Football and My Crisis of Faith.
 

I have been a football fan for more than forty years, and it has been one of the foundational interests of my life. I’ve played the sport since childhood, I’ve traveled to games, I’ve purchased jerseys, and I’ve been an unceasing student of statistics and strategies.

I’m now experiencing a crisis of faith, though, and I fear that football’s time is coming to an end for me. The catalyst was something really stupid, but it opened the door to a greater awareness that is quite disturbing and disillusioning.

The initial catalyst was the NFL’s “Together We Make Football” contest. I read about it and thought, “Wow, a nice celebration of football, and Super Bowl tickets would be a great prize”. So I wrote an essay and felt pretty good about it, and sent it in. I loved football.

The entries were posted on the site, and I read a few of them, and frankly, most of the essays and videos were pretty weak. People didn’t follow the rules or think about why a judge would pick them to win. Many of them were just pictures of people in jerseys saying, “We like football. Send us to the Super Bowl!”

But I saw another pattern, too, and it got me to thinking. There seemed to be a lot of people using disabilities or illness as an argument, particularly among their kids. “I had a lung infection. Send me to the Super Bowl!” “My son has spina bifida. Send us to the Super Bowl!” For the most part, they were not well-written or well-produced. They were requests for pity, and frankly I found them kind of off-putting. They seemed almost more like panhandling than an essay about why those people love football.

As I skimmed through, them, though, I found myself getting agitated. I’m a market research guy, and I found myself starting to read them from a marketing standpoint. I would find myself thinking that some NFL public-relations person would probably like this angle or that angle. “Hey, a disabled kid. Wouldn’t that be a great winner to use for marketing?” (Sorry if that’s insensitive, but it’s how p.r. people think.)

I looked through some more entries, and thought, “If I was a callous, cynical s.o.b., I’d bet that the five winners of this contest will be a disabled kid, an attractive woman, an inner-city African American, a veteran or active duty soldier, and then whoever writes the best essay." And then I immediately felt bad for being a callous, cynical s.o.b. and I submitted my essay.

The NFL announced the ten finalists recently. Three of the ten stories are interesting and speak to football. Three. The other seven are incredibly lame and contrived, and I think one is actually insulting to any longtime football fan. My cynical side picked wrong on the military guy, but if you look at the videos it’s pretty clear that this contest was not about celebrating football. We are not hearing the ten best essays about how football shapes and impacts people’s lives, and how they love football. We are hearing manufactured stories that are nothing more than a cynical marketing ploy to reach pre-defined target markets and serve as a p.r. tool.

Now, I mean no offense against the people in those videos when I say that. I have no doubt that nearly all of them like football, and that most of them love football. It’s not about them, or the fact that I wrote an epic, soul-shattering, thought-inspiring essay that was not selected since I don’t fit the any of the NFL’s market expansion segments.

What it really drove home was that the NFL is a business these days, and nothing more. I wanted a contest where I could write about football and how it has shaped my life, and where I could read about what it has done for others. That was what I was sold. Instead, I was used as a pawn so the NFL could sell its business.

Now, that thing is just a contest. I lose contests all the time. My years of playing and watching football have taught me to lose with grace, and I hope the winners of that contest have a great time. But it really made me think about who’s running the NFL now. I wanted the judges of that contest to be people who love football themselves, people who got into the business because they grew up passing and catching and tackling. I wanted the judges to be people who know who Otto Graham is. Who know Johnny Robinson and Doug Buffone and even John Jefferson, and who can tell you about the Sneaker Game or Christmas Day of 1971. I wanted the judges to be football people who understand what the story of football is about.

The judges of this contest were not football people. It is clear and obvious that they were p.r. people who said, “Okay, give me a person in this market segment and a person in that market segment and two more from that one, and let’s build stories around them." Those people probably don’t know Lawrence Taylor from Opie Taylor.

The NFL is run by businesspeople now. Lamar Hunt is gone. Bud Adams is gone. George Halas is gone. The league is run by lawyers and marketing people and advertisers. You could take them out of the NFL and exchange them with the industry leaders of soft drinks or smart phones, and it wouldn’t make a darn bit of difference. They’re selling a product, and I don’t think they really care what that product is.

