Chuck Klosterman Thinks About Football a Lot. Here’s What He Wants You to Know.

Chuck Klosterman, best-selling author and renowned chronicler of American pop culture, has taken his talents to sports. He’s written a new book, Football, which examines our most popular sport through his unique lens. Klosterman covers football from the widest possible lens, examining the strength of its hold on society—and what ultimately might break that hold and send the sport spiraling to its demise. In the process he weaves tales and observations about every level of the game, from six-man high school ball in Texas to the NFL.

Klosterman recently was at a book-signing event in Louisville sponsored by Carmichael’s Bookstore. I had a chance to discuss the book and the sport with him. The transcript of our discussion, edited for brevity and clarity:

Sports Illustrated: The book is called Football, so I’m going to start with you playing football growing up in North Dakota—quarterback and then other positions.

Chuck Klosterman: Yeah, I played nine-man football.

SI: You played it. You injected it into your veins as a fan and a consumer. And then you became a chronicler of it. Has your relationship with football changed as you’ve gone through these iterations?

CK: Well, absolutely. I mean, so I come from a small town, like 500 people, and I lived on a farm outside of that town. So there’s 23 kids in my graduating class. That’s how it was for most of the classes at my school. So there was kind of an expectation almost that every guy was going to play football. You were actually seen as being kind of a radical if you were not. Well, I would’ve played anyways because I loved football. I was collecting football cards, memorizing The Sporting News, all those things. It was such a big part of my life. It was a big part of my relationship with my dad and my brothers. And then I started in junior high and I’m not as good as I thought I was going to be. I guess I kind of thought I would immediately come in and be great, and that really wasn’t the case.

When I was a sophomore, our team won the state. We went 12–0, and I did not play one meaningful down that entire season. Junior, I started to play a little bit, but I was the fourth-string quarterback on a roster of 30 guys. So I was like, I just got to move to receiver. So I moved to receiver and I played outside linebacker. It was nine-man. So you played both ways and I did have a pretty good year as a senior. That was the right move, particularly that I became the punter we didn’t have. So we had this long legacy of weirdly very good punters at my high school, but they all graduated and I knew that was going to happen. So I spent the summer punting over our barn, which as it turns out is an excellent way to become a punter because I made the all-conference team, I think mostly for punting.

SI: So you were Kirk Ferentz’s dream recruit.

CK: Yeah, exactly, exactly. I would love to go to a school that punts 18 times a game.

SI: Nobody loves punting more than Kirk Ferentz, which you did drop into the book very deftly. Now that you have written about it, something that you’ve basically lived your whole life, did the process of writing this book change how you view football?

CK: Well, I’ve been thinking about football for 45 years of my life, and then more seriously, maybe over the last 20. At some point I just had made a decision that I wanted to do a sports book and football seemed like the obvious choice. I have more, maybe, a personal relationship with basketball, but in terms of writing about society, the world ideas, the way it reflects 20th century America, all of these things, football is kind of really the only choice, I suppose. There was an interesting period in the ’90s when I watched football a little less. I mentioned this in a book. It’s very strange to me. The Giants-Bills Super Bowl, I didn’t even see it. I was at a party in college where there was no TV. I missed an entire Super Bowl. It’s unbelievable to me now, but I was really into music, I was really into partying and stuff like that.

I was the sports editor at the college newspaper, so I felt like, oh, I got to think about the University of North Dakota football team all day. I don’t need to keep following. But then when I got out of college and I’m working in Fargo and I’m living by myself, but I didn’t at the time. And I remember watching Monday Night Football, and it was like an anniversary of Monday Night Football. I guess if it was 1994, that would probably be the 25th anniversary of Monday Night Football, I think. So it was all the old Howard Cosell stuff and Don Meredith stuff and the various highlights of games, some which predated me. But I feel like I’d seen all the highlights, some of which I actually remembered watching, and I remember feeling strangely emotional about it. I’m not sure what it was. It was almost sort of, I felt as though I was being pulled back to the person I was in fourth grade. And I was like, “This is still kind of part of me.”

