Between the Whistle and the Heartbeat

What the NFL teaches us about losing and finding our humanity.

What does my childhood in Broncos orange have in common with Jason Kelce, the Buffalo Bills, the Green Bay Packers, and even Damar Hamlin’s collapse on the field? At first glance, not much. But together they reveal the way football becomes a mirror of our shared life. It can strip away our humanity or call us deeper into it.

This week we look at how the NFL plays out all four movements of staying human: from shame to embrace, from performance to authenticity, from exploitation to solidarity, and from consumption to re-creation.

Watch or Listen

The Full Story

I was already a football fan before I really knew what fandom meant. The 80s Broncos—those bright orange jerseys, the raw rise and fall of my dad's voice echoing through the TV static—those were the soundtracks of my childhood.

I'd take it out into the backyard, where the grass became Mile High Stadium. I'd throw the ball high and run under it, pretending to be Steve Watson, or crash imaginary offensive lines like I was Lyle Alzado. I'd run plays and then insist my mom come watch my instant replays, even though each one looked completely different. But in my mind they mattered as much as the ones on TV.

On our old Texas Instruments computer, with clunky cartridges and blocky pixels, I'd call a play from the sidelines and watch what happened on the screen. It would be a few years before I took a controller in my hand and used it to help determine what happened on the digital field.

There was something beautifully innocent about those days. A purity in the love of the game and the family bonding time it provided.

The Complexity of Time and Relationships

But time has a way of bringing change, and far too often, it takes the simple joys of life and makes them far more complex.

That's certainly what happened in my family dynamic. My relationship with my dad grew more complicated. We rarely saw eye to eye, especially as I grew in stature and could look him in the eye. Often, I felt like I fell short of his pride. I know he often felt like he was little more than a paycheck. There was a low hum of "not good enough" in the background of our conversations.

And yet, Sundays were different. On Sundays, football became a bridge across the distance between us. Whatever fights or frustrations had lived in the week, the game stitched us back together for a few hours. The Broncos, win or lose, gave us a kind of shared heartbeat.

Final Moments: When the Game Becomes More

That heartbeat followed us all the way into January of this year. The Broncos broke a multi-year playoff absence and I knew that their game against the Buffalo Bills would be his last. Cancer ravaged his body, he barely had the energy to stay awake during the game, let alone to stand up and cheer. Every snap, every huddle, every play carried a weight beyond the scoreboard. That day, the game wasn't just football. It was memory, ritual, farewell.

Growing Awareness: The Darker Side of the Game

But just as time changed the dynamics in my family, time also changed how I saw football.

What was once pure joy (orange jerseys, backyard replays, Sunday afternoons) became more complicated. I began to notice the ways the game I loved also worked against my humanity. On the field players literally carried the weight of entire cities, knowing their performance could change the temper of a metropolitan area for days to come even and that Sunday afternoon brought a sharp spike in acts of domestic violence. I watched the NFL draft, an event that, as wide receiver Keyshawn Johnson once pointed out, behind the glitz and glamor holds an eerie resemblance to a slave market, one that enables billion-dollar owners to extract wealth from the bodies of the men on the field. Beyond the field, I couldn't help but ask how those owners acquired their billions in the first place, and how they used their power and the threat of taking the team to another city to extract concessions from municipalities. I struggled with what it meant to keep cheering when the same game that gave me belonging was also built on exploitation.

The Human Tension

That's the tension of football, and maybe the tension of being human. It can strip away our dignity, or it can call us deeper into it. It can dehumanize, or it can be one of the places we learn again how to stay human with one another.

Which is where I want to bring in the framework of We Can Stay Human. Because if you look closely, football plays out all four of the movements I talk about in this space:

• from shame to embrace,

• from performance to authenticity,

• from exploitation to solidarity,

• and from consumption to re-creation.

Each of those shows up every Sunday, and each one offers us a choice, not just as fans, but as people.

From Shame to Embrace

So let's start by asking if we will add to the chorus of shame, or will we join the quiet company of embrace?