And then I look at the games I am watching these days. I see rules changes that are designed for marketing value rather than sport. They’ve done the marketing analysis. If there’s more scoring, more casual fans will watch. If there are more passes, quarterbacks will become bigger celebrities. The games are cartoonish now, unbalanced scoring orgies because scoring lets casual fans know when to cheer. Defenses are being made irrelevant and quarterbacks are merely playing catch on their way to another 400 or 500 yards of showmanship. P.T. Barnum loves the aerial circus even as students of the game cringe.

And I am finally seeing the more sinister side of the business plan. I see blatant phantom penalties against the opponents of quarterbacks like Peyton Manning and Tom Brady, two of the highest-visibility products that the league sells, penalties that are critical in letting their teams win and continue playing as the TV audiences surge in January. If you’re running a business, you act to maximize your revenues, and Peyton Manning holding a Super Bowl trophy will do that a lot more than Alex Smith or Nick Foles doing so.

I don’t think the players rig games. It’s realistically impossible to do that in a high-level sport on a leaguewide basis. But Tom Brady is good. If Tom Brady gets four extra downs to win a game because of a pass interference call, he’s probably going to win. You can’t rig games, but you can tilt odds with just a few critical officiating decisions.

Maybe I’m waxing nostalgic, but I don’t think the NFL always had this attitude. Back when Hunt and Adams and Halas were around, the league was a competitive sport. Those owners loved the game and they wanted to win. The money was big, but it wasn’t insane. Look at the ownership and league management today. Are they football fans who want to win, or are they businesspeople who want to maximize profit? The cash flows are enormous.

I have been a Chiefs fan my whole life. In the modern world, that is naïve and Quixotic. The Chiefs are a small-market team and none of the players do national commercials. From a marketing perspective they support a middle-class fan base that is much smaller than most other markets. There’s not much marketing value in Alex Smith holding aloft a Lombardi trophy, and in fact there’s a huge opportunity cost if it’s him and not Peyton Manning. The league’s management team does not want Alex Smith or Jay Cutler or Jake Locker to win. Maybe they’ll do it, because a football field remains a chaotic place, but if so it will be against the wishes of the marketing braintrust of the NFL, and therefore against odds that have become more steep than one team in 32.

Sometime in the past twenty or thirty years, football evolved, and not in a good way. Any given game is still fun to watch. The players still try hard to win. On a tactical basis I enjoy the show and the athletes. But on a higher level I have reluctantly concluded that professional football has ceased to be a competitive sport. It’s an entertainment conglomerate, and just like the tables in Vegas the odds are stacked in the house’s favor. The house exists to make money.

I’ll probably continue to watch football. It’s a tradition. The games are fun. But at this point I’m reluctantly going to go into it knowing that it’s not what it appears. It’s a TV show. I’m not going to buy merchandise to support a TV show, and I’m not going to pay hundreds of dollars to watch a TV show live. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll go out and live life a little more on Sunday afternoons.

There’s a semi-famous internet clip of an audience member at a professional wrestling show. He’s given the microphone and thanks the wrestlers for the “all they’ve done to their bodies”, and then tearfully says, “It’s still real to me, dammit!” Well, I’d like to thank NFL players like Johnny Robinson and Doug Buffone and John Jefferson for all they’ve done to their bodies to entertain me. I have loved football and it’s been a great run. But it’s not real to me any more.

This is an interesting take sir

I agree with you. It's bothered me for some time as well. The NFL is a product for people who don't like football. In my opinion, that's the purpose behind the rule changes, the elimination of defense, and the crawl of it onto three nights a week of programming. In some ways you could say they're trying to grow the game, but they're really not. They're doing whatever possible to garner as many viewers as possible in order to boost ratings and TV deals, and that's discrete from growing it, because the game itself is secondary to the bright lights and production value, and what happens to the game is of ancillary concern. If more people will watch if DBs are never allowed to touch the WRs, then that's the change that will happen.