I moved to Akron, Ohio, to work at the Akron Beacon Journal, and that’s where this guy, Michael Weinreb, we kind of became friends. He was a sports writer and we were working at this newspaper—I was covering pop culture and he was covering sports and we would go to the bar, and he was just staggered that I knew anything about sports. He just didn’t think I’d know anything. And at one point he was like, “I think the guys in the sports department would lose their mind if they knew you knew more about this stuff than they did.” So whenever I would write books, I would always kind of sprinkle stuff in sports stuff. An analogy here or there, I started doing stuff ESPN asked me to write, and that kind of gave me confidence too, just the fact that they asked me.

But I can’t say that writing this book really changed my relationship to football. It was more like this: I kind of sometimes think of my mind as a ball of yarn and every thought I’ve had about football, every memory I’ve had about football, all the guys I liked, all the players that were important, all the personal memories to me, all the stuff back to playing on the playground, going to North Dakota State games but it was like 15 below—it’s like they’re all wrapped up in this ball and writing is just pulling the string and straightening it out. So in many ways, writing this book—outside of the very first book I did, which was about growing up and listening to heavy metal—this was the easiest book in some ways because I just felt like I had all this stuff. All I had to do was just figure out how to sort of deliver it.

So I mean it was a pleasurable experience and writing is not always pleasurable. I love doing it, but there was really no point at any part where I was like, “Oh God, I’m going to give up.” Or this sucks or whatever. In fact, I kind of wish I’d written one more essay about weather. I really like to think about the relationship between football and weather, but just at one point I was like, this is the book. I’ve got to send it in.

SI: So what would the weather essay say?

CK: Well, I think it’s interesting how it’s the only sport where we see the weather as almost on the same level as the players themselves. Baseball games will be canceled, basketball is indoors, hockey is the simulation of it being cold. I mean, it blows my mind that there were people writing … about how they felt the AFC and NFC championship games were problematic because of the weather and that this somehow damaged the product. What’s great about football is that it forces people—us and players and all of it—to sort of connect with some of the things that most of reality allows us to separate from. A lot of the things that were just an adverse part of living for most of humankind, we’ve been able to eliminate.

The weather, we are able basically to live in the modern world separate from the climate, and football demands us not to. Football forces us to sort of consider how that will affect not just how the game is played, but the mentality of how much respect we give these guys. The Dolphins’ head coach [Mike McDaniel], he acts really meek in cold weather and tries to overcompensate and it reflects really badly on him, and I don’t even know if he realizes it. I guess he’s fired now. But coming from North Dakota, I probably like weather more than most people. My wife would always be confused when I’d talk on the phone to my parents because we’d talk for 12 minutes and we’d talk about the weather for five minutes and she’s like, to her, that’s what you talk about when there’s nothing else going on. And I was like, not if you live on a farm in North Dakota. It’s the most important thing happening at all times.

SI: Along those lines, now the Kansas City Chiefs look like they’re going to build an indoor stadium.

CK: Yeah, Philadelphia, they’re talking about it.

SI: The Broncos are going to build a retractable roof stadium.

CK: Oh, see, that’s awful.

SI: I agree wholeheartedly.

CK: I mean particularly the Broncos, because some of the most memorable games, especially that Monday night game they played the Packers [in a blizzard in 1984], that is the most memorable Monday night game involving either of those two teams, and it was solely because of that weather. Is the community pushing back at all or do they want it? Sometimes if you live there you’re like, “Well, I’m a season-ticket holder. It would be nice to take my jacket off.”

SI: They are not getting public funding for it, so it’s kind of like, “We’re going to do what we want.” But they definitely should have the retractable roof element so that it can be open, and hopefully open all the time, because it snows in Denver. Snow should be on the ground and Denver should be part of the game. It was part of the game in the AFC championship game.

CK: If they have a retractable roof, they will not leave it open. It won’t happen. That’s too bad.

SI: Along those lines, you want weather football? I want weather football. I think most people enjoy weather football. You also like a lot of other things that may run counter to modern convenience or modern society. Why are you, I guess, a football traditionalist, a football conservative, however you want to put it?

CK: I suppose either of those things are true modifiers. I mean, I think that football is filled with so many contradictions and paradoxes, which is a lot of what this book is, but one of them is this. There is no American sport that is more willing to sort of capitalize or utilize technology. The idea of plays being sent in through a radio, when that was added in the ’90s, that was a crazy thing. You wouldn’t see that in any other sport. The computer that shows you where the first-down marker is. Almost all training techniques—football will really embrace modernity. And yet at its core, it is fundamentally mired in the past. It is a conservative-coded, somewhat reactionary sport where most people seem to agree that the most important qualities a football player can have are the same qualities they would’ve had in the 1950s.

