I didn’t realize how little I knew about football until I was thrown into the media box at the Bucknell vs. Penn game.
It’s not that I dislike football. It’s more so that I have the tendency to get distracted by everything but the game. My high school football team was pretty much categorically atrocious, but still, my friends and I stood in the stands at nearly every loss, viewing the game as an excuse to gather and talk, naturally about everything except football. In this case, by the first half hour of the Buckell vs. Penn game, I missed everything happening on the field because I was busy eavesdropping on a mom behind me, who was talking about the difficulty of making it to both of her son’s football games.
As someone entirely ignorant of the intricacies of the game, I understand the character of football games as akin to concerts. The rule of thumb is that a good concert is contingent on a good crowd. And perhaps, the same could be said of a good game as well. There are plenty of cases where I—like the avid sports fan—go to a concert out of pure devotion to the artist. But at the same time, I recognize that live music often functions as a means of building space and community with other people over the backdrop of music. We sing along to music, but really we’re more concerned with the people around us than the person on stage. Or in this case, we chant and boo and jeer with greater allegiance to fellow spectators than of concern for the field in itself. What ultimately emerges are two concurrent functions of the art itself (and yes, I am venturing to call sports an art) as well as the sociality of the gathering. To draw from theorist Marshall McLuhan, the medium itself has its own inherent meaning and sociality.
So what do we do with an empty concert hall?
I am not the first, by any means, to observe the general emptiness of Penn football games. But still, attending the Bucknell vs. Penn game stood in stark contrast to the non–nominal number of football games I had been dragged to—maybe it’s because, without the spectacle of the crowd, I had no choice but to watch the game itself. Rather than be a part of something larger than myself, I had to constantly ask myself, what the hell am I doing here?
The more bodies there are in a room the less pressure there is on the individual to perform. As Priya Parker points out in The Art of Gathering, to get people to really dance, you need over 150 people in the room. The idea is to anonymize the individual, allowing them to be subsumed by the amorphous being of the crowd so their actions are no longer perceived as their own. It is once they become invisible that there is no longer any risk of the all–too–fatal consequence of embarrassment.
Community lowers the barrier of “necessary knowledge” to enjoy an activity. Attending a near–empty stadium, however, raises the need to justify why exactly you’re spending your Saturday in Franklin Field, rather than, say, the suddenly far more appealing option of the Van Pelt sixth floor. You better really like football. Or in other words, it's suddenly a lot harder to be a poser.
Without the spectacle of the crowd, watching a sports game becomes an individualized act, and it inherently raises the bar of knowledge necessary to enjoy a game because you lose the distraction of revelry that a crowd guarantees.
Not to bring in another art metaphor (nor compare Penn football to Un Chien Andalou), but it’s akin to watching an art film. The fact of the matter is, if no one else in your circle is watching that very same movie, then the only benefit or enjoyment you could get out of analyzing the art itself, which requires a much higher level of foundational knowledge, to begin with. If you’re watching it with friends, on the other hand, you easily have the option to listen to someone else’s analysis or allow the movie night to redirect its attention to something entirely social.
Simply put, without the crowd, the medium of the sports game loses the benefit of sociality, and it solely becomes about the game itself. For those who know what’s going on, that’s perfectly enjoyable in of itself. But for someone like me, for whom half the fun of a football game lies in simply finding people to eavesdrop on, it becomes a much more difficult endeavor.
