Long-time sportscaster Bob Costas is predicting the end times are nearing for the NFL, and one writer who agrees with him is New York magazine's Will Leitch. To explain the NFL's precipitous slide, the magazine writer overlooks a whole lot of off-the-field problems and blames it on, among other things, Donald J. Trump, pro football's doomsday POTUS.
Leitch writes that the NFL was once so pervasive in society that you couldn't avoid it if you wanted to. "There was a time, not long ago, when the NFL was the most unifying public institution we had. No matter your political or demographic persuasion, the one thing you could find to talk about with someone was football. Richard Nixon and Hunter S. Thompson bonded over football, for crying out loud."
Now the league is experiencing an unparalleled crisis, caused by numerous problems, he writes:
Liberals think it’s dangerous, classist, totalitarian, and cruel. Conservatives think it’s pandering, too “politically correct.”
Of course, for Leitch, the place to start with the litany of problems is President Trump:
Dozens of players were protesting the first two weeks of the season, but no one seemed to care … until Trump’s weekend tweetstorm from his golf club back in September. But the fact that we’re even framing this in political terms — the idea that a game in which people throw a ball and tackle each other has somehow become another thing for us all to yell at each other about from our ideological corners — is a large part of the problem. You can no longer watch the NFL without thinking of everything swirling around it off the field. The bigger problem for the league is: So many people just aren’t watching at all.
His obligatory attack on a Republican president delivered, Leitch strays on to other causes of pro football's descent from greatness without placing blame where it belongs. He says a larger problem is that "the NFL, like many empires before it, got too large, too cocky, and too ambitious, and it overreached." That comment certainly takes the protesting players off the hook for angering the fans.
Also, Leitch complains:
The NFL has always been slow to react to issues of player safety, but in recent years, it has instituted a series of cosmetic changes meant to address growing discontent. These changes have arguably failed on both fronts: They’ve made the game less fun to watch, and they’re probably not keeping anyone safer.
The NFL, once again, can’t win for losing. People are mad at it for the toll the game takes on the players’ brains, but people are also mad at it because the ways it has tried to address the issue have made the games less kinetic and compelling.
Leitch hails the liberal Costas as a smart man who says, “the reality is that this game destroys people’s brains” and one who predicts “the whole thing could collapse like a house of cards if people actually begin connecting the dots." Leitch adds, "It is becoming increasingly clear that that history is nigh."
At the same time, Leitch writes the NBA reflects the future. It is thriving on "an unprecedented spate of political activism culminating in the still-surreal spectacle of LeBron calling President Trump 'U bum' on Twitter (which actually shut Trump up; he hasn’t talked about the NBA since). The NBA is vibrant and organic and alive; the NFL feels both toxic and bathed in amber."
An argument can be made against an NBA culture that is a turn-off to many Americans and its growing politicization (think Steve Kerr, Greg Popovich and James). But back to pro football: Leitch is explaining the woes of the NFL as akin to describing the sinking of the Titanic without mentioning the iceberg.
Leitch makes no mention of the source of the politicizing of pro football: Colin Kaepernick, Michael Bennett, Marshawn Lynch, et al. He fails to mention the serious arrest problem of the "National Felons League," he doesn't mention the absence of kneeling in the NBA and he does not mention the arrogance of the Nero-esque commissioner who demands a mega-millions salary and lifetime perks while presiding over the league's decline.
Costas and Leitch are wildly over-reaching. Despite its self-inflicted wounds, the $14 billion NFL leviathan isn't going away any time soon. This dysfunctional enterprise has always been a league of attrition that uses up young, fresh talent and spits it out for younger, fresher talent. Before CTE became an issue, many retired players were limping from years of injuries and surgeries. Despite their unfortunate circumstances, they never took a knee or politicized the game.
