Are you ready for some really bad football?

[CONTEXT: The way the Internet works, you might see this well after the end of the NFL’s 2024 regular season. Despite references to those unfolding storylines, nothing football-related in this thought exercise is time-sensitive.]

[TRIGGER warning for Packers fans. I may say some nice things about Detroit, Chicago, and Minneapolis.]

PREGAME SHOW

Snow is falling again in Buffalo, and resilience season has arrived on the gridiron.

As I write, the 2024 regular season is in the books. We saw some great football: The snow-globe game in Cleveland. The Hail Mary that crushed Chicago. The wicked weekly carnival ride of sick throws and gonzo catches. Saquon Barkley hurdling a grown man playing professional football, in reverse. Also Saquon Barkley outgaining entire teams. Freaking Josh Allen. Freaking Lamar Jackson.

Entering the playoffs, one storyline keeps building: will indomitable Detroit survive a brutal run of injuries? Is it resilient enough? The best team through most of the regular season, we began to question the Lions’ prospects as injuries across the defense mounted. Then we marveled as they broke through. We assumed that, to win the last game of the regular season, Detroit’s magnificent offense would need to outrun the resurgent arm of Minnesota Vikings quarterback Sam Darnold. But their MASH unit defense carried the evening.

“Yeah, we’re a resilient bunch, and nothing’s going to change that. We just gotta worry about the one in front of us.” That was head coach Dan Campbell before their game 16 matchup against San Francisco, and that was always the message coming from the Detroit Lions Headquarters and Training Facility in Allen Park, Michigan. The so-called and self-proclaimed biter of knee caps was hired in 2021 to revive a chronically tepid franchise, and resilience is a guiding theme with him at the helm. Just Google it on the Detroit Lions team site.

Tales of resilience infect and infuse sports, almost always in a really good way. That’s the great thing about this Detroit team. If they make it, great. They’re an archetype, a team that you love to hate, for mostly the right reasons. Football fans love the Detroit story because it’s been such a bad team for so long. The team is now fun to watch, and this current turnaround is remarkable and feels durable, even replicable. That’s something to treasure in sport — and in life.

Football is a complex sport that pushes some primal buttons. Basic laws of nature come into play when we describe the play. Hitting, blocking, stalking, catching. Metaphors like ‘hunting the quarterback’ evoke the coiled violence of a jungle cat. Teams butt heads like great beasts battling for dominance. Nature red in tooth and claw, stuff like that.

Football systems are like natural systems in more complicated ways, too. We can actually describe Detroit’s resilience challenge using the language of ecology. And vice versa. Football teams and ecosystems — both rise and fall. Fortune is intertwined with resilience.

Resilience is the key word here. It meanders through layers of meanings, describing many, many different things in the human experience. We’re going to connect the dots between ecosystem resilience and football resilience.

Below I try to talk about the state of the natural world using the same language I might use to talk about the Green Bay Packers in the locker room at my local YMCA. If you’re a fan of football or nature, this story is for you. You probably already know we’re having a hard time communicating about the looming threats to Spaceship Earth. It’s only one of the most important stories of our time, and we’re fumbling it away, arguing with the refs, blowing the clock management. Why not try the language of football? There is something a little comforting about 3 yards and a cloud of dust.

The game script looks like this:

The first quarter will leave no doubt that resilience is more than just a casual word in football. The second covers its use by the sport’s practitioners. Halftime adjustments will start tweaking some basic similarities between football systems and ecological systems. The third quarter will develop these similarities on the field. The fourth will get a grip on the possibility of steep environmental decline using the language of football. No politics, conspiracy theories, or moral complications.

So, are you ready for some football?

FIRST QUARTER

In January 2024, the Buffalo Bills faced the division rival Miami Dolphins in a high-stakes, regular-season finale. Miami had held a 2-game division lead into late November but stumbled as the Bills won 4 straight. Entering the game Miami was still guaranteed a playoff spot, but Buffalo’s only certain path to the postseason was to win.

For much of the game, victory seemed unlikely. The Bills offense was stranded inside the one-yard line as time expired at the half. Towards the end of the third, they fumbled away another promising drive. Miami led into the 4th quarter, when a 96-yard Bills punt return touchdown tied the game. They scored again, and finally ended the game with an interception inside the 2-minute warning.

In her post-game interview, NBC’s Melissa Stark asked Bills quarterback Josh Allen: “What is it about this team? Can you just explain the resilience?”

