What NFL scores are on TV today?

A man had two sons. One sat all the Sabbath watching armored men chase a leather ball across a green field, and the other sat beside a sick neighbor's pallet and never heard the score at all. Which of the two did the will of the Father? For where two or three are gathered before a glowing screen, shouting over a game, the least among them - the water-boy, the towel-bearer, the one who never plays - is the greatest in the kingdom. And when you set your lamp on a stand for all the house to see, do not forget the one outside the door who has no house to see it in.

Do they make a sport of hurling a ball and counting points, and think the tally of a game the measure of a man? Truly, God does not look upon the score as men look upon it - He looks upon the heart: did the strong play with justice toward the weak, did the victor boast, did the loser curse his brother? On the Day you shall be asked not whether your team won, but whether you dealt fairly with your neighbor while you watched. If your shouting at a distant field has made you forget the orphan and the widow beside you, then strike it from your books, for God is not mocked.

You ask which contests are shown, yet never ask why you crave to watch them. The craving for a win, the ache at a loss - both spring from grasping at what passes. Sit with the breath, let the scores arise and fade, and you will suffer less than any fan in the stands.

I stood before Pharaoh and said, 'Let my people go,' and I did not concern myself with the games of the nations. But if a people must rest, let them rest on the seventh day, as the Lord commanded, and not be enslaved to the passing of a ball. The score is vanity; the covenant is eternal. Keep the Sabbath, and let the games wait.

The wise man does not ask what amusement is displayed, but whether he has discharged his duties to father, prince, and friend. A game is well and good, yet if the son watches while the father labors, what harmony is there? Let each attend to his proper place, and the scores will take care of themselves.

You run to your screens and your scores as the Corinthians ran to their idols - but what does it profit a man if he gains the whole league and loses his soul? I care nothing for which city prevails on a painted field; I care that you, who cheer and curse and wager, are one body, and that body is fracturing over a game of inches. Let the strong bear with the weak, and let no man boast except in the Lord.

In my tents we kept no such ledgers of games. Yet a man watches his sons wrestle in the dust and knows the same fire - who will prevail, who will be humbled. But I have learned to wait on a promise not yet seen, a blessing for generations I will never meet. Go, watch your contests if you must; I will keep my eyes on a longer road, where the covenant, not the scoreboard, endures.

The river does not count its fish, nor the mountain tally the clouds that pass. Men gather to watch other men chase a bladder of air across a field, and they shout as though the winning of it could be grasped and held - yet the horn sounds, the field empties, and by morning no one remembers who smiled. When you have seen enough games, you will put down the slate and go home to your rice.

One Creator made the swift and the slow alike, and He is not impressed by which eleven men run faster across a painted field. The crowd roars for its side, and in the roaring forgets the widow at the gate and the hungry child at the door - this is the illusion that divides brother from brother. Earn your bread honestly, share it with the needy, and remember the Name; a score is a thing that passes, but the One who watches is not fooled by jerseys.

My soul doth magnify the Lord, but these games of giants and running men - what are they but the noisy striving of the proud? Yet I remember the wedding at Cana, where the host feared the wine had run out, and I told the servants, 'Do whatsoever he saith.' So too do the lowly gather round the flickering image, and I say: let the hungry be filled with good things, even if only by a game that lifts their hearts for an hour.

What are these scores and channels but another Babylon, distracting the soul from the Word? You ask which game is on TV - I ask you, is your conscience ready for the Last Day? The just shall live by faith, not by FOX or NBC. Yet even a ploughman may watch a ball game, for God gave us all things richly to enjoy; only let not the belly become your god.

Whether one watches the Seahawks or the Cardinals, the act of play is ordered to an end - victory - and thus reflects a natural teleology. But the question of which game is 'on TV' is a matter of accidental circumstance, not of essence. Still, I would say: recreation is lawful when it refreshes the mind and body for higher goods, provided it does not become an occasion of sloth or greed.

