"Football combines the two worst things about America: it is violence punctuated by committee meetings"

George Will’s observation draws upon both the cultural and organizational aspects of American football to make a pointed critique of broader American society. He identifies violence and bureaucracy as two defining, and perhaps troubling, features of the United States. Football, as an American pastime, comes to symbolize these dual characteristics.

On the field, football is inherently violent, with its physical clashes, aggressive tackles, and collisions between players, all dramatizing conflict and dominance. Will sees this not just as an essential part of the sport, but as a reflection of a deeper national ethos, the glorification or acceptance of violence as entertainment or as a way to resolve disputes. The brutality on the gridiron becomes a metaphor for what he views as a tendency towards confrontation in American culture at large.

Yet the violence is not unbridled; it is structured, governed, and repeatedly interrupted by deliberative processes, timeouts, huddles, reviews, and the endless meetings of coaches and officials. These pauses aren’t merely moments of rest, but emblematic of another American trait: the incessant recourse to committees. Decisions that could be swift are instead bogged down by procedure, discussion, and sometimes endless debate. The game’s momentum is repeatedly halted by strategy sessions and bureaucratic checks. Will characterizes these breaks as committee meetings, satirizing the American penchant for organization, rule-making, and administrative overcomplication.

Combining these two elements, Will’s remark positions football as a unique American invention that manages to merge the primal and the procedural. The physicality speaks to passion and struggle, while the constant meetings allude to a culture that cannot act without formal discussion and concurrence. Football becomes a microcosm of American life: a country constantly vacillating between raw action and procedural control, between impulse and institution, a spectacle defined as much by its interruptions as by its violence.