The Most Coveted Job in America

EPISODE 272: ...is also deeply misunderstood.

I say this often, because it’s true:

There is no institution in modern American life like football.

Mobile, high-speed Internet shattered our country into a zillion jagged pieces, each of them resembling a supposedly personalized algorithm, leaving us with fewer shared references — let alone experiences — than ever before.

We have Donald Trump.

We have Taylor Swift.

But most of all, we have football — the tradition to which both of those entities have, by no coincidence, attached. (This is typically around when I say the word “monoculture” and someone playing a PTFO drinking game blacks out.)

All of which is to say that the most coveted job in football — and therefore America, at all levels, from high school cafeterias to the NFL — is obvious.

The new book American Kings: A Biography of the Quarterback, by my friend Seth Wickersham — a.k.a. Alaska’s Uncle Rico — is out September 9. Inhaling it has been my preparation for both the college football and NFL seasons.

It’s a book about a unique job, in fine-grain detail. And Seth reported the hell out of it. Meaning that it does justice to how this story is also about everything else.

YOUTUBE SPOILER ALERT:

Daddy,

Pablo