Each week during professional football season, along with tens of millions of other Americans, I can be found glued to a television rooting for an NFL team. Granted, as a New York Jets fan, this is an exercise that involves less cheering and lot more colorful language and face palming.

But in an increasingly politicized culture, football provides an outlet for Americans to get jazzed up about something that does not involve bitter ideological disputes and whose outcome doesn’t have major national or international implications.