mylesudland

[mylesudland]

Some thoughts on youth sports

Baxter Holmes at ESPN has a fascinating story out about the NBA’s concern over injuries in its young players. For anyone who has spent time training — at any level — the concerns outlined will be ones you’ve heard before: a lack of mobility in explosive athletes and a lack of flexibility in strong athletes create ticking time bombs that go off in the form of broken legs, broken ankles, and warped backs. 

The concerns voiced by executives and doctors at the NBA level are also familiar in the modern world of youth sports — by specializing in one sport at a young age, these athletes are set up for disappointment. They will be disappointed by their health and disappointed by their in-competition performance. In 2019, the issues surrounding the culture of youth sports are not new. The parents, the kids, the coaches, the administrators in every part of the country at every level in every sport have heard this story a thousand times. 

And the “answers” end up sounding a lot like what AAU board member Rod Seaford told ESPN. 

“The NCAA and the NBA loves to lay fault for their ills at the feet of youth sports or AAU,” Seaford told ESPN. “That's a pretty common thing. We've approached the NCAA and NBA with various proposals [only] to get lip service. We don't get much serious conversation. I don't doubt that it's a legitimate concern. But it's really easy to lay all those faults of the youth coach.”

The only answer is that there is no answer. Except that as I see it, the current youth-sports-industrial complex has a pretty straightforward incentive structure that perpetuates and accentuates that unathletic athletes that are filtering into the highest levels of American sports. It’s called the NCAA. 

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For a brief time, I ran cross country in college. My results are not inspiring. But my path to college athletics began during a heated dinner conversation in the winter of 2006 when I told my parents I was going to give up baseball. It was a decision my father didn’t really understand: why did I need to run all year round? 

The previous fall I’d had a decent cross country season for a sophomore. Especially with the limited training I’d done the previous summer. After a string of races that showed promise, I ended up with a hairline fracture in my leg that resulted from running a race on an already stress-fractured leg. I ended up in a hard cast for a month. For me, the injury did not prompt questions about whether running was a viable long-term pursuit — was there, for instance, something anatomically that would disadvantage me as a long distance runner? — but instead convinced me that a tighter focus on running is what would stave off these injuries in the future. 

In the spring of 2006, the first during which I gave up baseball to pursue distance running as a singular pursuit, I ended up with a lingering shin injury and eventually my season ended with torn ankle ligaments after hitting a rock the wrong way on a run. For the second time in six months, I was in a hard cast. 

The next summer’s training led to a fall with a nagging hip injury. My results did not improve from the prior year. I survived the season, however, without a cast. Then the winter and spring of 2007 proved relatively injury free. And the results were just good enough that the opportunity to run in college was realistic. This, of course, had been the point all along. 

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In March, the public was made aware of something we all sort of knew was happening, we just didn’t know how. Rich parents were buying their way into college. 

And while the FBI explicitly outlined that putting your name on a building and getting your descendants admission to an elite university as a result is not illegal, paying someone to take the SATs for your kid is. So is sending money to a fixer who sends some money to a college coach who then makes a spot for your kid on a team. Even if they’ve never played the sport. But the system that I think was laid most bare in Operation Varsity Blues is found in the name: it’s about the sports. 

If you watch any college sports, you’ve see a version of this commercial before: “There are over 400,000 NCAA student athletes,” we’re told, “and most of them will be going pro in something other than sports.

And so while the NBA is worried about the load borne by kids playing over 100 games a year between AAU and their school-sponsored team, for those kids the NCAA is the finish line. 

And as the FBI’s investigation into college admissions bribery outlined, one of the surest ways to overachieve your academic limitations is to be a good athlete. 

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My modest success running long distances encouraged both of my brothers — always superior athletes to me — to pursue running both at a younger age and more seriously than myself. Both of them had considerable success. Both of them attended elite universities they would never have been accepted to based on their academic achievements as a result of this athletic success. The specialization that came to the Udland family ultimately worked out. 

Most weekends in the summer now we play golf together. None of us are particularly great. But the thing with golf is that everyone always thinks that if they could just spend more time practicing... So when we get together, the conversation sometimes leads to “what could have beens” about how things might be if we’d focused on, say, the three sports we all played as young kids (football, basketball, baseball) once we got to high school. Or what kind of golfers we could be if we’d played in high school, and so on. 

It’s the idle talk of former athletes re-living a not-lived version of their glory days. But what these conversations usually ignore is that the specialization we might now dream away was the right decision. It opened to each of us a college experience that would have otherwise been impossible. 

And so when we speak of the ills of youth sports, we must remember that the parents are not motivated because of professional sports, but about college sports. And while playing a sport in college is not realistic for most youth athletes, it is way more realistic than playing a professional sport. And the benefits — namely, an education at a university you might otherwise not be qualified to attend — are worth the risks of having more fun as a kid. Or, at least, that’s how many parents see it. 

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When I sat down to write this piece, I don’t think I meant to apologize for youth sports culture. And I’m not sure I really did. But re-reading this piece it seems that I have a lot of sympathy for a culture that directs money away from families who don’t have a lot to spare and takes time away from kids who won’t ever get their youth back. 

The youth sports industry is fueled by bitter parents who think things should’ve gone a different way and put that anxiety on a child who is not equipped to know they’re but a pawn in an insecure adult’s do-over. Youth sports should be fun. And for many kids, they are not. 

But the incentives that underwrite the youth sports industry are also not hard to decipher. Athletic achievement for many kids unlocks academic — and in turn, professional — doors that otherwise don’t exist. You can be a national level concert pianist and make your pitch to Harvard on that basis, but if you’re a high school boy that breaks 9:00 for the 2 mile, you’re pretty much in. 

This argument is also the one used by NCAA executives who believe that paying college athletes is not justified. “They get an education,” you hear the amateurism defender saying. “That’s the payment.” And for an Olympic sport athlete, this may well be true. For the members of a major football program where television rights and ticket sales bring in tens of millions of dollars a year, this argument is obfuscating bullshit. 

This argument also leaves out the kids who end up at schools they aren’t really qualified to attend. But the lack of investment in public schools in America is beyond the scope of this post. (The demonization of public schools is one of our nation’s most shameful public policy stances.) 

Holmes’ article simply struck a chord for me because the NBA viewing itself as a relevant stakeholder in the culture of youth sports seems to me like an odd position for the league to take.

The league is defined by a dozen or so stars and their backgrounds are highly varied. LeBron James was The Chosen One at age 16 and has, improbably, exceeded that hype. Kevin Durant went to a major university to play college ball, was a star from the beginning of his freshman season, then entered the league and was one of its best players within three years. Kawhi Leonard and Paul George were overlooked high school players, mid-first round picks, and have grown into themselves. Giannis Antetokounmpo’s journey to the NBA from Greece earned the 60 Minutes treatment. 

