Football as a Religion and the Death of Better Ideas

By Theodore Holden and OpenAI-5

The NFL as a Modern Civic Religion

At this point, American football has become more than a sport—it’s a faith. Sundays are its sabbath, stadiums its cathedrals, and the networks its evangelists. The rituals are fixed: national anthems, tailgates, prayers for victory, and the sacred halftime show. The league’s branding is so complete that questioning it borders on heresy. Innovation within such a religion isn’t rewarded; it’s punished. Once a sport becomes a creed, change becomes blasphemy.

The Wishbone: The Better Idea That Died

Nowhere is that clearer than in the fate of the wishbone offense. Created at Texas by Emory Bellard in 1968, it was the most elegant and efficient offensive system ever devised. The wishbone used triple-option reads, constant misdirection, and brute efficiency to outthink stronger teams. At its height, Oklahoma, Texas, Alabama, and Air Force used it to bulldoze opponents and win championships.

But the establishment quietly buried it. Why? It didn’t fit the NFL’s entertainment model. It ate clock. It minimized highlight passes. It made quarterbacks anonymous and receivers into blockers. It was built for victory, not spectacle—and the television age wanted spectacle. So the system was declared obsolete, not because it failed, but because it wasn’t marketable.

The Flexbone: Survival in the Shadows

Yet the idea didn’t truly die. The U.S. service academies—Navy, Air Force, and Army—kept the old knowledge alive. Navy’s modern version, called the flexbone, moves the halfbacks (or slotbacks) up close to the line. The formation looks like an end-around and puts the backs a few steps closer to downfield routes on passing plays. It’s compact, deceptive, and brutally logical—a system designed by engineers, not advertisers.

Despite the academies’ 225-pound weight limits, that system has produced miracles. There have been bowl games where undersized Navy teams absolutely dismantled much larger programs—one example being Navy’s 35–13 win over Colorado in the 2009 EagleBank Bowl. The option game shredded defenses built for speed and size. The smaller, disciplined unit out-executed the giants.

Officers, Not Entertainers

The service-academy quarterbacks aren’t angling for shoe deals or media careers. They’re future officers—young men aiming to be the next Chester Nimitz or Dwight Eisenhower. Their football training is really command training: learn to read, decide, and act without hesitation. It’s leadership through motion, not marketing. They play a purer form of the game because they are exempt from the circus that professional football has become.

A Tale of Two Systems

The contrast could not be sharper:

• The NFL — a commercial empire built on spectacle, celebrity, and consumer branding.
• The Service Academies — quiet monasteries of football craft, preserving forgotten wisdom for its own sake.

When Navy or Air Force topples a giant, it’s more than an upset—it’s a philosophical victory. It’s proof that precision, discipline, and humility can still defeat hype, bulk, and ego.

Wishbone passing game...

Mind you, you still need to be able to throw and catch footballs... But the wishbone appeared to be making that substantially easier to do. At Alabama it appeared to be eliminating the QBs need to deal with zone pass defenses. That is, a defense putting everybody p close enough to hope to stop the wishbone was just putting Ozzie Newsome out on man coverage...