Episode 20: Mansplaining Football with Evan Wheeler (11/26/2020)

Evan: Having Evan Wheeler mansplain – having special guest Canadian Evan Wheeler mansplain football to me. (both laugh)

Callie: I actually might keep that in, that’s a good cold open. (Evan laughs)

C: Hey y’all. Welcome to Fast Facts for Gen Z. I’m your host, Callie, and I don’t know anything about anything. Come with me while I explore the world, and I’ll tell you everything you ever, and never, wanted to know, through the eyes of Generation Z.

On today’s episode, we’re revisiting the concept of mediocre high school football, because it’s finally time for me to learn a little bit more about sports. If you haven’t listened to episode 6: Mediocre High School Football, pause this and go listen to that. It’ll make more sense.

Usually, I’m alone, but today I’m joined by a special guest. Everybody say hi to Evan! Hi Evan.

E: Hi, that’s me! Thanks for having me on the show, it’s great to be here.

C: Yeah! Can you introduce yourself, tell everyone why you’re here?

E: Well, my name is Evan. I hail from the great white north, I come from a city in Canada about an hour outside of Toronto… played two years of mediocre high school football, and I’ve been watching it since I was four years old, so the past thirteen years of my life.

C: Nice! Now, just to be clear, football means the same thing in both the US and Canada, so we’re talking about American football, not soccer.

E: American football, that’s correct. We do… we have soccer here, but it sucks.

C: I guess we should tell everybody how we met because you and I actually haven’t known each other for like, what?

E: Very long at all.

C: Like a week?

E: Maybe.

C: I wouldn’t even really say we know each other. This may alarm some of my adult viewers but we met online-

E: Scandal.

C: We have a mutual real-life friend!

E: Mutual real life friend who we both met in person.

C: Yes. She was one of my best friends for most of elementary and middle school, and then she moved to Canada.

E: And that’s how I met her! Yeah, so that’s how I met Callie. She plugged her podcast and I gave it a listen, and I got to the episode about high school football and I deemed myself enough of an expert to reach out and say, “Hey!”

C: Yeah, we were playing a video game and I was like “Oh, my podcast came out today, guys, go listen to it.” And Evan did.

E: I did.

C: So, you played football at your high school. Can you tell me about your whole experience? From trying out to the epic highs and lows of the game?

E: (laughs) The epic highs and lows. Yeah! So, as I mentioned before, I’ve been watching football basically all my life. My dad’s a big sports fan and I would watch football with him every Sunday, and I really enjoyed it. So as a kid, I would like, fantasize about playing football in the NFL, which is NOT going to happen, I am small, but I would love to fantasize about the NFL. I would beg my parents to let me play football, but since they were… semi-intelligent and I was a tiny kid, they said no because they thought I was going to get hurt, so when I finally got to high school-

C: They were right.

E: They were absolutely right! When I finally hit high school, they let me join the team; I whittled them down. And I spent my grade 9 year on the junior football team, so grades 9 and 10, and I was the backup quarterback.

C: Wow. Is that good? Is that impressive?

E: Well, the quarterback is the most superstar position, and I was his backup, so I never got to see the field.

C: Oh, nice.

E: Mediocre is generous! And then I actually transferred schools after that, went to a new high school for grade ten, and there I played defense. So I was tackling people and stopping them from throwing, and that went a little bit better. Football is definitely… I don’t know how big a deal it is in America, [but it] seems like not as big a deal here.

C: There aren’t that many teams in the Canadian football league, are there?

E: No, okay, so the CFL is a joke. (both laugh) Nobody pays any attention to the CFL. So the NFL has thirty-two teams, the NFL has a lot.

C: Oh, that’s a fun fact, I didn’t know that.

E: Yeah, NFL; 32 teams. The CFL has 9.

C: Mm.

E: I live in Canada, [and] I don’t watch the CFL at all.

C: Canada is quite large to have nine teams.

E: Toronto, Ottawa, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Calgary, Regina… there’s one in BC… yeah, I don’t know, there’s probably one more out west.

