Per capita cheese consumption in the US

It is a curious feature of the universe that American football players and American cheese have entered into what can only be described as a financial suicide pact, rising in tandem from 2005 to 2022 as though one were secretly funding the other's increasingly bewildering lifestyle choices. One might expect the correlation between, say, helmet technology and head injuries, or between quarterback fame and divorce rates, but cheese consumption and NFL salaries suggests either that professional athletes subsist entirely on dairy products, or that we have simply noticed two things going up at the same time and called it destiny. The universe has not, in fact, been waiting to tell us this.

What's actually happening here is almost certainly the work of a hidden third variable doing the heavy lifting in the background—most likely the sheer economic expansion of America during this period, which made people richer, made them buy more cheese, and made football franchises vastly more profitable at the same time. Between 2005 and 2022, median household income rose roughly 30 percent, and both cheese consumption (driven by pizza, nachos, and snacking culture) and NFL salaries (driven by television rights deals that went from roughly 4 billion dollars annually to nearly 10 billion) rode that same wave upward like surfers who didn't know they were on the same wave. It's rather like noticing that both hemlines and interest rates dropped in the 1990s and concluding one caused the other, when really they were both passengers on the same economic bus.

The troubling part is not that we found this correlation—it's that we will probably find forty more just like it if we keep looking, and some of them might be even more specific, more convincing, more utterly meaningless. Our pattern-seeking brains are magnificent engines for finding connections in noise, which is either humanity's greatest strength or its most reliable failure mode, depending on what time you ask us. We remain, as always, baffled by our own bafflement at cheese and football salaries moving in lockstep.