What’s behind our love-hate relationship with football?

Chuck Klosterman’s “Football” is a strange book — an impassioned collection of essays about the game that would make an awkward gift for the fan in your family. Though its release is timed to the height of the NFL postseason, Klosterman often seems inclined to put you off watching the sport. He muses at length about classic players and statistics, only to lament the dead-endedness of the debates they inspire. He broods on the sport’s structural absurdities and moral questionability. He predicts its eventual decline and death. As he puts it in the introduction, “I love football, but I don’t want to take it to the prom.”

But that’s a typically Klosterman-ish way of going about things. First as a music critic and later as a general cultural commentator, he has specialized in counterintuitive takes, pressure-testing our comforts, pleasures and basic perception of reality. What if the Eagles and hair metal are not only not-bad but actually good? What if everything we know about gravity is wrong? In 2010, he wrote a card game called HYPERtheticals that was designed to insert players into brain-breaking scenarios. (If you were reduced to cannibalism to survive, would you eat babies or the elderly first?)

I suspect that if a Gen Xer such as Klosterman had been born 10 years later, he would approach such matters like a swaggering edgelord, barking into a podcast microphone about our sheeplike assumptions. But in “Football” he takes a gentle, almost quaint approach to his provocations. He’s not so much striving to provoke as work through the inside-out ideas that pollute his brain as a fan. Each of the book’s 11 chapters opens with a forceful assertion that he’ll proceed to rationalize: Jim Thorpe is indisputably the greatest player ever, even though we have practically no footage of him playing the game; gambling makes the game better; playing football is OK, despite all the concerns about head trauma; and football will die despite its current cultural dominance.

The strategy has its virtues. Klosterman knows a lot about the game, and his command of esoterica generally serves the meatier questions that football engenders — about race, greatness, obsession, risk. And the pages are infused with a sense that the game is profoundly odd, starting with a name that suggests it privileges kicking over running and passing. “There are many, many things that could serve as bell cow of the U.S. monoculture,” he writes. “Why has society coalesced around a sport that wrecks people’s brains?”

The strongest essay is an attempt to explain why football is so popular, concluding that the game fits television like a nest in a tree — its action, its lulls, its militaristic but not overtly violent nature. Indeed, Klosterman suggests that the extreme athleticism of the game in recent years — see quarterback Patrick Mahomes or running back Christian McCaffrey — is evidence of a game striving to catch up with its video game version, instead of the other way around.

Klosterman suggests that the game thrives only on a fragile scaffold of rules, rigor and Americans’ consciences. We celebrate individual players’ accomplishments, he asserts, but they operate under a “construction of control where players succeed by doing exactly what they’re instructed to do.” (NFL quarterbacks, for instance, hardly ever call plays today.) Klosterman can’t avoid brandishing the word “fascism” to discuss the game’s organizing principles. And he argues that, looked at clearly, the game exists in opposition to principles upheld by many. “Nothing about the culture of football is what we want, or what we are told to want, or what we are supposed to want.” The sport does not “reject toxic masculinity.” It “celebrates the ability to ignore injury and accept pain” and “rewards domination of the weak” and “shuns individualism and identity.” Most fans may not see the game in those terms, but Klosterman contends that “the issue is that this is the perception of football culture, particularly among those with no affiliation to that world. It’s how football appears to any disinterested bystander.”

And perhaps this is what we want — which is why the game can be so morally fraught. So perhaps it makes sense that Klosterman’s efforts to address the game’s trickier tensions around race and head injuries feel unsatisfying. Considering the case of quarterback Colin Kaepernick, frozen out of the NFL for kneeling during the national anthem to protest police mistreatment of Black people by the police, Klosterman writes that the affair shows how “football reflects the day-to-day American projection of race.” But when it comes to taking a side on the matter, he, er, punts, suggesting that Kaepernick’s protest might have been welcomed if he had done it after the 49ers’ successful 2013 run and not following a subpar 2015 season. Klosterman’s approach to the issue of head injuries becomes a modified version of the trolley problem, musing on the various ways we choose danger (or don’t) and police it (or don’t).

In a similar way, his prediction of football’s eventual demise is at once provocative but safe: The game will die, he says, but only decades from now, as the rapid capitalization of college football helps drive NFL costs so high that eventually advertisers balk at the absurd expense. “There’s never been irrefutable evidence that TV advertising is effective at anything except introducing a new product to those who have never seen that product before,” he writes. Maybe, but experts have scratched their heads at the insane expense of Super Bowl ads since the days of the Pets.com sock puppet.

It may be that most Americans are happy to live with the game’s contradictions, even embrace the way it validates the kinds of injustices and ironies and unfairness embedded in our culture. That has lasted for centuries, and there’s no reason to think it won’t endure. Love and absurdity are part of the football, and American, experience. As Klosterman writes in the book’s conclusion: “I want to be controlled. I like it. I don’t care if it doesn’t make sense. That’s the best part.” He’s got plenty of company.