Engaging in a different kind of sports debate

This is a theme that popped up in a conversation I had with writer Chuck Klosterman, soon to be seen here, but what caught my eye was Gladwell’s ‘second conversation’ theory about sports.
The author of Blink, Outliers and other books suggested that there are at least two conversations going on about each sport at all times. One is what happens in terms of scores and events and plays on the field, and then there’s a second, which puts the first in a much broader context, a follow-up discussion which runs both parallel and perpendicular to the game itself.