Just Say No

So I find that don’t watch much pro football any more. This came as a bit of a surprise to me, since pro football is the King of All American Sports, and I am one of the Baby Boomer generation that crowned it. But apparently lots of loyal subjects are like me, because the TV ratings are plummeting and the end of their reign is nigh. There are lots of reasons for this, and I was questioning enough to list a few to see why you other peasants aren’t watching as much either.

1. Is it because the owners are the scum of the earth? Probably not all of them are, but our local owner certainly is. You can read about him here, this article is a classic: https://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/news/article/13039846/the-cranky-redskins-fans-guide-to-dan-snyder. But he’s only one of the 32 greedy grubbers who hold their communities for ransom so they can build new stadiums full of luxury boxes; or lock their players out so they can grab over half of the gross revenues and share almost $8 billion of TV money. Or preside over the only major sport that does not guarantee contracts, the median length of which are less than three years. Or resort to bogus accounting practices to cheat the players over their less-than-half-share of total revenues (http://www.businessinsider.com/nflpa-won-arbitration-assusing-nfl-of-witholding-millions-from-players-2016-2) ? Or maybe it’s just the “we’re running the plantation” attitude they brandish over their heavily African-American employee base (https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/texans-owner-bob-mcnair-inmates-runing-prison_us_59f3492ce4b03cd20b813041). I guess we don’t really have to choose just one reason to hate them; all the reasons are examples of their lordly arrogance.
2. Or might it be because the commissioner is a two-bit tyrant tool of the owners? Roger Freakin’ Goodell, the poster child for blue-blood, patriarchal culture makes me shudder every times I see his perpetually sour puss on my 50” screen. In their infinite wisdom, the owners gave him absolute power to adjudicate player issues, and he has managed to botch every one of them in his tone-deaf way (see Ray Rice, Tom Brady, Colin Kaepernick, Ezekiel Elliott, etc.). Meanwhile he pockets $40 million per, running a monopoly that somehow he still can steer to spiraling decline. The league would actually be better off if they just paid him just to lie on a beach somewhere.
3. Maybe it’s because an NFL football game has very little football and lots of beer, cars, and phones? Did you know that a football game lasts about 3 ½ hours to run 60 minutes of game clock, but actually has just over 11 minutes of football action (http://dailysnark.com/graph-shows-just-many-hours-commercials-youll-watch-football-season-vs-actual-action/)? Or that the ratio of commercial time to football time is almost 6-1? I guess this is acceptable if one is consuming a 12-pack of Bud Light and 2 bags of Doritos per game, but it’s a drag if you’re just on coconut water and kale chips. These days its much better to wait until the game is over and watch it in 11 minutes on YouTube.
4. Then again, perhaps it’s because the quality of the games themselves sucks? Lots of theories about this… the elimination of game-like contact from practices, the rash of injuries sidelining star players, the abomination that is Thursday night games, etc. But I think it’s mainly that the teams all run the same conservative, boring offenses, dinking the ball to the running backs 43 times per game. Don’t try anything stupid, or for God’s sake, fun. The football play itself has never been less interesting.
5. And with all of the recent changes to prevent injuries, maybe the main problem is the Kafkaesque rules of the game? Is it a catch, is it not a catch; is it holding, of course it is but is it legal holding; did he fumble or did his ass hit the ground first? There are two issues here: the efforts to take the violence that is inherent in football out of football, and the attempt to take subjectivity out of officials’ decisions. The former is like trying taking the caffeine out of coffee: why bother? And the latter, why the hell can’t the refs just exercise common sense and professional judgment? Oh wait, I forgot, this is America.
6. And since the rules are now incomprehensible, don’t you hate the breaks for plays under review? Almost half of play reviews now result in an overturned decision: http://www.espn.com/blog/nflnation/post/_/id/254326/amid-spike-in-replay-reversals-has-process-changed-under-alberto-riveron. But I was surprised to learn that the average game has less than two reviews, though they last about three minutes each; it seems like you could watch half a game during the reviews (actually you could!). Well, at least they have learned to cut away to commercials during the reviews and so we can hear about Bud Light (dilly, dilly!), JD Power, and Verizon a few more times.
7. Maybe I’m the only one who is bothered by the “Isn’t America great” marketing stance put forward by the league? Who was it that elevated the NFL to the position of political spokes-entity for patriotic Americans? Do we really need soldiers and jets and flags and the National Freakin’ Anthem at every football game? Seems to me that this is just the NFL leadership shamelessly exploiting every possible angle to further line their bloated pockets with more cash. We don’t play the national anthem at concerts, or movies, or pageants or shows, why do we need to play it at every sporting event? It’s just a damn game! Can’t we just watch it and get drunk without puffing out our chests and telling the rest of the world how great we are?
8. And on that subject of taking a political stance, what a clusterf**k the NFL made out of the ‘kneeling during the anthem’ debacle! It was such straightforward issue: all the league had to do was create a fund to support better policing in minority areas and throw some player and team marketing support behind it. Who wouldn’t be for that?? But instead they allowed it to become a civil war between Deplorables and The Rest of Us, totally pissing off both sides and costing the league millions of dollars (http://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/21250448/nfl-sponsor-papa-john-not-happy-anthem-protests). It was the worst handling of a PR problem since Donald Trump couldn’t find the bathroom in a Moscow hotel room. As a result, the NFL finds itself trying to straddle the widening chasm between red and blue America, and feeling its core be ripped asunder. Ouch.
9. But when it comes to hating the NFL, clearly the elephant in the room is that watching an NFL game is endorsing the destruction of human beings. It has become impossible to ignore that football ruins the minds and bodies of almost everyone who plays it at that level. When over 99% of ex-players brains showed significant signs of traumatic damage (https://www.si.com/nfl/2017/07/25/boston-university-study-cte-nfl-player-brains), there is no longer any doubt about the severity of the problem. Who can watch a game anymore without thinking about what it is doing to these young men and their families? Some would argue that the players choose this path with full knowledge of what they are in for, but they are young and foolish – weren’t we all? How many of them would choose to do it again? Many crippled former players have said they wouldn’t.
10. Finally (10 is a nice number!), there is no solution to the problem of brain damage and other crippling injuries. The NFL is trying to change the rules of the game to reduce or eliminate the problem, but violent collisions are inherent to the game, and a big part of its appeal to many fans (the red ones, of course). These changes have been implemented over the past few years, but 2017 was nevertheless a record year for serious injuries to key players. In particular, the repetitive head smashing that has been found to be most debilitating is unavoidable, especially for interior line players. Running backs know their shelf life can be measured with the fingers of one hand. And the players just keep getting bigger and faster and stronger; fifty years ago they were slow and fat and white, but now they are none of the above. The problem is not going to get any better, and the NFL should anticipate a slow and painful decline, just like most of its players.

Already millions of parents are turning away and not allowing their children to play football, eroding support for the game and ensuring its decline with the next generation. In fact, this recent survey shows that soccer, the most likely substitute for youth football, has made significant gains in popularity among young people: http://news.gallup.com/poll/224864/football-americans-favorite-sport-watch.aspx. This despite the fact that soccer is still boring as all get out! But soccer fans can wear player jerseys, gamble on it, and get drunk, so it seems to be a worthy and likely candidate to replace football in the years ahead.

So if you are still watching pro football, get on the bandwagon and stop! Join the millions who have found that you can waste just as much time watching Netflix and YouTube without endorsing the destruction of real humans and enriching the most horrible group of people since SPECTRE. Let me know how it goes for you, maybe we can start a support group on Facebook.