Rain so what if it ran by business you shouldn't think about it. It's fun to watch and interact with people online. Also that what make watching football fun to see the little guy beat the bigger city teams. If Green Bay can win why can't we. Don't lose faith rain man. Remember the saints were the worst team in the world and now they won a Super Bowl. If the saints can win with a not very big fan base so can we.

You mean, the year after Katrina when a Saints Super Bowl victory would be a huge marketing story?

I am sad. I feel as if I have lost a lifelong friend.

The modern NFL wants "drama" and "great stories."

They've forgotten that these things happen when there's great football...

The worst is when the refs are openly swinging games one way or another.

Sure was a great story to have "The Patriots" winning the superbowl after 9-11.

There was a clip during Bill Billicheats show where he walks up to the refs and they are like "don't worry, we'll protect your guy" or something of the sort.

The purity of the sport has most definitely been compromised.

Silly

I didn't realize you'd known that Hamas guy for so long.

So in this thread... Rain Man writes an essay about an essay.

Peyton Manning

Seems like most everything has been commercialized, analyzed, dissected, and colorized, all with the idea of getting your buck. Still, it is the individual players that make the games meaningful. I believe that most individual players have little interest in the hows and whys of marketing by the head offices of the NFL and are more concerned with achieving greatness among their peers on the field.

While I agree that the game isn't what it once was, I think the game on the field is what matters. Of the points you allude to, there are a couple that do give me pause.

1. Is there more than one way to build a winning team? I've beat the drum loudly that a franchise QB is the only way to build a team that can consistently compete for a SB year in and year out. I still mostly believe that, but with the way thigh paid QBs have impacted their team's salary caps, I'm beginning to think there may be another way. I don't have all the numbers in front of me, but it seems like the Ravens, Patriots, Cowboys, Packers, Giants, and Steelers are having trouble putting sufficient talent around their big $ QBs. SB championships over the last 10 years seem to be linked to being well rounded more than having a very top QB. I wish there was more balance between offense and defense and between passing and running, but air circuses haven't achieved a lock hold on winning the SB. There still seems to be some kind of balance.

2. The other key is that the game is called fairly. There is a perception that it isn't. That maybe teams lead by stars get a few more calls that go their way than non-sexy teams, especially when the game is on the line. That would be totally unacceptable if it were true. It seems that this is a testable hypothesis. If a well designed study were able to show favoritism, I think it could be publicized effectively, and would pretty much put an end to the practice.

3. The troubling trend that I'm most concerned with is the player safety issue. Player lawsuits could really damage the financial viability of the game. I think the league will continue to modify the rules to protect player safety. I also think fewer kids will play football due to safety concerns by their parents. Over time, I think that player safety issues will do more to undermine the game we love(d) than any other influence.

Wait a sec---Katrina hit right before the 2005 season. The Saints won the Superbowl following the 2009 season. That's five seasons later.

I can only say this, Rainman...Your OP should have been your contest entry.

Well its absolutely entertainment and not sport. If you tried to sue the NFL for rigging a game you wouldn't have a leg to stand on because the NFL is deemed entertainment and can produce whatever outcome they want for any given game. Does that mean the players rig games? No, although I'm sure it's happened but not as likely as the refs fixing games. And you're right, Saints going to the big game after Katrina, fixed, Pats after 911, fixed. There are plenty more I'm sure.

Interesting article, if it has already been posted then I apologize. http://spaces.covers.com/blog/Maximu...or-Profit.html

Hey, I presume this is a cleverly designed ruse to to make the NFL booger-pickers who spy on message boards select the Chiefs as the next SuperBowl winner due to your reverse psychological warfare! That's pure genious. You're like Hank Fan. Keep matriculating your words out into the interwebs, boys. Ah crap. Now they know we know.

Where exactly did you pick up that nonsense?

Also, the Saints got the Super Bowl 5 seasons after Katrina.