All of which is to say that the NBA’s worry about youth sports matters little to the league’s players that actually define for the public what the sport really is about. Which is about stars. 

Certainly, some NBA general managers would like the deeper parts of the league’s pool to be more mobile and less injury prone. The freak leg fracture suffered by Julius Randle — a product of the AAU system and the University of Kentucky’s NBA farm system — was certainly a blow to Randle, his family, and the Los Angeles Lakers. 

But the lesser versions of Julius Randle, the kid from Dayton he played in a summer league tournament back in 2011 that ended up getting a scholarship to Kent State, probably doesn’t regret his choice to overextend himself during high school summers. Because while that kid might’ve had his eye on Ohio State, a scholarship came through. The gamble paid off. 

And when you’re at a desk making calls to sell P&C insurance in suburban Cleveland, you don’t worry about your chronically stiff ankle in the morning. 

Instead you wonder what could’ve been with your buddies, knowing it worked out just fine. 

[mylesudland]

Aaron Sorkin is bored

I’m on the treadmill at the gym and CNN is on and Aaron Sorkin is talking to Fareed Zakaria. I’m not listening but I see the chyron is something about Sorkin’s take on the 2020 election. Fine.

And though I could sort of guess at it because no one thinks Aaron Sorkin isn’t going to step in it when he’s asked to assess the State of Play on a cable news show, he did quite a bit better.

At the same time Sorkin is doing this interview I’m listening to a podcast that has both Bill Simmons’ takes on the NFL and later features an interview with Aaron Sorkin. The Sorkin bit begins with the two of them immediately launching into another complaint about young people. It was more or less the appetizer for Sorkin’s more public political take.

“See, I really worry about creativity going forward in America” Simmons says, before going through the menu of boredom-slayers available to young people now. “Boredom, I think, is like the greatest thing you can have sometimes creatively.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” Sorkin says. “And there are too many...easy boredom killers. I’m the parent of a teenager, so I’ve raised a daughter entirely in the digital world. And it’s changing our kids.” Simmons says he doesn’t want the conversation to be just two old guys complaining about things, though Sorkin assures him -- “But we’re right.”

My question is: what, exactly, do these guys think the digital world is?

The digital world is the most boring place imaginable. It’s a stream of images that show celebrities and your friends having a great time with their friends that are not you. It’s a real-time news feed exposing every injustice happening in the world and how you are being institutionally neutered so that there’s nothing you can do about it. Even though you’re still allowed to vote. For now. The digital world sticks Donald Trump on your screen every four seconds to remind you the reality TV host is in fact the President of the United States. The digital world provides cover for any person with any idea to say their idea is right.

The digital world’s primary feature is the internet, a global meeting place we are required to visit -- for school, for work, to talk to our families, to more or less prove that we are alive today -- which is run by authoritarians that choose to amplify voices claiming everything is too liberal. It is hard to think of something worse than the internet and the only reason we’re there is because we are bored.

Like a bag of chips that contains no nutritional value but simulates the feeling of being full, the internet provides users with an endless stream of content that will pass the time on the clock and approximate the feeling of not being alone. But the reason we’re driven to the internet is because we are all, in fact, very much alone.

Writing in The Baffler, Kate Wagner explores how internet is not just in a constant state of change, but a constant state of destruction.

“Considering the average website is less than ten years old, that old warning from your parents that says to ‘be careful what you post online because it’ll be there forever’ is like the story your dad told you about chocolate milk coming from brown cows, a well-meant farce,” Wagner writes. “On the contrary, librarians and archivists have implored us for years to be wary of the impermanence of digital media; when a website, especially one that invites mass participation, goes offline or executes a huge dump of its data and resources, it’s as if a smallish Library of Alexandria has been burned to the ground... Ignored is the scope and species of the lost material, or what it might have meant to the scant few who are left to salvage the digital wreck.”

The internet’s modern insult isn’t just that you have to exist online to prove you exist irl -- Has a friend ever told you they’re seeing someone but then said they couldn’t find them on Google? The immediate assumption is that this person is a serial killer. -- it’s that your online presence requires you fulfill an ever-higher burden of proof. It requires more profiles to update and more passwords to change. As Wagner notes, “roughly 90 percent of time spent on our phones is devoted to apps—not the web.” And every app is its own private hellscape.

There’s Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, an email address, an AppleID (which brings you to iMessage and the App Store), a Spotify account (linked to Facebook, of course), a Netflix login, an Amazon account, Slack, Venmo, Uber, Lyft, three newspaper subscriptions, and we’re on the first of three iPhone homescreens. All of your information has either been stolen or is going to be stolen from these accounts.

The internet we know now is also merely an iteration. The internet exists for small slivers of time, not just in the grand scheme of all human life but in the context of any one human’s life. The internet that I grew up with, which is similar to the internet Wagner grew up with, is an internet my children will not know. No one knows it even now, all they can do is remember it.

One day I will be an old grumpy man like Aaron Sorkin. Hopefully I will not be asked to opine on the state of the Democratic party on television. But in Sorkin’s displeasure with the modern moment I think most young people see a part of themselves that for now can be approached with a bit of detached irony.

The part of themselves that has seen a young cousin spend four hours at Christmas texting on Snapchat without looking up and wondered why their aunt and uncle would give an 11 year old a cell phone because I didn’t get my first phone until 14. And that phone didn’t even have texting. I also shared it with my brothers. Kids these days, amirite Aaron Sorkin?

And I think our (alright fine, MY) discomfit with Sorkin’s commentaries is less about what he actually said -- which, on its face, is not that interesting: it will be said again, is being said right now, has been said from time immemorial -- than that he exposes how we’ve gotten it completely backwards.

The digital world so bemoaned by Sorkin is literally meaningless. The internet is not a boredom killer, it is boredom. The connected life we all live now is not the cause of a collective feeling of loss we carry with us everywhere. It is the symptom.

[mylesudland]

No one cares what they’re talking about

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to a stage on Tuesday to talk about augmented reality. 

This is sort of like virtual reality, except the term contains the sort of tech-industry nuance that makes everyone involved feel like this is something bigger than just placing a 3D image inside of a picture of your kitchen table. (Look, who am I to act like the technology behind this isn’t cool, but come on.) 

What Mark Zuckerberg was talking about is part killing Snapchat and part making the world look like this picture, which I think seems likely to define everything about his worldview. 

In this picture — taken in early 2016 — we see Zuckerberg clearly excited about whatever is happening in the room because everyone is wearing a headset he thinks is great, even though it’s plainly ridiculous. And the look on Zuckerberg’s face belies any sense that no reasonable person would look at this scene see “the future”; they would see a parody of it. 

Zuckerberg clearly cannot see himself. (And while we are all necessarily limited to only viewing the world through our eyes and out of our skull, part of the challenge of human existence is understanding, in bits and pieces, that we are not alone and not existing in isolation. The challenge of life is discovering the moments when we look like Zuckerberg, striding down a convention hall all alone but thinking we’re not, and course correcting.) 

