Listen, for instance, to Mina Kimes, the sharp and often very funny ESPN personality—one of my favorites. Casually and in a spirit of real but rigorous fun, like a particularly charismatic management consultant, she’s always tossing off sparkling insights about the subtler workings of football technique. Talking on a recent episode of her podcast, “The Mina Kimes Show Featuring Lenny,” about the Kansas City Chiefs’ hot start to the season, she launched into a disquisition on the quarterback Patrick Mahomes’s new success running play-action—a fake run that often sets up a successful pass. Historically, she said, “That’s just not been Patrick Mahomes.” She could have been wearing a lab coat and goggles, rhapsodizing over the discovery of some new genetic mutation:
> This was an offense that for many years was _worse_ using play-action, which never happens! Right? Like, usually play-action is the easy button and the numbers go up, but because they were never an under-center team, there was no commitment to the broader, like, philosophy of run-pass—they were not good at it. They are _shredding_ teams with play-action right now!
There was something thrilling about this highly informed short monologue—perhaps it was the fact that Kimes never once considered explaining (as I, just a paragraph ago, have sheepishly done) what the hell play-action is, or why not being “under center” would make it hard to pull off. The slang term for employing and interpreting lingo like Kimes’s is “ball knowledge.” There’s a heartening respect for the intelligence of the audience in this pocket of the media. If you don’t know, after all, you’ll probably look it up. If you’re searching for organic, largely unquestioned, even aspirational intellectualism in American public life, here it is. The public intellectual of the future won’t be wearing tweed or a button-down collar—the new uniform involves a coach’s headset, or the pancake makeup from the greenroom of some sports network.
Pete Hegseth, who persists in his insistence on being called the Secretary of War, recently issued a broadside in his first “State of the Force” address. He was purportedly offering an update on the health of the U.S. military, but really just stringing together statements like this: “We are no longer the Woke Department or the Weak Department. Simple translation of that: No fatties. No trannies. No beardos. No weirdos. No wimps. No radicals.” In keeping with his downwardly mobile, former-high-school-bully vibe, he might as well have added “no nerds” to the list.
But the human urge toward weird and disproportionately intense tunnelling toward understanding—the urge to gather and share knowledge, wherever it gleams—is hard to suppress. Play the tough guy if you want, but under your nose some fresh exercise in radical dorkery is stealthily blooming.
Here’s one such specimen: the former Pittsburgh Steelers coach Mike Tomlin has recently become a member of the football commentariat. He’s good at the job—he speaks fluent footballese, which might someday become the real national language of the U.S. and the territories it captures one international jaunt at a time. He’s admirably candid, too—recently he criticized the late-game coaching of the Dallas Cowboys, even though the norm is for former coaches to keep a respectful silence about the misdeeds of their colleagues still in the trenches.