Review of the Day: Football by Chuck Klosterman

I rarely watch American football, but I liked this book quite a bit. It is a series of more or less self-contained essays on the topic including: fantasy football, gambling, race, an assessment of the greatest players in the history of the game (Jim Thorpe and Jim Brown, among them), and other topics. This is my third Klosterman book and I anticipate I will read a fourth in the near future. He also does a good job narrating his own audiobook, at least in my opinion.

If the book has a flaw it is Klosterman’s occasional exuberance that leads him into going into too much detail for the casual fan or the person who almost never watches or talks about football.

Here are a few sample passages:

… football is always, always, always better on television than it is in person. The televised experience is so superior to the in-person experience that most people watching a football game live are mentally converting what they’re seeing into its TV equivalent, without even trying (p. 19).

What makes Texas different is not a manifestation of what happened in any one game or any one season. It’s the manifestation of a quasi-antediluvian ethos that makes small-town football a MacGuffin for everything else. It’s as if nothing would happen at all, or even exist, if football were removed from the equation (p. 76).

In fact, if asked what class of professionals are most consistently competent at their job, my answer would be whoever is setting the betting lines in various Las Vegas casinos. If I had a brain tumor, I’d want a neurosurgeon to handle the operation, but if I wanted to know the likelihood of my post-surgery survival, I’d trust an oddsmaker from Caesars Palace way more than any doctor. Bookmakers know things that cannot be known (p. 140).

I wish I loved sports, and particularly football, a lot less than I do. It consumes too much of my memory and too much of my time (p. 273).

Kindle and libro fm audiobook. 298 pgs. 8 February 2026.