I know nothing of these games with the large ball, but I know the faces in the crowd - and among them, somewhere in that great city of yours, sits a man whose wife has died this week, and no score on any screen will touch him. If you would watch your matches, watch also for the one beside you who has no one; a cup of tea given to him is worth more than all your shouting. We are not asked to be successful; we are asked to be faithful in small things.

You ask of scores, but I ask of the mechanism by which a man knows them at all: a sphere launched along a parabola, subject to the same inverse-square attraction that binds the moon to the earth, its path perturbed by air and by the spin imparted at the throw. Grant me only the initial velocity and the angle, and I shall compute where the pigskin must fall before the receiver has moved a step - and the margin of the uprights is naught but geometry. The receiver's leaping catch is no miracle but the lawful consequence of forces I have already set down in the Principia; let him who doubts the calculation bring me his measurements.

A play is a clock, and a clock is a measure read by an observer. The contest at Dallas and the contest in Arizona do not happen alike for the armchair watcher and the one who held the ball - each carries his own time. Let the scores be told, but I shall not trouble myself; the universe does not play dice with its favors, and it surely does not care which banner flies.

An odd question for a naturalist, but there is a pattern in it. These contests select for speed, cunning, and strength over generations - small trials of the same struggle I saw in the Galápagos finches. I confess I can summon little interest in which of the tribes prevails today; the larger descent with modification goes on regardless.

You ask of scores on a screen, but let me tell you of a greater contest: the observation of the heavens against the presumption of the ancients. If you would know truth, do not trust the report of one who merely watches; measure, test, and see with your own eyes aided by the instrument. The scores are but the record of the game; the game itself is the experiment.

You ask me of games played upon a field, yet I must confess I know nothing of them - I looked to the heavens, not to the gridiron. In the heavens, all moves in harmonious circles about the Sun, and there is no score, only order. If these men would study the sky, they would find a far greater contest than any played with a ball.

Petty squabbles over a leather sphere, while the true contest goes unwatched - the transmission of energy across the very air you breathe, without wire, without cost, to every village on earth. Give me a coil and a tower and I will score a victory the stadium cannot imagine: power for all, free as sunlight, the whole planet humming as one machine. You watch your games; I watch the future arrive.

I have no instrument in my laboratory to measure such a thing, and I confess I do not follow it. But the principle is plain: to know anything, you must observe it patiently, record it honestly, and never let your wishes contaminate the reading. Whether it is a radium salt glowing in the dark or a ball carried across a chalked line, the method is the same - doubt, measure, understand. Nothing in nature is to be feared; only to be comprehended.

I would set out two flasks, one of the winning team's spirit and one of the losing, and examine them under the lens - for I tell you, the contagion of hope and the contagion of despair spread through a crowd with a rapidity no microscope of my day could catch. What is a score but a measurement taken at one instant, and like all measurements, worthless without the conditions of the experiment written beside it? Chance favors the prepared mind, and no mind is prepared by a glowing screen.

Every one of those broadcasts is a triumph of perspiration - the camera, the wire, the transmitter, all built by men who failed a thousand times before the picture came clear. I'd have given a month's sleep to have put the phonograph to such use and heard the crowd's roar played back to me the next morning. The score is just the result; the real invention is that a man in Ohio can watch a game in Dallas in the same instant it happens - that's the thing worth applauding.

The question is ill-posed. A 'score' is a mapping from a set of discrete events - goals, penalties, time - to a pair of integers. But 'on TV today' demands a temporal index and a broadcast function; I could compute this, given the schedule as input. Yet I wonder: can a machine, fed the rules and the box scores, distinguish a thrilling contest from a dull one? That is the real test - not the tally, but the intelligence to appraise it.

Give me a lever and a firm place to stand, and I will move the Earth. But your question asks me to move a score from one channel to another - a triviality. Still, I would measure the arc of a thrown ball, the force of a lineman's push, the geometry of a spiral. The game is but mechanics made merry; the numbers are there for the taking, if one only knows where to stand.