Football is a stage where failure is magnified. A missed field goal, a dropped pass, a blown coverage. Suddenly the cameras zoom in, the commentators speculate, and an entire city names you the reason they lost. We've all seen it: the kicker who walks off the field with his head down, the quarterback who shoulders the whole defeat, the wide receiver replaying the drop in slow motion in his mind while millions replay it on their screens.

The Weight of Shame

Think of Scott Norwood in Super Bowl XXV. His name still synonymous with "wide right." That miss didn't just cost a game; it carved a scar into Buffalo's collective memory. That is shame doing its work. Shame isolates. Shame reduces a whole human life to a single mistake.

Thankfully, the story of Buffalo doesn't end with "wide right."

The Power of Embrace

A fanbase known as the Bills Mafia has a way of reminding us what embrace looks like. After Ravens tight end Mark Andrews dropped a critical playoff pass this year, Buffalo fans flooded his diabetes charity with more than $140,000 in donations, lifting him up instead of tearing him down. When Bengals quarterback Andy Dalton threw the touchdown that ended Buffalo's 17-year playoff drought, Bills fans poured millions into his foundation as a thank-you. They've given to opponents' charities after injuries, raised over a million dollars for Josh Allen's hometown hospital in honor of his late grandmother, and even turned blood drives into fan rituals. Time and again, Buffalo shows us that fandom can be more than ridicule or rivalry. It can be embrace.

This is the choice every game gives us: to reduce a person to their worst play, or to remember that they are more than the uniform, more than the stat line, more than the mistake.

And maybe that's the invitation for all of us, not just on Sundays, but every day.

It's a choice as old as humanity itself: will we reduce people to their worst moments, or will we hold them close in the very moment they feel most disposable?

And not just with the athletes on the field, but with ourselves and the people we engage with everyday. It's about how we respond when our partner forgets something important, when our kid drops the ball in school, when a coworker blows the presentation. We can pile on, or we can step in. We can shame, or we can embrace.

From Performance to Authenticity

Our next opportunity centers on the movement from performance to authenticity.

The Pressure to Perform

Football is performance at its peak. Every inch of the body is measured, timed, weighed, compared. Combine stats are broadcast like stock prices. Contracts rise and fall on a tenth of a second in the 40-yard dash, a single dropped ball in a preseason game, a slow-motion replay that exposes the tiniest mistake.

In that sense, the NFL echoes the wider culture we live in. We are all judged on performance. How fast can you respond to that email? How impressive is your résumé? How many likes did your last post get? We are told, again and again, that worth is measured by production.

The Beauty of Difference

But here is the paradox: football also honors authenticity. The game doesn't work if everyone tries to perform the same role. A 320-pound offensive lineman will never be a 185-pound wide receiver. A safety built for speed will never anchor the defensive line. Each position exists because every body is built differently, with unique gifts and limits. A team is not a collection of identical stars, but a mosaic of difference.

When a lineman leans into his size, his strength, his anchoring presence, he makes room for the running back's vision, the quarterback's timing, the receiver's flight. And when the receiver honors his speed and agility instead of wishing he was something else, the team becomes more than the sum of its parts.

That is authenticity. Not pretending to be someone else. Not performing for approval. But showing up in the truth of who you are, and offering that truth for the sake of the whole.

Jason Kelce: Authenticity in Action

Jason Kelce, best known outside of football as being Taylor Swift's fiancé's brother, is a living parable of this truth.

When he entered the league, scouts questioned whether he was too small to make it as an NFL lineman. At the 2011 draft, doubts circled about his frame, his raw strength, his ability to hold up against massive defensive tackles. He did not fit the mold of what a center was supposed to be.

But Kelce leaned into who he was. He wasn't going to out-benchpress the biggest guys on the line. What he brought instead was agility, vision, and an uncanny ability to read defenses and lead an offensive unit. He became the beating heart of the Eagles' line, not in spite of his difference, but because of it.

And he has never tried to sand down those differences. Off the field, he shows up in the same way—beard untrimmed, voice raw, personality larger than the suits and scripts the league sometimes expects. He is authentic, and that authenticity has made him beloved.