The Patriots did win the next SB after 9/11, but they also had a damn good team that went on to dominate most of the next 10 years. Anyway, wouldn't it have made more sense to fix the game for a New York team since they were the city attacked?

Exactly...

I truly don't understand how someone could truly believe that NFL games are fixed yet still be a fan that follows the sport. If I really thought that the league would not allow KC to beat Denver/Manning or allow KC to make it to the SB, I would have no interest in following it.

And again--where is the Saints/Katrina thing coming from?

August 2005 - Katrina hits
2005 season
2006 season
2007 season
2008 season
2009 season - Saints make the SB, win in Feb 2010

The Patriots "win" today may cause me to reexamine my love for the game. I have never seen the officials to blatantly give a team the victory as the refs did for the Pats today. Sure, there have been questionable calls in the past, (i.e. "the tuck rule", phantom holds, etc). But each I had seen contained acceptable amounts of grey area for me to believe that the destiny of the game was still in the hands of the players.

The referees gave the Patriot players and fans the win today, and unfortunately, I do not imagine these occurrences will cease anytime soon. When I was five years old, I fell in love with the gritty, ugly, and unpredictability of the game. The meaning of "Any Given Sunday" kept me occupied as a fan for the past fifteen seasons. However, it now feels as though the NFL has subverted its unpredictability for the benefit of its celebrities, marketability and narratives that allow it to create "must-see-TV".

Today the fans of Cleveland were robbed by a league that has turned its back on "Any Given Sunday" for the sake of the bottom line (though I imagine that Browns fans are already quite accustomed to this feeling).

I didn't say I believed every game was rigged but I do believe there are rigged games that are swung by the officials. There is too much money involved for it not to happen. I follow the Chiefs because they have been my team since I was a kid but if there was 100% proof tomorrow that the league has been fixing games I would stop watching.

Why is it that as a CHIEFS fan I always feel like I am holding Aces and Eights?

That was a single bad PI call at the end of the game. Has happened before.

For some reason, people always bring this up without really researching the year the Saints won.
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Rain man,

please send this essay to your local newspaper as well as the KC Star.

So you slept through all 492 versions of "New Orleans 5 Years Later"?

The ironic thing about this whole thing is that the league is way more competitive now that it ever was in the eras Rain Man is nostalgic about.
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The worst are those emo pieces about some sick kid during the pre-games. I know you got to throw in something for all the wives out there, but just give me my fantasy projections.

Simply put....you are over thinking this Rain Man.

Have you tried getting interested in local, semi-pro teams? I worked for a while with a guy who played for the Carroll County (Maryland) Cannons, and those guys really played for the love of the game. It's like the movie Slap Shot, just with football.

And, you're in luck. there's a league in the KC area.

Tuck Rule was as blatant as it gets.

Yeah but at the time, why would the league want to help the Patriots? Tom Brady was just another QB at that time and the Raider. were probably a bigger team marketwise than the Patriots at that point.
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I am not making a statement about any agenda, I just can not look at that play and see anything that resembles an incomplete pass.

It was against the Raiders, too.

Of course the NFL is a business ran by business people. If anything the NFL seems like the league least concerned with market size.

The only NFL game of import that looked possibly crooked to me was the Seahawks vs Steelers super bowl game. I can't really remember the specifics but I just remember the feeling that it seemed tainted to a guy who had no rooting interest either way.

Ya the game is rigged, the main reason I started working Sundays. I will never get that pissed off about a BS loss again.

fully where you are OP

*I am disgusted with all the ref face time & reviews

*no more contact, this game looks more like basketball & soccer

*Jamaal looks like a nostalgia clip inserted into today's game


I don't watch as much football these days. I travel for my work, often making travel schedules match games I wanted to attend. I used to attend 12 or more games per season and the past couple years that number has dwindled -- this season I have attended four games.

I don't make SB plans anymore. I didn't even watch SB45 two years ago, decided to work a project instead.

I like football because it is a high contact game mixed with strategy similar to chess & checkers. but now that contact is illegal, I have lost interest.

almost time to let go. I'll probably stop following after Jamaal retires.