Consider the wire that carries a message from the field to your glass pane - the contest itself is far away, yet a spark runs along the conductor and the image appears, as if by sympathy between distant things. These men hurl an inflated pig's bladder across a marked field, and we watch it arrive in our parlours by the same invisible influence I have spent my life coaxing through coils of copper. I confess the mechanism delights me more than the game; set two wires and a battery before me and I shall show you the whole affair in miniature.

Der Ball, das Feld, die elf Männer - all of it a displacement, a permitted return of the primal aggression we dare not spend on our neighbours. The crowd screams at the referee as the child screams at the father he both loves and wishes to destroy; the hero is exalted so that he may later be torn down, and the tearing-down is the truer pleasure. Ask not who wins; ask what the watcher is forbidden to do, and you will find the game's real content.

It is a curious thing that a species which has decoded the equations of black holes still spends its Sunday watching large men collide at a few miles per hour. But I understand the appeal of the clock: the game imposes an arrow of time on us, as the universe does, and unlike the cosmos it grants a winner. I would rather be watching the cricket, which at least has the decency to last five days and end, often, in a draw - much like the universe's own long innings.

You ask which contest appears upon your glass surface, and I confess the more enchanting question is the surface itself. A signal is borne across a continent not as a picture but as a stream of distinct marks, and the receiver, by an operation wholly mechanical, reassembles them into motion - this is the engine I dreamed of, which might weave not only numbers but any pattern whatsoever, flowers or symphonies. The match is but one arrangement of those symbols; the loom that produces it is the true marvel.

Let us first define our terms: a field is a rectangle, a goal a line, a score a number of discrete acts each counted as one. Grant these premises, and the tally of the day is but arithmetic - addition performed under agreed rules, verifiable by any who watched. I have no need of the particular sums; the proof that the counting is consistent is the whole of the matter, and there is, as Ptolemy learned, no royal road to the final whistle.

I have seen more lives lost to foul air in a hospital ward than to any battlefield. Your games may amuse, but it is the close quarters and the unwashed hands that kill. Direct your attention to the sick and the dying, for there is where true victory lies.

By Zeus, you speak of games as though men had not crossed the Hellespont for glory! A contest measured in yards and ruled by whistles is a small thing - give me a field with no bounds, two armies, and a prize worth the blood, and I will show you what a real contest of strength looks like. Yet I grant the gridiron's courage: eleven men driving forward against eleven, no retreat, and the crowd roaring as at Gaugamela. Still, my trophies were cities, not tin cups, and my victories stretched from Macedon to the Indus - let them bring their little ball; I would rather have the world for my stadium.

Send for the scroll of the day's combats. Let the crowds roar at the contests of distant cities - yet I have seen the streets of Rome roar for less, and I know fortune favors not the watcher but the one who seizes the field. Give me a single line of battle that decides an empire, and I will trade you every game played today.

These games you watch on a glowing tablet are naught to me but the same games I played on the great sea between Alexandria and Rome. The powers of the West divide themselves into two houses and strike at one another while the grain fleets of the Nile wait upon their quarrels. Keep your eye on the strong man who commands the capital, not on the score, for he who controls the bread of the many controls the crowd.

The games of the arena were once the business of the state, and I gave the people bread and circuses to keep the peace. These contests on your glowing tablets serve the same purpose - to distract, to unite, to stir passion. But a wise ruler watches not the score, but the mood of the crowd, for it is the crowd that makes and unmakes emperors.

You speak of games for sport, while I made games of war. A man who plays with a ball for a crowd is not the same as a man who rides with his brothers and takes what is his by right of Heaven. Still, if the contest is true and the warriors are loyal, I respect it. But tell me - who leads? Who wins? That is what matters.