Kelce's story reminds us that the measure of a life is not whether we can perform according to someone else's expectations. The real measure is whether we can inhabit our own gifts, our own bodies, our own voices, and bring them to the team around us. That is what makes us whole.

Authenticity in All of Life

This is a lesson contained with some of the church's oldest writings, though it is often forgotten in contemporary communities. The body is not made of one part but many. And when each part honors its design, life flourishes.

So the question that football presses on us is not just, "Can you perform?" but "Can you be real?" Can you show up with your own frame, your own gifts, your own limits, and trust that who you are is needed? Because in the end, authenticity outlasts performance. Performance burns us out. Authenticity makes us whole.

From Exploitation to Solidarity

And now we come to one of the most difficult movements of We Can Stay Human. While football is built on joy, it is also built on exploitation. Players risk their bodies, often sacrificing long-term health for short-term glory. Billionaire owners rake in the profits while ordinary people shoulder the costs. Nowhere is that clearer than a Walmart heir owning the Denver Broncos.

The Walmart Business Model

Walmart embraces a business model that makes billions at the expense of its employees and the surrounding community. When Walmart arrives in a community, the cost is more than what shows up on a price tag. Small grocers, hardware stores, and pharmacies often shutter within a few years, unable to compete with Walmart's supply chain muscle. And every dollar spent at Walmart flows out to corporate headquarters and shareholders instead of circulating through local businesses and neighborhoods. The result is not just lost shops, but lost character, lost livelihoods, and lost wealth that once stayed rooted in the community.

The Hidden Costs

Some argue that the jobs Walmart brings offsets these costs, yet many of these jobs come with wages so low that workers rely on public assistance to survive, which means the community subsidizes the company's profits. Walmart workers earn so little that thousands depend on Medicaid. One congressional study estimated that Walmart workers require $6.2 billion in public assistance every year. Another broke it down: one Walmart employee costs their community nearly $6,000 annually. Multiply that by the more than two million people Walmart employs, and you begin to see the scale of Walmart's public grift.

Corporate Taxation and Public Good

So what about Walmart's contribution to the tax base? It's almost enough to offset the public's medicaid costs. That said, corporate taxes aren't supposed to just offset costs created by the business, they are supposed to fund our common life. Schools, roads, healthcare, veterans' care, national parks. But when every penny Walmart pays is swallowed just to backfill the assistance their workers require, it means their taxes aren't building the future, they're just destroying the present.

In the end, as I see it, Walmart wealth was not earned, it's a mix of theft, both from workers through low wages and from all of us by not contributing to public funding. And what did they do with that stolen money? They bought a football team. My team. The team that carried me through childhood and grief. It is a bitter truth that the very thing that gave me belonging was purchased with money siphoned from both workers and the public at large. And now that family expects to be celebrated for their charitable contributions and community service done through the team. But every time the TV pans to them in their luxury suite, I remember the workers and the taxpayers who paid the real price for their wealth. If their was any justice in the world, the Waltons would watch not from the owner's box, but a jail cell.

Glimpses of Another Way

And yet, football also holds glimpses of another way. In January 2023, the whole football world froze when Bill's safety Damar Hamlin collapsed on the field. His heart stopped, and for a moment so did ours. It wasn't about wins or losses anymore. It was about a man's life. And what happened next was extraordinary. Players from both teams knelt together, sobbing, praying. Fans filled the hospital parking lot with candles and vigils. The Bills' community, known for tailgates and table-smashing, showed up with tenderness and generosity, raising millions for Hamlin's foundation.

The Green Bay Model

As another example, the Green Bay Packers are the only publicly owned franchise in the NFL. In a league dominated by private billionaires, the Packers belong to their community. Fans don't just cheer from the stands, they hold shares of the team itself. That kind of ownership makes solidarity more than a slogan. It's baked into the DNA of the franchise. When you walk into Lambeau, you're not in another billionaire's plaything, you're in a community's living room.