“Well, I think it’s the best group I’ve ever been a part of in terms of togetherness, and just overall,” said Allen. “There’s just something about it. I don’t know if I can describe it. We’ve just got it.”

Allen doesn’t really answer the question, but then who does? Athletes and coaches routinely lapse into bland affirmations — culturally specific teamspeak that can be part strategy, part propaganda. Coachspeak is a related dialect, and a source of endless interpretive speculation among NFL fans.

Part of Allen’s aw-shucks delivery encourages us to apply our own definition. Resilience does a lot of heavy lifting in the human experience. It’s a core trait of our species, and almost always considered a positive attribute. Talk about resilience and you’ll tap into those working definitions.

In football, everybody talks resilience: athletes and coaches, scribes and commentators. Resilience comes into play all over the field — individuals overcoming injury or personal hardship, roster construction, overcoming mistakes and poor performances. 

Resilience is a word that sportstalk leans on. Stark had lobbed a softball to Allen. Just a few minutes later he used the word twice in his post-game press conference.

So what does resilience mean?

Kansas City Chiefs linebacker coach Brendan Daley used it to talk about his position group’s relish of goal line challenges: “It’s a really resilient group in terms of their mentality.” That fits the first dictionary definition: “the capacity to withstand or to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.”

Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes has used it to talk about his knee, and this leans more to the second common dictionary definition: “the ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity.” (Coaching note: we’ll see this play again in the 3rd quarter.)

But there’s an even more football-specific definition. It’s a brutal sport, and injuries are inevitable. Resilience is the ability of a team to overcome the loss of key players. The Lions beating the Vikings with 6 defensive players on injured reserve and 15 players on the injury report — that’s resilience.

Resilience has more specific meanings in other professions. Engineers, social scientists, and ecologists all have their own working definitions.

Resilience is a core idea influencing people who study coastal and river systems. It’s also a core idea influencing those who prepare for the natural disasters unleashed when these systems are weather-whipped into fury. We hear it after floods and particularly after epochal storms like Milton and Helene.

Whatever it means, resilience is clearly valued and useful, from gridiron to Main Street to the gates of Yellowstone. That probably means that it matters how we talk about resilience. We do that a lot in football — conversations that are seen by a lot of people. This Sportico headline says it all: “NFL SWALLOWS TV WHOLE, WITH 93 OF YEAR’S TOP 100 BROADCASTS.”

SECOND QUARTER

Broadcaster Al Michaels tripped my curiosity switch about gridiron resilience. I was watching a Sunday Night Football maybe 6 or 7 years ago. The details of the broadcast are lost to me, but a vague memory suggests the game was in Houston. And somewhere in America — maybe also Houston — a significant storm had just passed. Football broadcasts often acknowledge major disasters, sometimes while encouraging relief efforts. Wherever he was, Michaels was lauding the resilience of a city in the face of a storm.

I’d been learning about resilience, particularly about how it works in ecological and climate change. And I wondered at the time: when Michaels used the term resilience, did he mean the same thing as a stormwater engineer in Houston or a wetland scientist in Louisiana? Probably not.

The definitions are conceptual kinfolk, for sure, built on the idea of elastic strength. But do the subtle differences in use and definition matter? What happens if those working to prepare us for climate change mean resilience one way, and instead we substitute football’s meaning? It sounds like the kind of mistake that would get a coach fired.

The idea simmered. During the fall of 2023 I thought I was hearing resilience a lot during football broadcasts. I finally decided to dig. A somewhat imperfect search on The Athletic’s database collected more than 250 articles dating back to 2017. I also stuck a voice recorder by the television and recorded multiple games, scanning the broadcasts for resilien*. 

I was looking for patterns. When does football talk about resilience? Do writers, athletes, and coaches use the word in the same way? 

By my rough tally, in 116 of these articles resilience was the writer’s word. Direct quotes from coaches accounted for 68 uses, and players added another 65. The rest were miscellany — execs, trainers, fans.

It’s very often paired with words like “mental toughness.”

There’s also a seasonality to the use of resilience. During the offseason — free agency, the draft, and training camp — resilience tends to be an individual narrative. A player who overcomes injury or some other hardship to make the roster is resilient.

Once the season begins team narratives amplify. Comebacks — by players and teams — are a particularly popular resilience story. Overcoming mistakes, like winning despite a poor start to a game or a season, is resilient. Successfully adapting to the loss of one or more players is resilient.