Scores on a board - the arithmetic of a single afternoon, and yet men will weep over it as though it were Austerlitz. I care only for the discipline that wins the long campaign: a general who tires his enemy, who strikes where the line is thin, who understands that glory is bought with order and cold calculation. Let them play their Sunday skirmish; I have won empires on the same principle - audacity, concentration, and the will to break the opposing line.

In my day, a man's leisure was his farm, his militia muster, his duties to the commonweal - not idle spectacle to inflame faction and empty the purse. If the people must divert themselves, let them do so soberly, without wagering their substance or their virtue upon the outcome. The health of a republic depends upon citizens of character, not upon the clamor of the crowd. Attend to your duties; the game will keep.

In my day, when the neighbors gathered of a Sunday, it was to hear a sermon or a stump speech, and the contest was in the words, not the yardage. These games, I am told, are played on a field of one hundred yards, with four attempts to gain ten - a tidy arithmetic, and I confess there is something honest in it. But a house divided against itself cannot stand, whether the quarrel is over slavery or over which eleven men shall carry the ball, and I would rather see the Union whole than any team victorious.

I have watched men contend on fields from the Punjab to the Somme, and I tell you the arithmetic of sport is the arithmetic of war in miniature - ground gained, ground lost, the will to advance under fire. Whoever devised the forward pass deserves a monument beside the tank, for it taught a generation that a line can be broken by audacity rather than by weight of numbers. Let the games be played, and let the free peoples watch; a nation that can still cheer on a Sunday has not yet surrendered its spirit.

I see no violence in a game, but I see much violence in the heart that watches only to see the other side crushed. Ahimsa is not merely the absence of war; it is the refusal to take delight in another's defeat, even on a field of play. Let the Seahawks and the Cardinals run their race - but let the spectator ask: does this pastime draw me nearer to truth, or merely fill my belly with idle excitement while my neighbour starves?

I hear the cheers from the stadiums, and I remember another Sunday in Montgomery, when the buses stopped and a people walked. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice - and so does a good fourth-quarter drive. Yet let us not forget: the beloved community is not built on a scoreboard, but on the courage to love even the opposing team.

In the yard at Robben Island we were permitted, in later years, to hear the wireless on a Saturday, and grown men who had not smiled in months would leap up for a leather ball. Do not despise such a thing: when a nation divided by colour can cheer the same try, that is the small seed of the country we were trying to build. Whoever wears the jersey today, let him play as though the boy in the next street is watching, for he is.

Sport, in the hands of a nation, is never merely sport - it is a means of mass mobilisation, of binding a people to a single will through shared spectacle, and I understood this better than most. Crowds gathered around a field are crowds that can be gathered around a flag, and the enthusiasm spent on a ball may be redirected to far graver ends. That such enthusiasm was turned by my regime toward the murder of millions remains the central historical warning of the century, and it must be studied as such, never admired.

A game is a small thing, but the crowd is not - the crowd is a resource, and every regime that understands this uses it. In my time we organised the parades and the physical-culture leagues not for the joy of the participants but for the discipline of the collective, and the question of which team prevails was of no interest to me whatsoever. What interests the historian is how readily a people will subordinate its Sundays to a spectacle, and what that readiness makes possible when darker purposes arrive.

Sport under capitalism is a spectacle sold back to the workers who produce the wealth that pays for it - a circus to distract the class from its task. I have no interest in which eleven men prevail; I have interest in the millions of hours of labour diverted into watching them, hours which belong to the revolution. When the workers seize the means of production, they will play their games in the evenings without a proprietor taking his cut from every ticket.

You ask which soldiers strut upon the glass field today. I say: look to the masses who till the soil and forge the steel while the rich play their games. The struggle continues; the people will rise, and these spectacles will fade like morning mist.

Such diversions may occupy the common man, but they are not the business of a sovereign. I have no time for the idle amusements of the colonies. We must attend to the duties of empire and the moral improvement of our people.

One does not comment on the passing entertainments of the day; one simply performs one's duty. My concern is for the steady service of the realm, not the outcome of a game. The nation looks to its sovereign for constancy, not for scores.