We saw it in 2011, when Wisconsin's governor tried to strip away the rights of teachers and public workers. Packers players, including Charles Woodson, stood with the unions. They recognized that their own strength as a players' association was bound up with the struggles of nurses and educators and bus drivers. It was an extraordinary moment of solidarity.

The sad irony is that no other NFL team will ever be publicly owned. The rest of the league's owners voted to ban that model years ago. They saw what happens when a community has a stake in its own team, and they wanted to make sure it never happened again. That is greed at work. That is power protecting itself. That is exploitation trying to crush solidarity.

So the question lingers. Will we let the game keep feeding the machinery of exploitation, or will we learn choose solidarity instead?

From Consumption to Re-creation

And now we come to the last movement of We Can Stay Human, the movement from consumption to re-creation.

The Easy Path of Consumption

Football is easy to consume. You can park yourself on the couch, stack up snacks, and let the hours dissolve in a haze of commercials, replays, and fantasy stats. Whole Sundays get swallowed that way. It can become another form of anesthesia, a way of checking out from our own lives.

The Power of Ritual

But it doesn't have to be that. Football can also be re-creation. It can be ritual. It can be connection. It can be joy shared in a living room or a stadium.

For me, this season, it means watching every Broncos game with my mom. After decades of watching games with my dad, my mom would otherwise be left alone in front of the TV on Sundays. So she'll come over, I'll cook, and together we'll make Sundays into something more than consumption. They will be communion.

And I know I'm not the only one. For some, it's the tailgate outside the stadium, where food is shared and strangers become kin for a few hours. For others, it's the friendly ribbing across rival teams in a neighborhood bar. For an entire city, it's the roar that rises when the home team wins, a sound that unites people who might disagree on everything else.

That is the difference between consuming the game and letting it become re-creation. Consumption leaves us dulled and passive. Re-creation leaves us more human, more alive, more connected.

Finding the Middle Path

So how will you approach the NFL this season? Some of you will avoid it, and I understand why. Others will catch every moment of every game, and I understand why. But what if we met somewhere in the middle. What if we listened closely, and started to hear the same question echoing beneath every snap, every huddle, every chant of the crowd: What does it mean to be human? Because football is not just about points on a scoreboard.

The Thread That Binds

When I ask if football can teach us to stay human, I think of Buffalo, moving from shame to embrace. I think of the way a team is made whole by honoring the unique gifts of its players, like Jason Kelce leaning into his difference until it became his strength. I think of the city of Green Bay and how they serve as a model of solidarity. I think of time with my parents where the game becomes re-creation, a place of connection and joy. All of these threads come together in one question: will we stay human?

The Deeper Choice

In each of these tensions, there is a deeper choice at play. Catholic Priest and writer Henri Nouwen called them the two forms of life: the taking life and the forgiving life. Others would name it the way of the ego and the way of compassion. In Buddhism, it might be the path of clinging or the path of release. In Sufism, it is the path of the nafs or the path of the Beloved. However you name it, we are always choosing whether to take or to give back, whether to shrink or to expand, whether to strip away humanity or to restore it.

And maybe that is what the good news looks like in a stadium. Not a John 3:16 sign waved from the end zone, a prayer circle at the 50-yard line, a player thanking God for victory, or a sermon shouted through a megaphone as you leave the stadium. But the ordinary miracle of people choosing to stay human with one another.

The Real Victory

When I sat with my dad for his last game in January, I realized football had never just been about football. It was about belonging. It was about presence. It was about weaving my story into his, even when the threads were frayed. That is what I think we are all longing for. Not perfection. Not domination. Just to be seen, embraced, held, human.

So as this new season begins, maybe the question isn't: Will my team win? Maybe the question is: Will I stay human? Will I choose embrace over shame? Will I honor authenticity instead of demanding performance? Will I stand in solidarity instead of shrugging at exploitation? Will I re-create instead of just consume?

Because in the end, the real victory, is the one where we stay human.

Practices As We Step Into the 2025 Season

Here are three practices to help you approach the NFL this season. Whether your day only allows for a 60-second reclamation reflection, your week a one-hour resistance ritual, or you find yourself ready for a full on rebellion against a world that assaults your humanity, I have something for you.