Which brings us back to Tuesday’s speech at the latest Facebook developer conference. 

Business Insider’s Matt Weinberger writes:

It's no secret Mark Zuckerberg is pinning Facebook's prospects on augmented reality — technology that overlays digital imagery onto the real world, like Snapchat's signature camera filters.

At this year's F8 conference, taking place this week, Zuckerberg doubled down on the company's ambitious 10-year master plan, which was first revealed in 2016. According to this timeline, Facebook expects to turn artificial intelligence, ubiquitous internet connectivity, and virtual and augmented reality into viable parts of its business over the next decade. [...]

In the short term, Facebook's play for augmented reality is going to look a lot like competing with Snapchat — and in a meaningful way, it is. Facebook needs developer and user love, so it needs to keep offering fun and funny tools to keep people from moving away from using its apps.

In the long term, though, this is Facebook versus everybody else to usher in an age of a new kind of computing — and pretty much every tech company out there will get caught in the crossfire, as Apple, Google, Microsoft, and more rush out their responses to this extremely existential, but still meaningful, threat.

Matt argues that, basically, Facebook is going after the smartphone. 

Which is just about perfect. 

Because the entire genre within which Zuckerberg is working is one pioneered by Steve Jobs, and a genre that peaked when he introduced iPhone, which really made “smartphone” not just a viable product category but a thing that continues to change the world. 

In the mid-’00s, Jobs brought the broader culture into his famous reality distortion field with addresses at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC), with his performances climaxing with the 2007 unveiling of iPhone.

And in the years that followed this initial launch, each new WWDC keynote from Jobs announcing the latest iteration of iPhone was more hyped than the last. These performances not only created consumer and tech history in real-time, but provided us with the kind of “look how great the future will be” response the public needed in the years following the financial crisis. 

Jobs, then, was successful not only because he is Steve Jobs but because he was selling the right product at the perfect time. iPhone hasn’t been great in a vacuum. Neither, of course, has Facebook succeeded alone.

But so while Jobs is so obviously a more capable speaker than Zuckerberg — and current Apple CEO Tim Cook — what Jobs introduced us to is actually cool. Jobs and Apple brought to the masses a slick, complete, and brand new consumer experience. Facebook is introducing incremental engineering improvements. 

It is, of course, impossible to separate the current success of iPhone with the hindsight vision of it as a revolutionary product. 

However, taking an iPod and attaching it to a phone that also connects to the internet, and looks like that, was such a massive leap forward in 2007 I think we’d be impressed with our first look at that device right now. If the aliens come down to Earth tomorrow and want to know what our best technology is, the original iPhone will suffice. 

So while Jobs’ skill as an orator as salesman is superior to Zuckerberg, his material was also better. Except that I think this assertion sort of takes at face value that these tech presentations need to exist. They don’t. And, with HBO’s top-ticking show “Silicon Valley” due back on the air next Sunday, I think it’s clear we’re past the point when an earnest tech product presentation is going to resonate beyond the level of creating new material for the satirists. 

Because, sure, satire is dead in the age of Andy Borowitz and Donald Trump, but wearing one signature color of casual clothing and discussing your vision for making the world better by placing virtual items in the physical space of your platform’s users is a set piece Mike Judge would find too much.  

Partly because we’ve all seen this shtick, but mostly because no one cares — they are too busy dicking around on their iPhones anyway. 

[mylesudland]

Razors and Underwear

One of the most tired tropes in media is that millennials value experiences over stuff.

Certainly, millennials have a proclivity to advertise — or rather, find friendly media to advertise — their plans to retire young and do “something meaningful” (since we all know working for a living isn’t that, right?). This would push forward the idea that millennials care not about raising children and being, I don’t know, boring or whatever, but doing Cool Things, etc. etc. 

But millennials still buy plenty of stuff, will buy plenty of stuff, and my suspicion is that this cliché will die as we see the current millennial generation mature into an improving job market and their prime child-rearing ages. As I’ve written before, I think millennials will be just like their parents.

Moving outside of millennial employment improving and household formation increasing, I think we see the outlines of this take shape when you survey the advertising partners for many millennial-focused new media ventures and take stock of some of the more successful venture-backed companies of the last several years, particularly those targeted at millennial men. 

The Tony Kornheiser Show is a radio-show-turned-podcast which I listen to almost daily and quite enjoy. It is basically a room of people 50 and older ranting about sports (and other things) in the kind of way anyone who’s ever listened to sports radio will find familiar. This is where the “hot take” originated.

Some listeners might not care for the “get off my lawn” ethos of the program, but there’s something about I find both familiar (I listened to “Mike and the Mad Dog” almost every day as a kid) and somehow, comforting. It feels good, I guess, to not feel like you’re getting overly serious analysis on something as inherently unserious as last week’s NFL games or whether the Washington Nationals are doling out their free agency money the right way. 

Anyway. 

The show is sponsored primarily by consumer packaged goods startups that cater to what seems likely to be the program’s core audience: millennial men.

Harry’s, MeUndies, Blue Apron, SeatGeek, and Uber are all regular sponsors (among others like Omaha Steaks and Boxed). 

But the first two on this list are of particular interest to me, mostly because they address things I am sure most young men — millennial or otherwise — hadn’t really thought about until they grew up, got jobs, and left their parents’ sphere of influence. Namely: how to keep yourself presentable and basically clothed.

These might seem like the kinds of small matters only a helpless caricature of a barbaric young man can’t handle on their own, but I can assure you that many, many men did not think about buying shaving supplies or underwear until their 25th birthday. 

But so these sponsors of this show get me thinking about a point that’s been made by Ben Thompson over at Stratechery, and one he made quite clearly when analyzing Unilever’s $1 billion purchase of Dollar Shave Club. Namely, that the entire television bundle and broader content-and-advertising complex is propped up by live sports and consumer packaged goods. The thinking, then, is that as both the habits for consuming video content (or any content) and the habits for buying consumer packaged goods change, both parties are in for rude awakenings.

Here’s the relevant bit from Ben’s post:

I would tend to agree, but I don’t think this necessarily results in the bottom falling out of either industry so much as this is a problem for the industry’s entrenched players.

Harry’s and MeUndies are both very clearly problems for Gillette and Fruit of the Loom, among other legacy producers of razors and underwear (Schick, Hanes, Jockey, Braun, and so on). But more than Harry’s and MeUndies being problems in terms of how they serve customers, these companies are problems in terms of how they acquire and keep customers. 

Gillette and Fruit of the Loom acquire customers by owning shelf space in pharmacies and department stores, as well as advertising on cable and network television, online outlets, and so on. 