What if we just enslave the gladiators and have them play each Sunday for their lives?

Bring them in for a look?

I actually think that was more of an opportunistic thing rather than a fix. Here are the Saints, looking like they might win the Superbowl...what can we market here...AH! Katrina!

As Cosmo stated, it's too long after the actual event to link it to a fix. Rather, it was a chance for the NFL to exploit a story. They do that shit all the time.

Which team do you guys think should have won in 2009 that had their Super Bowl stolen from them? I recall the Saints being pretty good that year.

It has parity. It's not competitive.

Yes, the individual games are closer. But the same teams, by and large, win most of those close contests, year after year.

SB championships over the last 10 years are ultimately linked to teams FINDING the very top QB. Once everybody KNOWS they're a top QB, they get paid, and like you said, that contract becomes a noose around that team's salary cap.

It's why a team should draft a QB in the first few rounds every single year.

Well of course. That's going to be the case no matter what era you're talking about. But the number of teams that have a chance at the Superbowl is bigger now more than in any other era also.
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Honestly, my enjoyment of the game changed dramatically this past offseason while I contemplated everything that had happened and whether or not I still wanted to be a fan of the Chiefs.

I had to get the "it's all about the Super Bowl" idea out of my head. Primarily because I came to the realization that the Chiefs will likely never win one. The cards are stacked heavily against them.

So then, why are people Detroit fans? Or Cleveland fans? Or dare I say it, Chiefs fans?

Or the year that 911 occurred and the PATRIOTS won

You can see so-called conspiracies everywhere. I don't believe it goes that deep.


I see bias for stars and their teams, which happens in every sport. We need to be the team that has the star that gets the token calls every game.

"B b b but that team had a chance to win after the bad call!"

:facepalm:

This is the NFL, a game can, and has been nudged toward the darling team by a biased call many, many times.

Never gonna happen.

We're the "feel good" story. Where guys like Joe Montana go to die. And where guys that weren't all that good in the 1st place go to "resurrect" their careers.

We're not ever going to be the lead actor in this play. We're part of the supporting cast.

Rain Man essay > 90% of sports 'writers'

Indy did it, so we have that 1:11tybillion chance of getting lucky.

Drafting RT's isn't going to do it, though.

I have two comments, actually 3.

1) I can understand this feeling in general and my subconscience feels exactly what Rainman expresses.

2) This feeling I have found can be altered by drinking heavily on
Sundays.

3) If I were GM of a football team I would draft Defense heavily every year to keep my D young and fast. I would build my Offense around that Franchise QB that would have to be paid and plug in the rest through FA. It is a formula I've developed in theory during my long days at the farm when I have not too much to think about.

4) Oh yeah, I must add a 4th thought , sorry, but ,Peyton Manning.

What is stacked against them, other than choices the team itself made (signings, trades, draft picks)?

The general attitude of the fans, aka what they are usually satisfied with vs what they are not.

The size of the market they're in.

The location of the market they're in.

Off the top of my head.

Yeah, it was rigged that a shitty team would win just because it's team name is Patriots.

Never mind that the team was great and basically dominated the next decade, or that having a New York team win would have been the more obvious storyline.

There is a network where people spend hours watching people cook. I thought golf was bad

And so those things make it less likely to win the Super Bowl? How?

Attractive women and food.

Everything golf is not...

There's like 15 minutes of attractive women for every 24 hours of programming.

EEEWWWWWW.

Dude, They were going to be put on a pedestal as long as Bin Laden was alive. Now they claim he was buried at sea so no one really knows for sure. Which translates to keeping the Patriots on the top until we're done in Afghanistan.

I'm just going to assume you're being obtuse.

Green Bay, pittsburgh, and Indianapolis are similar size and in the middle of the country. Our fan base is fine. Save our chiefs proved we won't stand for a consistently crappy product. We are probably closer to a Super Bowl now than in a long time. Our core is fairly young, built through the draft and we aren't completely one sided like in the past

You should send this in as your essay.

Green Bay is THE original NFL franchise. Pittsburgh and Indy also have history on their side. None of the 3 are original AFL teams, FWIW.

