I'm not sure where you're getting these ideas, but I'd venture to guess that you don't actually believe in the things you're attributing to other people.

You could find plenty of guys willing to defend sports on their own terms. I don't think, if you let them talk for a day, they'd come out with anything like what you're putting in their mouths. I do think the things they'd tell you about sports are plausible enough as the "real reasons" they're fans. In my (admittedly not deep) experience, analysis of the action is a big thing. Criticizing the performance might rise to the level of a minor phenomenon. People are perfectly happy enthusing over great things that their heroes have done.

Just because people use sports as a vector for expressing manliness doesn't mean they don't enjoy it. Drinking beer because it helps you fit in doesn't mean you don't enjoy drinking beer. You can always have more than one reason to do something.

A man might enjoy throwing around a football because of the visceral experience of a solid catch, the nostalgic recollection of doing it with his dad, the anticipation of doing it with his son in the future, the vicarious simulation of a quarterback he looks up to, the amorphous pleasure of exercising, and because he can throw it further than his buddy.

Actually, I agree with all of what you just listed. But no one watches sports because they can throw the television farther than their friends, no one watched chariot races then or watches NASCAR now because they drive better than their friends, and no one watched gladiators because they routinely trounced their friends in battles to the death. Sports aren't there to satisfy the urge to show that you're better within your group than the rest of the group. They're there to satisfy the urge to tribalism, to show that your group is better than other groups.

Not really. We're talking about two different motivations.

Yes. People from San Francisco want the 49ers to win, because they're representatives of a kind. But there's nothing particularly manhood-affirming in this experience. People don't want their team to win in order to feel more masculine; as you said, it's a tribalism thing. That's why sports-watching is accompanied by other activities, like exclusion, beer-drinking, steak-grilling, and so on.

The reason you watch sports to affirm your manhood is because you feel you know better. You could, in their shoes, stomp the other team into the ground. You could tell your team what to do and they'd do it and they'd win. This isn't tribalism; such people would happily switch sides in order to prove they could win from there, too.

Listen to the content of the conversation. A bunch of guys, sitting around, agreeing with each other on what they would have done instead. If their team loses, the tribally motivated will say, "Better luck next time." Those who are motivated by masculinity say, "Should have done it better." It's indistinct if their team wins; they have nothing to prove because they backed the right horse.

People usually don't watch sports to affirm their manhood. Activities for doing that tend to be active. But when they do, it's not about tribalism.

Nothing you've said relates to anything I've said, though. The complaint is over the judgment of sports-watching men that if you're not interested in sports (for the usual reasons), you're not a real man. That has nothing to do with whether, if you want to be reassured that you're macho enough, you go watch sports.