George Plimpton is credited with the “Small Ball Theory,” which he expounded upon in a 1992 essay for the New York Times.
“This stated that there seems to be a correlation between the standard of writing about a particular sport and the ball it utilizes — that the smaller the ball, the more formidable the literature,” he wrote.
For a refined sportswriter like Plimpton, he theorized that sports like golf and baseball had a better literary catalogue than, say, football and basketball.
“In keeping with the Small Ball Theory, football has relatively slim pickings,” he wrote, noting that fictional titles such as “North Dallas Forty,” “End Zone,” and “Semi-Tough” were more illuminating than nonfiction works. Though he did mention his own book, “Paper Lion,” and Jerry Kramer’s famous as-told-to with Dick Schaap, “Instant Replay.”
All five of those books are fantastic and are part of my ever-expanding sports book library, which has overtaken my office, a closet and my basement, much to my family’s chagrin. Still, I would respectfully disagree with that dated idea.
Some of my favorites include “Bringing the Heat,” by Mark Bowden, “Collision Low Crossers,” by Nicholas Dawidoff, “Blood, Sweat and Chalk,” by Tim Layden. These books take you inside the game. David Maraniss’ biography on Vince Lombardi, “When Pride Still Mattered,” transcends the genre. Is Fred Exley’s classic “A Fan’s Notes” a football book? It certainly defines the mania of being a true fanatic. This season, I’ve written admiringly about Seth Wickersham’s new book on quarterbacking, “American Kings.”
Access is hard to come by these days, and it’s not like American men are diving into fiction as they once did. But there’s plenty of good writing about sports, and football in particular. A new book about the game recently crossed my desk. It’s titled “Football,” and it’s by Chuck Klosterman, the prolific pop culture writer and author.
If you like football and you like Klosterman, well, you might already own this book, as it went on sale this past week. But if you like either football or Klosterman, I’d recommend it all the same. It’s a wonderful addition to the genre. Just to warn you, it’s not a breakdown of the Sean McVay coaching tree or a deep dive into the power brokers of the NFL. It’s the exact book you’d expect from Klosterman, who has always dabbled in sportswriting or sports talking in his quest to explain the world through culture.
“No one wants to see someone die on the football field, but the fact that it is possible does raise the stakes.”
—@CKlosterman and @PabloTorre on why football’s “4- to 7-second windows of hyperkinetic, violent action” are so profoundly seductive pic.twitter.com/JeJKGdBZry
— Pablo Torre Finds Out (@pablofindsout) January 22, 2026
“It’s not about any specific aspect of football,” he said in a phone conversation. “It is about the idea of football as this almost universal thing. The only thing left about the American monoculture is like football and Taylor Swift. And there are these things that sort of inform the experience of living in this country, even if you don’t care. If I had to give a little more elaborate answer, I would probably say it describes how football maybe is the defining concept of the last half of the 20th century. And I don’t know if it will continue to be that moving forward. The 21st century might be different, but I think if we’re trying to understand America from 1950 to the year 2000, this is probably the best vessel.”
Klosterman said his publisher wasn’t that interested in a football book when he raised the idea.
“I don’t know what they imagined the book was going to be,” he told me, “but it was not the book that ended up coming out, because now they seem happy about it.”
He had written 12 books, but he figured now was the time to write one specifically about sports.
“I guess in some ways I see basketball as my favorite game in a vacuum, but football seems so much more important to me,” he said. “I watch it so much. I care about it more. I talk about it much more.”
Part of the early conceit in the book is that he’s writing to some theoretical audience in some unlikely future where football is extinct or just not as popular as it is now. Through that lens, he’s going to explain why it was so important in his lifetime. Klosterman is a rabid football fan. He played nine-man high school football in North Dakota and has a love-hate relationship with the Dallas Cowboys and a fanatical commitment to college football, the kind reserved for Southerners and degenerate gamblers, even though he’s not an SEC grad and doesn’t bet.
Personally, I’m dubious that football will ever lose its luster.
There was a scare a decade ago about concussions killing football, and we all remember when a lot of people turned on the NFL, on both sides of the political divide, because of Colin Kaepernick and the national anthem. (Klosterman writes about all of this.) But, of course, football has never been more popular. Kids are still playing it in high school, and we’re all watching it more than ever.