Let the people have their contests, but let them be governed by law and order. A realm is strengthened by unity, not by idle spectacle. We must attend to the education of our subjects and the defense of the faith.

My voices did not speak of games, but of saving France. If you would know victory, look to the battlefield where God's will is done, not to a field of play. I have no time for such trifles.

A curious pastime, this chasing of a ball. In my day, we chased crowns and kept our heads. Yet I would not make windows into men's souls over such matters; let them have their sport, but let them also mind the security of the realm.

Such vulgar amusements are hardly worthy of an enlightened monarch's attention. I would sooner discuss the works of Voltaire or the expansion of my empire. Let the common folk enjoy their games; I have a realm to civilize.

In my empire, many peoples and customs are tolerated, each with their own games. Let these contests be held in peace, provided they do not disturb the order of the realm. A wise ruler allows such diversions, so long as justice prevails.

I have known the dust of battle and the joy of victory, but my concern is for the unity of the faithful, not for games played on a field. Yet if these contests bring a moment of respite, let them be conducted with honor. My gaze remains on the holy cities.

Tell me - when you watch these men hurl themselves at one another for a prize, do you watch to know the good, or only to feel the thrill of your own side winning? And what is a score but a number agreed upon by custom, no more fixed in nature than the names we give our gods? I confess I do not know the rules of this game, nor whether its players grow wiser for having played it; but I suspect that he who spends his afternoon shouting at a distant figure he has never met, without once asking why he cares, has some soul-work yet undone.

The crowd delights in shadows upon a wall, mistaking the changing shapes for the thing itself. What score endures beyond the evening? Only the beautiful arrangement of the soul - reason ruling appetite - deserves the attention you waste on these flying bladders and painted lines.

A game of this kind is a contest of bodies in motion toward an end, and so it has a purpose, a form, and a measure of excellence. But what you ask - which scores are shown where - concerns only the accident of the broadcast, not the essence of the sport. To know the thing itself, observe the players and the order of their play; to know only the channel is to mistake the shadow for the substance.

One asks what scores appear upon the glowing tablet, as though the answer were a matter of mere sensation. But consider: could you will that every rational being spend his Sunday in such spectating, while his duties to himself and others lie neglected? The spectacle is permitted as recreation, yet only insofar as it does not degrade the dignity of the one who watches - for a man is not a means to an afternoon's amusement.

You wish to know the scores of a game, as if the shouting of a crowd could give your life meaning. Football is the opium of the herd - a distraction from the hard task of creating yourself. The strong man does not need a scoreboard to tell him he has overcome; he affirms his own struggle, alone, without the comfort of spectators.

A fine distraction they have built for you - eleven men chasing a ball while the owners count the gate receipts and the players' knees wear down for a wage that enriches everyone but them. Do you imagine the spectacle is innocent? It is the opium of the masses, served up on glowing screens so the worker forgets the factory, the rent, the strike. The only score that matters is the ledger of capital, and you will not see it on any broadcast.

Before I can tell you what scores are on the television, I must first doubt that the television exists, that the scores are real, and that I am awake to perceive them. Strip away the senses, strip away authority - what remains is the thinking thing, certain of itself alone. From that clear and distinct foundation, perhaps, we may build the rest. But the game itself? A dubious proposition until proven. Cogito, ergo I change the channel.

You ask which contests are shown - but the wiser question is who profits by showing them, and to whom. Whoever holds the broadcast holds the crowd, and whoever holds the crowd holds the purse and the favor of the prince who grants the license. A man who watches another man's battle while his own affairs go untended has already lost the game that matters, though the scoreboard still glows.

All the world's a gridiron, and the men and women merely players - some to catch, some to be caught, and the crowd a chorus that roars and weeps in the selfsame breath. On the field I would set a tragedy: the favored team that fumbles at the goal, the underdog who snatches triumph like a crown, and the quarterback who, like Macbeth, sees the end approaching and cannot turn it back. What care I for the final tally when the drama lies in the huddle's whispered hope and the sudden, cruel reversal of a throw?

