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In next week's news, the Oscars become a national holiday, Manti Te'o gets clocked again, and Kobe and Dwight try to work it out, Jeff MacGregor writes.

While you weren't looking, the NFL became our national metaphor for everything. From Sandy Hook to Camp Courage, the measure of America is football.

With the Super Bowl rising this week until it blots out the sun, maybe it's worth asking how and how much technology has changed the way we watch and think of sports.

On the day of Robert Griffin III's knee surgery, we're reminded that football players will do what football players do -- and that football coaches behave as football coaches. As do football owners and writers.

College football in New York City used to be the most important thing in America. Maybe 100 years from now people will look back at the Pinstripe Bowl the same way.

Football is the last Great Circus and the last of our epic American fables. To say otherwise is dishonest.

In which we return yet again to the work of Samuel Beckett in the interest of clarifying American football. A country road. A tree. Evening. ESTRAGON: Nothing to be done. VLADIMIR: I'm beginning to come around to that. All my life I've...

The scourging, purifying hate last week for a man who ran a football business was kind of extraordinary. Art Modell left Cleveland and the fans did not forget. How much loyalty does a team owe its city?

If it wasn't the best sports day in history it was certainly one of the busiest. From tennis to soccer to baseball to tracks to hockey to basketball to boxing, June 9 had everything but football.

Corruption, fraud, violence, injury, death. The ruin of college football was complete by the end of the century. The 19th century.

The week in review from death to life, from loss to win, from political metaphors to sports clichés.

The basic contribution of Tim Tebow to professional football, it seems to me, and to religious discussion and to modern American culture generally, has been to embody the essential tension between faith and science.

In between the not-very-memorable football, the Super Bowl was a four-hour blur of consumerism. This year, the whole thing felt like an intervention on behalf of an addiction to nostalgia.

The NFL intake mechanism for its raw materials, the draft, requires very young men to make what seem like very important decisions. Its feeder league, big college football, suffers or benefits accordingly.

When it was all said and done, that TicketCity Bowl appearance by Penn State was anything but a feel-good story. It never should've happened.

It was brutal and unsportsmanlike, and yet it plays straight into the essence of the game. So how do we punish Ndamukong Suh for doing exactly what we expect him to do?