Does watching the NFL make you evil?
If America has a secular religion, it is probably the National Football League, if only for the happening-on-Sunday thing and the ritual consumption of alcohol and breads.
Now, if you’re a Catholic, you might feel a sense of queasy familiarity every time your worship admits to enabling and pardoning a vast criminal conspiracy. If you’re a football fan, the collection of billionaires and their federally protected cartel present the American faithful with so many ethical dilemmas that even DirectTV’s Sunday Ticket satellite package – not only picking a game from the TV guide, but simply the act of paying for it – can send you through a vaguely Augustinian self-recrimination.
The NFL is run by Commissioner Roger Goodell, an optics-obsessed water carrier for 32 chair-moistening, check-cashing aristocrats who leverage economic (and social) resentments to turn their own fans against the labor that creates the game, all while praising themselves as market players in a market that is rigged by law. They filch public funds and flush the effluent from their own monuments into the same local infrastructure they beggar with tax breaks and bond issues. They seem wholly indifferent to the treatment of people who compose half the globe. They let known frauds run teams and don’t care if team names are undisputed racial slurs. And they may have achieved all this shameless excess while suppressing knowledge that their profit engine was literally annihilating the minds of their employees.
The NFL, as fun as it is, is the only major sport that has forced its fans, for two consecutive years, to spend their Sundays wondering: “Am I facilitating evil?”
To date, we still can’t be sure how much NFL ownership knew that mid-game and mid-practice concussions created long-term neurodegenerative conditions for its players, when it learned that, and to what extent it tried to cover up the conspiracy. We know that Commissioner Goodell has consistently acted like the lady who doth protest too much, making a production of punishing high-impact hits, despite evidence that what contributes most to Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) are sub-concussive hits – akin to driving into a wall at 35mph – that occur along the line of scrimmage, on every down of every game. Goodell will even (please!) think of the spines of the children, running handclap-heavy happy ads
about unaccountable youth coaching standards and
the “Heads Up” tackling program, a technique that works only in an NFL ad’s Smurf-like fantasyland divorced from the reality of tackling.
But the arc of the NFL’s moral universe bends toward optics, only upon inconvenience. Problems are addressed with great fanfare, occluding whether the fanfare presents a solution at all. Self-congratulation about Michael Sam’s drafting makes
an excellent counterpoint to a league that made room for homophobic, predatory bullying. Every pre-game show’s “gee-whiz, what an articulate young man” dog-whistling about Russell Wilson serves as a counterpoint to
dog-whistling about Colin Kaepernick’s “thuggish” hat orientation. Anything, really, to trowel vaseline over the lens for a soft ESPN Sunday NFL Countdown segment. Decisive leadership in settling concussion lawsuits can even let a league
with an annual $9bn in revenues get off the hook with $756m in compensation for perhaps literally
destroying its employees’ minds – all while
permanently sealing off any internal data that might reveal the degree to which the league was complicit in knowingly slamming holes into said brains.
And that’s just every down to feel nauseated about.
When the camera pans across the stands, you can ponder the NFL’s attitude toward women. (
Unless you’re watching the Pittsburgh Steelers on offense, in which case you can think about the NFL’s attitude toward women without taking your eye off the quarterback.) Forget cloddish attempts to curry favor with women via pink shoes or encouraging them to buy matching $80 jerseys with their husbands/boyfriends, and forget that five minutes of gameplay are bookended for hours every Sunday with ads about how male fans’ only true happiness comes when
their goddamn wives just goddamn well shut up and let them watch the Coors can turn blue.
Instead, you can focus on how Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice
received only a two-game suspension for knocking out his then-girlfriend (now wife) and dragging her unconscious body out of a hotel elevator. Focus, too, on how Goodell reduced the potential suspension
after interviewing Rice’s wife Janay in the same room with him, his team’s president, his team’s general manager and two other men, in violation of what even a semi-interested fan of Law & Order: SVU could tell you is the humane way to encourage a battered woman to feel safe and speak honestly about her situation. Focus, also, on how Goodell
grandly announced a “new” domestic violence policy last week, despite the fact that
he had always possessed the ability to unilaterally impose harsher punishments.
Do not look for relief by panning your gaze from the stands up to the white guys in the boxes. At the same time that Cleveland Browns wide receiver Josh Gordon can be banned from the game for a year for smoking weed again, Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay can get a six-game suspension and fine for
driving drunk while carrying an arsenal of oxycodone and Vicodin and a briefcase with five figures in cash. And don’t forget the Browns owner, Jimmy Haslam,
who just paid that $92m fine for fraud.
But no one watches the Browns if they can help it.
So if you want to talk awful owners, you have to stick with the Washington
Redskins owner Dan Snyder, a man so thoroughly petty, vindictive and awful that his only response to
this legendary and objectively true list of his petty, vindictive awfulness was to sue the author and newspaper responsible for it.
Dan Snyder isn’t satisfied with being the avatar of every cruel and stupid thing about modern capitalism. For the average owner of a major sport franchise, it would be enough to monetize any former free event and sell a substandard product – from the peanuts to the on-field product – and pass the savings on to himself while screwing everyone in sight. No, now Dan Snyder is in another proudly conservative business altogether: claiming to be victimized by victims.
