Football Stats and Julia Roberts's Daughter

After this weeks' championship games, I’m aware that football season is sadly coming to a close. Football is one of my favorite parts about the fall and winter. It means being huddled on cold bleachers drinking hot chocolate (or beer…depending on the venue) surrounded by crisp air. Or it means sitting in around a television in someone’s living room or at a loud bar, surrounded by friends and family, eating (and drinking) carbohydrates. But best of all, it means having something completely out of your control that you can concentrate and invest all of your hope in for just a few hours at a time. It means being a part of a group that is unified (or polarized, depending on your loyalties) by the same driving force: your team’s success.

As far as having a team, I’m an orphan, a nomad, Switzerland. I’ve been accused of being a bandwagon fan, but it’s really difficult to actively follow a team when you don’t have cable and also don’t enjoy the over-stimulating environment of sports bars enough to frequent them on a semi-weekly basis. But I do really enjoy watching football and I can attribute this to two unlikely sources: NFL Blitz for Nintendo-64 and the sports fanatic that I dated for about a year in college. At the age of 16, NFL Blitz helped me understand the purpose of football and explained to me why people kept shouting “First Down!” whenever guys got tackled. However, NFL Blitz didn’t teach me anything about penalties because they didn’t exist in the game so calls like off-sides, false start, pass interference, holding, these meant nothing to me. But at least I understood what it meant when there was a “turnover on downs” and I will ever be indebted to you Nintendo-64 for that.

NFL Blitz gave me a good solid foundation of football knowledge and the overzealous sports fan that I dated in college helped fill in some of the gaps. In NFL Blitz, there were only 7 players and the only real position I was familiar with was quarterback. When I started having to watch more football in the fall of 2002 than I ever had in my life, it dawned on me that there were a lot of people on the field, and that these guys weren’t able to just run “Da Bomb” (the best play EVER from NFL Blitz) every time. When it became apparent that this boy I was dating liked football more than he liked talking to me, I decided to learn the game so I would be able to see and converse with him before February. (And then I was screwed because March Madness would begin and I never had any N64 games about basketball). So under the condescending tutelage of this sports-fanatic-boyfriend, I learned about the different positions of the 11 (not 7) players on the field, and I was soon able to identify the penalties as the flags were thrown. Our relationship made it to the Super Bowl that year, and I watched Tampa Bay beat Oakland (the scariest team in NFL history) snuggled up with him in the floor of a cold, dingy dorm room.

But I’ve decided, this football season especially, that no matter how much I enjoy watching football or understand the game, I will never be able to obtain, store, and regurgitate football statistics in the way that 99% of the male population can. It’s mind-blowing, fascinating, frightening, and weird. It’s like this unspoken connection between men. A wide-receiver makes an unbelievable catch (maybe they did run “Da Bomb” after all) and one guy will look at another guy and say, “Did he play for USC?” And the response is instantaneous, robotic even, “Yeah, but he was out his sophomore year for knee surgery.” Quarterback throws an interception. “Can’t be too hard on him. First interception in 168 passes.” How do guys know all of these things? How are they able to remember which college every player went to, how many rushing yards he has this season, his pass percentage, or tackles and assists. And then there is the knowledge about the coaches. “He used to coach for Minnesota State, from 83-89.” (Really? You forgot your fiancée’s birthday last year, but you remembered that?) I want to know how this Rainmanish knowledge is instilled in boys and where are girls when this is happening? What are they being specialized in?

Now before you go getting all Betty Friedan on me, I know there are girls that are just as capable of spitting out football stats and knowing the coaches social security numbers just like the big boys, but it’s a small percentage, comparatively. And I will argue that these girls grew up with older brothers and dads that forced them at a very young age to watch Sports Center for hours. It comes natural to them and they are the envy and awe of non-stats-spitting girls all over the world. They participate in the cryptic sports banter and the rest of us girls stare at them, heads cocked to the side, amazed and impressed with our mouths open just a little bit. If I truly wanted to participate (which I’m okay with not) I could study, and learn, make flashcards, but it’s kind of like learning a language. These code-switching ladies who are able to talk sports grew up with this talk; they learned it in the prime language acquisition time, called language plasticity, a linguistic door that closes by the time you are about 8 years old. I can learn football language now, but I will never be mistaken as a native speaker; there will always be an accent and I might mix up some of the grammar every once in a while.

This also leaves me wondering that if most guys have this vast store of football knowledge, what is the equivalent for us ladies? I know the areas that we are knowledgeable about exist on an individual level and are not necessarily related to our gender, but what realm of society do most girls appear to “naturally” know? I asked this last night while I was watching football at a friend’s apartment, and I wasn’t pleased with the answers. We came up with brand names (I fail here) and movie star trivia. I emphatically disagreed because they all just seemed too shallow and unintelligent. But when one of the guys tried to tell me that Cameron Diaz was in Runaway Bride, I quickly corrected him. “You’re thinking My Best Friend’s Wedding. Cameron Diaz AND Julia Roberts are in that one. Runaway Bride is Julia and Richard Gere,” (duh). And I could also tell you that Julia Robert’s daughter’s name is Hazel.