It’s
something that’s been brewing for a while now. It’s been gnawing at my
conscience, like a little scratch at the back of my skull. The camel’s back was
beginning to sag, and finally this past week the straw finally came along to
break it.
Actually,
it’s not just the camel’s back. The NFL is broken. It has become a cesspool of
laughably misplaced priorities, an organization enabling some of the worst
behaviors in society. It manufactures controversies to distract us from what we
really should be outraged about and uses its monetary influence over its
partners to dodge any responsibility for its actions. And I’m done. The
league’s arrogance and actions have led this lifelong NFL fan to conclude I
simply cannot justify giving my money and my attention to it anymore.
I should be one of your biggest
fans, and for most of my life, I was.
White male, 40 (yes, a bit old for the absolute perfect demo but not far
off), spends money on movies, alcohol, junk food now and then, maybe even a car
if the chips fall right. I’m the kind of guy you want, but you lost me. Not
because the product is bad (although there are some rules regarding receptions
and reviews that are getting ridiculous), but because my conscience won’t let
me be a fan anymore. I used to get up every NFL Sunday looking forward to the
games. I sang the praises of Sunday Ticket and then later Redzone. I had gear
of my favorite team. No more, though.
NFL,
we’re going to have to go our separate ways. It’s not me, it’s you.
It was
the Tom Brady suspension that put me over the edge. It was not because I was a
Patriots fan who felt my hero was being scapegoated. It was not because I was a
fan of another team who was appalled the suspension wasn’t longer. In fact, I
don’t think anything involving the deflated football “controversy” matters in
the least. Since the teams use their own set of footballs, and the set one
quarterback uses has zero effect on the ones the opposing quarterback uses,
what the hell does it matter if one wants to throw a ball more inflated than
another? This should not even be a rule.
But never mind all that. It's superfluous. The Tom
Brady suspension (which will probably be reversed before the season starts) put
me over the edge because of the message it sent and how it related to other
issues the NFL has dealt with recently.
Tom
Brady got four games. Ray Rice originally got two. You might remember Ray. He
punched his girlfriend unconscious in a hotel elevator. Two games.
Now
some NFL enablers come out and say he ended up thrown out of the NFL
altogether. But that only happened when TMZ (of all organizations) got the tape
and posted it on its website. So the NFL made the change and did the right
thing only after it was blatantly caught trying to sweep it under the rug, so
in my book the NFL does not deserve a single iota of credit for that. If the
league had its way, Rice would have missed a couple of weeks and been back on
the field.
Think
about that for a second: A man punched his wife and knocked her out cold, and
the NFL’s idea of punishment for that was a two-week suspension. They claimed
they had not seen the video, which is laughable.
The NFL security team is a pretty high powered organization with
retirees from high up in other law enforcement. The Security Director is Jim
Miller, who used to be the Commissioner of the Pennsylvania State Police. Are
we really pretending the NFL’s resources (which would include access to the most
popular league on earth as a bargaining chip) could not get hold of a videotape
when the Miley and Kylie-chasing buffoons at TMZ could?
It’s
also amazing how the NFL “reporters” did not have this story. They dutifully
reported lies the NFL, and specifically Roger Goodell, told about what the
league knew and saw, the Ravens’ press conference, and what happened behind
closed doors with Rice and his wife. These “reporters” are people like Peter
King and Jay Glazer, masquerading as journalists when in truth they are the NFL
and Goodell’s PR firm. They spew out “news” like which backup tight end is out
with a pulled hamstring but can’t be bothered to investigate a story about a
man beating his wife and the league trying to minimize its impact on his
playing time to preserve itself. When actual journalists got on the case from
the New York Times, they ripped the NFL’s story to shreds in mere days. Where
were “journalists” such as King and Glazer then? They were exposed as the
carnival barkers they really are.
There
has been a rash of incidents involving NFL players being violent toward women
and children. Adrian Peterson beat his child until he had bleeding welts. Other
wife and girlfriend-beaters served token suspensions and were re-signed to big
contracts. After all this, they decide some ridiculous “kind of deflated”
football controversy is TWICE as bad (four games) as brutally assaulting your
fiancée. Twice as bad.
Remember
that next time you go to buy a pink jersey for your wife or daughter.
Despite
all this, the NFL had record viewership for the Super Bowl this year. I know.
They seem unstoppable. It seems as if nothing can touch them. It seems they can
go on ignoring these issues and blowing up phony controversies to distract us
and the TV networks desperate to hold on to their good favor will continue to
act as their mouthpiece while faking objectivity. But at one point baseball
seems unassailable as the top sport in the country. Horse racing and boxing
used to round out the top three. Things change. The NFL might keep on this path
of arrogance and one day people will become fed up with the league’s
minimization of domestic violence as an issue. Maybe people will wake up to the
fact the NFL is creating a larger and larger group of former players with
severe health issues and brain injuries while at the same time doing everything
it can to stiff those former players on post-career benefits. Maybe someday
people will realize going to NFL games in person is a rotten experience, full
of price-gouging antics, unpleasant and sometimes violent drunks in the stands
reveling in the league’s beer culture and slowly find other things to do. Maybe
someday people will just get tired of being treated like walking wallets with
no brains.
Trends
move faster than ever now. TV shows on cable are hot for a few years and then
fade out faster than ever (at one point in just the last ten years alone
“Trading Spaces,” “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” and “The Osbournes” were
considered cultural phenomenons that are now history). When people decide to
move on, they move on faster than ever. The NFL seems invincible now, but horse
racing thought so too at one time.
Tom Brady
was suspended for four games for “conduct detrimental to the integrity of the
league.” There is another reason it makes no sense. You can’t be detrimental to
the integrity of a league that clearly has no integrity.
NFL,
we’re done. It’s not me, it’s you.