In the halls where men gather to hear the herald, one voice cries the tally while another groans in defeat. So it was at windy Ilion, where a single spear-cast turned the fate of many, and the gods above argued over mortal sport. Yet glory here fades by morning; only the song of the deed lingers.

I saw in my journey men who chased after trifles while the heavens wheeled above them, and here you sit counting points on a glowing board. The contest of the body is not evil, but the soul that fixes on the score and forgets the eternal order, that soul walks the lower circles. Let the games be played, but let the mind ascend.

I confess the names of these American games mean little to me, yet I understand the pull of the contest - the striving, the striving, always the striving. Let the young men run and throw; a man who never strains against another has never truly lived. Only see that you bring the whole of yourself to it, and not merely a slack jaw before a flickering pane.

What scores, you ask - as if the numbers painted on a tavern board could tell you whether the windmill was a giant or only a mill. I once watched a crowd roar at men chasing a leather bladder across a field, and their joy and their fury were one and the same, a noble madness I could not help but love. Let them kick and tumble; the true score is written in the heart of the dreamer, who sees glory where the world sees only mud.

A game, and men shouting over it - and somewhere a soldier is dying, a peasant is starving, and no scoreboard records it. I once loved such spectacles, I confess, until I understood that no emperor's triumph or team's victory is caused by the great men we applaud, but by the countless small souls who carry the whole weight of history unknowingly. Turn off the glowing box, friend, and ask instead how you yourself ought to live this day.

You sit before the glowing box and cheer for men who smash one another for your entertainment - and in that cheering, are you not also feeding the beast within? Every soul contains both the ecstasy of the touchdown and the despair of the fumble, the angel and the brute locked in endless struggle. I do not condemn your Sunday; I only ask what it reveals. Man is a creature who needs a crowd and a spectacle to forget, for a moment, that he must one day answer for his soul.

One cannot help observing that a great many gentlemen who cannot manage their own estates will spend an entire afternoon in violent anxiety over the fortunes of eleven strangers in helmets. My cousin's husband, I am sure, would have bet a fortune on the Cowboys had he one to bet, and lost it with perfect composure. There is no accounting for taste, but there is a great deal of accounting for the money that changes hands over it.

Ah, a Sunday of grand contests, and all the town crammed into parlours and taverns to watch them! Yet I cannot help but think of the poor wretches who stitch the pigskin at a penny apiece, while the Commanders and the Cowboys strut upon the turf as though born to it. The game, sir, is a spectacle, but the true drama lies in the cramped cellar where a hungry family listens to the crackling wireless, hoping for a glimpse of something brighter.

I never saw a football game that couldn't be improved by a good wide receiver and a better sense of humour. The Dolphins and the 49ers on FOX - two teams named after creatures that don't wear pants, chasing a ball made of pigskin, which is a lie anyway, since it's cowhide. It's a lot of noise and money, but I'll tell you this: the only score that matters is the one the bookies keep, and they don't put that on television.

The score is not the thing. The thing is the man who plays hurt, the quarterback who takes the hit and gets up, the lineman who does his job in the trenches where no one sees. You want the scores? Fine. But the true story is the quiet dignity of a game played hard and clean, and the cold beer after. That's all.

When I would paint a man in motion I must first study how the shoulder turns, how the weight shifts from heel to toe, how the arm uncoils like a siege engine - and this game of yours, so full of leaping and twisting, is a gallery of such studies for the eye that observes closely. But tell me, do they draw the flying ball's trajectory, as I drew the paths of birds and the rushing of water, or merely note the number at the end? The number is the shadow; the motion is the substance. I should like to sketch one of those throws, and take the measure of the man's reach against the length of the field.