And I think that my natural inclination as a person—and this is not just as a football fan, this is the way I am sort of with music, film, politics—I’m always interested in the past that just predates me. To me, the greatest decade for football was the 1970s. Now the first football game I ever saw was Super Bowl XII, which happened in January of 1978, so I missed most of the ’70s, and yet that is what I sort of crave and long for and are most interested in. I am very aware that if I had been born in 1962, I would feel this way about the ’60s. I’m sure of it. There is something about football that fosters the kind of person who longs for the past, an unrealized past, like an unexperienced past for me. As a sports fan, I am almost like a radical conservative. I don’t want anything to change. I am against instant replay for officiating. I’m the only person left I know who’s like that.

SI: To your point, football has been unyielding in many of those areas. This is the way it has to be played. It has to be brutally physical. It has to be dangerous. There has to be a rigid hierarchy to it. There is a big push for flag football now, but there’s a lot of resistance from people who say it’s not real football.

CK: Well, it’s not real football. I mean, just another thing that’s crazy about football that makes it so different from other sports is that, if we found the 10 best just sort of amateur basketball players in town and we put them in a gym and we split ’em up five-on-five, they could play a highly competitive game that might not seem that different than watching an official game. We’re able to simulate so many sports in a way that’s kind of realistic. It’s hard to do baseball, right, because baseball has a lot of moving parts and a specific field, but we have this whole infrastructure of softball where 9 million people play softball during a year. Soccer, you could just play, all you need is a kickable object. That’s all you need, but you can’t simulate football.

It’s only real if it’s 11 on 11, the guys are wearing pads and they have rehearsed what they’re going to do hundreds of times. You can’t really play a pickup football game in a way that resembles what we see. And part of that is tied to the violent nature of it. It makes it very exclusionary. I don’t think anybody here sees football as a blood sport. You’re not watching it with the hope that you’re going to see someone be physically hurt or even killed on the field. That’s not what you want to see. And yet, that has to be part of the possibility for the game to be meaningful. It’s the strategy and the aesthetics, and that’s what we all love about it in a lot of ways. And yet the stakes are higher because there is an element of danger. The comparison I often use is like a guy climbing K2. A guy climbing K2 does not want to die on the mountain, but if there was no chance he could die, it could not be the most meaningful thing he does in his life. Some things require a kind of risk and football has that which has kind of been taken out of most of other society.

SI: An interesting part of the book—you ask whether strangers should be allowed to do dangerous things? Tell us how that relates to football and where your thought process was.

CK: So you can’t really write about football and say well, I’m not going to talk about CTE. Ten years ago particularly, or 15 years ago, it seemed like it was almost swallowing the sport. It’s all we heard about. It’s very interesting how it has disappeared from the conversation. In part because the NFL has done something kind of brilliant and diabolical. Every time there’s a guy who comes forward with CTE research, they immediately hire him. They hire every guy who has an idea about this.

But I was thinking about just the moral question of this. I think we can now agree the CTE thing is not going to doom football. Could doom it at the high school level, the junior high level, as parents are less willing to let their kids play. But the NFL is not going to be stopped. Kind of the existential part of it is the idea of micro concussions. What if it turns out that every time you get any contact with your head, you are getting a micro concussion?

SI: We are having this conversation in Louisville, and you mentioned in the book that your favorite current player is Lamar Jackson. You mentioned him briefly in a section of the book on race. Can you get into that?

CK: I don’t think many people, especially people who look like me, want to be writing about race. It’s a troubling thing. My perspective is almost inherently myopic. It’s a very complicated thing. But you can’t talk about professional sports and football without talking about race to some degree. Now, in basketball, in some ways the conversation is easier because pro basketball is almost like a photo negative of society. It’s like 13% of the population is Black and the NBA, it’s probably 13% of the population is white. Almost all the ideas that we have about how society works in our kind of regular reality is sort of flipped in basketball. But football is a little stranger because the statistics, the ratio, is closer.

