A league of copycats -- Mimetic Theory and Literary Study

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Date Posted: 15:51:26 05/04/08 Sun
Author: JD
Subject: A league of copycats

A couple weeks ago I was watching the NFL Draft and the announcers said something that caught my attention. He was talking about how the New York Giants won the Super Bowl by drafting a certain way the year before and that teams were doing the same thing now this year. He specifically said that it is a league of copycats. That comment made me think about it, and I realized that a lot of sports are shaped because of this phenomenon. In basketball and football especially (those are the ones I watch so I know them best) when one team starts to do something and it works for them, other teams copy that method and eventually the practice becomes a common element of the game. What's even more interesting is that those that do the imitation unsuccessfully are even called pretenders. It's as if sports (taking the teams as individuals themselves) becomes a showcase for interdividual rivalry in the strategies that they may or may not use. The teams that imitate one another well and thus contest one another are recognized as the contenders: they are so close to the model that you cant call them a failed imitator or "pretender" like the teams that cannot come close to their models

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