Watch What Happens from the Sidelines

Corralled with the men at a backyard dinner party on a crisp, early September evening, conversation turned to the topic I’ve fumbled every football season of my adult life: fantasy picks.

While the fellas sized up each other’s rosters, it dawned on me that I could probably name more Bravo Housewives than active players in the NFL—a feat that, depending on whom you ask, a straight man should maybe keep to himself. I prayed nobody would look to me for a potential lineup.

I tried to wait out the discussion by getting up to pour myself another glass of wine, but when I sat back down, the conversation had escalated.

A tattoo artist I’d met earlier was aiming to provoke the group with an edgy comment about his desire to watch Giants quarterback Jaxson Dart “die on the field” this season. It was the first time I’d heard the parodically all-American name that could have been lifted straight from Don DeLillo’s End Zone. Overcome by being found out, I froze as the artist looked for my reaction and clocked my cluelessness. He looked a little disappointed his bit hadn’t landed with me. Googling it a day later, I’d understand why someone might wish ill upon a blond-haired, 23-year-old zoomer QB who’d once introduced Trump at a rally.

The irony of the situation wasn’t lost on me. My awkward, dejected demeanor now mirrored the ones I’d seen on men forced to listen to me gab with their wives and girlfriends about Southern Charm and Bethenny Frankel while they looked for an exit. Like many others, Andy Cohen’s universe slowly opened up to me through years of passively watching his celebrity circus with my ex-girlfriend. But I never set out to know Bravo over ball.

The truth is I hadn’t given football any real attention since fifth grade when I broke my arm skateboarding, just hours before I was supposed to try out for the tackle league. I remember feeling crushed that the season would go on without me because for corn-fed Midwesterners, football was the training ground for American fraternity. The huddle had closed, sidelining me from my first real shot at lasting brotherly bonds. Sure, I knew the basics; growing up in Kansas, you can’t help but absorb pass types, penalty flags, and the meaning of third-and-long. Still, what I never had was the lore—who was good, who was washed, who had promise, and why. As a result, I’d been left to walk into certain cultural conversations with men without a playbook.

In the past few years, it seems people won’t stop opining about the so-called male loneliness epidemic—debating its legitimacy and its men-only framing, when women are just as economically squeezed and lonely—and its many offshoots. There’s “mankeeping,” women’s emotional labor for men with shrinking social circles, and partners managing their friendless husbands’ social lives. The topic has been written about ad nauseam in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Cut; it’s even become a meme. Whether the epidemic is real or not, all the noise around it has forced me to take inventory of how I experience loneliness, especially when it comes to the task of making new friends.

Although my best guy friends live nearby—friendships that long ago transcended our shared interests—my desire for more sociability and diversity among relationships hasn’t waned. Growing older, however, I see myself embodying the cliché of running into the difficulty of penetrating new groups and making male friends. Maybe it’s a skill issue. But the injured child in me, tethered to an irrational belief (as my therapist might put it), prefers to think my inability has more to do with having never been indoctrinated into the world of football—the gateway sport into the culture of sports.

Like the Bravosphere, football remains one of the last vestiges of American monoculture, and I’ve done my best to evade it outside the occasional watch. However, no matter how hard I try to avoid it, whether on the road for work or at a dinner full of couples, I keep finding myself among other aging, lonely men grasping at it as fodder for connection.

Was my aversion to these conversations masking a secret desire to become someone who could rattle off depth charts the way I can rattle off Housewives taglines? Do I actually yearn to participate in this surface-level sports banter—the checkdown men throw when incurious minds can’t find anyone deep and open (A checkdown is the short, safe pass a quarterback dumps off to the nearest open man when everyone downfield is covered. It doesn’t gain much, but it drives)?

After 32 years of opting out, it was time to find out.