Harry’s and MeUndies, meanwhile, acquire customers almost exclusively by buying digital advertising, be it on a podcast or website, and then selling subscriptions to their products. (Hence Unilever’s acquisition of Dollar Shave Club.) The pitch from Harry’s is that it’s razor-buying made simple, while MeUndies argues that it offers a superior product at a nearly premium, but still affordable, price point. 

And while the origins of this post are perhaps a bit too reliant on anecdata for some readers, I suspect that many of us who’ve grown up in a world saturated with advertising don’t appreciate how good this stuff is. I am not hearing ads on podcasts for MeUndies and Harry’s razors because that’s the only space they could afford, but because these companies know consumer trends are working in their favor. 

Their target audience of young professionals is growing older and, as a result, seeking solutions on some of life’s basic modern needs. And these young professionals listen to podcasts. This quite literally is not rocket science — these companies will better find me in my ears than through television screens.

The stories we seem to most often hear, or perhaps most often remember, are those that take on outliers. Millennials retiring young, shunning “stuff,” and so on. This is obvious, but I think often forgotten when considering why we see and hear the advertising we see and hear.

Advertising is not so much a flailing attempt to get consumers to do something, but to push consumer behavior that, whether these consumers know it or not, has been more or less predetermined and then to push that seeming choice in a certain direction. We don’t see advertising, but rather media stories, about young millennial retirees because 1) there aren’t many and 2) there’s nothing there to sell. 

And so I don’t find the question of whether millennials will end up being like their parents all that interesting of a question. The answer seems obvious. 

What’s interesting about the maturing millennial generation is how that macro outcome looks different on a micro level. How are we advertised to? What answers do incumbent and startup brands offer us as consumers? And whether the winners (consumers) and losers (legacy brands) will continue to be the same.

[mylesudland]

Bill Simmons’ Vanity Project Was The Top For ESPN

The top is in for ESPN. 

And the top was hit with Grantland.

Launched to much fanfare back in 2011, Grantland was the website ESPN gave resident overgrown teenager Bill Simmons to keep him at the company. 

As others have commented since Simmons’ departure — which at the time seemed to doom the site’s future existence and now, with 5 months’ hindsight, most certainly has — the site was for writers by writers. By which I take folks to mean the site publishes long pieces that are the kind of length only a writer could find acceptable: these pieces do not suit rigorous editors or discerning readers. 

And so it was. 

But then Simmons was fired after going on the radio program of former ESPNer and now NBCer Dan Patrick and bashing Roger Goodell. (Simmons had previously been suspended for calling Goodell a liar, but the real crime was going on a non-ESPN property, a big no-no in Bristol.) 

And the Grantland project was basically over. 

But of course, this is a sideshow. Grantland is a small website that when it’s finally rolled up we’ll look back on and say “Oh yeah, remember that?” Perhaps we’ll read some of its writers tomorrow. 

I wrote back in July that based on reports from The Hollywood Reporter and The Wall Street Journal that the company wanted to cut costs — moves that were also reported around the same time that high-priced talent like Simmons and Keith Olbermann were shown the door — that something appeared to be happening at ESPN that was not great for the company’s future prospects. Or, more broadly, the cable industry. 

Then there was the summer meltdown of media stocks, which was sort of set off by Disney CEO Bob Iger’s long defense of ESPN on the company’s earnings conference call, which had more than a hint of “nothing to see here folks keep moving on” that roundly spooked investors who were also simultaneously digesting poor results from cable giant Viacom.

As tends to be the case, nothing happened for a while and then it was all at once.

And now the actual fat-trimming is here: layoffs are coming to ESPN, reportedly tomorrow. 

Meanwhile James Andrew Miller is writing in Vanity Fair that ESPN might keep Grantland open to prove it can move on without Simmons. 

But when you’re the so-called “Worldwide Leader in Sports” and you’re laying off about 4% of your staff while reports are flying about a messy breakup with a guy who has a popular podcast, you’ve completely lost the thread. 

ESPN broadcasts Monday Night Football, the college football playoff, and I’m sure it’s thinking about how to position itself for a Super Bowl when those rights are up for bidding next. 

A robust over-the-top streaming infrastructure alongside airing ESPN on ABC for national broadcasting in 2022, when you’re going to have what, 250 million people around the world watching the game?

That’s got to be the long game here for ESPN, not this small potatoes haggling about a staffer who developed a devoted following of vocal young men.

And yet here we are, talking about people losing their jobs, Disney’s one-time golden goose property trimming fat, and bloggers-turned-media-primma-donnas grabbing headlines. 

What are the baseball playoffs on tonight? TBS and Fox. 

What are the Masters on? CBS. 

What is the NCAA Basketball Tournament on? TBS, TNT, CBS. 

The Super Bowl is played on Fox, NBC, and CBS. ESPN gets one NFL playoff game. 

ESPN shows the most live sports, but airing 30 college football games on Saturday’s, publicly feuding with someone who, for all intents and purposes, had been given internal hush money to run his own fiefdom, and then cutting jobs is not a good look. 

Reports on the matter indicate that ESPN would command a significant premium to any other cable channel, by a VERY wide margin, in an over-the-top offering. 

But how practical is that, really?

I don’t know, of course, and probably neither does Disney. 

But what seems to have happened here is that ESPN became the unquestioned leader in sports coverage right as cable’s power was peaking, and then allowed a single digital media figure to come in over the top of that. 

Which cut the legs out of the whole thing. 

[mylesudland]

It’s Not The Real Thing, But Then It Never Could’ve Been — Some Thoughts on “The End of the Tour”

Jason Segal is not David Foster Wallace. And yet of course he’d like to be. So would I. So would, probably, many people.

In “The End of The Tour,” the biopic about Wallace’s time spent with Rolling Stone writer David Lipsky at the end of his 1996 book tour accompanying the release of “Infinite Jest,” the last words we hear Wallace say are: “You don’t want to be me.”

This is at once the film’s overriding message and its ultimate seduction. But it goes further: it is perhaps the yearning desire by so many young people of a bookish or writerly bent to follow in Wallace’s gigantic footsteps, to be Wallace, whether in writing style or dress or affect or reading habits, that has even led to this movie’s having a chance at production at all. The cult of Wallace exists precisely because people want to be like him. But Wallace is right.

The film is based on Lipsky’s book “Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself,” a book that deserves an award for its title alone, and a book that provides a deceptively distant vision of who Wallace really was. If you want to get an idea of who David Foster Wallace really was, what he was really like, I’ve always suspected that his writing, not his conversation with a journalist, is where you’ll find those answers. 

So but Lipsky’s book is merely the transcript of his conversation with Wallace for an article that never actually ran. What that book, and to a lesser extent the movie, reveals is an agile conversationalist who never forgot that he was being interviewed for a national magazine profile but merely managed to more expertly internalize this reality as the interview’s 5 days progressed. The book is a performance, the movie that performance being performed.