There’s also strange ideas within positions like offensive linemen tend to be white, defensive linemen tend to be Black. There are almost no Black punters. I kind of start talking about how the idea of someone like Christian McCaffrey when I was in fifth grade or fourth grade was impossible. That the idea that the best running back in the NFL could be a white guy whose game is based on speed. That would have almost been like a joke in an Airplane! movie or something. But now the conversation about race has changed. And the thing about Lamar Jackson is particularly interesting. So there was this long period in the ’60s and ’70s where it was extraordinarily common for a great Black high school quarterback to go to college and get moved to wide receiver or get moved to defensive back. And if that didn’t happen, if they went to Nebraska or Oklahoma or Clemson, they became like an option quarterback.

And that was also seen as somewhat disqualifying in terms of being an NFL quarterback. There was this idea that if you were mobile, if you were a real great runner, that even if you attempted to become a pocket passer, you would always be tempted to revert to that. I suppose, some people would say, like to create like a practical rationale for this racism. Doug Williams came out of Grambling and he was drafted in the first round. And I think part of it had to do with that as a senior, his rushing total was like -17 yards. He never ran. They were able to sort of classify him as being like the traditional quarterback.

Even into the 1990s, people like Steve Young would be criticized for running. It was seen as though that if you were a very athletic quarterback who ran the ball himself, there was a limit to how good your team could advance. Well, that changed starting with Michael Vick to some degree, but with a lot of guys to the point now where much of the language that was used to sort of marginalize and hurt Black quarterbacks in the past is now used in the exact same way as a compliment. They’re saying the exact same things.

In some ways, the caricature or the stereotype that they’re using is identical, but now it has been made positive. Lamar Jackson is a very interesting guy in the sense that he’s been MVP twice, and yet he is consistently criticized by guys on television who I’m pretty sure voted for him to be MVP, but it’s like a stylistic criticism. That is what is so interesting about this. No one would say, “He can’t play quarterback. He’s not a good quarterback. He doesn’t have the skills.” Nobody says that about them.

SI: He lasted till the last pick of the first round (in 2018), which tells me there was some resistance to the whole idea of the way Lamar plays quarterback.

CK: But he in some ways was kind of the tipping point in that now it’s almost the other way, that they almost over-index that. Somebody like Josh Allen now, part of his value is this added component that they can spread the field, snap him the ball on the shotgun and have him just go right up the gut. Which is like something that you run in junior high, but now NFL teams do this.

So there’s a section in the book where I kind of just talk about sort of the history of the Black quarterback, because it’s so visible. Seventy percent of quarterbacks in the NFL are white, but the position of quarterback gets 70% of the attention by the public. And it’s also very interesting that there’s very often Black starting quarterbacks, but less often Black backup quarterbacks. It’s almost like if you’re not exceptional, you have no chance to be there. You have to be great. You have to be indisputably great to be in that position. And if you’re just good, they’ll find someone else. I mean, it’s one of these things that’s still talked about.

We don’t really talk about race that much with any other position. If you listen to talk radio and stuff, sports talk radio, this will still come up though, because for one, the meaning of quarterback is so different than any other position. I mean, even as early as like, if you watch a movie from the 1950s and there’s like a teenager and he’s the most popular guy in school, he’s already the quarterback. That kind of transcends the idea of being a football player. If the idea is that he’s just like a generic football player, he’s probably kind of not smart. He’s kind of almost going to be like a Bluto-type character. But if you say he’s the quarterback, then it’s totally different. He’s also going to be good looking and he’s going to be popular and all these things.

SI: Absolutely. It is fraught with all kinds of characterizations beyond whether you throw a post pattern against a two-deep coverage.

CK: What’s also interesting about it is now up until the 1970s, for the most part, quarterbacks all called their own plays on the field. That’s why they would be called the field general. The last teams to do this were the Steelers with [Terry] Bradshaw, the Raiders were kind of a holdout. But what’s odd is we still see the quarterback almost pretend that he’s playing that role. The 49ers don’t even let their quarterbacks audible. It is so controlled that he can’t even change the play at the line of scrimmage. And yet we still look at [Brock] Purdy and we think of him differently than every other guy on the team in part because playing quarterback is difficult.

I’ve written 13 books. I was a journalist. I’ve done these things. There was nothing I’ve done in my life that was harder than trying to play quarterback, because the combination of what you have to understand intellectually and what you have to execute physically, in a situation where the pocket is always collapsing … What I always compare it to is like, you took biology in 10th grade and you’re going to cut open the frog and you have the biology book and you see the frog and you see all his lungs, gills, his heart, you see everything, everything’s color coded.

