Every real American loves good old-fashioned football. This declaration is embodied every fall by the billions of dollars spent on everything from jerseys to tickets to advertisements to team trinkets. While the world raises a furrowed brow at our obsession with “football”, we take pride in our all-American sport. Yet behind the glamorous curtain of star-spangled pride and forty-yard touchdowns lies something rather amiss- American football represents us.

Our ecstatic displays of devotion upon seeing scrimmage lines filled with burly men barging into each other is bizarre, and symbolizes more than simply a love for sport. In American football lies the character of the American citizenry, for better or worse.

This obsession with sports is hardly new, starting with the very first breaths of Western civilization. Ever since the time of deadly Roman gladiator fights and dangerous chariot races, people have loved to see champions clash for glory and gold. Most of these fights resulted in horrible injuries and sometimes death for competitors in victory or defeat.

These early athletes breathed the arena until the day they died- literally. While it’s fair to say much has changed since the days of life-and-death struggles in the Coliseum, the modern sapling still doesn’t sprout far from ancient roots. We are like Romans in many ways; we have a republic with a Senate, we have an unstoppable military, and we have a lust to spectate competition-especially at the expense of real issues.

This isn’t to say that all sports aren’t a distraction, far from it. All entertainment, from sports to cinema, amounts to a diversion from real world problems. However, the faux pomp that surrounds baseball, basketball, or hockey doesn’t remotely compare to the festival that football offers.

To put it in dollars and cents, the NFL is projected to gain $13 billion from this year’s games (Forbes), up from $9 billion from 2014 (Wall Street Journal). The NFL’s billion-dollar profits easily make it the top dog in pro sports (CNBC), and upon careful analysis, it is easy to see why.

Football is the perfect petri dish of our all-American anthropology. Football provides a reason to bond with other people from our birthplace. Football permits us to claim credit when we (our team) wins, and place blame on others when they (our team) lose. Football ignites our palpable distaste for authority and rules (think referee rulings), and tempts us to slake our incessant appetites for fat and sugar saturated foodstuffs (they’re not serving kale at tailgate parties). But what football allows us to do, above all else, is live in a fantasy reality of bread and games even if that comes with a hefty price. In our society, as all real Americans know, women continue to be reduced to sexual objects, be it on Sports Illustrated magazines (you know which edition) or in the skimpy cheerleader outfits of your favorite football team.

Veterans are callously discarded, often with untreated PTSD, after we thank them before the big game and then send them to war. Our obesity rates are astronomical, with 1 out of 6 kids that we bring before our wide-screen altars dealing with this condition (US Department of Health).

On the scrimmage line, the health of the athletes we claim to revere continually suffers. Researchers from Boston University & the Department of Veterans Affairs found that 96% of all football players that were examined by them and around 79% of all football players in postmortem examinations had a deadly disease known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy. This disease, caused by repeated head trauma to the brain, can lead to memory loss and depression (Frontline 2015).

Essentially, our padded gladiators may just be slowly killing themselves each time the quarterback calls “hike!”.

All of these problems worsen for one reason; we turn a blind eye to them in order to enjoy our Panem et Circenses-our bread and games.

“Panem et Circenses- that’s all the common people want” the satirical Roman poet Juvenal remarked about the Roman masses’ desire for bloody sport instead of civic discourse. Is this, too, what we have done today? Have we neglected our civic duties and our cultural sins in order to indulge our fantasies?

We already know the all-American answer to that question: game on.