My friend Betsy wrote from Boston that she was enraged by Belechik's decision that the Patriots go for a first down deep in their own territory and blew the call, as the Colts took over from there, Manning throwing deep and Addai taking it in to give the Colts the win, 35 to 34. Easily one of the great contests betwen great teams/quarterbacks, as Brady and Manning both threw for more than 300 yards. The game was full of hard-fought scoring. It seemed to me, who had a brief run as a linebacker at UCLA, that the Colts 'wanted it more,' as the coaches are wont to say when there is a struggle to clinch a victory. Interesting also how we use military language in this most dangerous of games, in which on every play, pain is inflicted on the opponents. This comes up as Michael Oriad in Slate lets fly some salient notions in his article Flag Football:

The Pro Football Hall of Fame lists another 226 NFL personnel who served in Korea but has no such list for Vietnam, most likely because the number was apparently just six. Vietnam was the war to be avoided, not courted, by football players as well as college students generally. Several NFL clubs had connections to local National Guard units to keep their players out of combat. Within the larger culture the idea that football was "the American war game" unraveled or became more complicated. The radical left denounced football as fascist and imperialist, while the extreme right proclaimed it as a bastion of traditional American values. (For someone who was actually playing football at the time, the game bore no relationship whatsoever to the war in Southeast Asia, although in certain academic settings I considered it prudent to keep quiet about my alternative football life.)

Football in the 1960s became political, not just warlike. An ardent fan of the game, President Richard Nixon also used football—see his calculated attendance at 1969's "Game of the Century" between Arkansas and Texas—to identify with his "silent majority" against his enemies. Pregame and halftime at the Orange Bowl (and soon the Super Bowl) became showcases for elaborate patriotic displays. Over time, football fans came to take this football-related patriotism—a brand of flag-waving more like superpatriotism—for granted, as if it were embedded in long tradition, perhaps even in the very nature of the game. It wasn't and isn't.

The routine playing of "The Star-Spangled Banner" before sporting events did not begin until World War II. Twenty-some years later in Miami, a man named Earnie Seiler—the director of the Orange Bowl since its inception in 1935—seized the moment of war, civil rights protest, and countercultural discord to drench football spectacle in superpatriotism. Baseball might have been the national pastime, but college football had been the country's chief sporting spectacle since the 1920s. Bands and cheerleaders and all of the related pageantry were not incidental to the sport, but essential elements. Baseball had no pregame or halftime shows, only a seventh-inning stretch (which post-9/11 could include "America the Beautiful" along with "Take Me out to the Ballgame"). Football had time and space for the spectacle that Seiler created in the 1960s: elaborate salutes to the flag, Uncle Sam, and the Statue of Liberty.

Michael Oriand

Slate, 17Nov09