wealth taxation; attrition or emasculation of trade unions”—weren’t yet apparent to football fans, they were already underway. In 1972, it may not have been evident that football would dominate the next decades, but it has—the others aren’t even close, and haven’t been in decades. It’s not just that football is the most popular sport, it’s that the NFL dominates American culture, attached to and promoting a very specific form of cis, racist, masculine toxicity: militaristic, punishing, dangerous, deadly, and racist AF. The NFL dominates in a marriage of neoliberal material and ideological realities condensed into UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s slogan, There Is No Alternative. 

Thatcher dismantled the social safety net in Britain in much the same manner as Ronald Reagan did in the United States. Famously, Thatcher stated that her best achievement was the rebranding of the opposition party: “We forced our opponents to change their minds.” That is, the Labour Party, which once championed the National Health Service, world-class housing policies and other social safety nets, reinvented itself to advance profits over people under the brand “New Labour.” It’s the kind of “softer, gentler destruction of social life” that characterized Bill Clinton and the “Third Way”: slightly less conservative social policy stapled onto Anderson’s hallmarks of neolibarlism listed above.

Generally, historians credit the NFL’s rise in popularity through the 1960s to Americans having more leisure time and disposable income to buy televisions (thanks to unions’ wresting from capital a good chunk of the wealth generated by the expanding economy—the settler and non-settler colonial characteristics of this economy are beyond the purview of this piece), combined with the league’s skillful positioning of itself for television. Though it wasn’t until 1977 that the majority of the NFL’s revenue came from broadcast rather than attendance, they saw the possibilities in television sooner than the other sports. A big boost came in 1963, when CBS Sports invented the instant replay. In 1964, the NFL bought its own in-house film unit to capture all the game play, investing in cameras that could follow players and the ball closely. 

With a marketing expert, Pete Rozell, as head of the organization, the NFL developed dramatic storylines about the teams’ conflicts, inventing or exacerbating rivalries not between teams and their cities, but among star players. This allegiance was reinforced by the mobility forced on Americans as neoliberalism reorganized American life through deindustrialization, disinvestment in urban and rural communities, and subsidies for large corporations. As Americans moved around the country, pushed by the changing economic order, they continued attachment by cheering on the team of their childhood, or the team of their parent. Football became paramount just as neoliberalism began eroding the economic and social stability of the 1950s and 60s—rooting for teams with names that conjured up those halcyon manufacturing days (the Steelers, the Packers, the Jets) and acceptable, if fading, white ethnicities (the Vikings) offered fans a way to connect to that idea of America—to win a culture war that Archie Bunker types were very much losing in the early 70s, as activists made gains on civil rights, welfare rights, feminism and women’s rights, LGBTQIA issues, environmental protection, and ending the Vietnam War.

Even now, more than fifty years since the oil shocks pushed President Jimmy Carter to put on a sweater, install solar panels, and handily resolved the profit crisis facing global capital, the NFL trades on this nostalgia for patriarchal, racist, expansionist stability. It wasn’t until 2022 that the Washington, DC team stopped calling itself a racial slur. (The new name is “Commanders.”) And former manufacturing strongholds like Green Bay and Indianapolis, which today would be unlikely to attract a professional sports franchise, continue to hold on to their football teams. The neoliberalism here is honored in the breach—because the Green Bay Packers are community-owned, the small, post-industrial city can fend off attempts to relocate the team. 

Football’s dominance over American life is a neoliberal success story akin to Amazon’s—the story of using changing technology, context, and rules to create a monopoly. Like Amazon, the NFL benefitting from first-mover advantage, and created what Jeff Bezos calls a “flywheel,” in which every element of the business model feed its expansion, which then enables it to crush or eat its rivals. “This is a metaphor for monopolization,” as author Stacy Mitchell has pointed out. When faced with upstart competitors, the NFL has similarly leveraged their market dominance to destroy these competitors by denying them talent and access to markets. In the end, the NFL destroyed them or—because neoliberalism functionally ended antitrust enforcement—bought them: There Is No Alternative. 

Similarly, the Democratic Party controls access to the electorate—stomping out challenges to the status quo. This is most recognizable in how party officials and structures punish primary challengers and the firms that support them.  The Working Family Party and the Democratic Socialists of America work to be both political home and effective vehicle for people who want progressive economic, social, and foreign policy, but even flagship insurgent candidates (Bernie Sanders for president, Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and the rest of the squad) must go through Democratic primaries and party structures to be elected to office—structures and processes designed to preserve the status quo and incumbent office holders. (Consider how the national party and its standard-bearers backed California Senator Diane Feinstein despite the state party’s endorsement of another candidate—and two years after investigative reporting revealed her cognitive decline.)  