Resilience storylines are so widespread in the NFL that I’ll just quickly recap the 4 teams in my home division, the NFC North. This happens to be the most competitive division in football this year. Will it be the most resilient?

Green Bay Packers head coach Matt LaFleur loves to tout the resilience of his ascending young quarterback, Jordan Love. After a weird win against the Bears, LaFleur trotted out the word for his whole squad.

Minnesota quarterback Sam Darnold uses the word regularly in press conferences to describe his team. But really it’s his career reclamation this season that has been an avatar for individual resilience. Last year, backup Viking quarterback Josh Dobbs was acquired mid-season then led the team to multiple wins with practically no preparation. His resilience was touted pre-game. Dobbs also inspired an NFL Films production about his long-running friendship with a young brain tumor patient, AJ Cucksey. The two met in 2017 when AJ was a young boy and Dobbs was calling signals for the University of Tennessee. They stayed in touch through Dobbs’ stints at multiple NFL teams. AJ became a young man and decided to play football despite health challenges. The name of the film: “Resilience”.

In Chicago, general manager Ryan Poles is the resilience advocate, asking his scouts to explicitly evaluate individual resilience. (As a snarky Packers fan I’d be remiss if I didn’t note here that the team’s most resilient resource may just be its long-suffering fan base. “Bear down” is the team’s slogan. I’ll also grudgingly admit it’s a good one, with overtones of resilience.)

Somehow Detroit’s resilience thinking has both more substance and more hype. That’s the Dan Campbell effect. His Lions media guide biography says he’s building “a culture based on resilience” at Ford Field. 

If you’ve watched a game recently, you’ll see GRIT tattooed on the goalpost pads; to hear the players talk, grit seems like the mindset equivalent of pad level. Sometimes a synonym of resilience, sometimes an adjacent concept, grit may be the best 4-letter definition we have of resilience. (In some social science research, grit and resilience are used interchangeably.)

Conclusion: The NFL does not have a casual relationship with the idea of resilience.

HALFTIME

Ecosystems and football teams are not remotely the same thing.

But before I try to bind them into the same playbook, please remember that this is just a cocktail napkin model. You can’t expect a bump in your Madden gameplay or your FanDuel bottom line. A lot of you can probably build the model out far enough that it gets even cooler, but eventually it’s going to break.

The main point: spotting the weakness in complex, timing-dependent systems. 

Ecosystems and football teams are both complex systems with many pieces and a few striking similarities. Both move along, day by day, season by season, following a lot of complex rules. Timing is critical. The many building blocks are similar from ecosystem to ecosystem, team to team. Each piece of the puzzle has a job to do.

Productivity is the point of both systems. Under the laws of nature, ecosystems produce life. Under the rules of football, teams produce points. The rules/laws combine with the players/species to govern and shape the flow of energy through these finely tuned systems. 

The offense has the ball. The center puts the ball into play, usually by giving it to the quarterback. The quarterback can run with the ball, hand it to another player, or throw it to another player. Depending on the philosophy of the coach there are going to be tendencies, rules for running versus throwing, scenarios for 4th down and even trick plays. If you’re not touching the ball, you’re blocking. Every position group on the field plays a role, even if it’s just a feint. Each contributes to the overall productivity of the team.

“Football is such a connected sport,” explained Ryen Russillo recently on his podcast. “Everybody has to do their job for something to work. All these other things had to work out for you. If one piece of it is off, maybe you get away [with it]. A couple pieces are off? The whole play is screwed up.”

In this way football positions are a lot like what scientists call ecological functions. These are the jobs that various parts of an ecosystem perform that benefit other members of the system — or the team.

Green plants take energy from sunshine, turning it into all kinds of living tissue. These become both food and habitat for other living things. Plants also have other ecological functions, such as holding soils, storing and filtering water, and recycling nutrients. Beavers create wetland environments that host myriad species over much of North America. The pollination of thousands of different plants occurs thanks to legions of different insects. Some ecological functions can be insanely specific, like when a parasitic wasp needs a particular prey species.

Swamps in Mississippi, Spain or Thailand, may have vastly different plants and animals in them, but the animals in each do the same kinds of things. The green plants capture energy from the sun and hold water and soil. Insects graze back the plants and so provide more diverse food for birds and mammals. And so on: nature’s Round River keeps flowing.

