Politics & Power Quote by George Will

George Will’s line lands because it disguises a broadside as a neat piece of mechanics: take the sport most mythologized as communal ritual and reduce it to a grim workflow diagram. “Violence punctuated by committee meetings” is funny in the way an office memo is funny when it’s describing something obscene. The joke isn’t just that football is brutal. It’s that the brutality is packaged, scheduled, arbitrated, and endlessly discussed - America’s favorite talent: turning primal impulse into process.

The specific intent is double-edged. Will is needling football’s defenders who treat it as pure, spontaneous masculinity. The committees (coaches, owners, league offices, rules analysts, replay officials, TV timeouts) reveal the opposite: violence administered by bureaucracy. That’s not a sidebar; it’s the product. The hits matter because they’re framed by deliberation, strategy, and corporate logistics, then sold as tradition.

The subtext takes aim at two national self-images that often coexist without apology: we celebrate force, then insist we’re a rule-bound, reasonable society. Football becomes a miniature of American governance and American business - conflict managed by meetings, talking points, and enforced “discipline.” Will also slips in a cultural class critique: the sport’s mass appeal is tied to its spectacle, while its institutional machinery mirrors the very managerial culture that supposedly boring “elites” run.

Context matters: as a conservative columnist watching late-20th-century America professionalize everything, Will is both scolding and marveling. His cynicism is that we don’t choose between violence and procedure; we braid them together and call it entertainment.