How Football Shaped America

Football followed baseball into America's consciousness by a few years in the late 19th century. While professional baseball became the national pastime and provided the country with heroes and a modern mythology, football weaved its way into the fabric of American society. In small towns, high school football games became the focal points of activity on Friday nights. Colleges became identified as much for their football teams as their academic traditions. In the early years of television, football proved to be a catalyst that brought millions of viewers to the small screen. Football also helped foster integration in Southern colleges when civil rights efforts were struggling in the late 1960s and early 1970s. And Super Bowl Sunday has become the most popular secular tradition in the nation.

Football and Toughness

As one of the writers of the film "Any Given Sunday," former NFL player Jamie Williams noted that baseball is what America aspires to be, but football more accurately reflects the country's true identity: "We are a warring nation. We define ourselves through our strategy in violence. We have tactically and strategically put ourselves in a power position, which is what football is all about." In the factory towns of the north and Midwest, the toughness of football was especially appealing, which is why the National Football League's earliest and longest-lasting teams were formed in cities like Chicago, Detroit, Green Bay, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. Football provided an outlet for that toughness, both as a spectator sport and as an activity for boys growing up in those communities.

Football vs. Academics

From its earliest incarnations, football has had a place on college campuses. Often a college's reputation and public image is shaped by the performance of its football team. As you might expect, conflicts between the academic interests at a college and its football program have simmered and erupted on campuses for many years. The 1940 Broadway hit, "The Male Animal," by Eliot Nugent and James Thurber, for example, pit a college's former football hero against an intellectual professor in a thoughtful comedy with elements that still ring true. Because college football and pro football are among the most popular sports in the nation, the sport has come to represent in many ways the clash between popular culture and intellectual pursuits.

Football and the South

While college campuses and much of Southern society remained stubbornly segregated through the 1960s and into the '70s, it was football that helped colleges catch up and helped to start to change some minds about integration. After the fully integrated USC Trojans beat the all-white University of Alabama Crimson Tide in Tuscaloosa in 1970, Alabama coach Bear Bryant told his school's leaders that it was time to start recruiting African-American players. What helped Bryant's cause was the remarkable performance of USC running back Sam "Bam" Cunningham, an African-American who grew up in Alabama, but wasn't recruited by any Southern schools. In their book, "One Night, Two Teams," Winston Groom and Steven Travers quote an Alabama assistant who said years later, "Sam Cunningham did more to integrate Alabama in 60 minutes than Martin Luther King did in 20 years."

Football and Small Town America

At the high school level, Friday nights in the fall have become centered around the games of the local football team in small towns and neighborhoods in big cities across the country. The American icon of the high school jock, symbolizing all that is popular and cool among teenage males, is inevitably portrayed as a football player. The football cheerleader continues to represent the female side of high school popularity. While a certain romance floats about the Friday night football game, the popular H.G. Bissinger book "Friday Night Lights" shows that aspects of an obsession with a high school football program can be unhealthy for a community, too.

Football and Television

In his book, "How Football Explains America," ESPN football reporter Sal Paolantonio makes the case that, contrary to widely accepted belief, it wasn't television that made football so popular in the 1950s and '60s, but the other way around. He notes that television needed young male adults, and in the cold weather of late fall and winter, Sunday afternoon coverage became a huge draw for guys of all ages, and soon televised football games helped shape how Americans celebrate Thanksgiving, New Year's Day and even Monday nights in the fall. The Super Bowl annually draws tens of millions of people in the U.S. to hold parties and watch the NFL's championship game on a day that has become a de facto national holiday.