And then when you open up the frog for real, it’s just brown. It’s just like brown stuff.

That’s what playing quarterbacks like. I’ll admit, I was great at learning the plays, learning the audible system, explaining the plays I couldn’t actually execute. But then when the play actually happened, the guys were never where I thought they were going to be. I feel like I can remember in my mind every single time I ran a pass play that worked the way it was supposed to work. And I’m counting practice, too. There were so few situations where it actually happened the way I wanted and thought it would happen.

SI: To a large degree, you’re managing the best of a deteriorating situation after the snap. Having watched Indiana completely disrupt the sport, your thoughts about that and where college football is?

CK: For the product on the field, it is still my favorite sport. I think it is the most watchable, most entertaining sport. A lot of the things that I had always loved about college football still exists as a game. Everything else about it seems potentially catastrophic because they have just sort of full-on professionalized it.

There were always people who still had the ability to think like, “Well, we don’t really know [whether players are being paid under the table]. We can kind of live with this illusion.” Now that illusion is gone. The things that are so great to me about college sports and college football in particular are things like the regional quality. The fact that the way a team would play in the Big Ten was different than the way they played in the Pac-12. So when those teams played in the Rose Bowl, there was this kind of interesting discord. I thought it was very interesting before they had a playoff, how we didn’t really know who won the national championship and we just had to talk about it. I liked those things. I did not think that it was essential that we had this clear objective outcome.

Nor do I like this flattening of the sport now. In the past, say Nick Saban or whoever, you go into a kid’s house and you sit down at the table with his parents and you say like, “Look, he might not play when he’s a freshman. He might just play on special things when he’s a sophomore. Send him to my school. I’m going to mold him into a person. I’ll be a father figure to him in this way. I’ll be tough on him. I’ll be tough on him in a way you wouldn’t be, but I can be.” That kind of exists except now at the end of that conversation, the parent would just say like, “That’s great. Texas A&M offered $400,000. What’s your amount?”

[Curt] Cignetti at Indiana, he seems like a genius maybe in many contexts, but clearly the biggest thing is his evaluation of talent, particularly as a bargain. What kid can I take from James Madison and pay him less than all these other schools are paying? And in the short term, it’s actually good for college football, probably in terms of casual interest, because a casual person tends to like pro sports more than college sports. If you live in Indiana, it’s probably amazing that you’ve never had this experience before. And so in the short term, it probably will be good for the interest in college football, but I think long term it’s going to be a huge problem because with anything, sports or anything else, the key is not how many people like it? It’s how many people love it?

As a writer, there are a lot of people who like my books, but one person who loves my books is worth 50 people who like it because there’s tons of things I like and I don’t really give a s--- about. There’s tons of bands that if you ask me, Do I like them? I’d say yeah. And they’d be like, “When’s the last time you listened to it?” It might be like 40 years. I like them, but not like the bands I love. So I think that football at the college level is putting itself in a precarious position because it’s becoming financially fragile by being so large. It’s also risking the fact that maybe the kind of guy whose entire life is built around thinking about the Tennessee Volunteers, maybe his son won’t feel that way because his son will be watching essentially a pro version that’s not as good as the NFL.

When the NIL and the portal stuff happened, I feel like there was kind of a general consensus that this is going to lead to some unexpected teams suddenly being awesome. Now, I don’t think anyone thought it would be Indiana. I remember thinking maybe it’ll be like Liberty or Utah or BYU or something like that. So there was going to be a team. It just seemed impossible that it would be Indiana because of their history, and also because I think that there was an assumption there’s probably going to be four or five teams in the Big Ten that are just going to stack up (ahead of the Hoosiers).

SI: I feel like Vanderbilt being good at football is a real disruptor.

CK: Yes, it is totally plausible to imagine Vanderbilt winning the SEC in one of the coming years, and that is weird. And it feels like that should be something we should be happy about, but I’m not because if you’re a traditionalist, part of the reason that you like tradition is it makes you intellectually secure. I like the idea that, yes, I have a sense that certain programs are going to be good, Texas and Alabama. They had down periods, but for the most part, the best teams with the best teams for how many years? Sixty years? That tradition is a secure feeling.

More College Football from Sports Illustrated

Listen to SI’s college sports podcast, Others Receiving Votes, below or on Apple and Spotify. Watch the show on SI’s YouTube channel.