C: Is “BC” British Columbia?

E: British Columbia, yes, sorry. Um, yeah, the CFL is tiny and no one pays attention to it.

C: Aw, that’s sad.

E: I would say, very confidently, that more people in Canada pay attention to American college football than Canadian pro football.

C: Really?

E: Mmhmm, yeah, college football’s a big deal, college football’s huge.

C: I mean, I guess it’s a big deal here too. It depends on the person.

E: Yeah, so college football is smaller than the NFL but easily bigger than the CFL.

C: Um, here’s another fun fact I found last night. Evan, do you know why a football is shaped the way it is?

E: Like egg?

C: (laughs) Yeah.

E: Why is it shaped like it is? I have a guess. Something to do with aerodynamics.

C: No, you’re wrong.

E: Oh? Tell me.

C: It’s because footballs were originally made out of an inflated pig’s bladder. And that’s the shape it is.

E: I- okay so we call a football the pigskin, but I always thought that instead of leather, it was like pigskin. No, it’s a bladder, wow that’s gross.

C: Yeah, I was about to ask, do they call them pigskins in Canada too sometimes?

E: Yeah! It’s definitely a recognized word for a football. You say “pigskin” and most people will know what you’re talking about.

C: Interesting! You say “pigskin” in America and most people will laugh at you but they’ll know what you’re talking about.

E: Why would they laugh?

C: Because no one uses that word anymore.

E: Really? We’re not with the times then. Interesting.

C: Yeah. Soccer balls were also made out of pig bladders, so they used to be the same shape. But then, you know, obviously a perfectly round ball is a lot easier to play soccer with.

E: Yeah, no, a football, when you kick it and it hits the ground, it is unpredictable.

C: It do be bouncin’.

E: Good call on soccer’s part to find a better…

C: Yeah, as soon as the technology was created to make a round ball, they made round balls.

E: Sphere was the right choice for that.

C: Yeah, so when I talked about football before in the last episode, it was glaringly obvious that I didn’t know what I was talking about. Because, you know, I didn’t. (Evan laughs) Can you explain to me how football is played?

E: Yeah, so in Canada, we play with slightly different football rules, which makes it really confusing.

C: Oh that’s awful!

E: Yeah, so the CFL plays with a slightly larger ball. You know those little forky things?

C: Uh… yeah, the touchdown things? No, the field goal things?

E: Yeah, exactly, so those are called the uprights. In America, they’re in the back of the endzone and in Canada they’re in the front.

C: Do people run into them by accident? I feel like I would.

E: Yes, that causes injuries in both Canada and America. We are familiar with American rules. I watched the NFL… even when we play high school ball – this is weird – junior plays with American rules, senior plays with Canadian rules.

C: That’s terrible I hate it.

E: Right? Right? Anyway, football, at its core, is a game of possession. One team has the ball and is trying to score. It is not as… flippy floppy as, say, basketball, where you can give it up super easily and it’s basically like watching a tennis match, you’re going back and forth. It’s based on who has the ball. So there’s two teams, obviously, and they alternate between being on offense and being on defense. If you have the ball, you’re trying to score points. You can do this mainly via touchdowns, which means having the ball in your possession in the endzone, or a field goal, which means kicking it through the fork things, the uprights. And those are six and three points, respectively.

C: Okay.

E: The team on defense –

C: Are field goals three points in America? I thought it was only one.

E: Oh-kay, so after a touchdown, a touchdown is six points, you kick it through the uprights for one more point.

C: Oh.

E: Which is just a field goal from a set distance, which is really close, and it’s basically automatic so people just refer to touchdowns as being seven points.

C: Ohhh

E: So that’s the PAT, the point-after-attempt.

C: Okay, I got you, keep going.

E: Yeah, so a field goal in and of itself is three points. Anyway. The team on defense is trying to stop the offense, and they can do this via the downs system. A down basically just means a try. An attempt. So the offense has four tries to get ten yards, which is thirty feet – oh I guess you know that!

C: I do!

