My Football: Right or Left?

Ross Douthat at The American Scene comments on Michael Tomasky's piece in The American Prospect about football as a Republican sport (subscription required, but excerpts here); he also links to Fred Barnes' classic article on how various sports operate as political metaphors.

Re: football's rightward shift -- I'm not so sure.  To me, football-as-corporate-militarism was much more pronounced in the 60's -- the heyday of NFL Films, with warriors battling over frozen tundra, before Namath came along to shake things up.  Now, it's schizophrenic.  Football wants the corporate values and the corporate audience -- but it also wants the secularist, Hollywood lift.  And it keeps tripping on the border between the two.  See, for example, the ABC Monday Night Football/Desperate Housewives incident, or the much-noted Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction.  Blowups happen when you try to have it both ways.

Meanwhile, the Army is looking to soccer, not football, as its metaphor-of-the-future -- an approach that qualified as one of the major ideas of 2004 in The New York Times Magazine's roundup.  So who's right now?  And who's left?  Clearly, much more fieldwork is needed here...