A couple of weeks ago, via the magic of the internet, I was listening to a local AM radio broadcast of an Ohio State football game. Though they were fairly clearly en route to a win versus San Diego State an observation by the broadcast team’s sideline reporter - former OSU quarterback Jim Karsatos - revealed a source for concern.

Karsatos: I’m so frustrated. We’re dancing with them when we should be punching them in the mouth!

(That “quote” is, admittedly, from memory, but I’ll stand by the key elements – frustration and the distinction between dancing and punching in the mouth.)

As football fans would recognize, the charming phrase to “punch someone in the mouth” can be used with a relatively specialized football meaning. Namely, it refers to running the ball more or less straight up the middle of the field as opposed to passing the ball or running the ball out toward the sidelines.

One way of looking at Karsatos’ lament, then, is that it is a figurative expression of a fairly specific point of football strategy. I.e., he believed Ohio State would be more successful running the ball straight at the middle of the San Diego State Defense, rather than trying to beat them with plays to the outside of the field.

If this is correct, though, shouldn’t we expect – when strategy dictates more passing or plays to the outside of the field – to hear a report in which the sideline reporter demands angrily: “Why are we punching them in the mouth? We should be dancing with them!!” Not, as they say, bloody likely.

So far, this is generally a rumination on the discourse of sports broadcasting, but it leads to something that might at step toward answering E Hayot’s call for “serious formal work on sports.”

While sports have general associations attached to them – football as a whole is taken to be more violently masculine than baseball, say – the punch/dance space within football is a useful reminder of the degree to which particular performances and strategies within sports can shape a variety of socially legible experiences.

It is the case, for instance, that a straightforward running play in football looks quite different (in person or on TV) from a pass or lateral run:

At the snap of the ball, do the offensive lineman surge forward, initiating contact with the defensive players (this would be mouth-smashing), or do they stand up and retreat backward, absorbing and redirecting the on-rushing defense (“Why are they dancing?”)?

Running plays are quick to unfold – their success or failure is apparent with a speed that feels almost instant as the offensive line either has or hasn’t created a lane through which the back can run. Passing plays, on the other hand, are punctuated by discernable segments, the quarterback drops back and surveys the field, then – in a moment of pregnant tension that shares something with a basketball shot, perhaps – the ball is in the air, then, it arrives at its destination to be caught, dropped, knocked away or intercepted. On television – the means by which I imagine most people enjoy a football game – this tension is augmented by the scale of the screen in that the player to whom the quarterback is throwing the ball is generally off-screen at the moment the ball takes flight.

In an aesthetic space, these differences are surely interpretable. And I would venture to say that as it circulates through, in the surplus of language we can see the aesthetic reception of the difference between smashing teams in the mouth and dancing with them. As it has evolved over the decades, football is currently more dancing than ever before – especially at the college level. So, if there is masculinist pressure toward smashing, it seems to face a tough opponent in its cousin Practicality.

All football plays, of course, require feats of strength, balance and speed – but there is a difference in how things look that gets mapped on to the meaning of the game beyond the game itself. The prevailing pressures to win first and foremost are such that we’re unlikely to get much explicitly aesthetic or cultural accounting of players’ or coaches’ strategy. But it seems of some interest – hopefully these notes start to sketch out the rudiments of what could be really interesting work – that the rules and responsive strategies of football translate into movement and spectacle that can both establish and threaten the implicit male subject that it centers for teams, players and fans.

Otherwise, who could possibly care whether one bunch of strangers beats another bunch of strangers in a made-up contest?