Many Native Americans justifiably have a problem with the team’s name being, by definition in just about any dictionary you can find, an ethnic slur. So naturally Dan Snyder has spun up the victimization engines and tried to run them with the smooth purr of the Fox News machine – where honest, hard-working real American traditions are constantly assailed by incredibly powerful opportunistic race hustlers and PC police, like Native Americans. You know, them. They run all the networks.
Snyder has
bought and paid for his spokes-tokenism and
his astroturf, but more importantly, he believes he has history on his side. Except history is something that has facts in it. Like, the fact that the Native American after whom Snyder claims the team was named was instead
an ethnic German who made up his native status in part for showmanship and also to avoid being drafted into World War I. Naturally, Dan Snyder claims the history books he reads don’t say that and somehow back him up, but those books were written by his dad, which is the historiographical equivalent of “My mom thinks I’m handsome.” Except your mom probably didn’t write
a children’s primer that includes “reverse racism”.
Back in the real world, Keith Olbermann has repeatedly pointed out that
the team’s famously racist founder explicitly cited the name as originating from a marketing ploy totally unrelated to honoring Native American heritage. And Dan Snyder’s dedication to “Redskins” might be a cynical ploy as well – raising the outrage stakes so high that he can
blackmail concerned citizens and football fans into building a replacement for his only 17-year-old stadium in exchange for relinquishing the name. Dan Snyder’s former general manager, Vinny Cerrato,
seems to suspect as much, and every crass venal thing everyone knows about Dan Snyder suggests Cerrato isn’t wrong.
Which is what takes us from the particular back to the general, because you don’t need to have a Dan Snyder or a Jimmy Haslam to have a creep for an owner. Almost every one of them is either plotting – or still celebrating – the fleecing of ladder-climbing, short-time stewards of local American governments for a publicly financed stadium. The NFL represents a collection of billionaires extorting towns into socializing debt and privatizing profit, despite
consensus that publicly financed stadiums do not create revenue for local governments. They almost always cost you, both in terms of the construction paycheck upfront and a backend full of preferential tax rates and impacts on the environment, transportation infrastructure and police overtime.
After that, stare through your TV and into the future, and see your local owner
salivating at the chance to further gut the collective bargaining agreement with the NFL Players Association – finger-steepling and eager to engineer another lockout or force a strike and hope that dog-whistling about “working for the good of the game” will motivate anti-blinged-out-player resentment lingering in every team fanbase. These are the people who locked out referees in order to chisel money from their guaranteed paychecks, then successfully conned an increasingly anti-union audience into thinking it was
the referees who chose to jeopardize the sanctity of the game.
The 32 dead souls ringing the Dr Strangelove war room of the NFL ownership meeting interrupt their Randroid tongue-bathing only to squeal like scalded truffle pigs at the thought of any power devolving to the actual people whose ability, knowledge and gameplay make the NFL worth watching in the first place. They issue great puling statements about income imbalance in a game that pays them $100m per annum just for the act of being able to cash checks and maybe pay attention long enough to run a franchise into the ground. Like Dan Snyder’s historian-hobbyist defense of racism, they crank up the victimization machine about a system in which employee contracts are rarely guaranteed past a single year and can be terminated for multiple reasons, and they rely desperately on fans’ willingness to think,
I’d play or referee this game for nothing, these players are just spoiled millionaires. They can’t stop telling you about the selfishness of athletes who, in the last agreement between billionaires and a sputtering players union, consented to allowing Roger Goodell and future commissioners the wide latitude to suspend players for an entire year for smoking pot – then ding an owner with as much force as a popcorn fart, wag a finger at him and tell him to stay off Twitter for six games while sunning himself in a Caribbean tax shelter.
At this point, the only thing standing between Roger Goodell and his ambition to raise league revenues to $25bn per year by 2027 are purely vestigial economic organs. You know, like football players.
Given its indifference toward women and racism, its eagerness to plunder public coffers and its outright economic and medical hostility toward its own labor force, it is flabbergasting that any of us remain fans of the NFL at all. It’s a game of on-the-field supermen managed and exploited with all the “superman” sociopathy of Wall Street-Silicon Valley vulture capital neofascism. The one thing the NFL hasn’t figured out how to do yet is compel fans to download a $159 app, the only purpose of which is to tell them they’re fungible, fired and that both their job and satellite feed has been outsourced to a bare wall in a 50,000-square-foot maquiladora in order to free job creators from their shackles.
If American football was a game played by 22 men in $5,000 bespoke suits passing a briefcase full of junk bonds to each other, we’d rightfully despise it. Instead, I will probably watch over 300 hours of this game before the postseason starts. Because I am stupid, and because I tell myself that the bargain I have struck where I am not a Nielsen household, and I buy no tickets or cable packages or merchandise is enough. And nothing will change, because NFL ownership and their hollow-hammered lickspittle Roger Goodell know that millions more will strike similar, smaller compromises. All because, when the game is right – when it really goes right – it is beautiful enough, even for just a little while, to let us forget everything else.
