Professional Football is Perhaps The Crucible of Cultural Extremes

It looks like we have the usual post-Super Bowl culture rows simply because some coaches embraced religion over the other more violent, bad-boy culture of professional football. The NFL--or the most publicized sides of it--seems to be a realm lacking any moderation or equivocation; it requires all or nothing; either you wear a halo or some horns to fill a niche or to please the clientele, who require their crowing points.

That's part of what makes football the modern American religion, supplanting anything that conservative evangelicals might have in store for us with their theocratic visions. Why else would it be so important to keep big-screen Super Bowl parties viable options for evangelical churches, who would otherwise have to close on Super Sunday, even through Snickers commercials with men kissing each other and beer commercials ending with combatants getting knocked in the head with blunt objects?

Gads. Whatever happened to the virtues of moderation and avoidance of the vice of going to extremes? Wasn't the grid iron ever an Aristotelian or Thomistic playground where the adage of "staying within yourself" actually mattered? Is it too much to ask football to attract passable temperates who aren't so drastically bent on jumping off the deep end of the moment?