The Great American Football Ritual Summary

Douglas E. Foley offers an interesting analysis of American football culture in high schools, in his article titled “The Great American Football Ritual: Reproducing Race, Class and Gender Inequality”. The author covers the ways that the football culture splits people apart and segregates them into groups based on what they contribute to the football scene. The football scene seems to bring negativity to the lives of every group it touches, yet it is still a staple in American culture to this day.
The author covers the most prevalent groups and events relating to football. Some of them are pep rallies, marching band, cheerleaders / pep squads, spectators / ex-players, and the brains / farm kids / nobodies. The pep rally is a school-wide event,

where everyone from students to teachers is talking about the game before the rally and the day is pretty much derailed for learning.

The interesting part is how the author discusses the students seating’s at the rally itself. The people who do not want to participate are towards the exits waiting for the moment they can leave, while the people interested and involved in football are in the middle. Even in the middle, they wind up being segregated by what they do in relation to football and with their seniority levels. The next group discussed is the marching band. The women in marching bad typically would be regarded as cool, but the men got the titles of being “weak”, “gay”, and “not being real men”. The football players would even go as far as “testing their manliness” by punching them in the arm and seeing if they flinched. Cheerleaders and pep squads were another group showing segregation and inequality. The author mentions that the cheerleader positions was more reserved for the “pretty” girls, while the pep squad was for those who were less attractive and less desirable. Even the cheerleaders themselves were ridiculed for a multitude of reasons. They were fantasized about by men from every group, yet the football players mocked them if they did not go out with them, and degraded

them, and they were gossiped about just for existing. The spectators and ex-players are another major problematic group. People from the community will heckle the players for any mistakes they made during the game, while the players are forced socially to stand there and take it without talking back. One other group of people would be the brains / farm kids / nobodies. The brains were the ones who played sports with less physical contact were the brains, and did not have as much of a negative stigma. If a “brain” could not do sports, they would maintain their status by helping the jocks with their schoolwork to try and remain in the in-crowd. The nobodies / farm kids usually did not have time to participate in sports activities, so they got the title of the nobodies, because of their absence to these “essential” events.
To promote greater overall equality, football needs to be stripped back down to being what it is, a game.

The community members need to just let the players have fun and enjoy it, where they currently heckle and harass players in public. The cheerleaders should be encouraged to include a wider range of students across age / race / fitness barriers (as long as the person can actually perform as a cheerleader), to prevent it from being only the “pretty” girls. The schools need to work toward ensuring all groups are treated equally and with respect, and they need to encourage football as being a way to bring people together, not driving them apart. Some added diversity in all of these sub-groups should help to fix this, and make the community one again instead of many

groups.
Research in sociology involves many potentially complicated steps, and working to avoid controversy and ethical issues. I did not know the level of detail that needed to go into creating sociological studies before reading this section of the textbook. I think I personally would have made the failure of asking slightly loaded questions because I would have been looking for a particular answer, even though that would skew my results. This idea has a good section in the book under “Loading The dice: How Not to Do Research”, where they discuss the ways to not skew your results and force answers that do not truly reflect the general population. I also learned a lot about how to choose a more reliably random sample to help prevent any biases from contaminating my results. I also found the 8-step research model to be very useful in learning the brief concepts of how a sociological study is done start to finish.