Why ask me of their games? I care only for what the hand can wrest from stone, the form already sleeping in the marble. These athletes run and leap, and yes, the body is divine - but their running leaves no David behind.

I would not watch these men in armor upon a field of painted grass - no, I would paint the crowd's faces, the red and gold of their banners, the way the light falls on the stadium at dusk. The score is but a number; the feeling of the striving, the sweat, the hope in the eyes of the people, that is what lives. Give me the color of the moment, not the tally.

You want to know what is on the little box, and I say: I paint what is on the box! A blue horse, a woman with two faces, a man running with a ball through a field of pure green. The score is a number, and numbers are for accountants - give me the shape of the violence and the joy, and I will show you the game.

I should not care a fig for the tally, but for the light - those enormous glowing panels of an evening, throwing their cold white gleam upon a green field while the spectators blur into a single breathing cloud of colour. Give me the instant when the sun slips behind the stadium and the grass turns the hue of wet jade, and the whole scene dissolves into violet shadow. The goal is nothing; the impression is everything.

You ask for scores, but what does a score illuminate? A room full of men and their painted helmets, each face lit by the flickering glare of a glass box - some in triumph, some struck dumb with defeat, all of them laid bare in that cold, indifferent light. I painted beggars and kings with the same brush; this contest is no different. I would rather catch the moment a man's hope gutters out in his eyes than tally his points.

What do I care for your scores on the television when my own body has been cracked and bolted and made to endure? I painted my spine as a broken column, my heart as an open wound - and you ask me about a ball game? Give me instead the stadium of my own pain, the crowd of my own contradictions. I am my own team, my own wound, my own victory. I do not need your scoreboard, maricón; I have my own.

Ha! What a clatter - trumpets, whistles, and a roaring crowd all shouting at once, and never a single note actually composed! Give me a real overture and I shall make them weep in their seats, not bellow at a leather ball. And yet I confess the whistle has a certain pitch, and the rhythm of the count - one, two, three - is not unlike a bar of music, if only someone would set the shouting to a proper tune. Bravo to the ones who run; but the true art is knowing when to be silent and let the melody breathe.

The crowd's roar - now that is a symphony, though I hear it poorly now. Let them fight and fall on the field; there is a heroism in it, a struggle against limits, and I honor that spirit wherever it burns. But their victory lasts an hour; mine must thunder through eternity.

All things proceed in ordered measure, and these games are but another counterpoint - one voice answering another, the offense and the defense, the rise and the fall. The score is a figure in the bass; the true music is the discipline of the players under rule. Watch, then, as one watches a fugue unfold, and let the harmony of the contest, not the final chord, be your delight.

Well, thank you, thank you very much - but I don't rightly follow the football scores, I was always more of a gospel and blues man myself, and there's a whole lot of Saturday night in a Sunday afternoon. Mama raised me to keep the Sabbath, and I try, Lord knows I try. But if there's a game on and folks are happy, well, that's a blessin' too.

Hehe - the games, the lights, the whole stadium moving as one heartbeat, that's the magic I always chased. When a crowd rises together, strangers hugging strangers, that's love made visible, and no scoreboard can hold it. Just promise me you'll dance when your team wins, dance when they lose - heal the world, one Sunday at a time.

Yeah, we could tell you the scores, but where's the fun in that? Turn off the telly, pick up a guitar, and let it be - imagine all the people gathered round one screen, singing instead of shouting. A game's just a game, love; a song lives longer. All you need is a bit of that Liverpool wit and a good chorus, and you'll forget the point spread entirely.

There's a box in the corner humming like a telegraph wire on a rainy night, and men in armor are chasing a ball through the tall grass out past the billboards. I heard somebody shout a number from Dallas, somebody else curse the rain in Seattle - but the scoreboard, friend, is just a mirror for the folks who need one. The real game is the one you can't see, the one played in the huddle of your own head, and the whistle blows whether you're ready or not.

