We mainly stick to film here on the Company blog, but I wanted to take a moment to discuss a topic that’s been neglected: football.

Maybe it’s that I’ve spent the last six months watching, reviewing, and all around marinating in college football for Perseverence, or maybe it’s that I’ve been watching games for the past seven hours, but I’m intrigued by tonight’s SEC Championship, which ended with something rarely seen at a football game — tears.

Tim Tebow, the University of Florida’s übermensch-impresario quarterback (and 2007 Heisman winner), led Florida to a 12-0 season this year (not to mention a National Championship last year) and met the University of Alabama (also 12-0) for the SEC  title.  They were ranked 1 and 2, respectively.  Alabama destroyed them, 32-13, thanks primarily to their star running back Mark Ingram.  And Tim Tebow took a knee to weep.

The big football games all inevitably end the same way on our televisions: with the faces of the losing team standing on their sidelines, emotionless.  It’s the same voyeurism that fuels news crews to aim their cameras at grieving families and dethroned celebrities at the moments of their worst imagining.  News media, led by cable television and the twenty-four hour newscycle, capitalizes on suffering.  Well, not so much the suffering as a projection of suffering for the viewer (or, voyeur) to attain a false emotional bond, whether it be pity or disgust or delight.  Remember Balloon Boy when people thought he was actually trapped in the balloon?  The cameras weren’t just trained on the flying object for aesthetics — they were allowing an audience to feel the breathtaking pity of wondering … waiting … for a boy to fall from the sky.

When it comes to those silent sidelines at the end of a football game, there always seems to be a deep sense of stoicism.  The faces are blank for a reason.  Football players are our modern society’s conception of warriors.  Seeing Tim Tebow, a tough motherfucker by all accounts, crying on the sidelines felt as though, in an extremely unusual moment, we were seeing something that we shouldn’t.  It was like being at a dinner party hosted by your friends that you knew to be having problems and accidentally walking in on them fighting in the kitchen.  You know that it’s happening but seeing it isn’t just unusual, it’s uncomfortable.

I should say that I think Tebow’s been way too comfortable on the pedestal that all the sports blogs have put him on in the past few years.  Messiah’s are dangerous currency in athletics. But seeing a player reduced to tears because of a loss eliminates the pomp and circumstance that the sponsors and networks have lent to modern college football games.  For all the criticisms that sports have received in the past decade — the steroids and the elitism — we have forgotten that athletics are some of the most emotional and resonant events that exist.  They are protected, deservedly so, in layers upon layers of repressed emotional responses.  The best players are arguably better in part from their ability to keep strong emotions at check during tough games.  Yet, when there are fissures in the marble statues that the guise of ESPN maintain each game to be — those idealized events — we remember that there’s a humanism buried deep beneath the pads.