From Portside Culture <[email protected]>
Subject Why We Can’t Turn Off the NFL
Date January 23, 2023 1:00 AM
  Links have been removed from this email. Learn more in the FAQ.
  Links have been removed from this email. Learn more in the FAQ.
[America’s unbreakable fixation with football will only lead to
more injuries like Damar Hamlin’s. A uniquely American concoction of
capitalism and culture has allowed football to continue to thrive,
even as the dangers it presents to players, both professional and
amateur, have become clearer. Football remains the biggest hit on TV.]
[[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

WHY WE CAN’T TURN OFF THE NFL  
[[link removed]]


 

Dylan Scott
January 5, 2023
Vox
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ America’s unbreakable fixation with football will only lead to
more injuries like Damar Hamlin’s. A uniquely American concoction of
capitalism and culture has allowed football to continue to thrive,
even as the dangers it presents to players, both professional and
amateur, have become clearer. Football remains the biggest hit on TV.
_

Chris Jones of the Kansas City Chiefs takes a photo with fans after
defeating the Jacksonville Jaguars at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas
City, Missouri, on November 13, 2022. , David Eulitt/Getty Images

 

Dylan Scott [[link removed]] covers health
care for Vox. He has reported on health policy for more than 10 years,
writing for Governing magazine, Talking Points Memo and STAT before
joining Vox in 2017.

There was nothing remarkable about the play that led to Buffalo Bills
defensive back Damar Hamlin collapsing on the field during Monday
Night Football
[[link removed]].
A Cincinnati Bengals player caught the ball over the middle, ran
upfield, and collided with Hamlin in a rendition of a play that
football fans have seen countless times.

But this time, Hamlin staggered to his feet, wobbled, and dropped. We
learned later that his heart had stopped. The game, between two of the
NFL’s best teams, was suspended, but only after the teams reportedly
balked at the league’s suggestion that they regroup and finish the
game. (The NFL has denied this; the journalists who reported it stand
by their reporting
[[link removed]].)
It felt like a seminal moment for a sport beleaguered by questions
about the dangers it poses to its players.

But the odds are against any long-term impact. America’s most
popular sports league will still conclude its regular season next
week, followed by three rounds of playoffs, all leading to the Super
Bowl on February 12, which will inevitably be the most watched TV show
in the United States of the entire year.

That’s because the NFL’s grip on the American consciousness is
ironclad. The worst-case scenario — a player dying after one of the
violent hits that are football’s hallmark — nearly came to pass on
Monday night, but this weekend’s games will kick off unabated.

A uniquely American concoction of capitalism and culture has allowed
football to continue to thrive, even as the dangers it presents to
players, both professional and amateur, have become clearer
[[link removed]].
Football remains the biggest hit on TV.

It is dangerous. It is corrupt. It is also a visual spectacle and
thrilling competition. Every season brings new and returning
characters, dangling plot lines and out-of-nowhere twists, and a
dramatic climax on Super Bowl Sunday.

To lose football would be to lose a part of ourselves. Rooting for the
Ohio State Buckeyes and Cleveland Browns was integral to my childhood,
as much as going to church and school. It was part of my identity.

Football is not inevitable. There are signs of slippage, if you look
closely enough. But no precipitous collapse. And the NFL, ever mindful
of maintaining its dominance, has worked tirelessly to keep it that
way.

So the game plays on — with Damar Hamlin, another casualty, left in
its wake.

Why Americans love football

Americans love television as much as any people in the world, and the
NFL is our favorite show: 75 of the 100 most-watched television
programs in 2021 were NFL games
[[link removed]].
The Super Bowl routinely pulls in 100 million viewers or more
[[link removed]] in
the United States. For many of them, that might be the only game they
watch all year. But they watch.

Chiefs fans celebrate at the Power and Light District in Kansas City,
Missouri, as the Kansas City Chiefs defeat the San Francisco 49ers in
the Super Bowl on February 2, 2020. 

Kyle Rivas/Getty Images

The game we call football is fundamentally and uniquely American.
It’s an amalgamation of what the rest of the world calls football
(but what we call soccer) and rugby; the first recognized game was
played in New Jersey between two college squads in 1898, and it
evolved and grew in popularity from there.

But unlike the other signature American sports, baseball and
basketball, football has not found quite the same success abroad.

That isn’t for lack of trying. The NFL now routinely holds
regular-season games in London and operated a European offshoot until
2017 [[link removed]]. Some small fandoms
are emerging in the United Kingdom and Germany
[[link removed]].
But there has been nothing comparable to basketball’s EuroLeague,
which now regularly produces stars
[[link removed]] who
move to the NBA, or Japan
[[link removed]] and South
Korea’s baseball leagues
[[link removed]].
Even Olympic basketball
[[link removed]] has
occasionally yielded to American dominance; football doesn’t have
nearly enough international appeal to even be considered for a place
in the world’s most historic and varied athletic competition.