E: So, yeah, the offense has four tries to get ten yards, and they can do this by running or throwing. And if they don’t get to that marker in four tries, the other team gets to go. So that’s the objective of being on defense.

C: Why is it called a down? Instead of just a try. There has to be a reason. I’m gonna Google it right now.

E: There’s a lot more rules, you can turn the ball over by throwing it to the wrong team or by fumbling, but the basic premise is to get the most points in sixty minutes, so four fifteen-minute quarters. And that’s all. So that’s football basically. It’s about having possession, keeping possession, and getting into the endzone and scoring points.

C: So I have learned what a down means.

E: Hit me.

C: It was originally a word for a ball that was dead in the field.

E: Ohhhh yeah that makes sense.

C: And then it became a word for… everything (what it is now.)

E: Yeah. Interesting! I didn’t know that! See, I’m learning, I’m teaching you stuff, you’re teaching me stuff. Football is a complex game if you want to get into the details, but on its head: possession; point A-point B.

C: You said something earlier about if American football is like, big. It is a… American football culture is a beast, honestly, it’s so deeply ingrained in our culture that when I think of common American stereotypes, I think of football first. I think it’s actually baseball that’s supposed to be the true American sport, but football is such a dominant force in the media that it’s legitimately hard to escape. You can escape baseball if you want to.

E: Really? Alright, well, I also think of football… I don’t think it’s the number one American stereotype for me. I definitely associate it more with the academic experience: high school, college, than I do with America as a whole. But I do definitely associate football with America. But I do agree moreso than baseball.

C: Yeah, so football culture in Canada isn’t… the same?

E: No. So football? Very big. Probably the second biggest sport. Hockey, though-

C: Mm.

E: Is number one. Hockey’s king here. So, yeah, football… it is American, it is violent. A lot of kids, when they come into high school football, don’t know the game. There’s a lot of “This is how to play football” involved in the practices, especially in junior football, because that’s the grade nines and grade tens.

C: Yeah, I think most people in America [who play] go into high school football knowing how to play football. Because they’ve played in clubs or they’ve played in middle school.

E: The big problem is injuries.

C: Mm. Yeah, my mom has a theory that football, at least in high schools and maybe colleges, won’t be around that much longer because of the injuries.

E: It’s a very real possibility. I don’t know… I can’t speak to the climate in America, but I know that, since it’s not as big here, it would be not as big a deal to get rid of it. And they’re already doing it to hockey.

C: Oh, really?

E: So, kids’ hockey is getting neutered.

C: Oh, wow.

E: I don’t think you can hit until you’re sixteen. Like there’s just zero checking. Yeah, they’re really trying to clean up the game.

C: Wow. So what is, like, the diversity like at your school? Because I know it’s different from the way it is here.

E: There are regions of Canada that are far more diverse. My high school is offensively white.

C: Oh dear.

E: Just painfully so. I unironically think the number of Black people in my high school is single digits.

C: Oh.

E: No lie. We have a decent number of East Asian people and Middle Eastern people, we have a lot of international students in our area, and lots of refugees, and just people who came from those areas in general. We had one Black kid on the team. And he was our best player. (both laugh).

C: Woooo, stereotypes.

E: Woooo, stereotypes!

C: So, at my school, the race breakdown is still mostly white, not as offensively white.

E: Like 70 or 80 percent.

