Teaching high school English in Texas, I gave my students the opportunity to earn extra credit points at the beginning of every class. It was one of the ways I used to get them thinking and engaged right away. They learned common Latin words and phrases, “Name That Tune”—pop, country, even opera–on Fridays, and part of the fun was asking them to identify Texas State Symbols.
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Like everything else about Texas, that list is big. There’s a state fish: the Guadalupe bass, and even a cooking implement: the cast-iron Dutch Oven. When I asked them about the state sport, they all replied: “football!” “No,” I answered. “It’s rodeo. Football is our religion.”
And so it is across America. We take football, high school and college, seriously indeed. In states like Wyoming, small-town high school teams can have as few as six players, and some years there might not be enough kids interested to form a team, but one thing remains: football is so popular and rigorously followed that it might as well be our religion.
In Michigan, where football is also taken seriously, Democrat/Islamist Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, a serious Muslim, apparently doesn’t understand the religious implications of Michigan football, or doesn’t care, and it’s costing him:
Democrat socialist Abdul El-Sayed has made a lot of braindead comments regarding football over the years, and throughout his campaign for state senator in Michigan.
El-Sayed once connected American football to toxic masculinity and the transatlantic slave trade, but he’s also pandered by embracing the NFL and Detroit Lions in his campaign messaging. In a 2021 essay in response to then Las Vegas Raiders Head Coach Jon Gruden, El-Sayed wrote, “The toxic masculinity at the heart of America’s most popular sport — and men’s sports culture more generally — is way deeper than a few emails.”
In separate remarks, he referenced Manifest Destiny, the destruction of Native American communities, and the transatlantic slave trade before saying, “And all of this, like a lot of these narratives, you kind of see echoed in the ethos of football.”
Wow. El-Sayed is not alone, however, in comparing football to slavery. Colin Kaepernick, sporting a planet-sized afro and with help from Netflix—surprise!—did the same thing last month. That was self-sabotaging for a man who keeps trying to cajole any NFL team into hiring him again.
El-Sayed and former Michigan Democrat Senator Debbie Stabenow held a campaign event with Michigan farmers, where he tried to one-up Kaepernick:
At the end of the event, El-Sayed pleaded with the farmers to speak with friends and neighbors on the other side of the political aisle, who “made a different political choice” in the last election. He told the few people in the audience to not “indict” those folks for a “bad decision that they can’t take back.”
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He encouraged them to maybe even ditch talking about politics and have a conversation about the weather or “Will (the University of) Michigan ever win a football game without cheating,” El-Sayed said with a chuckle in the midst of a couple awkward laughs.
If you’re a politician, you don’t insult Mom, apple pie, the flag, or football, and farmers are among the Americans patriotically glad to be under those Friday Night Lights. Talk about misreading a room, or in this case, a field! Social media immediately backlashed:
Michigan superfan & founder of Barstool Sports, Dave Portnoy said, “This guy really is a terrorist.”
El-Sayed’s opponent Mike Rogers responded to the controversy, quoting Portnoy’s post saying, “@StoolPresidente is exactly right.”
Graphic: X Post
Others mentioned El-Sayed’s comments were unforgivable for a Michigan alum. Some said he “lost votes.”
I suspect even some Democrats now realize that not all cultures are alike or equally valuable, and Islam, which sees itself as working toward global domination every day, a world without America and football, is one of those. Abdul El-Sayed just said the quiet part out loud.
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Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, lifelong athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer, and high school and college English teacher. He is a published author and blogger. His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor.
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