NFL Malaise

I’ve enjoyed football since I was a kid. Played it in youth leagues and in the neighborhood. Loved the Colts – Baltimore version – growing up in Maryland. Eventually wrote about the game, and other sports, as a professional career. 

In recent years, however, I’ve become increasingly disaffected by the NFL. I still pay passing attention to scores and standings. I read about players and teams and trends. I know guys who cover the league for different media outlets and who work for the Players’ Association. I still marvel at the athleticism and am intrigued by tactics and schemes. I might have a game on TV, but rarely watch closely; it’s often on in the background with the sound down or in another room so that I may catch a couple plays or check a score. 

For me, it’s harder and harder to square the game with the practices and personalities of those who run it. Loathsome team owners. Shameful attention to players’ health, particularly concussions and long-term brain injury. Indefensible behavior regarding sexual assault and domestic violence. 

Many in the audience are sports fans and have their own loyalties and levels of interest. I have no desire to persuade you one way or the other. There are plenty of outlets for more comprehensive examination of issues than an aging, cynical keyboard jockey, so I’ll just offer some observations. 

Our multi-tiered system of justice is alive and well in the NFL. Who you are and how well you do your job count for much more than your crimes and transgressions. That’s why franchise quarterback Deshaun Watson gets $230 million in guaranteed money and an 11-game suspension despite serial lechery that would have given Hugh Hefner pause, while rookie punter Matt Araiza gets dumped by the Bills after a rape allegation that they supposedly knew about goes public. It’s why the Dolphins’ Tyreek Hill cuffs around his son’s mother more than once, as well as his toddler son, and still ends up with a nine-figure contract. It’s why Antonio Brown kept getting chances despite a beach full of red flags. It’s why the Bengals’ Joe Mixon remains employed, and why the Steelers and yinzers everywhere keep their blinders on so that they may worship Ben Roethlisberger. 

Watson’s case exposed the NFL’s incompetence, some would say indifference, toward addressing sexual assault. Commish Roger Goodell and NFL brass sought an indefinite suspension, reportedly a full season, due to the magnitude and number of women who accused Watson of inappropriate sexual behavior. Watson and the NFL Players’ Association hoped for something far less. Third-party arbitrator and former Federal judge Sue Robinson found that Watson likely committed sexual assault and violated the league’s personal conduct policy by undermining the integrity of the NFL, yet she handed down only a six-game suspension. 

The outrage was predictable and justified. 

I’ll let the G:TB legal staff parse Robinson’s ruling, but I’d argue that she spun the mirror around to face the NFL and flipped on the lights. She pointed out that, guilt aside, the NFL’s Collective Bargaining Agreement doesn’t define sexual assault, nor does it define the transgression of creating a danger to the safety of others. Bound by fairness and precedent in prior cases, she couldn’t simply conjure up a more “appropriate” punishment. She conveyed, essentially, that because the NFL had done such a piss-poor job dealing with sexual assault in the past and had no discipline structure in place, she wasn’t going to be the one to let them off the hook. 

Goodell and the NFLPA were forced to come up with something else, so they split the difference, hence the 11-game suspension and nominal fine – still, an absurdly meager punishment. With 11 games now as precedent in a case involving two dozen accusers, good luck getting anything approximating justice in the future. 

The Tua Tagovailoa situation highlights another concern. No need to rehash the particulars, but suffice to say that a quarterback laid out and exhibiting signs of severe head trauma in front of the entire football-watching world was potentially disastrous. According to several reports, the NFL will tighten concussion protocols and expand the leeway for docs and medical people to remove players from games. That’s a good thing. There’s no question that the league has made strides in the area of head trauma and brain injury, but unfortunately it’s mostly been under threat of lawsuits and public scrutiny. 

Remember that for years the league denied any connection between the game and the proliferation of brain injury, chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and cognitive impairment among retired players. The work of a handful of doctors and researchers, several high-profile suicides, and a growing chorus of retirees finally tipped the scales in just the past decade. Rather than risk a trial, the NFL settled with thousands of former players and created a fund that gave them access to millions of dollars for medical conditions related to head trauma. 

However, many former players complain that money isn’t as easy to obtain as it should be, and it was revealed a few years ago that the league used an algorithm that made it more difficult for black retirees to receive settlement money than white retirees. The system previously in place until just last year started with the assumption that black men have lower cognitive skills than whites, so it was harder to show a decline and qualify for payments. Not a good look for a league in which 58 percent of the players are black. 

Being an NFL fan requires something of a moral compromise. In a study published in the Journal of American Medical Association in July 2017, CTE was found in 99 percent of the brains of deceased NFL players who donated them to science – 110 of 111 examined. 

So, our entertainment is tied to a sport whose inherent violence creates overwhelming odds that its participants will experience some level of cognitive decline later in life. We can comfort ourselves with the fact that the league has reduced the number and severity of big hits through both penalty and practice, that players are increasingly aware of the risks when they suit up, that they’re well compensated for those risks. The rationalization machine works overtime. 

Speaking of rationalizations, it’s common practice to root for teams while trashing team owners. The NFL doesn’t have a monopoly on dirtbag owners (Helloooo, Robert Sarver! Howdy-doo, Jeff Loria! Hey there, Jimmy Dolan!), but there’s plenty of animus to go around. The Bengals’ Mike Brown is notoriously cheap and petty, yet lucked into a Super Bowl after several good drafts and a second-half brain lock by the Chiefs. Rams owner Stan Kroenke pledged to keep the team in St. Louis, until he didn’t. Three playoff wins since 1996 haven’t convinced Cowboys owner Jerry Jones to fire the GM – himself – and quit acting as if he’d accomplished something this century. Former Panthers owner and founder Jerry Richardson had a statue of himself put up outside the stadium amid allegations and hefty financial settlements for sexism and racism. New Broncos owner Rob Walton couldn’t be bothered to learn how to pronounce Goodell’s name properly at his intro presser, which was yet another tell about who exactly works for whom. 

But I’ll leave you with this: after creating and enabling a toxic, misogynistic workplace to which dozens of former employees spoke, after grossly mismanaging a franchise for decades, after fleecing and alienating fans and local government, after an NFL investigation that he slow-walked and whose results were never made public, the only casualty in the probe of Washington owner Dan Snyder and the franchise remains a guy working 2,400 miles away – Raiders coach Jon Gruden. Apparently, the toxicity matters only when it spills into the vault. All the above doesn’t even get into the Colin Kaepernick situation, rampant nepotism within the coaching ranks, and the dearth of black head coaches, which the Washington Post examined in a recent deep dive. 

Thank goodness college football is untainted.