You may remember Chuck Klosterman from Spin magazine back when… well, not quite back when it didn’t suck—that was long before Klosterman was there—but it certainly sucked less. Or perhaps from the books he’s authored, like Fargo Rock City or Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs. Or, even more likely, from his work for Page 2 at ESPN.com—which is where they’ve excerpted some outstanding, football-related stuff from his upcoming essay collection, Eating the Dinosaur.

The read option is by far the most pervasive offensive play in college football and an increasingly popular gadget play in pro football, especially for the Miami Dolphins (who run it by moving quarterback Chad Pennington to wide receiver and using running back Ronnie Brown at QB, a formation commonly called the Wildcat). If somebody makes a movie about American life a hundred years from now and wants to show a fictionalized image of what football looked like, this is the play they should try to cinematically replicate. Every week of autumn, I watch between nine and fifteen hours of football; depending on who's playing, I probably see this play eighty to a hundred and fifty times a weekend. Michigan has just run it three times in succession. This play defines the relationship between football and modernity; it's What Interesting Football Teams Are Doing Now. And it's helped me rethink the relationship between football and conservatism, a premise I had long conceded but never adequately questioned.

. . .

Twenty-five years ago, the read option didn't exist. Coaches would have given a dozen reasons why it couldn't be used. Ten years ago, it was a play of mild desperation, most often used by teams who couldn't compete physically. But now almost everyone uses it. It's the vortex of an offensive scheme that has become dominant. But ten years from now -- or even less, probably -- this play will have disappeared completely. In 2018, no one will run it, because every team will be running something else. It will have been replaced with new thinking. And this is football's interesting contradiction: It feels like a conservative game. It appeals to a conservative mind-set and a reactionary media and it promotes conservative values. But in tangible practicality, football is the most progressive game we have -- it constantly innovates, it immediately embraces every new technology, and almost all the important thinking about the game is liberal. If football was a politician, it would be some kind of reverse libertarian: staunchly conservative on social issues, but freethinking on anything related to policy. So the current upsurge of the read option is symbolic of something unrelated to the practice of football; it's symbolic of the nature of football and how that idea is misinterpreted because of its iconography.

That’s a pretty damn interesting interpretation, and I think he might just be bang on. It sets up the much larger, more detailed excerpt that’s over at ESPN, and is well worth a read… y’know… if you’re interested in the symbolic importance of the Wildcat formation, or what the hell football really represents, culturally and intellectually. “Football was Nixon's favorite sport,” he notes, “but it was Hunter S. Thompson's favorite, too.”