Forgive me for romanticizing it, but this is the last issue before Thanksgiving, when football fills our nostrils as warmly as holiday kitchen aromas. Football is an art form, in a sense, a way of filling physical space with something organic and colorful. Watching a play break from its neatly ordered rows to a random scattering of players is a display of human ingenuity and invention. There is also no denying the important function football viewing can play in the relationships of men. Males aren't known, archetypically, for their knack for relating to each other with much depth or intimacy.
Football is a catalyst of sorts.
But I understand the defense mechanisms in faithful viewers when such criticisms arise. The problem here is the residue of religious tradition that is fixated on taboos, on do's and don't's. Thus speaking negatively about an activity is quickly translated as a taboo against it. This flies in the face of what discernment is all about. Football, odd as it sounds, is part of humans' fulfillment of the cultural mandate.