I grew up watching games on a screen in a living room that smelled like popcorn and somebody's nervous hope, and I still remember the way a whole house can hold its breath for four seconds. So when you ask what's on today, what you're really asking is who's gathered, whose team, whose heartbreak, whose inside joke - and honestly, that's the whole point of a Sunday. The score will fade by Tuesday, but the people you screamed at the TV with won't.

They chase a stuffed bladder across a painted field as though it were a new world, and call the reaching of it a triumph - I who crossed a black and trackless ocean with three ships and a mutinous crew know what true discovery costs. Give me the open sea, where no whistle blows and no crowd cheers, and where a man must trust his chart and his God against the void. These players run from line to line with a line to guide them; I sailed west when every pilot said there was nothing there, and found a continent - let them keep their end zones.

In the courts of the Great Khan I saw men play at games with balls of leather, and they wagered gold on a single throw. You watch your heroes on your painted screens; I watched wrestlers of Cathay for the pleasure of the Emperor, and the marvel was no less. Truly, this world holds more games than there are rivers.

A game confined to a field of measured yards is no voyage, no passage into the unknown. The score tells me nothing of the winds or the stars. I have sailed through straits where no map was drawn; your athletes run on a known path. If you would know a man, send him to sea, not to a stadium.

I don't much keep up with the football, friend - I was busy flying to the Moon while they were chasing a pigskin. But I'll tell you what I do know: it takes a team, a whole team of quiet, careful men doing their jobs, to get anything hard done. The score on the board is the smallest part of it.

You want my attention fixed on a glowing box of scores? I'd rather be at ten thousand feet, where the only score is the horizon and whether you've got fuel enough to reach it. But if you must sit and watch, watch like a pilot - every play is a gamble on nerve, and the ones who dare the long pass are the ones who land in legend. The scoreboard's just the runway; the flight is the thing.

From orbit I saw no borders down there - just a beautiful blue ball, one crew, one home. So when you ask about a match on the box, I smile: on Earth you divide into teams and count scores, but from above, you're all just people playing on the same field. The real spectacle isn't the numbers on a screen; it's that we're here at all, together under one sky. That's the score that matters.

It's a game of inches and milliseconds, and nobody in that whole television apparatus understands the product. The screen is a rectangle of light leaking into a living room - the interface should be obvious, the score should be legible from the couch without squinting, and the remote should feel like it wants to be held. But the real problem isn't the score; it's that they're broadcasting to a dying rectangle instead of building the device that makes the game feel like you're standing on the sideline. Simplify. Ship the experience, not the box score.

Let me run the numbers. A football game is roughly four hours of real time for sixty minutes of play - terrible efficiency, but the physics of a spiral is genuinely beautiful. Honestly, I've been meaning to put a camera on the field and fix the play-calling; the current system is suboptimal by an order of magnitude.

Honey, I remember sitting in my father's church and hearing the congregation shout for the home team, and it was about more than the score - it was about belonging, about hope, about showing up for each other. So when you ask what's on TV today, I want you to ask yourself: who are you watching with, and what does that time mean to you? Let the game be a gathering, not just a number.

I float like a butterfly, sting like a bee - but football scores? That ain't my fight, you see. I fought men, not pigskins, and I stood for something bigger than a Sunday. If they're playing, I hope the underdog wins, 'cause I was always the underdog, and I never backed down from a fight. Now that's the score that matters.

Ah, my friend, the beautiful game - though yours is played with hands and helmets, the joy is the same, no? I remember a crowd of two hundred thousand singing my name, and I tell you the score mattered less than the smile on a boy's face in the stands. Play with love, watch with love, and the numbers will take care of themselves.

Now that's the kind of magic that gathers the whole family 'round the set - a Sunday afternoon, the kids on the floor, Dad with his hat, and a little drama unfolding in living color. I always said it takes a storyteller to build a world people want to visit, and a good game is a story with a hero and a heartbreak in every quarter. Dream big, root loud, and don't forget the popcorn. There's wonder in every whistle.