We are minutes away from the first of many Sunday afternoons brought to you by the National Football League. To put the American obsession with their own particularly violent and brutal version of football in context, keep in mind the words of Jonathan Yardley in his review of Michael Oriard’s “Brand NFL: Making and Selling America’s Favorite Sport”:

The league’s obsessive focus on “image” is complicated by players’ use of recreational and performance-enhancing drugs, by various embarrassing crimes committed by a handful of them and by racial tensions and discrimination that persist despite the NFL’s efforts to ameliorate them. More fundamentally, Oriard wonders whether the NFL may have gained the whole world but lost, or at least compromised, its soul.

Oriard’s book isn’t anti-football or even anti-NFL. He played in the league, in fact, before he became a professor of literature at Oregon State University.

Oriard’s argument, instead, is a rallying cry, according to Yardley, against the consumerist mentality that is threatening to overwhelm both the production and consumption of the sport:

He is concerned about “oversaturation” of NFL games and products, but he thinks “the greater danger lies in devaluing the actual football games if they become simply part of a larger spectacle or a multipronged marketing campaign.

So, when you feel yourself getting lost in the spectacle — and ignoring how football interacts with the real world — take a couple of steps back, throw the ball away, and start again.

And during the commercial breaks, you might read a little of what we’ve been saying about football at PopPolitics over the years.