Like the Democratic Party, the NFL has a monopoly. And with that too-big power comes the familiar malfeasance common to large corporations—from Big Tobacco to Big Law to Big Oil to Big Tech. The NFL has been caught denying, lying, and minimizing the cascading harmful consequences the violence visits on workers (such as brain injuries), families (domestic violence), communities (stadium subsidies), and the culture as a whole (9/11, extrajudicial police murder). 

 

CONSERVATIVE RESISTANCE 

 

The NFL is technically a coalition of the teams—akin to the AFL-CIO. In reality, the League is the controlling authority on most matters:  whether, and to where, a team can move; whether a new team can form; the rules for how the draft (the NFL hiring hall) will function; how not to hire a talented quarterback who performed a short symbol of solidarity with fans opposing the epidemic of police murder. 

While the League itself does not determine a team’s strategy on the field, football culture is one of conservatism: resistance to change, obedience, conformity, and deference to authority. As journalist S. C. Gywnne writes in his chronicle of the forward pass, “Coaches were not interested in…elemental changes to the game of football. And they hated risk.”[3] As the Carlisle Indians example suggests, enforcing an informal prohibition on inventive and creative strategies favors the bigger, stronger team, and football player size has, thus, kept pace with these demands. Alongside this is specialization, which means the players who bulk up the most, and run at each other the most, are overwhelmingly Black. The players who do not have been overwhelmingly white—81%— due to the racism of U.S. society as well as “the inclination of decision-makers to stick with what has worked so well for so long,” in the analysis of the journalists who determined that 81% number.[4] 

In the running game, the bigger players protect the smaller, skilled players—so the distribution of risk of injury is concentrated among the larger players, who were more likely to be Black. The passing game does increase the likelihood of injury among the skilled players, but in doing so spreads it more evenly across the entire offensive lineup.  

Nonetheless, Hal Mumme managed to develop a comprehensive passing game strategy coaching high school teams and college teams ignored by NFL talent scouts. Eventually, his winning strategy elevated his career into top-ranked college football teams. Mumme’s basic strategy, known as “Air Raid,” is democratic, simple, and flexible. It is now the default strategy in the NFL.

The passing game’s story is a long incubation and a winding road to the NFL runs right through this conservatism. I found three lessons for American leftists interested in trying to advance strategies that could win a new feature of the only opposition party we have:

 

1. Play is the source of new ideas; play is only possible outside the scrutiny of the system. 

2. Incubating new strategies requires study; study requires time and tape. 

3. Results unto themselves are not persuasive: context, timing, and networks must all align.

 

This isn’t really all that innovative an idea. It’s the same idea that the three “currencies” of power are “organized people, money, and ideas,” to borrow from a report on organizing called “The Antidote to Authoritarianism,” although the above sequence is is ideas, money, people.  

 

PLAY

 

Hal Mumme, the auteur of the contemporary passing game, found inspiration for it by watching kids just toss the ball to each other for fun. It was 1989, and Mumme was coaching at a college virtually unknown for its football. He promised recruits that playing on his team would be fun—that even practice would be fun. This is noteworthy because football practice was not usually fun. It was not supposed to be fun, it was supposed to be brutal. Players tackled each other, encouraged to rough one another up. Coaches mandated sprints at the end of practice, sprints so intense players puked. And hours and hours of practice.

Instead, Mumme cut back the time spent in practice. He eliminated those sprints and he insisted on light-touch, rather than tackles. As part of his commitment to fun, and his experiment with the new strategy he was developing, he simplified everything, dumped the big playbook, and just drilled technique. With unremarkable players, at a school with minimal financial support, his team began winning upsets. 

“How many football coaches have you heard say, ‘This is war! This is hard work!'” Mumme told ESPN Magazine in 2014. “Guess what. Football isn’t work. I’ve never worked a day in my life. This isn’t rocket science! This isn’t cancer! It’s fun!” 

Play—fun—is underrated as both a strategy and an experience. The national situation is serious, but if the experience of getting together and figuring out what to do, how to do, and with whom do it is not, well, fun—we won’t. Those of us schooled in the methods of non-profit management—strict divisions of labor, dutiful documentation, listing out the tasks to the nth detail—can miss the forest for the trees. It makes it easy to lose track of the obvious: organizing—or participating—in any political or community institution is a thing individuals do on top of the obligations of our lives. We choose to do it, and if it is not usually meaningful and at least sometimes fun, we will not continue. This is not an argument against seriousness. But without the room to tease, to tweak, to joke—generating new ideas or trying them out—it is impossible. 

Laughing about things is especially important when you try things that don’t work, which is also hard to do under scrutiny. This lesson is about the untold dividends of avoiding the spotlight of prestige—it’s hard to have fun while being policed, or otherwise watched closely. Mumme coached a team that really wanted to win—they had a lot to prove—but the advantage of being counted out and generally ignored is the ability to hold those weirdo practices without scrutiny or scolding from peers or authorities, or being forced to run those sprints that made players puke.

