Being and Timeouts | (Mis)Applying Postmodern Jargon to Sports
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The Banality of Punting

November 17, 2011
By
Hannah_Arendt1

Before we get into this, no, I am not actually comparing the Holocaust to Punting. This is a humor site people. Nothing evokes the ire of the football fan community than a coach unwilling to go for it on 4th & short. After stringing together 8 to 9 yards of offense, a coach forfeits the ball with a deep punt. This decision is even more despicable when the team has already invaded the “Maroon Zone” — opponent territory beyond the threshold for a reasonable FG attempt. Despite the fact that fans have no patience for this practice, it remains a...

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Lovable Losers: The Chicago Cubs and Overidentification With the Obscene Supplement of Competiton

November 10, 2011
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Lovable Losers: The Chicago Cubs and Overidentification With the Obscene Supplement of Competiton

While the concept is perhaps best known to sports fans as having been forged by cultural activists in the Neue Slowenische Kunst as means of confronting Tito Stalinism and contemporary neo-liberalism (Parker: 2007), it is becoming apparent that the strategy of “overidentification” may now be rising to its zenith on the North Side of Chicago. Overidentification refers to the approach of adopting a set of ideas, images, or politics and attacking them, indirectly through an obscenely exaggerated adoption of them. (Parker: 2007) The crux of the strategy’s effectiveness is its capacity to draw attention to the fact that the overt message is...

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Studies in Dromology: Chip Kelly and the Oregon Offense as Virilio’s Paradigm of Speed and War

October 31, 2011
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Studies in Dromology: Chip Kelly and the Oregon Offense as Virilio’s Paradigm of Speed and War

“violence can be reduced to nothing but movement.” – Paul Virilio At this crucial juncture in the middle of the college football season, we must revisit the prophetic work of French college football expert Paul Virilio, who predicted the most recent trends in college football nearly 34 years ago. In his 1977 work Speed and Politics, Virilio asked: if the world is run by the engine of accumulating capital, why does it continue to accelerate beyond the limit of the realization of capital?  Virilio answered that the driving force of the technocratic society is not capitalism but the dromological...

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