Lipsky and Wallace are fast friends. In the film they find common ground in being readers and writers, in being “nervous guys” in the mid-1990s, post-grunge white men who aren’t sure how to make it in a decade that has seen the century’s main pillar — staid suburban conservatism — destabilized right as they hit middle age. Wallace talks obsessively in the film about being American, about how his experience feels particularly American. To be sad and alone and educated and accomplished and empty is for the Illinois-raised Wallace a symptom of his circumstances and not something inherent in the human condition. As someone who hasn’t left the US, who am I to say.

But in watching “The End of the Tour,” I found myself wanting to be reading the book again. The old cliche is that the book is better than the movie. The first derivative of this is that the movie and book are equally good but each in their own way: they are simply different. (In an interview with Charlie Rose, Wallace describes this as a “Godfather thing.”) I’ll allow that “The End of the Tour” and “Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself” are different — the movie, for one, has a narrative arc — but it isn’t fair to say they are equally as good. The book is the superior product. And even then.

On some level, of course, any good book turned into a movie that remains faithful to the book should illuminate, well, the book. No one who is serious about learning more about Wallace is going to see the movie and not feel the need to read the book, or any of Wallace’s books (though of course any first-time Wallace readers will be greatly disappointed to move first to “Infinite Jest,” which involves a level of monkish devotion to be read inside any sort of reasonable timeframe that anyone who has read it cover-to-cover can’t help but seem like book-reading equivalent of the washed up jock who won’t stop talking about the time he won state). But again, this doesn’t mean “Although Of Course” isn’t a flawed book. Or at least, a flawed representation of Wallace.

I first came to David Foster Wallace after he’d died. I remember seeing on the homepage of CNN.com during my freshman year of college, my first month of overwhelming homesickness, that some guy named David Foster Wallace had died. He’d been an author, had written a book called “Infinite Jest” that “Time” listed as one of 100 books you had to read before you died, or one of the best 100 books of all time or something; either way, I’d never heard of it. And so through some Google-ing (I assume), I ended up finding a 1997 interview with Wallace and Charlie Rose. It’s a half hour of conversation that I’ve probably seen 25 or 30 times. It is, to me, the first and last representation of Wallace. Jason Segal looks the part, and he is admirable in the role, but I almost know too starkly, as someone who’s watched the Wallace interviews that survive online, that he’s not the real the thing.

The first Wallace book I ever read was “Consider the Lobster.” It’s a book of essays. It can be read however you’d like. I read it in order. And so the first words of Wallace’s I ever read were about his time in Las Vegas at a porn convention. “Big Red Sun.” I’ve never re-read that essay.

It was a bizarre entry into reading what would eventually be the entirety of his catalogue in just a few years, but it’s almost the only way it can go. Readers of his short story selections will either be greeted by a story about a washed-up poet laureate reading by the pool or a constant on Jeopardy!; novel readers will first meet an unwell teenaged tennis player in Arizona or a dew-covered field in the American Midwest. It’s all chaos and magic.

The point-all being that to read Wallace for the first time is to be immersed in something you’d never thought about before, presented in a way you’ve never been shown something before. Wallace’s writing is on its own intimidating, but over time it invites you in. Meaningfully. Sincerely. And I guess then the baggage I brought to the movie is that my first encounter with Wallace was an interview — that interview — and I’ve never let it go.

When you read Lipsky’s book or watch the movie, you get a sense, at least how I read it and saw it, that we’re getting Wallace as he tries to talk himself out of what he knows to be an inevitable reality: it gets harder.

The movie’s most poignant moments are around Wallace telling Lipsky that this isn’t real: the praise for the book, the tour itself, Lipsky’s presence in Wallace’s life. None of these things — recognition, minor fame — are what real life is about. Real life doesn’t have a reporter trailing you or people inviting you to come read your writing or to play writer or something in their presence. Real life, to Wallace, is to be alone in a room as a single 34-year-old with a piece of paper. And whether that’s a fulfilling or sad existence is the battle Wallace fought, in his actual real life and in the pages that poured out of it.

As I made my way through Wallace’s bibliography as a 19 and 20 year old, I decided that I wanted to be Wallace. I wanted to teach college writing and write books in my house in some rural mid-size town in Middle America where I would be left alone. As it stands, I write about business and the economy and live in a small apartment in a crowded neighborhood in the most populated city in the country. I barely write fiction anymore and I don’t teach it to kids. I am not David Foster Wallace.

I listened to Jason Segal’s interview with Marc Maron before I saw “The End of The Tour.” I read a few reviews: I don’t know if they were good or bad. When I heard Segal talk to Maron about the movie it was clear that he’d internalized Wallace. He saw his career as having a Wallace-like arc, as having not been fulfilled by the success of “Freaks and Geeks” and of 2005’s “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” which Segal wrote as 24 year old and which catapulted him into Hollywood stardom and demand. That success, of course, allowed him even the chance at this role.

The movie opens with a conversation about Wallace before: Wallace’s youth triumphs as a city-wide football player, transitioning to tennis, transitioning to literary titan. We’re introduced to Wallace as the sort of brooding and retired male athlete equivalent of a manic pixie dream girl.

And from here we are seduced.

When I sat down to write about the movie I didn’t know if I wanted to just come out and say it: I liked it, but I’m not sure why. And I’m not sure if I wanted to. Liking the movie and not liking the movie, when you’re immersed in something resembling Wallace’s headspace for an hour and 46 minutes is a hard judgement to make without being aware that those judgements have certain implications that are going to need to be addressed as sort of knock-on impacts or whatever. You can’t just say one way or another.

You emerge from the film, as you emerge from the book the film is based on, aware that you are now aware in a world in which other people are aware of both your awareness and theirs.

You know you aren’t alone.  

[mylesudland]

Interstellar Is A Movie About Parenting

I saw Interstellar last week.

I thought it was really good.

The obvious benchmark against which to measure the movie is Inception, but there is a level of coherence to Interstellar that doesn't quite elicit the same, "What the fuck is going on?" question the way Inception did on first viewing (and kind of still does). Interstellar isn't clear, and not by a longshot, and while both movies lack anything resembling meaningful stakes for their main characters, the questions explored by Interstellar are, I think, simply more interesting.

I didn't read any reviews of Interstellar before I saw the movie and only a few after, but one, I don't remember where, said the movie was a love letter from Nolan to his daughter. This reads as both an interesting and yet lazy observation.

Every movie, every art work, is ostensibly about one thing but actually about another.

In Interstellar's case, I think we have a movie about space that is actually about parenting. 

Early in the movie, Matthew McConaughey tells his daughter (who is like 11? 12? which makes this line kind of weird, but whatever), that once you become a parent, you become the ghost of your child's future. 

This is the whole point of the movie.