I hope this means you still believe in Storage Wars and Duck Dynasty. Those shows aren't fabricated at all!

For anyone who thinks the games are rigged or at least intentionally "biased," you're really talking about the game officials literally taking direct orders from the NFL to make calls against one team and go easy on the other. And not once has an official ever come forward to say this was happening? Is the entire game crew in on it, or does the NFL just plant 1 guy per crew to slip in a few holding or PI calls?

Every now and again there's a team that fights the odds.

Tampa, Baltimore (1st SB win,) Cardinals (literal red-headed stepchildren,) Rams, etc...

Ok, I'm going to assume you're kidding.

even my wife said that game was rigged early on.


oh, and Marshall Faulk;

"I understand Bill [Belichick] is a great coach," Faulk told Curran. "But No. 13 [Kurt Warner] will tell you ... Mike Martz will tell you ... We had some plays in the red zone that we hadn't ran. I think we got to fourth down -- we ran three plays that we hadn't ran, that Mike drew up for that game. Bill's a helluva coach … we hadn't ran them the whole year [and the Patriots were ready for them]." And the only time that Rams practiced those plays? At the walkthrough.


nice lil article/video link here;

http://www.cbssports.com/nfl/eye-on-...ss-to-patriots

FWIW, I'm not suggesting that the NFL is rigged or blatantly biased (I do think it's inherently biased in some cases).

I think the combination of city, fans, ownership, NFL structure, and several other factors are going to make it nearly impossible for the Chiefs to win a Super Bowl.

I don't think he takes orders from the NFL but that roided out freak Ed Hochuli takes advantage of every opportunity to make game changing calls that often are impossible to defend.

There is no other ref I'd fear having more in a meaningful game...

So basically, it's down to "we need a miracle".

I'm going to assume you're avoiding answering the question. How does playing in the Midwest in a smaller market make it less likely for the Chiefs to make the Super Bowl? If this was baseball and we were talking about the Royals, I'd agree. But football has revenue sharing and salary caps. Everyone has a chance. The teams that have a long run of success are largely the ones who drafted a great QB.

Great post, and completely agree. You should submit this to them as a follow up.

I'm not sure if it's always been this way, or maybe I was just too young to see it when I really enjoyed the NFL. In the past 5-7 years I've noticed the same thing, but I've also completed college (so I view everything from a different perspective) and the Chiefs have done plenty on the field to make me uninterested (note: it's no coincidence Herm was hired around the time this all started). So, I guess in some ways I'd have to rely on people who are older than me to help determine if it's always been this way, but my guess is that it hasn't... when products are starting out, the focus is in the right place, then money takes over.

As far as the game itself, it's a quarterback league that's all about the excitement of big offense... works really well for marketing and the casual fan, but games can be pretty ridiculous when there's no defense. Almost to the point of college shootouts.

It's a watered down league... over the top parity with too many teams, but every team has a chance, which is good for business. There's a lot of shitty football being played, but hey, your Tebow-led team or your 7-9 team still has a chance to make the playoffs, so you should buy season tickets! Just look at a lot of Chiefs fans... it's all about making the playoffs and having a chance from there. That kind of hope puts butts in seats.

As far as the business side of things, it's all about making more money than last year. Hey, if we made eleventy billion dollars two years in a row, we're stagnant! I've worked for a company that was all about the stock holder, and it couldn't have been more obvious in the way they treated everyone but the stock holder.

Ticket prices, wanting more games or even teams in London, the eleventy billion dollar TV deals that include 50% commercials.... it's all about squeezing every last penny out of existing sources of revenue and finding new sources, and a lot of it hurts the game or the fans.

When the focus isn't on the product and customer, those two things will suffer.

Jeff Triplett.

There's a reason we haven't drafted a great QB.

Did you actually just quote your wife as evidence that the NFL is rigged?

"Why ain't there no Chiefs on that wall, Goodell? Huh?"

http://www.gettogethablog.com/wp-con...gSalBuggin.jpg