C: I’d say we’re like… sixty…five percent white? And then we have about equal Black and Hispanic populations. I can count the number of broadly Asian on one hand. And I think I know them all.

~~~editor Callie: I use “Hispanic” and “Latino/a” interchangeably in this podcast. I know that’s incorrect. I’m sorry. Hispanic refers to people with Spanish and Latin-American (Spanish-speaking) ancestry, while Latino/a/x refers to people with Latin-American ancestry, including countries that don’t speak Spanish, and excluding Spain and Portugal.~~~

E: Really? That’s interesting, because I would say that’s our number two race demographic. East Asian.

C: Well, this is specific to my high school. My high school services the rural community.

E: Ahh, I see.

C: So if you go south to the big city, their Asian populations are a lot higher.

E: That makes sense, because if you’re East Asian, you’ve probably come here since the 50s, probably after World War II ended.

C: Probably.

E: Probably even waited a little bit after that because the anti-Japanese sentiment I know was high.

C: Yeah, and white people are racist and can’t tell the difference.

E: Exactly. So, um, probably the 50s, 60s, so that makes sense that they wouldn’t be in the rural, traditionally farmland, “this is my great-grand-pappy’s farm” area.

C: (laughing) Great-

E: (laughing) So! Football culture is definitely less. We don’t really have a stereotypical football boy. Do you have a stereotypical football boy?

C: Yeah! So like, in my last episode about football, I talked about popularity and the correlations, at least in the media, between playing football and being the stereotypical popular kid. But yeah, we do have some of that trope. We have football boys. But you don’t have any of that?

E: Football doesn’t necessarily equate to high standing, but being good at football likely equates to you being tall or large in some way and athletic. Being good at any sport does lend itself to popularity, but we have hockey boys.

C: So, my high school’s mascot is the Panther.

E: Ooh! Original.

C: (laughs) Ye- mhm- and every girls’ sports team is- they are not the Panthers, they are the Lady Panthers.

E: No! That’s a joke!

C: Because “panthers” is a gendered word, apparently.

E: (laughs) That’s- That cannot be real.

C: So, my sister’s tennis team, the girls’ tennis team, the women’s tennis team, are the Lady Panthers, and the boys’ tennis team are the Panthers.

E: That is… hilariously misogynistic.

C: I know! How hard is it to just say “Panthers?”

E: We are the Knights. We don’t have the Lady Knights. Like, if I heard “the Lady Knights” I would assume it’s like an affectionate pet name for a girls’ team. I don’t think it would be super out of place. I don’t think it’d be super appropriate, but I don’t think it’d be super out of place. But yeah, no, we certainly don’t have that.

C: I’ve been to exactly one football game, to impress that girl, and I… we didn’t pay attention to the game, which was lucky [for me]. Someone asked someone else to Homecoming!

E: HOCO!!! We don’t have Hoco.

C: Oh, nice. I was gonna go Homecoming with that girl! And then we didn’t.

E: Nice! Super fun! Love that!

C: Yeah, I’ve never been to Homecoming. But we have it! Obviously not this year.

E: We have prom, but that’s just for the grades elevens and twelves.

C: Yeah, we have prom too.

E: We have semis. We don’t have Hoco, but I’ve definitely heard of it.

C: Yeah! It’s the big football game.

E: Oh! That’s your big football game, okay, that makes sense.

C: Yes, the Homecoming game.

E: Why do you have Homecoming in high school? Homecoming is a university thing.

C: Is it? I don’t know, I’ve never been to the Homecoming game, Evan. I don’t know what happens there. There’s a Homecoming Court.

E: Oh wow.

C: There’s like, girls that get voted on to Homecoming Court, and they dress up pretty and walk across the field with their dads during the game.

E: Noooo, that’s a joke. You’re messing with me now.

C: No no no, they have sashes.

E: (laughing) Is everything a beauty contest???

C: Yes.

(Evan laughs)

E: I will tell… probably my most interesting football story.

C: Please.

E: This is probably the biggest contributing factor beyond my parents nagging as to why I did not play high school football last year.

C: What’s your… what’s the story?

E: The story is that between grades nine and ten, I transferred high schools, and in that span of time, I also came out as bisexual.

C: Nice.

E: And I wanted to be open about it. My parents were super understanding and cool about it, my friends were super understanding and cool about it, a decent number of them had already come out themselves.

C: That always happens.

E: It always happens. So I thought it would be fine to be openly bisexual. And it should be.

C: This story is not going to end well.

E: Oh, no. I joined the football team.

C: Uh-huh.

E: And, sure enough, everyone’s in the locker room: (mocking) “That’s so gay!” And I don’t know how this came about, but someone was like, “Wheels! Are you like, actually gay though?”

C: (mocking) “Are you gay, bro?”

