Author of the recently released book "Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times," Mark Leibovich made an appearance earlier this week on The Daily Show. A major theme of his six-minute chat with host Trevor Noah is that NFL owners are predominantly white, Republican and inept. Echoing former President Barack Obama's "you didn't build that" line for the ages, Leibovich says NFL owners are immature people who just lucked into the ownership of their respective teams.
Leibovich (appearing on left in photo), the chief national correspondent for The New York Times Magazine, is known for profiling political and media figures. He spent four years attending NFL games, interviewing owners and attending draft days and owners' meetings to gather material for this 350-page book. In a review, Bloomberg Opinion columnist Joe Nocera thoroughly trashed "Big Game."
During their conversation, Noah wanted to know the most surprising thing Leibovich had learned about NFL owners. The answer was not flattering:
"Just how inept they are. I mean that, I mean that in the most respectful way. These are billionaires, almost every single one of them. A lot of them just sort of lucked into their football team, inherited the team, just sort of wound up with football teams. These are people who own probably the most, some of the most, like, powerful entertainment companies in their various markets. And I just kind of found them to be a motley crew, with a few exceptions."
There was a racial connection to those insults, too. Leibovich assured Noah that all but one of the owners are white. Noah also wanted to confirm the white viewership of NFL games: "Is the NFL as predominantly white in its viewership as you say it is?":
"It's pretty high. I think it varies from between you know between 65 percent and maybe 80 percent depending on what survey you look at. But about maybe 75 percent of the players, the workforce, is African-American. Much of the fan base is predominantly Republican. It's traditionally been the most conservative sport. And it does create a dynamic of great imbalance, one between the owners who own it, the players who play it and who are damaging themselves. ..."
Leibovich said he had spoken with Steve Tisch, a co-owner of the New York Giants, who called the NFL a "junior high school for billionaires." Leibovich added, "Which I think is probably a little bit unfair to the junior high school students. These are smaller than life characters, and you have to have out-sized -- I mean that in a very respectful way -- you have to have outsized influence on how we spend our Sundays and how we spend our tax dollars and so forth."
Noah and Leibovich also discussed politics and President Donald Trump.
"The NFL has gone from being one of the most unifying institutions in this country to probably the most divisive sports brands we have, and one of the reasons is politics," Leibovich remarked. But it wasn't Colin Kaepernick and the league's protesters who ushered in the politics.
Before President Donald Trump started "going after Colin Kaepernick and going after the protests, was talking about football as sort of a template for why America has gone soft," the author told Noah. "He said football has gone soft and America has gone soft. Political correctness has overtaken football. And penalty flags are like, you know, the PC police. So in some ways I think a lot of the same tensions that have existed in football for many years have been, you know, mimicked in many ways, by Donald Trump. And in a sense it is inevitable that these reality shows would collide."
Noah was curious to find out if Leibovich believes the NFL will survive, based on "what people now see the sport as." Leibovich said mostly people see football as an escape from the rules of society, but concluded the planet's going to end in about 20 years, so it really doesn't matter. Noah agreed: "Right, we'll all be gone by then."
