Football Touchdown Dances: A Violent Change

-- By LisaMiller - 15 Dec 2024

Brief History of Football Touchdown Dances

In a world of dumb, sometimes terrifying Internet trends that fame-thirsty users participate in for their five-seconds-of-fame, we are on the precipice of another potentially life-threatening craze. A pillar of American football culture, touchdown celebrations, boasts a sordid past of violent, sexual, and haughty dance moves that have led to serious fines. Usually, this means mimicking finger guns and bow and arrows, but this year the dances have taken an egregious turn into mimicking brandishing weapons and firing machine guns with two hands.

Justin Walley, a 22-year-old player for the Minnesota Golden Gophers, was flagged for unsportsmanlike conduct after simulating brandishing a weapon by pulling up his jersey to show off an imaginary gun. Drake London, a 23-year-old wide receiver for the Atlanta Falcons, was fined $14,069 for mimicking firing a gun into the crowd. Commenting on London's act, the Falcon's head coach Raheem Morris said, "He was probably shooting t-shirts into the stands, because he's just that kind of guy, but he was excited. He got excited." London also apologized for his unsportsmanlike conduct and that he lost himself in the moment, but neither acknowledged why that movement was used to exhibit excitement. In this essay, I will explore the recent phenomenon of football touchdown celebration dances becoming excessively violent, and how, although it is not the first case of violence in popular culture, it is a case study for the misplaced use of extreme violence in the form of machine guns that differ from the historical usage of violence in the media.

The No Fun League

One video with almost 600,000 views shows a man reviewing these instances and states that the brandishing a weapon call is "one of the funniest penalty calls" and that it was an "awesome celebration." He asks where we draw the line because mimicking a gun for a few seconds is not enough for such a harsh penalty.

The NFL has earned the moniker "No Fun League" for its (apparently) excessive fines and penalties. An association of the No Fun League and this new assault rifle trend could lead people to think the NFL is once again trying to stifle the entertainment factor of football. A negative public perception of the referees attempting to stop these "celebrations" could have the opposite intended effect and cause fans, especially impressionable young boys, to revere the players and mimic that in their own lives with imaginary or real weapons. Although this might seem like a drastic jump in logic, the rise in school shootings, violence against women, and an unpredictable, gun-loving, president-elect present a dangerous future when coupled with these casual acts of violence in football. We should not accept "I got excited" as an acceptable apology for firing an assault weapon into the crowd because that subconsciously approves the correlation between excitement and violence in the viewer's minds. These dances tell audiences that an instant display of violence is an appropriate response, whether out of excitement or hatred. The diminishing "wow" factor of an assault weapon is a dangerous concept because it strips the fear that should be associated with it.

Weapons of Mass Destruction

These dances are not the first example of normalization of violence nor even a groundbreaking level of violence. This country desperately lacks gun control and will certainly not see any improvement for the next four years, and instances like this can subconsciously affect young, susceptible minds. It is not the only, and certainly not the most dramatic, daily instance of violence they see, but it is not getting a bad rep like school shootings, murders on television, or violence in literature. There is very little finger pointing, and what the NFL has done does not get at the source of the issue (let alone them being known as the "No Fun League" to which people will not take this fine seriously). The lack of gun control has led to increased outright violence and a re-hardwiring of people’s brains to put these mass weapons of destruction onto our everyday lives.

It is especially worth noting they are mimicking machine weapons that kill at unrivaled amounts of speed -- weapons where you can stand hundreds of feet away from your target and still hurt them without ever looking them in the eye. Homer's Iliad certainly has direct violence, but it doesn't go unnoticed. We point it out and use it as a crux for understanding the entire context of the poem: war. There is no art, message, or purpose associated with these celebrations that furthers society; there is not even a negative connotation with them. The coach equated that movement with shooting t-shirt cannons instead of saying the word. The lack of accountability and frankness about depicting an automatic weapon only further ingrains its unchecked, normalization.

Again, this is not the only instance but we are allowing this to go by unscathed and not attaching any sort of label to this. School shootings may have horrifyingly become frequent and "normalized," but they have not lost their gravity and negative connotations -- people have just become used to the despair when learning of them. There may be political discourse on gun control and how to stop them, but no one supports school shootings. We are at a dangerous point in society where these seeds of violence are wanton and accepted. These football dances are not universally (or even barely) accepted to be bad, and they are a case study and dangerous omen for our culture's brazen obsession with not just blood and weapons, but automatic weapons that have increasingly less supervision and legislative oversight.