Attempts have been made to explain why Americans seem so beguiled by
this particular game. Europeans are more familiar with and attached to
football’s predecessors, soccer and rugby, and the fandoms for those
sports have their own dark underbellies. But in the United States, the
fall calendar for many people revolves around high school football on
Friday nights, College Football Saturdays, Sunday Night Football,
Monday Night Football. It is simply woven into our social fabric.

But it wasn’t always this way. Baseball was for a long time regarded
as America’s pastime, the subject of wartime patriotism.
Football’s preeminence requires more explanation than mere inertia
and ubiquity. Murray Ross delivered
[[link removed]] maybe
the best one I have read in his essay “Football Red and Baseball
Green: The Heroics and Bucolics of American Sport” from 1971,
published by the Chicago Review.

In his telling, football was a thoroughly modern game compared to
baseball, a sport once so synonymous with America that it’s been
said the country fought World War II to protect Mom, apple pie, and
baseball. Football is a gladiatorial combat between demigods, defined
by conquests and the finely tuned cooperation of its gameplay: 11 men
on the field with their own specific task and working toward a common
goal.

Baseball — which football overtook by the late 20th century — is,
by contrast, pastoral and individualized, Ross wrote. And whereas
baseball looked back to a time before industrialization, with its
expansive setting and leisurely pace, football embraced the modern age
of specialized toil under the pressure of a clock steadily ticking
down.

I can’t say I was all that conscious of the ways football’s
subtext mirrored that of the developed economy I was growing up in.
What I remember are SportsCenter highlights and the 2003 Orange Bowl,
when my home state’s Buckeyes triumphed in a nail-biter to win the
national championship. I remember all the pain and the occasional
bliss of my stolen-and-resurrected Cleveland Browns fandom
[[link removed]].
It has been a common touchstone with my friends and family, as I moved
across the country and back again.

It can be fun to watch, too. Its gameplay is more methodical than
basketball’s, allowing the viewer to catch their breath between
plays, but faster-paced than baseball’s, with the 60-minute game
time adding urgency to every action. It allows the game to maintain a
clearer narrative: You don’t know if an RBI single in the first
inning will really affect a game’s final outcome, but you can be
more confident that a 4th-and-1 in the first quarter might prove
important.

Every play is its own story in a miniature, each snap an adrenaline
rush. The offense and defense burst into action when the ball is
hiked. Sophisticated blocking patterns slowly reveal an open hole for
the running back. Or the receiving corps runs finely tuned routes to
break free of the defense’s coverage, while the quarterback
withstands an assault from the defensive line before trying to uncork
a pinpoint pass to his target. You might see a fake punt or a flea
flicker, in which a running back takes the ball from the quarterback
and then tosses it back to him to attempt a long pass. Or the defense
could turn the tables by intercepting a pass or forcing a fumble, a
plot twist that sends the action screaming in the other direction.

It is violent, yes. But it is also balletic and complex, every drive
its own game of chess between two teams. The players must not only
possess the kind of preternatural athletic ability that makes any
high-level sports competition compelling but also act in unison to
achieve their goal. It makes for beautiful and tension-filled
television viewing, edge-of-your-seat thrillers in which the outcome
has not already been predetermined by a screenwriter.

Taven Bryan, left, of the Cleveland Browns reacts after Greg Zuerlein
of the New York Jets made a 57-yard field goal during the fourth
quarter of the game at FirstEnergy Stadium in Cleveland, Ohio, on
September 18, 2022. 

Nick Cammett/Getty Images

The NFL has another advantage for fans: more parity. Unlike the MLB
and NBA, where wealthy “glamour” teams can dominate because of
their spending advantages or their locales, pro football distributes
its revenue evenly among its 32 teams and strictly controls their
payrolls, giving each a fairer shot at attracting and keeping talent.
Even for my woeful Cleveland Browns, there is a real chance they could
turn things around and contend for a Super Bowl, if only they find the
right coach or the right quarterback. For lower-rung MLB and NBA
teams, those hopes are much fainter because of the disparities in
revenue and prestige.

And the NFL’s season demands appointment viewing by design. For your
favorite team, there is one game a week, usually on Sunday. With only
17 games in the regular season, each individual NFL game carries more
import than the typical game of an MLB (162 games) or NBA (82 games)
regular season. There are no filler episodes.

