ESPN has a weird relationship with football.

On the one hand, ESPN televises a lot of it — 10 tons of college games, high school games, and an NFL game every Monday night.

On the other hand, ESPN The Magazine and ESPN’s Grantland website seem to advocate for its elimination. Consider this from Chuck Klosterman:

To me, this is what’s so fascinating about the contemporary state of football: It’s dominated by two hugely meaningful, totally irrefutable paradigms that refuse to acknowledge the existence of the other. Imagine two vertical, parallel lines accelerating skyward — that’s what football is like now. On the one hand, there is no way that a cognizant world can continue adoring a game where the end result is dementia and death; on the other hand, there is no way you can feasibly eliminate a sport that generates so much revenue (for so many people) and is so deeply beloved by everyday citizens who will never have to absorb the punishment. Is it possible that — in the future — the only teenagers playing football will be working-class kids with limited economic resources? Maybe. But that’s not exactly a recipe for diminishing athletic returns. Is it possible that — in 10 years — researchers will prove that playing just one season of pro football has the same impact on life expectancy as smoking two packs of cigarettes every day for a decade? Perhaps. But we’ll probably learn about that study during the Super Bowl pregame show, communally watched by a worldwide audience of 180 million people. Will the government have to get involved? I suppose that’s possible — but what U.S. president is going to come out against football? Only one who thinks Florida and Texas aren’t essential to his reelection.

That’s not exactly a ringing vote for football, is it?

Then there’s ESPN The (Impossible to Read Because It’s Designed for a Generation That Supposedly Doesn’t Read) Magazine’s J.R. Moehringer and his 120 reasons why football will last forever. The reasons I like:

1. In a typical regulation football game, the two teams combine to run roughly 120 plays from scrimmage compared with nearly 300 pitches in a typical baseball game. There are no “waste pitches” in football. Every play is meaningful, consequential, suspenseful. Every play is part of a mighty struggle, a drive, and in the end all 120 plays combine to create a narrative, or metanarrative. Baseball, boxing, handball, sooner or later every game gets compared to narrative, but only in football are the plays perfectly linear, drawn up with letters, and only in football is the field itself lined like a sheet of notebook paper. The metanarrative of a single football game then fits within the larger saga of Football, which fits within — and helps explain — the masterplot of America. …

37. Football will survive because it’s weathered this crisis before. I don’t know that I believe the old chestnut History repeats itself. Life is various, ever changing, and though situations might have precedents, every situation is a snowflake. I agree with Chesterton: “Of all earthly studies, history is the only one that does not repeat itself.” And yet, it must be acknowledged, football has been here before. Right here. On this same moral hash mark. It was born in blood. It was weaned on death. It was invented in the late 1800s when some mad scientists got the idea to combine rugby with soccer, then slowly stirred in elements of wrestling, boxing, lacrosse, bullfighting, track and field and keep-away. Then they simmered it real slow, like a meat sauce, until it congealed into something that would make gladiators shudder.

38. It caught on right away, captured the public’s imagination, because its ruggedness was thought to cultivate masculinity, to instill vitality, just when American men feared they were losing touch with those things. (Has that ever not been true of American men?) Rules were added. The forward pass. The line of scrimmage. Gradually the game acquired a matrix of dos and don’ts, a rulebook more complex than the assembly instructions for an Ikea entertainment center.

39. Complexity made the fans feel like cognoscenti. With a little homework, the everyman could monitor the action knowingly, through field glasses, like a five-star general watching the battle from a distant hilltop. But the game never alienated the ignorati. Maybe while watching the Packers vs. Vikings you notice the D dropping a man into coverage, or sugaring a safety down into the box. Maybe you recognize that the O is in an 11-personnel set, or a 22. Maybe you don’t. Maybe you just like all the pretty colors. Doesn’t matter. The NFL is a capacious tent. Come one, come all, step right up.

40. Nothing else approaches football’s universal, transcultural, transgender, trans-generational appeal. Besides football, clean water and the Gap, nothing else in modern America can claim black fans and white fans, gay fans and straight fans, male fans and female fans, 9-year-old fans and 89-year-old fans.

41. Television, which tells us who we are by showing us when we gather, proves football’s cultural hegemony better than anything else. Nine of the 10 highest-rated single telecasts last year were football, including the Super Bowl, the most watched program of 2011, seen by 110 million people, or more than one-third of the populace. Four of the five most watched TV programs in American history have been Super Bowls. Thanksgiving Thursday and Super Bowl Sunday are the only two days when the entire American Family gathers in Rockwellian fashion around the dinner table, and let’s be honest, both days are all about football.

42. Michael MacCambridge, author of America’s Game, says we miss the point when we think of football as a man’s game. It is and it isn’t. “I think everybody knows that the TV show each year watched by the greatest number of men is the Super Bowl,” he says. “But the TV show every year watched by the greatest number of women is the Super Bowl. That’s true for African-Americans, Hispanics and so on — across the board.”

43. MacCambridge says football exploits something in our national DNA, something we have in common with the ancient Romans — a weakness for spectacle. “What I think American life is about now is big events that people can look forward to and gear up for.” Sometimes that means the Oscars, he says, sometimes it means the season finale of Breaking Bad. But come autumn it means the Big Game. “The presence of the game is everywhere,” MacCambridge says. “You feel it in coffee shops, you feel it in churches & There’s this quickening pace.” …

58. Yes, 2012 is an eon away from 1962. The Cold War has ended; we no longer use football as nuclear Kabuki theater. But Doomsday is still uppermost in our minds. You can’t sit in a church, or movie theater, and feel safe. Terrorism is neither gone nor forgotten, though we pretend both are true. Meanwhile, the national debt crests $16 trillion, the thermometer rises like a bloodred soufflé. Drug-resistant viruses, flesh-eating viruses, grid-eviscerating computer viruses, all lurk. A subcontinent of soda bottles and condoms and dental floss blobs around the Pacific. Mutant species. Solar flares. Seventeen-foot pythons. Nancy Grace. Wyoming lawmakers recently debated what their state should do when the United States collapses. Options they weighed: buy an aircraft carrier, raise an army, print special Wyoming currency. Q: How much is that loaf of bread? A: Ten and a half Cheyennes.(Half a dozen other states have had similar debates.) Football still comforts us, still braces us, because no matter what Armageddons we face, or imagine we face, the gridiron is a grassy stage on which we can watch something we need to watch, something we as a society can’t seem to watch enough — courage.

