Why Football Matters: Free Your Mind

Football has made me a better person.

As my journey on the road to becoming a football nut indicates, I used to be a snob.

Who am I kidding? I’m still a snob.

Or rather, have snobby tendencies. But I’ve learned some key lessons in the last eight years. Obviously the old cliché never say never, or you can’t know what the future holds.

More importantly, I’ve learned to look below the surface. I let my jealousy and ignorance dismiss a sizable portion of the population. I assumed football was nothing more but meatheads chasing pigskin and its fans were people who couldn’t appreciate more elegant forms of entertainment. I was dead wrong on both counts.

Since then, I’ve filtered everything through a dialectical lens. Politics is just as polarizing as the sports/non-sports divide. Instead of pigheadedly making up my mind on an issue and jumping to denouncing the opposition, as I used to, I’ll try to see where they’re coming from. People don’t pick opinions out of thin air just to irritate me, but have reasons for their position that should be considered. I don’t always change my mind on an issue, but at least I can see where the other side is coming from.

I’m even eating healthier. Football was a ‘try it, you might like it’ proposition, just like eating veggies is. I’m still not choosing broccoli given my druthers, but I’m sticking with it, just like I had to when learning NCAA rulebook.

By putting aside my knee jerk reactions, I’ve been introduced to a world full of richer, more meaningful experiences. Perhaps I would have learned how to do so in some other way, but football expedited the process. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.