For the Love of Football Sunday

The NFL Sunday Ticket provides a rare occasion in which sitting around a TV set and staring intently stirs up so much excitement and encourages an environment of companionship and sociability. This rare sort of circumstance seems to be a unique product of the sports culture, something that only televised sports has the ability to elicit. No other example epitomizes the phenomenon better than the pairing of football and American men. Sundays are waste days anyway. Unless a person is a Christian or serious about brunches, watching football seems to be the one and only alternative. If the path to be followed is one down the latter, then the first day of the week begins -- albeit a late start, since everyone sleeps in on the weekends -- by a visit to the store. Here takes place the purchasing of the necessary supplies: chips, dip, and beer (unless you are in a state that does not permit the sale of alcohol on Sundays, in which case the beer run needs to be done the day before). Before or during the trip, phone calls are made to the guy pals to check in with everyone and confirm whose couch everyone is going to park on for the afternoon.

As people arrive in the living room of choice, the bags of chips are torn open, bottle caps popped off, and eyes peeled to the figures on the TV lining up and crashing into each other along the yard lines. The viewing experience is made all the more preferable if the screen is wide, flat, and in high definition, which means that if someone among the group owns a TV that meets these criteria, chances are that's the living room where they sit. There's typically not a whole lot of conversation going on; people may be tired from a late Saturday night but, more importantly, they simply want to sit back and take in the game. The company provides a more or less wordless companionship, aside from snippets of commentary about what's happening on the field and the occasional personal anecdote on the week's shenanigans. But of course there are also those moments of collective raw excitement: spasmodic banging on tables, leaping out of seats, and shouting at the tops of lungs in reaction to the team's highs and lows. It is these moments that electrify, or at least jolt out of a daydream, any nonbeliever that happens to be in the room.

It is in this uncomplicated way that the ritual of the NFL Sunday Ticket makes for a pleasantly lazy and yet energy-charged afternoon, spent with the best people to be lazy and act crazily with. To close the weekend -- or to start the week, depending on your view -- this sort of football afternoon could be the best relief.

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