Take one look at me and you can safely assume I’m not the sporty type. I have never followed professional sports, don’t know the first thing about fantasy leagues, can’t tell Peyton from Eli and still don’t know the real difference between the AFC and the NFC.
Despite my father and sister being avid sports fans, the appeal was never there for me. Sure, I can stomach the occasional game, but after seeing the same Bud Light ad for what feels like the thousandth time, my interest starts to wane. Add to that the fact that the NFL as an entity is as bad as companies come — think mistreatment of cheerleaders and notoriously poor handling of breast cancer — and my tolerance for it dips even lower.
Still, disregarding my distaste for professional televised sports, I remain a voracious culture hound. If there’s a loop, I make it my business to be in it. However, sports have always been in that one circle that evades me. Whenever the topic comes up in conversation, I pretend to be absorbed in my phone until the topic changes to something more my speed. This playoff season, however, I decided enough was enough. No longer would my pop culture knowledge end at ESPN.
I figured I’d start with the biggest target, and the NFL seemed like the obvious choice.
Football had always been the sport that I enjoyed the most, albeit only marginally. Its appeal is easy to grasp: giant supermen shoving each other for control of the ball while performing acrobatic stunts and feats of agility along the way. It’s a crowd-pleaser. Throw in some of the highest production values in the history of television, and you’ve got a genuine spectacle on your hands.
The first step on my journey was to indoctrinate myself into the culture so I could absorb as much as I could about football through exposure alone. Rather than slogging through Deadspin in hopes of gleaning anything of worth, I figured I should go to where the lowest common denominators go for news: Twitter.
After only a few days of following the NFL’s account, I had already picked up on a number of key points people bring up when talking about sports: the game schedule and the highlight reel. Already, I could participate in a basic conversation about football without feeling like a complete idiot. This was my way in — not through careful observation of games and statistics, but through the lethargic osmosis of social media.
However, I could not subsist on tweets alone. At some point, I needed to watch a game. This, I knew, would be my undoing. I had never made it through a full game of football that wasn’t the Super Bowl.
According to a 2010 Wall Street Journal study, each televised NFL game has an average of 11 minutes of actual playtime. The rest of the time is taken up by commercials, replays and the time between plays. But television networks know that their audiences are not captive. They know viewers will be on their phones during downtime, so they capitalize on this by extending the game onto Twitter with constant updates, polls, memes and GIFs to keep viewers engaged.
Following a game on social media, I found, was just as important as watching live. Almost every down resulted in a tweet. After games, I could recite stats, pull up a Vine of the catch everyone was talking about and know which team was playing next — all thanks to the NFL’s Twitter account.
Psychologist Anders Ericsson argued that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to get good at something, but I don’t think that’s entirely true. While it takes 10,000 hours of devotion to become an expert in a given field, it takes far less time to simply be proficient in one.
My goal from the beginning of this exercise was only to become a novice in the sports fandom. I want to be clear that I retained virtually no knowledge from my social media endeavor, but I did appear as if I did, and that’s all that matters.
I did, however, find myself getting swept up in the emotion of it all. Though I never understood why sports fans were so vocal watching games at home, I was compelled to stand up and cheer following a Hail Mary in the Green Bay-Seattle game, and cracked a smile at Cam Newton’s undeniable swagger and athleticism.
So as the NFL social media team gears up for the 2016 Super Bowl, so too will I. I will refresh my timeline incessantly during the game, checking trending topics and poring over GIFs to keep up appearances — as only an introvert can.