I have a bad short-term memory, and so I almost never remember individual lines from movies I see one time, but I couldn't shake this line. And I still can't. There were all kinds of problems with the writing in Interstellar, though if we want to be charitable, you've got to give a little bit of leeway to the whole, "Here are some people that have traveled into another galaxy, I wonder what they'll talk about," thing, which is, admittedly, not an easy exercise. But this line succinctly and clearly outlines the movie's ambitions: to explore the ways we perceive time when we're with or without our loved ones. 

From the perspective of our main narrator, McConaughey's character, this is about how time moves between him and his daughter. His wife is hardly mentioned and we take for granted that his son will be fine. (Footnote: I appreciate that Christopher Nolan goes out and makes a movie that has so much scope and scale, and yet clearly doesn't worry about sorting out all of the inter- and intrapersonal dramas. He is singularly focused on exploring the idea of bending and violating what we understand as time's linear march, and while he kowtows to a few cinematic and narrative conventions, he basically explores this idea and nothing else. Some light physics but whatever: every movie can bring in consultants to work out the particulars.) And so the whole movie revolves around his relationship with his daughter, we also get, solar system-like, more distant orbits of loving relationships — the closest being the father-daughter relationship between Anne Hathaway and Michael Caine — that sort out our character-level motivations.

The interesting upshot, however, is that this relationship isn't explicitly explored all that much, for McConaughey and his daughter don't reunite for two hours of movie time and almost a hundred years of actual time. But of course this is the question: what relationships can and do and will bridge this gap?

Again, Nolan is willing to let this web of relationships sort of get fleshed out and then lie dormant, the movie spending long, extended scenes traveling through wormholes, blackholes, gravity-intensive planets where hours take years on Earth, and this is all done on basically a background that the viewer trust Nolan's vision, that this will be worth it. 

The problem with Nolan's movies, and Interstellar is no exception, is that lots of people don't go to movies to piece together a conceptual thread, but a narrative one. In Interstellar, Nolan is only concerned about circling back to what he clearly sees as the tyranny of time. Neil deGrasse Tyson explained the four dimensions we experience as humans — the three physical dimensions plus time — and how time is the only one we can't move freely within. And this is the notion Nolan is attacking, but unlike Inception where the desire explore time seemed like an end to itself (I never thought Leonardo DiCaprio's desire to get out of his dream was ever that interesting), rooting Interstellar's battle with time inside of McConaughey's desire to see his daughter grow up starts out as forgettable but winds its way towards containing real stakes. But this is all to say that sitting in a movie for almost three hours and working out what the director is trying to say about time isn't exactly what lots of people go to the movies to do. 

But back to the parenting thing. 

"The ghost of your child's future."

I'm not a parent, and I don't think I'm very close to being one. But I am a child, and fortunately I still have both of my parents, and they both have both of theirs. The threads of childhood and parenthood run fortunately deep for this stage in my life, and so I've been sort of pinging this idea around in my head for the last week. 

"The ghost of your child's future."

It's both an extremely bleak and yet incredibly comforting way to view the experience. That in some sense who you are as a parent isn't what you might believe, or that as a child you're not looking at some separate person, some adult who is in charge of you, but a version of yourself. And I think we know these things but also deny them, reject out of hand the idea that we're not going to become "truly ourselves" but merely a clay-mold of some person who came before us. Though this reaction, I think, is mostly the young person's knee-jerk, and upon more careful consideration the idea that we're not out here all alone, that we do have something to draw on, someone not to look up to but to work towards becoming is a great comfort and a fine motivator. 

I think Nolan uses space as his medium because 1) he really wanted to bend time again without putting his characters to sleep, but 2) because when we think about the loneliness of existence, space provides the biggest and most obvious vacuum. 

When McConaughey leaves his daughter to go into space, they are both sent towards their own version of a vacuum. By separating from each other, they lose not just a part of themselves, but perhaps the whole of who they knew themselves, at that moment, to be. Father and daughter, one and the same. 

But as I write this, and as I thought about what I was going to say about the movie this week, I found myself increasingly worried that perhaps I'd just been bamboozled by some playground philosophizing from Nolan and a good Hans Zimmer soundtrack. That perhaps the exploration of what it means to be a parent isn't anything unique, or different, from what most movies are trying to say or accomplish. I don't see that many movies, and so it seems like this is a distinct risk, but also isn't the point of good art that it matters to one reader, one listener, one viewer, at one specific point in time and that it affects them? Isn't the goal of the artist to reach people, one at a time, in whatever way possible?

I think so. 

I'm sure there is some review out there completely shredding Nolan's overbearing satisfaction with his own ideas and filmmaking techniques. I'm sure something went horribly wrong with the film's lighting. But I know that the movie affected me, and made me think about something, anything. 

Because maybe every movie with a father-daughter duo is about being a parent, and maybe every movie (well, probably definitely every movie) is about love, but these seemed like new, radical concepts in Nolan's hands.

It was as if I'd never thought about what it meant to love something before I saw the movie: across the galaxy and back again. 

[mylesudland]

Some Thoughts On Being An English Major

Lots of people are English majors.

And why not? It's pretty easy, you get to read books and write papers which generally argue a central point. Some of the more derisive criticism of the subject would say that you get to make stuff up, or that you can't be wrong, both of which are false, but I suppose if you're going to define "schooling" and "learning" as making marked progress towards being able to recall some fact or successfully compute some formula then yes, you're making it up. 

Earlier this week I spoke on a careers panel for English majors at my alma mater, the University of Connecticut. 

It was a fine panel, I guess. I mean, look, it is always fun to be given the floor to talk about things you think.

But among the four panelists were three editorial assistants and myself. Two of these folks are in publishing, the third was doing something more vague I never quite figured out, but I kept getting the sense that, all things considered, we weren't really making the future seem all that hopeful or promising for these students.

Basically, you can either go into publishing, which like pays nothing and is super competitive and, if you go into the industry because you love books will definitely make you hate books; or you can wing it like I did and maybe get lucky if you work hard.

There was a lot of dismissal from some of the other panelists (and maybe from me too), about teaching, because this is usually what people think when they think about what an English major could possibly do for a living. This is a shame for a number of reasons, the foremost being that teaching is fucking hard. Like, way harder than blogging about the stock market or working in publishing, and teaching is also super important and we should be encouraging college students who even have an ounce of compassion to think about being teachers. 

There are a few caveats here we should note. The panel was put on by the director of the writing internship program at UConn, which is fairly demanding and attracts a pretty specific type of student, and so the tilt was basically: if you do the writing internship, you can maybe get a job like these guys up here have. 

The other thing worth noting is that this panel was for undergraduates who are focused on getting a first job, which is very different than getting a job after you've already had a job or been working, and a supremely terrifying prospect at 20 or 21 years old. 