“We’ll see, we’ll see,” he said. “The thing is, yes, you’re right in the sense that right now, in the present, it seems more likely that football would usurp every other sport and there would only be football. But that seems much more plausible considering the current condition of the world, and I guess the best argument that I would make in response is that, well, nothing has lasted forever.”
There’s an idea that football is a bubble, but this one seems to only expand with no pop in sight.
“Football can only get bigger,” Klosterman said. “The NFL, particularly, is designed only for expansion. It cannot be the same.”
Games are on nearly every day of the week. The NFL has discovered it can put games on Christmas, even if it falls on a Wednesday. The schedule is soon going to expand to 18 games. Next year’s national championship for college football will be on Jan. 25. The college game is beset with organizational chaos, and yet this season’s national championship was uniquely popular. Its result was downright wholesome.
It’s not like the football-loving masses have been turned into hooting idiots. While people still call into sports radio to rant, the seeming goal of the football fan now is to sound educated, whether it’s about the modern offense or sports betting. Some of the most popular content online and, for some reason, on sports radio, is “film” analysis. Average fans speak in jargon that they’ve learned from football writers and ex-quarterbacks, all of whom use it to sound smart.
For many people, football is the way we communicate, more than ever.
Most people assume the rise of legalized sports betting is one reason why football is more popular than ever, and Klosterman writes about that in the book. In the chapter “Allegory of the Cave,” he quotes his brother-in-law: “You can’t understand football if you’re not betting on it.”
Klosterman doesn’t bet, but as he writes, “What I’ve discovered is something I never anticipated: Gambling enriches football, at least conversationally.”
“It is interesting, like when I talk to other dads, if we’re meeting for some school event, we’re all usually talking about sports, and there’s always these two conversations going on,” he told me when I brought this up. “One, we’re talking about what’s happening in the NFL or what’s happening in the NBA, and then the other conversation is all these guys telling me what they lost money on or how excited they are because they see this value in the upcoming Tulane-Ole Miss game or something. It’s weird. They’re both about sports, and they are both talking about players and games and outcomes, but they’re two silos. One is about this thing that all people are experiencing, and the other is this incredibly personal thing that one person is experiencing because they’re putting money into it.”
As a father and a 47-year-old man, I can confirm.
If you live in a football market or a college town, though, not every conversation is about gambling. Just like not every conversation was about concussions or the national anthem or whatever football-adjacent topic was dominating the headlines.
Living in suburban Chicago, we just wrapped up two feel-good stories that dominated the season: Indiana football and the Bears.
The Hoosiers, of course, won a national championship last Monday night, a scenario so unlikely it’s still hard to fathom that it actually happened, and the Bears are, with the hire of Ben Johnson, suddenly a competent, fun team.
Indiana University fans celebrate at a watch party in Bloomington during Monday night’s College Football Playoff national championship game between the Hoosiers and Miami Hurricanes. (Jon Cherry / Getty Images)
Like most of the Chicago area, the suburb in which I live is full of Indiana grads (and parents of current students) and, of course, Bears fans.
I have a 15-year-old son and a 12-year-old daughter. My son is a Pittsburgh Steelers fan, like me, who recently walked into my home office wearing a bootleg Kaleb Johnson T-shirt and complaining that special teams coach Danny Smith has moved on to Tampa Bay. I remember the first time he was truly angry after a loss. It was the first time I took him to a game in Pittsburgh, and the Jets came back to win. It was Kenny Pickett’s first game, and Mitch Trubisky got benched. He’s never been the same. Now I’ve noticed he’s started posting Indiana content on his Instagram stories in honor of his mom, a loud and proud IU grad.
My daughter has never cared much about sports until this season. Now, she loves Fernando Mendoza and is especially infatuated with Bears quarterback Caleb Williams, who also paints his nails and drinks matcha lattes. When the Bears played the Rams in the divisional round, I was covering the game and received impassioned texts from her. She was anxious in the fourth quarter, and she was upset after the loss.
She was now, like her brother before her, a true fan through pain. She is why football will never die.
For all the negativity out there about the game — the greed, the gambling, the violence, the never-ending bloat — when Indiana wins a national title and the Bears are making people happy and then painfully sad, it’s hard not to see why we love the game so intensely.
Football makes us feel something personal and something communal. That’s why we put up with everything that comes along with it.
“It’s normal for Americans to have an abnormal relationship with football,” Klosterman writes, “and I’m too normal to confront my simplicities.”
