Lessons of Super Bowl 100 Imagining football's future through the big game of 2066.

摘要

Fifty years ago, when it was still a modest spectacle watched on a single medium, played by a single gender, contested exclusively between teams from the US, and largely ignored by most of planet Earth, Super Bowl 50 was nevertheless called a "world championship" by the National Football League, whose very name betrayed a parochial, one-nation interest in what the rest of the world knew-if they knew it at all-as "American football." That was 2016, when the NFL was a quaint pastime played for relatively low stakes and officiated by human beings who nipped a coin to start every game, used a physical length of chain to measure a first down, blew a whistle to halt play, and threw a yellow handkerchief to signal a penalty. So primitive was the technology of that benighted age typing with opposable thumbs was our principal form of communication-that NFL players literally practiced against stuffed dummies.