And so while we kind of talked about the value of being an English major, there were also questions like what do you do in an interview, and so on, the kinds of things that, unfortunately, I tend to be kind of flip about and say, "I don't know! Be yourself! It will work out!" Which fortunately it has for me so far but doesn't work for everyone and probably at least a few times won't work for me in the future. 

But anyway, going into this panel I was thinking about what I wanted to tell these kids, and I don't know if I succeeded. Because I wanted these kids to know that they can actually do anything as an English major. (I mean, yeah, sure, you probably can't go right to medical school, but work with me here.) 

You can sell insurance, you can be an investment banker, you can be a dog walker, you can be in marketing, digital ad sales, human resources, you can sell bonds, or annuities, or industrial equipment. 

And the analogy I made was that as an English major, you presumably will know how to actually read and write.

Last year, UConn's men's basketball team won the national title, and though they had just an okay regular season, I felt like they really had a chance in the tournament because they had two guys who could do one thing: dribble. 

Most people assume that if you play basketball you can dribble. And that's kind of true, but also not. Because I'm talking about capital-D Dribble. Like, really dribble. 

So think about it this way: everyone assumes that college graduates can read and write. And they can. But as an English major, and perhaps more broadly as someone who studies in the humanities, you can actually read and write, capital-R and capital-W Read and Write. 

These are scarce commodities.

Being able to read and write is not the case for many people. (Most people?) Because reading and writing are hard. They are time-intensive activities that require a certain focus, a certain ability to develop ideas, explain ideas, expand on ideas, re-work ideas. There is a demand for a certain kind of clarity and concision in writing well, a tightness that maybe bullshitting with your buddies doesn't require. And reading requires a focus that watching TV or sitting in a meeting doesn't quite demand. 

These are, of course, my biases. 

But we all believe something, and these are the things I believe. 

I studied English because a teacher in high school told me I was a good writer and since I wasn't much good at anything else in school, I took this on good faith and followed what seemed like the path that skill provided. 

And I love seeing students study English, or history, or philosophy, subjects that many parents may look at askance, wonder how their child will ever make a living after studying such amorphous subjects in school. 

And I want more students who like reading and writing to study English and craft these skills, to struggle with how to think and communicate better and then figure out how to apply these skills — which seem to me essential for success in anything resembling life — to a job later. 

I am immensely fortunate to be able to basically read and write for a living, but even with the intellectual freedom that my job provides me, it is still not like being in school. And it never will be. This is why there is work and school: these are different things.

I didn't know how to tell these kids to appreciate being in school, to enjoy being English majors who have to read a lot and write a lot and not much else.

"Work sucks," I told them. And I mean that, but not because the work itself is bad, but because work requires a different focus, a different way to think about being alive that being a student didn't, at least for me, require. 

And while my pushing back against the blind herding of students now towards STEM fields is the topic for another essay, I can't help but feel studying English helps students develop the skills needed for the only job we are all compelled to take: how to be alive. 

[mylesudland]

Random Insight From Jim Cramer

I like Jim Cramer.

People give him shit all the time because he recommends stocks on his show every night, and then the companies behind those stocks sometimes go bankrupt like a month later. Which, admittedly, isn't a great look. But still.

On Twitter on Saturday morning though, Cramer sent out two tweets about being a sports reporter in Tallahassee, Florida, the home of Florida State.

It has always been hard to report on college sports in college towns where the players and coaches and teams are a bigger influence than just about anything else in American civic life.

As a young sports reporter I covered the FSU 'Noles for the Tallahassee Democrat. It was "challenging" to be critical of off-field behavior

— Jim Cramer (@jimcramer)

October 11, 2014

First, I loved the 'Noles. Loved Bowden. But as a reporter I had to report the news, good or bad, and I was hated for it. Hated!!!

— Jim Cramer (@jimcramer)

October 11, 2014

On Friday, The New York Times reported on the disaster that seems to be the justice system in Tallahassee, and Florida State's start quarterback Jaemis Winston is now set to face a third-party investigation into the rape accusation brought against him by a woman in 2012 that was later thrown out. 

We can go to financial media for news on finance and sports media for news on sports, and so on.

As a reporter, I am constantly reminding myself to stay in my lane, as it were. To report what I know not what I think, and to appreciate that when readers come to Business Insider to read my articles they are probably not looking for my take on college football (I think Auburn will win the SEC again) or the latest Pynchon novel (I could take it or leave it, but I'm glad I read it). 

And while Twitter has all kinds of problems being useful to people who aren't in the media or rely on breaking news for their livelihoods (like, say a stock trader), what it is great for is allowing people to perhaps veer slightly outside of their lane. 

You only get 140 characters to say something on Twitter, and if you're going to comment on something that isn't in your so-called area of expertise, it requires that you really focus on getting the most out of that space. 

People often talk about how Twitter is a breeding ground for trolls. I mean, it's not not, but if you're going to use the medium in a thoughtful manner, the 140-character limit tends to bring out succinct commentary from a wide range of people. 

You should, of course, be reading Adam Weinstein at Deadspin on the Florida State debacle, as that is his area of expertise, but one of Twitter's great features is that someone in an unrelated industry, like Jim Cramer, fills in some of the story around the edges.

For better or worse.

[mylesudland]

Gary Hart and the Roots of Conventional Wisdom

In this week's New York Times Magazine, Matt Bai has a great feature about a presidential candidate I'd never heard of. 

Gary Hart was a serious contender, perhaps even the frontrunner, for president in 1987. The Reagan administration was against the ropes in the Iran-Contra affair, and Hart was significantly outpolling then-Vice President Bush 41.

Bai angles Hart as the, "the first serious presidential contender of the 1960s generation," which is to say that Hart and all future presidential candidates, and perhaps all future politicians, would be subject to different social expectations. Among them, fidelity. 

Bai writes: 

The Hart episode is almost universally remembered as a tale of classic hubris. A Kennedy-like figure on a fast track to the presidency defies the media to find anything nonexemplary in his personal life, even as he carries on an affair with a woman half his age and poses for pictures with her, and naturally he gets caught and humiliated. How could he not have known this would happen? How could such a smart guy have been that stupid?

Of course, you could reasonably have asked that same question of the three most important political figures of Hart’s lifetime, all Democratic presidents thought of as towering successes. Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson were adulterers, before and during their presidencies, and we can safely assume they had plenty of company. In his 1978 memoir, Theodore White, the most prolific and influential chronicler of presidential politics in the last half of the 20th century, wrote that he was “reasonably sure” that of all the candidates he had covered, only three — Harry Truman, George Romney and Jimmy Carter — hadn’t enjoyed the pleasure of “casual partners.” He and his colleagues considered those affairs irrelevant.

But the reason that Bai's piece is so good is that is unpacks the origins of the modern politician and their journalistic contemporaries. Maybe this is something everybody knows and it had just never occurred to me, but Bai puts forth the idea — which to me seems overwhelmingly right and incisive — that the generation of journalists who followed Woodward and Bernstein, the famed Washington Post reporters that broke the Watergate story, would want nothing more than to have the "next Watergate," the next great scandal taking down a major politician. 