It was too late to lobby my way into anyone’s league, and I had no one to show me the ropes. So, hours before the season’s first game, I dropped $100, auto-drafted into a randomized league on Yahoo Fantasy (a lesser fantasy app), and signed up for its news notifications and robot-powered analysis. I figured if I could learn all the Housewives lore by passively watching Bravo in the background, perhaps the same could be done with football.

I quickly realized I was out of my depth. The app threw stats, point totals, matchups, and trade rules at me, all attached to names I’d never heard. The robot that picked my team then graded it an F. Overwhelmed and nearly defeated, I tried to remember the confusion I’d felt the first time my ex put on The Real Housewives of New York City, and how lost I’d been trying to tell Dorinda from Ramona from Luann. I wanted to power through, trusting it would all make sense by season’s end.

Then came the actual ball watching. I tuned in to the Chiefs’ first home game, which doubled as running back Kenneth Walker’s impressive Kansas City debut, and was elated to discover the robot had done something good for once in drafting him onto my team.

But the three-hour runtime of the game filled me with unease: Keeping up would mean giving every game this much time and energy. Realistically, I could manage to follow one team and just let my phone light up with fantasy updates.

A week and a few dozen notifications later, I attended a tastefully crunchy wedding at a vintage camper resort in Seaview, Washington. I knew almost no one except a few family members and a childhood neighbor, Garrett, who’d also made the trek out to the Pacific Northwest.

Not to stereotype, but the guests were mostly DIY artists, writers, and musicians, so I didn’t expect any ball talk to come up, which was a relief, as I hadn’t quite learned enough. But I remembered Garrett, on the other hand—again, not to stereotype—had joined a fraternity and gone on to work for a bank.

It had been years since I’d chatted with him one-on-one, so I was anxious about navigating the changes in interests a person undergoes over a couple of decades. But when we met up a few hours before the ceremony, dapping each other up and hugging, we were immediately back in grade school, goofing around. I was impressed it took a full 30 minutes of sustained chatter before we hit a light lull. Feeling comfortable around Garrett, I decided to challenge myself and fill it with the topic I used to dread.

“You been watching any football?” I asked.

“Not really,” he said.

I had misjudged him, so I felt compelled to explain myself and tell him about my ongoing experiment: how I’d auto-drafted into a fantasy league to learn ball as a way to cope with the anxiety I feel when I don’t know how to chat with normie men. The exercise seemed to amuse him, so he paused and thought about a response before giving me his take.

“I don’t think you need to do all that,” he said. “When I had to travel for work and meet some guys across the country, if the conversation ever turned to that, I would just ask them about the worst players on their teams, and then just let ’em vent.”

“That’s all you got to do,” he added.

It reminded me of the tattoo artist who’d wished death upon Trump’s opening act. He hadn’t been shit-testing me, as I suspected. He just needed to let off some steam with an audience, and it was me who’d shit-tested him, incuriously shutting him down by not following up about his death wish for the zoomer MAGA quarterback.

I found comfort in Garrett’s response. From there we drifted into heavier, more existential territory: our parents’ health, our futures, what we want for ourselves.

Later that evening at the reception, after meeting his date, I found out he had also become Bravofied through girlfriend osmosis. The three of us spent the rest of dinner criticizing the contrived performances of the Salt Lake City cast, Summer House’s bed-rotting problem and the boring Next Gen members who weren’t “clocking in” (a term I stole from my ex) for work.

Perhaps the cure for male loneliness, as the meme goes, is Bravo. Or maybe it’s the checkdown after all—a short, safe throw that keeps the drive alive long enough for somebody to go deep.

I left Seaview the next morning relieved of the need to keep such close tabs on my fantasy league. I’d dip in and out at my leisure and watch games when I felt like it. Yet I let the Yahoo Fantasy notifications buzz, lighting up my phone with injury reports and waiver-wire advice for a team I’d already half abandoned. I swiped most of them away unread.

But a few days later, one caught my eye long enough for me to read over twice: Giants quarterback Jaxson Dart was out for the season with a knee injury, surgery ahead.

There was a name I recognized.