Even today, aware as I am of the physical dangers and moral hazard for
supporting owners who bilk cities for millions to build new stadiums
they don’t need
[[link removed]] or coaches
[[link removed]] and players
accused of all sorts of wrongdoing
[[link removed]],
I do still tune in more Sundays than I don’t.

How the NFL has staved off the death of football

That makes me part of the problem. The NFL continues to defy any
claims of its impending doom, in part because people like me are still
tuning in.

The league has worked hard to keep our attention. It has been
desperate to stave off the brain damage backlash, which was driven
deeper into the public consciousness by shocking stories involving
star players, such as retired San Diego Chargers linebacker Junior
Seau’s death by suicide (and the subsequent revelation he had CTE
[[link removed]])
and Indianapolis Colts quarterback Andrew Luck’s sudden retirement
[[link removed]] in
his prime to avoid any further injury. There have been enormous
settlements
[[link removed]] in
lawsuits involving former players who alleged the league hid the risks
of playing football from them.

And football, the game, is facing a more uncertain
future. Participation in tackle football among children ages 6 to 12
[[link removed]] dropped
by nearly 18 percent from 2008 to 2021, while baseball and basketball
held steady and soccer soared. Half of US adults now say
[[link removed]] the
sport is inappropriate for youths.

But football, the television show, is still thriving, and, barring a
dramatic change, it will continue to do so. The product isn’t going
away: The decline in youth participation has not been universal, and
in some of its cultural strongholds like the Southeast, more kids
have been playing football in the last decade
[[link removed]].
The NFL should continue to have a pipeline of new stars for the
foreseeable future.

The league has been canny in keeping the game afloat. It has altered
its rulebook and made an already cinematic game even more fluid and
exciting, with the bonus of doing so in the name of player safety. It
has instituted rules to protect quarterbacks
[[link removed]],
its biggest stars, from dangerous hits to their legs and head. If a
wide receiver cuts across the middle of the field to catche the ball,
defensive players are barred from hitting the other player in
particularly rough ways, such as leading with their helmet
[[link removed]].

That may make the game marginally less dangerous. But a notable side
effect is that it makes the game easier for offenses. Defensive
players have to think twice about landing punishing blows, unless they
risk a penalty, and that shift along with new concepts in how
offensive plays are designed has opened up the game
[[link removed]].
Quarterbacks are throwing more passes, for more yards, and teams are
scoring more touchdowns than they did in the 2000s and earlier
[[link removed]].
League-wide scoring hit a record high in 2020
[[link removed]], though
it has dropped off a bit in the past two seasons.

The NFL has also long indulged in subtle marketing campaigns
to entwine itself with the military
[[link removed]] (making
football, by definition, patriotic) and to soften its image, such
as previous breast cancer awareness campaigns
[[link removed].] that
saw modern-day gladiators and their frumpy, grumpy coaches wearing
dashes of pink.

Isaiah Likely of the Baltimore Ravens takes the field with a member of
the US military before the game against the Carolina Panthers at M&T
Bank Stadium in Baltimore, Maryland, on November 20, 2022.

 Scott Taetsch/Getty Images

Where gambling was once verboten in all professional sports after the
Black Sox and Pete Rose scandals of the last century, the NFL, like
the NBA and other leagues, has embraced it. First indirectly, via
fantasy football (for which the league runs its own platforms), and
now more overtly, including NFL deals with sportsbooks
[[link removed]] and partnerships with online betting
sites
[[link removed]].

All of which serves to have fans put skin in the game. Murray Ross
wrote more than 50 years ago that, while we might be able to imagine
settling under a major leaguer’s fly ball and catching it, it’s
impossible to believe we could actually hold on to a pass from an NFL
quarterback while absorbing a hit from a linebacker in the same way.
The NFL has found a way to make us a part of the action. Fans are more
invested than ever.

The game today looks very different from the game Ross was writing
about. But at its core, it is still American football. Those reforms
didn’t prevent Damar Hamlin’s injury. Enormous men running at
breathtaking speed over very short distances and colliding with one
another cannot be made entirely safe.

May Hamlin recover quickly. But he won’t be the last player to
experience such a trauma. Until America stops watching, there will
always be another game on.

* football
[[link removed]]
* NFL
[[link removed]]
* capitalism
[[link removed]]
* Worker Safety
[[link removed]]
* money in sports
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit portside.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 



########################################################################

[link removed]

To unsubscribe from the xxxxxx list, click the following link:
[link removed]
Screenshot of the email generated on import

Message Analysis

  • Sender: Portside
  • Political Party: n/a
  • Country: United States
  • State/Locality: n/a
  • Office: n/a
  • Email Providers:
    • L-Soft LISTSERV