[lazepoo]

I completely understand how you feel. The notion of everything being a calculated production has extended itself past football for me though. I think that most major products are designed to appeal to the broadest market of groups even when that is at the expense of the groups that originally popularized whatever that product was. It's a slow creep towards ensuring that everything mainstream is completely accessible for casual enjoyment regardless of what that does to the integrity of the original product as the rough edges are sanded smooth and all the corners are padded.

The same thing has happened to mainstream music and literature. Most music is slickly produced and easily consumable without a substantive message, most books are written with a focus on accessibility to reading groups and casual readers (and familiar, formulaic plots) without regard for the literary characteristics of classic works. Look at movies: to paraphrase your original post, blockbusters today are an orgy of special effects. It's all in pursuit of the almighty dollar rather than the pursuit of a goal or artistic ideal.

Our world has been sapped of authenticity by commerce, and I would argue that this extends to our jobs as well. Businesses exist to make money first and provide a service second, and their focus is on doing what's right for them right now, not on the long term or the greater good.

So, what's happening in the NFL is just a reflection of what's happening in the world at large, we just didn't notice until it seeped into football, an area we'd believed was shielded from that sort of insidious effect by virtue of it being a game rather than a business, a fact that is no longer true.