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.