So let’s head back towards football. Like the swamps above, a football team in Florida or Michigan has completely different players, yet they all do the same thing: The center snaps the ball to the quarterback, who then distributes it to running backs and receivers while being protected by the offensive line. 

A football play is a complex, interdependent system that relies on timing and people doing their jobs. Think about the precision of the long snapper. Think about how many times you see the running back or receiver cross between the quarterback and center just before the ball is snapped, and how rare it is for that timing to be off. It’s a game of inches.

When you can run the ball, it makes it easier to pass. When you can pass the ball deep, it makes it easier to run. When the wide receivers block well, runners and other wide receivers benefit. The kicker is going to have a very hard time doing their job if either the long snapper or the holder fails at theirs. Running backs tend to do as well as their blocking. Wide receivers are almost completely dependent on the quality of quarterback play.

That connectivity, precision, and synergy combines to create the athletic beauty of American football. Many of the moving pieces of ecosystems also operate using that kind of connectivity, precision, and synergy. 

Under stable conditions over time, ecological processes tune themselves to the timing of the seasons. They reach a balance of productivity and decay, of give and take. It’s sometimes called equilibrium. Ecosystems are always changing, but this kind of balance and relative stability is what we often ascribe to wild and semi-wild natural systems.

Football fans also know about this equilibrium. Good teams have it, and there have been a lot of good teams. Some franchises have been good for extended periods of time. Roster assembly is not just collecting athletes. Coaching, the front office, and support staff such as trainers and nutritionists and equipment managers all play a role. The character of all these people plays a role.

Because football is a violent sport and injury is common, the team needs more than one player at every critical position. The dominant philosophy here is known as “next man up.” You may have 3 to 6 running backs in the room on an NFL team. The best player plays the most. If he goes down, or needs a rest, his playing time goes to the next guy. The average length of an NFL career is 3.3 years. That means a football team that’s good for an extended period of time has to be good at managing the inevitable churn of the roster.

How well a team handles this continuing roster transition, alongside the inevitable injury depletion, is football resilience.

THIRD QUARTER

So let’s talk about Detroit. A fabulous and willfully dominant Lions squad has been “kicked in the nards by the football gods,” to borrow a phrase used by podcaster and NFL Network talking head Rich Eisen.

Detroit has put 6 defensive starters on injured reserve since the season began. Heading into their final tilt against Minnesota, 13 defensive players were on the injury report. The previous week, before their game against San Francisco, Dan Campbell was all about “next man up.” They won. And then they won again.

The Lions now get a week off, and home field advantage through the playoffs. If they survive this injury depletion — and they lost yet another defensive starter in that last game — to go far enough in the playoffs, someone will write or film a narrative symbolically comparing the rise of the team to the rise of the city. They will probably use the word resilience — it’s a tag many Rust Belt cities like to claim as they work their way slowly back to economic relevance.

For teams like Buffalo, Detroit, and Cleveland, this regional history is woven through the long narrative arc of their teams. We love our sportsball because these stories run through the fabric of families and communities. Detroit lies on the banks of the Lake St. Claire and the Detroit River, which connects Lakes Huron and Erie. And this fluid connection to the Great Lakes is useful because there are few better regions to talk about resilience. In the NFC North, three cities border the Great Lakes, while the fourth serves as a connection between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Basin.

Lakes reflect the changing landscapes around them. And large lakes can be a window to great change. For more than a decade, cities of the Great Lakes have been collectively focusing on the resilience of their coastlines, river-ways, and both their fresh and stormwater infrastructure. Climate change is here, and the first signs are an overall increase in precipitation and escalating storm intensity. Lake levels are trending high, and many rivers are prone to flooding. Paradoxically, there’s also some drought.

If you dispute climate talk, maybe this is where you check out. In football terms this makes you the fair-weather fan, the one with so much near-sighted bluster that you thought your Raiders actually had a shot this year. 2024 was the hottest year in human history, bro. Southern California is burning at unheard-of intensity. And since 1951, total annual precipitation in the U.S. Great Lakes has gone up 14%. Your record is your record.

Let’s use some football lingo to break down a fairly simple and common example of environmental change: the eutrophication, or nutrient pollution, of lakes and rivers. 

When we think of land, we like it rich. Farmland, bursting with nutrients — that’s a good thing, right? But it’s a little more complicated when we talk about lakes and rivers. The clear freshwater systems we love so much, and prefer to drink from, are typically poor in nutrients.