Woodward and Bernstein, who were subsequently portrayed in film by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, took down a sitting president with their reporting. And so it seems almost obvious in hindsight (as things tend to anyway): the entire goal of a career as a political journalist is to take down politicians. 

I'm not a political reporter, and I'm not saying that John Edwards' affair is the kind of story that shouldn't have mattered or whatever. But the origins of why this kind of personal transgression becomes almost an inevitability in the life of a modern politician are worth considering.

One of the three men mentioned above that were believed to have never been adulterers has a last name that ought to stand out: Romney. 

It is no coincidence that this son is one of the only people that has successfully navigated a political career without real personal turmoil. The charge against Mitt Romney, the two-time presidential candidate who will probably become a three-time presidential candidate (and of course this time might actually become president), is that he's too boring, too bland, too much spewing a message his team believes will appeal to voters.

But Bai's piece makes it seem obvious and inevitable: who else but Mitt Romney, George Romney's son, a man whose closet houses skeletons not of extramarital affairs but private equity deals, could ever navigate the political terrain that Gary Hart first encountered, and that knocked him flat on his face?

[mylesudland]

A Few Brief Thoughts on the NFL

Summer ended and football returned this weekend. I don’t know if this is good or bad. 

I was lazily watching SportsCenter on Sunday morning and ESPN’s Jeremy Schaap had a short video essay about how football has become the dominant sport in American culture. There wasn’t really any substance to the piece, except that it pointed out, as you can do pretty much every August, that football is the most important and popular sport in America. This popularity, in turn, breeds its own kind of annual handwringing about What Does It Mean That Football As Our Most Important And Popular Sport; of course, as if I’m not doing exactly the same thing here.

This past spring Mark Cuban said that the NFL is 10 years from implosion, arguing that the greed of NFL owners will eventually be the downfall of the league. And while Cuban put the hard number on it, I think his point will inevitably be true, regardless of the timeframe: there is no way the NFL can continue to become more popular each year.

And I don’t think the argument that the NFL can’t get more popular is really all that hard to make. 

In The New York Times this weekend, Nick Wingfield wrote a great piece about professional video gamers, and the crowds and money that e-sport competitions are attracting. This piece made me think that maybe we’re assuming, a little too uncritically, that the main threat to the NFL’s popularity is a concussion lawsuit or waning participation among kids. That these risks pose real threats to the league, all things considered, seems like a lazy argument in and of itself; has legislation and participation destroyed the tobacco industry? Depends who you ask, but Philip Morris reported $13.5 billion in operating income on $80 billion of revenue in 2013, so take it or leave it, I guess.

But what's more, reading Wingfield’s piece, it’s clear that e-sports are connecting to their fans in a way that has become anathema for a league like the NFL.

In his piece, Wingfield writes:

Because professional gamers often practice on sites like Twitch, fans can get behind-the-scenes peeks at practice sessions by their favorite players. The more generous ones even invite fans to play a round with them.

“Imagine if LeBron James and Michael Jordan, in every practice and every live N.B.A. game, had a GoPro camera strapped to their chest and they had an earbud where they can hear people ask direct questions and occasionally answer it when they’re playing,” said Dennis Fong, 37, an early professional gamer who is the new chief executive of Raptr, a social network for gamers. “That level of access is unprecedented.”

You get the sense that the appeal of watching professional video games isn’t what watching football might’ve been for a previous generation of American kids, but is something completely different, which should probably scare the NFL greatly.

Before professional sports became the big-box commodity they are today, my impression is that there was a certain mystique around players that connected to something more juvenile and naive than it does today. Or maybe it’s just that I’m not as naive as I used to be, though this seems unlikely. 

I remember watching NFL Films shows about the great teams of the 1960s and 70s and 80s on ESPN Classic when I was a kid. These programs had the great NFL Films music, with a dramatic voiceover that made the games seem like grand dramas. But that same air time today is filled by a panel discussion about the day’s goings on in the NFL, which means an hour of former players talking about Michael Sam’s sexuality and Johnny Manziel’s touchdown celebrations. If I was 10, I’d probably rather watch someone play video games on Twitch, too. 

And the thing is, it’s not like the NFL, or any sport for that matter, can’t still be documented and repackaged as some grand human drama. The whole reason we watch sports is because it’s dramatic, melodramatic even. But it might be the sport’s sheer scale that makes capturing that drama difficult, if not impossible.

If you watch ESPN or NFL Network pretty much anytime there isn’t a live game on, you’re basically watching CNN, but for sports. Certainly the huge number of arrests involving NFL players is one long running news story and PR event for the league to manage.

But even leaving out the torrent of arrests racked up by NFL players, these networks cover the league by basically taking all the fun out of it. 

From the start of training camp until the Super Bowl is over, ESPN and the NFL Network are like CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and all network coverage during a presidential election rolled into two. And then after the Super Bowl they go all-in on covering the scouting combine, which is literally just college kids taking physicals and running around a field in their underwear. The combine also marks the start of the network’s coverage of the NFL draft, which lasts from February to May. The draft, which was once treated as a sort of droll piece of official league business, is now three-day television event, despite the fact that the event consists of league officials reading the names of college students at a podium. Again, millions of people watch the reading of names on television, as if Roger Goodell were a televangelist telling the viewers for whom they should pray this year.

But so if the popularity of professional sports was once connected to some folk-hero aspect of that sport’s stars, we’re now being marketed what amounts to a grocery store flyer of the year’s best deals at each position: this is the name of a left tackle, he has a “high motor,” a “good football IQ,” “quick feet,” and for this, dear fan, you must love him. 

If a key element of the success of e-sports is the access fans have to the pro gamers, then as far as I can tell, the exact opposite tactic is being taken by the NFL, and probably all major American sports. The goal for these sports — or businesses, really, I mean let’s call it what it is — is to make players automatons, cogs in a machine that are completely replaceable and interchangeable. And if you look at how rosters turn over each year, from a practical standpoint the NFL is already there. 

And so it’s almost as if the league assumes fans will appreciate good roster management decisions the way people in the business world appreciate a great stock pick from Warren Buffett. But if we agree that the stock picks of Warren Buffett or some hedge fund manager are extremely boring bits of industry arcana for the vast majority of people, is it not fair to believe that over time, people will be bored by similar coverage of the NFL? 

Ultimately, I guess that to me it’s not clear exactly what the sport’s popularity is anchored in anymore. Maybe fantasy football, maybe people really like Peyton Manning, or maybe people like an excuse to ignore their families and drink beer on Sunday afternoons. But I’m also reasonably confident that the league running a clean and efficient business is not what makes people tune in on Sundays.