The other obvious symbol in The Blind Side is, of course, the idea of the “blind side”: in other words, the field of vision that a quarterback can’t see when he’s throwing the ball, since he’s faced in the opposite direction. (For a right-handed quarterback, this would be the area to the quarterback’s left.) As Lewis interprets it, the blind side was a major weakness in the game of football as it was played before the mid-1980s: big, fast tacklers could tackle quarterbacks from their blind side, without being seen until it was too late to react. The blind side symbolizes, first, the major rethinking of football that took place in the eighties, and, second, the unlikely players, like Michael Oher, who seemingly emerged from thin air after the eighties.
The Blind Side Symbol Timeline in The Blind Side