Eutrophication was a defining problem of 20th century water quality, and it remains a fundamental challenge today. Rich farmland, spilling its excess into the ditches that feed streams and rivers, is a major source of the green choking our waters. The tab for nitrogen and phosphorus pollution in U.S. freshwaters is estimated to be at least $2.4 billion annually. (I’d bet we’re undercounting.) An extreme manifestation is the large dead zones that occur in the Gulf of Mexico, Chesapeake Bay, coastal PNW, and in Lakes Michigan and Erie.

When Lake Erie was declared dead in the early 1970s, eutrophication was a major part of the problem. The lake is in somewhat better shape today, but it hasn’t truly recovered. It still festers harmful algal blooms like the one that poisoned Toledo’s water supply in 2014.

What happened to the ecosystem team that kept Lake Erie clean? It’s a pretty simple story. An estimated 50 percent of Great Lakes wetlands have been lost across the basin. In Ohio less than 5-10 percent of pre-colonial wetlands remain. 

These wetlands blocked nutrient pollution by filtering water before it reached the Lakes. Losing them is like losing your starting left tackle in football. The result is a continuing failure to block pollution. Water quality drops. Harmful algal blooms kill fish, poison drinking water, muck up our beaches, and make for unpleasant or even dangerous swimming and boating.

Why can’t we turn back the clock to pre-colonial Lake Erie? There was a time, maybe 200 years ago, when it might have been possible to return the Lake Erie basin to something close to what it had been. Remember that team chemistry, what we called ecosystem equilibrium? In a way, the lake was trying to be its clear and vigorous self. That’s nature’s recovery instinct, how we can keep hitting a piece of land or a body of water and it so often springs back. That’s the regenerative powers of rain and sun and complex living systems. That’s the elastic strength of an ecosystem snapping back in place. That’s ecological resilience.

The Great Lakes being, well, Great, still have some snap in them. We’re a little late to restore them to the crystalline bounty reported by early settlers. But now we’re failing them in a way that makes Dan Snyder and Woody Johnson look like Hall of Fame owners. Not only have we failed to replace the left tackle, we’ve given almost no thought to repairing the offensive line around him. And we have stopped teaching anyone how to block.

A good football team would be drafting and developing new players across the line. But where ecosystems are concerned we have minimal plans of succession. If species are the “players” we largely leave roster building to random acts of ecological invasion. That’s part of the problem with the precious wetlands that do remain — they’re clogged with invasive species that don’t fit the scheme of the ecosystem. They also undermine teamwork. We might as well be stocking the O line with the most avid fans at the game.

At the moment, scientists who study planetary change are concerned that we may be breaching at least 4 of 9 major planetary boundaries. We’re making generationally bad decisions — the kinds that can set a team back for decades. 

That’s one place where the model breaks: football teams have the opportunity for a hard reset, like the turnaround currently being executed by Detroit.

It’s different on the landscape. Wherever you live, it’s the only place like it in the world. It has a cultural and ecological backstory, an underlying resilience, that explains how people live there. We have to find new ways of doing business with nature if we’re going to support and take advantage of that resilience. Humans help define this equation because the well-being of people and that of ecosystems are indelibly linked.

You don’t need to look any further than Great Lakes cities. While their teams struggle with on-field resilience, their home cities are devising other modes of resilience. The city of Green Bay lists among its “Key Strategies and Initiatives” the goal of 21st century infrastructure: “Install innovative, resilient systems and services…” to meet current and future needs. Chicago’s “Resilient Chicago” plan is focused on “the ability to rebound quickly from and strengthen a city’s capacity to respond to shocks or stresses.” Detroit’s climate change strategy defines resilience as adapting to change: “Strengthening infrastructure and equipping families and communities with the resources to protect themselves against the harmful effects of climate change and recover when climate impacts occur.”

The bureaucratic language of these commitments is stilted, but the people doing the work are inspiring. They know that resilience is not about getting the last few sheets of plywood and a roll of duct tape from Home Depot. It’s about the integrity of the ecosystems that support life. The ecological rulebook will ultimately determine the quality and longevity of the human future.

How are we doing? You know those games between unevenly matched teams that somehow stay close for the first two quarters and even most of the way into the third? Finally, the weaker team collapses and the winning team breaks it open. That may be where we are now on Planet Earth. Life’s going to get very uncomfortable for a lot more people.