E: (mocking) “Are you, like, no homo but are you gay, bro?” And I looked him in the eyes and I weighed my options and I said, “Technically no, but I am interested in men.”

C: “Yeah, a little bit.”

E: (laughs) And they kinda lost their minds. So, I did not know the extent to which the full team did not like me because I was gay. I did not know that until after the season was over. I was in Florida, and my friend texted me, and he was like “Yeah, we just played our final game. We got blown out.” And I said, “Yeah, that checks out.” And then he said, “You know these people like, hate you, right?”

C: Oh my god.

E: And I was like “What?” And he said “Yeah, they call you the F-slur behind your back all the time.”

C: Oh nooo!

E: Oh yeah!

C: That’s so sad!

E: These are the people I would help up after they made a tackle all the time, like I didn’t love these kids but I certainly thought of them as my teammates.

C: Yeah, because you’re like a normal –

(Callie and Evan both talking, incomprehensible speech decrying lack of empathy in Evan’s football team and saying that any normal empathetic person wouldn’t say slurs about a person behind their back)

E: So, the most egregious incident, however, was a kid… God I don’t want to protect his identity but I’m gonna call him Jonathan. So Jonathan was… he’s a year younger than me, so he was a grade nine when I was on the team and I was a grade ten. And his locker was right next to mine.

C: Mhm.

E: And… word got out I was into men, and here’s the thing that homophobes do. [Things that] straight men do when they hear someone’s gay: they assume they’re interested in them.

C: Oh, girls do that too.

E: Most of homophobia is rooted in a man’s fear that you will do to them what they do to girls.

C: Yeah!

E: So this guy got word that I was gay, and he was not a Big Kid, and my locker was right next to his, and he confronted me one day after practice. He was like, “Yo, Wheeler. Are you gay?”

C: (mocking, again) “Are you gay?”

E: And I was like, “I have a girlfriend, here’s a picture of her.”

C: Oh, nice, you actively had a girlfriend during this time.

E: Actively was in a heterosexual relationship.

C: (sighs at Jonathan)

E: “Um, here’s my girlfriend, I am interested in men, you are ugly.” (Callie laughs) And he quit the team because he thought I was going to molest him.

C: You called him ugly!

E: (laughs) I didn’t call him ugly to his face! He was so scared I was going to touch him that he would go, “Don’t to- don’t come near me bro.” And he quit the team. He was so scared that I was going to molest him that he left the team, he quit the team. Never came back.

C: Wow.

E: So… after that, I got a real introspective look at the quality of the boys who played football at my school, got a pretty big deep dive into their racism, pretty big deep dive into their sexism, and a pretty hands-on experience with their homophobia. And I didn’t really want a part of that. It was unnecessarily violent, in and of the sport, and I could just watch it, so I didn’t play the next year. And my friends were like, “Come on, man, you should play,” but my close friends really understood.

C: Sure. Yeah, I once was walking down the hall with my girlfriend in like… I don’t know, freshman year or something, maybe sophomore year. And… someone was walking past and looked at us, and was like, “*censored*,” and I was like, “Who are you?”

E: Whoa!!!! Whoa!!!!! (both laughing) Out of left field!

C: And I was like, first of all, I am going to class. Second of all, shut up! Third, yes.

E: Whoa!! (both laughing) Quite the time.

C: I’m gonna do an episode at some point about being gay in a lightly rural high school. (Evan laughs)

E: Yeah. Like a seven and a half out of ten on the homophobia scale?

C: Mmmmmm, like a six and a half.

E: Six and a half? Alright.

C: Like you can bubble yourself into groups that aren’t. Like there are enough for there to be groups that aren’t.

E: Alright. Okay, if yours is a six and a half, I’d say mine is a five.

C: Okay.

E: Like, it exists, but more with specific people than as a culture. The teachers are really accepting of it because they’re all educated individuals.

C: Oh, what’s that like? (Evan laughs) Sorry, I use this podcast as a project, as like a weekly assignment for my English class.

E: Really?

C: Mrs. Stephens? Some of the teachers are homophobic. That’s it. That’s all I got for you. (both laughing) I’m not naming any names, but…but like…

E: (exaggerated sniffing) Smells like homophobia to me.

C: Mmm, I would say more smells like racism.

E: Oh! Oh that’s also bad. (laughs) Hot take from Evan Wheeler: that’s also bad!

C: (laughing) Hot take from Evan Wheeler the Canadian: racism is bad!

E: Completely hot take alert: racism is not good!

C: Thank you, Evan, I’m glad we can have this conversation.

E: This is why you bring me on! For topical, relevant hot takes about the world at large! Yeah, so my region is pretty white but also decently… like my high school’s white but my region is decently multicultural.

C: Mhm.

E: So I don’t see a lot of racism, it doesn’t really happen in front of me. Like I see microaggressions and whatnot, and I’m “Woke TM” to pick up and be like “You shouldn’t do that.” And I have started calling it out more.

