A beer a minute in Texas football: Heavy drinking and the heroizing of the antihero in Friday Night Lights

This article applies a qualitative framing analysis to the first three seasons of the television series Friday Night Lights, focusing particularly on its incorporation of heavy drinking into narrative representations of the player whose character is most consistently central to the game of football as fictionally mediated in small-town Texas over the course of those three seasons. The analysis suggests that over the course of that period Friday Night Lights embeds nuanced social meanings in its framing of alcohol use by that player and other characters so as to associate it with multiple potential outcomes. Yet among those outcomes, the most dominant framing works to, in effect, reverse a progression through which media representations historically evolved from a heroic model toward an antihero model, with heavy drinking central to that narrative process of meaning-making in such messages.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

Chronicle of a (Football) Death Foretold: The Imminent Demise of a National Pastime?

Football today, most conspicuously at the professional level (National Football League), is the economic and cultural colossus of American spectator sports. To speak of its ‘life cycle’, then, would seem nonsensical: although it has a clear ‘birth’, to speak of its ‘death’ might seem ridiculously premature. Yet, recent developments make imagining such a death possible. In this essay, I will explore two current controversies – over ‘athletes’ rights' at the collegiate level and the dangers of traumatic head injury at all levels – that have the potential to destroy American football at least in the form we know it today. And it will trace the factors behind those controversies – the insistent and persistent ‘amateurism’ of American college athletes and the fundamental violence of the game itself – back to their origins. What might end American football as we know it was present in the game from nearly its beginning