59. I don’t mean simply Hemingway’s pressurized grace. I mean order. Courage, among other things, is order. Simple order. Cool, clear order. One of the exquisite pleasures of a football game is seeing a group of men risk their bodies, their lives, their fortunes, figuratively, literally, to wrest order from entropy.

60. This is the meat and potatoes of all mythology. This is the primal drama. This is what the play-by-play guys are really talking about when they talk about third and long. …

62. Football is always about right now, this moment, because it’s always evolving. Part of creating order is adapting, and football is Darwinian, inside and out, whereas baseball fights off change like a 3-2 curveball. We live in an age of God Particles and nanorobots and live feeds from Mars, and Bud Selig is still Hamleting about instant replay? The mind reels.

63. Football will survive because, from its inception, it has reflected our image of an idealized manhood. “Modern American men,” MacCambridge writes, “found a truth and beauty in pro football that was more reliable, more sharply defined, than almost any other aspect of their lives.” Why? Because manhood isn’t something you possess, manhood is something you must prove, repeatedly, and a three-hour football game offers repeated proof. …

65. Manhood in America used to mean mastering a trade. Then it meant conquering frontiers. After industrialism killed craftsmanship, after the frontiers were paved under for a million Bed Bath & Beyonds, what was left? A few things. Football, chiefly, according to novelist Frederick Exley: “In football a man was asked to do a difficult and brutal job, and he either did it or got out. There was nothing rhetorical or vague about it; I chose to believe that it was not unlike the jobs which all men, in some sunnier past, had been called upon to do. It smacked of something old, something traditional, something unclouded by legerdemain and subterfuge. It had that kind of power over me.” …

67. I remember interviewing a female professor from the University of Texas at Austin. We were eating at a diner just off campus, discussing the all-powerful Longhorns. I asked her why Texans, why Floridians, why Americans are so enslaved to football. She forked her food, thinking. Finally she said something like: The male body. You can’t ever underestimate the awesome power and appeal of the male body. She then said more things about the male body. She talked about a particular football player in one of her classes, the rocked-up statuary Greekness of him, and I feared the girls around us were staring. It was like that moment in When Harry Met Sally … I’ll have what she’s having. …

70. Baseball always gets credit for the foundational part of masculinity — the father thing. The eternal game of backyard catch, Field of Dreams, the Ripkens, the Griffeys, the Bondses, so on. But football is the real paternal game, because it’s a conveyor belt of father figures, in the form of coaches. …

76. Football will survive because there will always be kids who need it even more than they love it. Marcel Reece, a fullback with the Raiders: “People ask me all the time, How’d you choose football? I tell them, I didn’t choose football. It chose me. It was the only time in my life I experienced love at first sight.”

77. Takeo Spikes, linebacker with the Chargers, ditto: “You can lock me up in solitary confinement for a couple of years, never tell me the date, never tell me the month, anything, and I could tell you what month it is, and I could tell you when it’s football season, that’s how much it’s been embedded in me.”

78. Delanie Walker, tight end with the 49ers, used football as a lead blocker in his escape from Pomona, 30 miles east of Los Angeles. Gangs, drugs, crime, poverty. “Football saved my life,” he says, sitting in the 49ers’ training facility at the start of camp. He has no trouble remembering the epiphanic moment. “I was about 8. My mom couldn’t afford to put me in Pop Warner, so I used to play this game with other kids called three flags up.” The rules were simple. There were no rules. Someone threw a ball in the air. The kids all jumped. Whoever came down with it then turned heel and ran for dear life, the mob in hot pursuit. Again and again, Walker snared the ball and ran, and no one could catch him or bring him down. “I just remember that day thinking, This is me. I don’t think I can do anything else.” …

84. Jameel McClain, a linebacker with the Ravens, says people make it complicated when it’s really quite simple. Football offers clarity in a world of doublespeak and lies. “Everything else in life, people can label you without getting the chance to understand you. In football, I tell you who I am. What I’m about. It’s the one thing to me where the definition of you … it’s all in your control.” …

90. Football will survive, but it may be narrower, lesser. In a future filled with scarcity, football may be yet another thing reduced and rationed. Red states, especially Southern states, already embrace football with religious intensity. (The past seven champions of college football have come from the Old Confederacy.) If football becomes redder, if it becomes regionalized, yet another thing we all disagree about, like Obamacare and gay marriage and guns, it might not be football, per se. …

94. Football will survive because its absence would create a cultural vacuum. Maybe not a vacuum, because nature abhors a vacuum and nature wouldn’t abhor the loss of football. Nature would be fine. The death of football would create a cultural DustBuster. “Institutions are embedded in it,” [former NFL lineman Michael] Oriard says. “It’s embedded in institutions. If it goes away, the question is, What replaces it? How will we satisfy whatever needs it served?” Offhand, Oriard can’t think of a way. …

118. I really don’t see it happening. But if it does, if it doesn’t, that’s tomorrow’s problem. We shouldn’t borrow trouble. We should do our jobs, ignore the clock, focus on this day, this season. Football isn’t baseball; it’s often over long before it’s over, but still.