Nobody will admit the best novel of our generation is about football

No but it is another story by the same author (John Bois) in which

> Tim Tebow finds himself able to do the impossible; he gets the ball and runs it to the end zone. It is then that the entire back of the stadium opens up, and it’s revealed that successful Canadian football drives don’t have a defined stopping point. They go “to street”, meaning that the team can move the ball through the city and out to the wilderness. The entire country of Canada is potentially in play, and Tim Tebow is the only person ever born who is able to take advantage of this.

I loved 17776 and never heard of this but I'm keen to check it out

When the author starts their post off insulting David French they lose all credibility in my mind as an arbiter of literature. David French has written an enormous number of posts I disagree strongly with, and an equivalent number that I agree strongly with. That's because he thinks and writes about extremely complex matters of morality and does not reduce his views to the "liberal" or "conservative" orthodoxy.

He started out as a darling of the religious right, because he played a major role in causes the religious right considered "theirs." When he began to write with equal clarity about how other aspects of the religious right's focus are at odds with those same deeply held principles that led him to do the work the right loved, they turned on him like this.

Complex moral issues are exactly that, complex. We need more intelligent people thinking hard about them, not more polarization into "you're either with us or against us" mindsets.

I'll be clear here that I'm not interested in judgements on literature provided by someone who frames their worldview as hating one of the few writers willing to address the real complexities of real issues today.

I immediately thought of Unseen Academicals.

I really enjoy Jon Bois' work and what his influence on SB Nation/Secret Base turned into. Their content now is really great even if he himself has taken a backseat to the newer creators.

The best book about sport is Fever Pitch, not a novel but stories of Nick Hornby's own football fandom as he grew up. I don't even like sport and I loved it. He then peaked when he wrote Hi Fidelity, a fantastic novel about relationships and music.