~~~editor Callie: “Woke TM” is a way to mock the Gen Z mindset that we’re officially woke now so we can’t be racist or homophobic because we’re awake to the issues, but criticizing that mindset also makes it hard to say, “I’m awake to some of these issues,” so we have to accept that we sound like a stereotype when we say it.~~~

C: That’s good. That’s a step.

E: The biggest case of overt racism I’ve seen also came from the football team.

C: Oh, nice. At my school, I see a lot of evidence of systemic racism because that’s the way the US is structured.

E: Mm.

C: Like in my AP and high level, college level classes, the population breakdown, the demographic breakdown changes drastically from 60% white to like 95% white.

E: Really?

C: Not because the Black and Hispanic kids aren’t smart! But because they’re tracked out of those classes. They can say, “I want to take an AP class,” and the guidance counselor will say no.

~~~editor Callie: School administrators can deny that this happens all they want, but even if a guidance counselor doesn’t say no directly, there’s nothing stopping the student from just not being put in those classes. Expectations are lower. Support for Black and Hispanic students is lacking from elementary school up, so once they get to high school, it’s easy to look at something as quantitative as grades and extrapolate qualitative information about the student, like that they’re lazy or not smart, based on stereotypes instead of asking, “what could this student achieve with adequate support?” ~~~

E: Oh no! On a similar but opposite note, I would say that the AP and advanced courses are considerably less white because they have a huge Asian population.

C: Mmm. Not to play into stereotypes, we’re making observations.

E: Yeah, absolutely! And it’s based off of stereotypes, I would say.

C: Yeah. Oh, oh! So like they’re tracked into it more? Because of the stereotype?

E: I would not be surprised at all.

C: Ohhhh

E: Like I obviously have no empirical proof but I think there’s definitely a confirmation bias regarding Asian kids being smart. I have not seen a Black person in any of my AP classes.

C: Wow.

E: Any of them. Yeah. None of them. And, again, there’s fewer than ten at my school, but…

C: Sure, but still!

E: It’s definitely here too. Definitely, definitely, definitely.

C: Yeah. Like, I reported a [white] girl for having a vape once and she got like a verbal warning and got her vape taken away. But if she had been a Black kid, she would’ve been gone. She would’ve been suspended.

E: Wow.

C: So this podcast has taken a wild journey from football to politics to Canada vs. America. It’s been a wild ride, Evan, thank you for talking to me.

E: Yeah, absolutely, thanks for having me on! I think this podcast is going to come out around American Thanksgiving.

C: Yeah, I think it might come out on American Thanksgiving, if I can get it edited in time.

E: Ooh, serendipitous for it being the football episode!

C: Yeah!

E: How ’bout that.

C: Very nice.

E: Yeah, it was great to be here! If you need me to mansplain some more sports, I would love to come back.

C: Alright, thank you, Evan.

E: Thanks for having me.

C: Thank you for listening to Fast Facts for Gen Z. Be sure to follow this podcast to be notified whenever I release a new episode, and follow me on Twitter @FastFactsPod for live updates of my thoughts and ideas. This is Callie, signing off.