 

STUDY REQUIRES TIME AND TAPE

 

The NFL understands that its product is entertainment. It creates and enforces rules to ensure games are likely to be dramatic contests—the teams that did the worst get the first pick in the draft, for example. Through their subsidiary, NFL Films, the league both monetizes and provides the material for the workers—coaches, players—to hone their craft. That material is known as “the tape.” 

Since the mid-1960s, NFL Films has filmed, and archived, nearly all gameplay. To prepare for upcoming games, players and coaches study the tape—video of their own game play, sometimes their practices, historical footage, and, of course, the performance of their opposition. By studying the tape, coaches and players identify variables to shift—changes to make in strategy or execution required both by their own logic and, by studying the tape of their future opponent, to retool for the particular challenges posed by the next opponent. This helps mitigate the inclination to course-correct the previous game (“fight the last war”), rather than face the next contest. 

Among the advantages of shorter, less intense, more fun practices was more time for everyone—coaches and players alike—to study tape. This allowed workers to also note how changes to tactics and strategy move through the ecosystem of the NFL, and how teams adapt strategies to fit the strengths and weaknesses of players or teams. 

One thing that is obvious in NFL tape review, that seems not to be obvious to many, is that studying the tape means looking at the decisions teams make in the context they find themselves in. Each player is working in relation to the others on his own team, the context of the other team, and the overall moment they’re in in the season, the trends operating in the game. 

The metaphor for politics is clear. Too often, our side looks at the right’s choices without considering the context that frames, and sometimes defines, the choice. Too often we’ve tried to emulate the right without accounting for, say, how the culture, the economics, or other conditions favor their objectives. (Remember Air America, the liberal answer to right-wing talk radio? Among the problems with that experiment was the failure to account for how the market structure of radio favored the right.)

 

RESULTS ARE NECESSARY, BUT NOT SUFFICIENT

 

Though the Air Raid is Mumme’s brainchild, and is now the default NFL offense strategy, Mumme himself never made it to the NFL, and after a short time at the University of Kentucky (1997-2000), he has spent the last twenty-five years as he has most of his career with lesser-known teams. It is the players he coached, and the coaches he mentored and the players they coached, that brought the Air Raid to the NFL.  

Mumme’s career, as Gwynne follows it in his book, showcases how winning games against bigger and better resourced teams generated resistance, until the effectiveness of the strategy, combined with the right messengers, were in a position to implement it without fanfare. One significant difference between football and politics is that, in football, there is a lot more agreement on the results of any given contest. When a team loses, players do not perform public relations gymnastics, trying to find inside the loss a kernel to spin into a victory for a grant report, or to supporters (or members), or others—even as there are, often, moments to celebrate. Players and/or coaches stand in front of the cameras and take responsibility for the losses, often acknowledging that they’ve disappointed their fans, or themselves, the owners. They name, and recognize, the consequences that losses have for the rest of the season, and perhaps for the shape of their careers. 

Tim Walz—a more self-reflective Democrat than most—said in March, “An old white guy who ran for Vice-President, you’ll land on your feet pretty well,” before expressing regret for failing to win. (Perhaps it is only coincidental that Walz was the least-wealthy vice presidential nominee in history.)  But Walz is an outlier—Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and other top Democrats neither apologize nor face significant consequences. A 2025 NFL comparison might be Shadeur Sanders, son of Deion Sanders, the pro football and pro baseball player turned college football coach. Shadeur played for his dad at the college level, and was the most-hyped player in the draft—expected to be chosen in the first round. (Not unlike choosing teammates in elementary school dodgeball, the best players are snapped up as soon as possible at the NFL hiring hall known as the Draft. The lower your pick number, the more sought after you are.) Despite the hype, and his famous dad’s support, Shadeur was the 144^th player chosen. This was “one of the  biggest slides in NFL history,” noted The Athletic. It was the biggest story coming out of the draft. ESPN Draft Analyst Matt Miller blamed Sanders’s approach, including—in a very member-of-Congress-twist—a coterie of sycophants and yes-people giving him bad advice. “Miller continued, “There was never anyone from the outside that could get through to him and say, ‘Wait a second, he’s not guaranteed to be a two or three draft pick.’ And the fact that you are approaching the process that way is hurting him.” Sanders was the second quarterback drafted by the Cleveland Browns.

Were politics more like football, the strategists, consultants, and candidates who failed to win an election would retire or be fired, instead of hanging around mucking up the strategy for the next season.  After all, getting away with lying to yourself, or, to be aided and abetted in lying to everyone, is a prerogative reserved only for the NFL itself—not within it. 

 

 

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[1] Quoted in Sally Jenkins, The Real All Americans (New York: Anchor, 2008), 245.

[2] Jenkins, 2.

[3] S.C. Gwynne, The Perfect Pass: American Genius and the Reinvention of Football (New York: Scribner, 2017).

[4] Gwynne.