FOURTH QUARTER

What does Al Michaels mean when he talks about a city’s resilience? He’s been around the booth long enough to know how sports can practically fetishize a concept like resilience. But he’s talking about the human social and economic response — how communities, cities, and even regions can pull together to facilitate recovery after a disaster. It’s a perfectly fine endeavor. I commend the spirit of it.

But it’s not a deep enough resilience cut. So long as we fail to take into account ecological systems, running to Home Depot isn’t going to solve much. For some teams, losing becomes a habit. Disaster is getting to be a habit.

So let’s get back to Detroit and its mantra of mental toughness. Dan Campbell has proven himself a master motivator. “Yeah, a lot of guys are less than 100 percent,” he said recently. “That’s just the way the NFL goes. But no excuses. Got to go out there and perform.”

His grit, his resilience, his power to strategize and will his players through each game is extraordinary. And humans — we’re going to need our coaches, our gurus, our taskmasters. But does this football concept of resilience work for nature?

Commentators, watching extreme feats of athleticism, love to spout about how “you can’t teach speed.” It’s one of those clichés that happens to be true. You can’t coach speed, or athleticism, or reaction time.

You also can’t coach Koala Bear or Long Billed Curlew. No other part of the natural world cares how we get jacked up for the big game. The trees aren’t listening. Salmon will find a cool gravel bed to spawn in, or not. Cheering from the riverbanks will do nothing. Birds will survive a heat dome — or not. Many sea creatures — including those that generate a fair share of our oxygen — make their homes from elements sifted out of the water. No pep talk will make them try harder as too much carbon in the water shifts oceanic chemistry.

No halftime speech will shift any of these planet-changing outcomes.

Are you ready for some terrifyingly bad football?

Our O line is patchwork and weak. Our quarterback is 5 years past his prime and still hasn’t learned the new offense. The next decade is going to be like watching our favorite team lose its best players, one by one, to career-diminishing injuries. RedZone TV could have a devastating new meaning. Your office fantasy pool is dead.

We’re asking too much of the Earth, and that’s even true in football. A lot of fans are conflicted by the expansion of the NFL — an extra team in the playoffs, the Christmas takeover via Netflix, and 17 games in a season — with 18 on the horizon. 

“An extra playoff team? I hated that,” said Domonique Foxworth on Rusillo’s podcast after the closing weekend of the regular season. A former player and union leader, Foxworth has his own podcast and is a regular guest on ESPN’s morning shows. “I hate an extra game on the season, like last week. We all love football. Football is great. Last week kind of sucked, guys.”

“Don’t let your desire to make more and more money ruin this beautiful product,” he argued. It’s already happened in college football and professional basketball. “Don’t start watering down the product. We’re going to end up with all our guys hurt or doing load management and having these week 18s and 19s and 20s that suck.”

A day later he spoke with Mina Kimes, in his weekly guest spot, about how some teams retained their generally unpopular general managers. They’re on the hot seat, argued Kimes: “I would worry that they would be making decisions with that in mind, with that sort of short-term timeline, regardless of whether or not it aligns with the long term direction of the franchise.”

“The short-term thinking will always kill you,” warned Foxworth.

TWO MINUTE WARNING

How much time is left in this game?

That’s debatable. I’m not a clockwatcher. There’s regular buzz about meeting the 1.5 degrees Celsius target, but that one number may be too reductive to make sense. Ecologists, like sports fans, can be stat nerds. Crunch those numbers and there are problems all the way down. The raw numbers for water and air quality, for heat waves and dry spells, are grim. Ask someone on the ground in Los Angeles now, or in North Carolina a few months ago, if this seems like an overreaction.

Things look bad, but I’d rather focus on the next set of downs. We all love a comeback story, right? What’s the play call for Redemption Road? How about a Gaia Special?

We can’t do better than starting to have the conversations that we’ve been deliberately avoiding for the last 20 years. I’ve walked into innumerable casual situations where being able to talk about ‘the game’ served as a welcome mat for continuing dialogue. I’m a Packers fan and have been known to watch football with Bears and Vikings fans. In this world, anything is possible.

Let’s end with the ecological wisdom of Bill Belichick, widely viewed as one of the best football coaches of all time: “There is an old saying about the strength of the wolf is the pack, and I think there is a lot of truth to that. On a football team, it’s not the strength of the individual players, but it is the strength of the unit and how they all function together.”

OVERTIME

We hope.