Love affair with NFL ignores myriad issues
It’s that week. The one devoted to glorifying a football game. A good week to reflect on America’s continued obsession with this game and this league.
This has been another tough season for the NFL. And for those of us who watch it. You have to be in full denial, pulling an impenetrable wall between what you’re watching and what you know about what you’re watching, to really enjoy the sport. Remarkably, millions of us manage to do just that. Television ratings are booming.
It’s as though we have all implanted a memory-erase chip that makes us forget what we know. We allow the NFL to repackage its controversies and problems into neat little bundles, like co-opting the social-justice push by painting End Racism in the end zones (spoiler alert: it hasn’t happened). We forget, we compartmentalize and we watch.
Remember CTE? The degenerative brain disease associated with repeated blows to the head that surged into the public consciousness a decade ago, with player suicides and the publication of “League of Denial,” the scathing book by journalists Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru.
CTE hasn’t gone away. This week, findings of a Boston University CTE study were released, showing that almost 92 percent of the brains studied of former NFL players were diagnosed with CTE. Researchers said the results were in sharp contrast to the rate of CTE detected in the brains of the general public.
The NFL still doesn’t seem to know what to do about concussions, as we saw with the season-long saga involving Miami quarterback Tua Tagovailoa. We all watched him get a concussion in Week 3, head bouncing off the ground, standing up wobbly and collapsing again, only to be put back into the game and then start the next game four days later. In which he, not shockingly, suffered another concussion.
Concussion protocols failed Tagovailoa. His injury originally was described as a back problem. The unaffiliated neurotrauma specialist who evaluated him was fired. There are now real questions about whether Tagovailoa should ever play football again. Can he be adequately protected?
This season, we watched a man almost die on a football field. Buffalo safety Damar Hamlin collapsed, his heart stopped, and he was revived only because of the quick work of the trainers and first responders present. The story did have a happy ending and was quickly spun to be one of resilience, faith and community support. Those sentiments overwhelmed what actually happened: a man almost died on national television, with the world and his teammates watching. If it was a cautionary tale for the league, you wouldn’t know it.
The list goes on. A serial sexual abuser — Deshaun Watson — was welcomed as a franchise savior in Cleveland. Washington’s Daniel Snyder continues to own his football team despite overseeing a dysfunctional and toxic culture. Tony Dungy, revered as a league icon, tweeted dangerous and hateful misinformation about transgender youth (a shocking lack of empathy for a man who lost a child to suicide) and compared Hamlin’s injury to abortion at an anti-abortion rally. Despite lip service by the league about encouraging minority hiring for two decades, there are far fewer Black head coaches than there were a few years ago: DeMeco Ryans’ hiring by the Texans brings the total back to three.
Why, again, do we love this sport?
The toxicity leaks into the stadiums. My friend and her adult daughter, two very nice women, spent a boatload of money to attend the NFC Championship Game in Philadelphia and root on the 49ers. They figured it was a once in a lifetime opportunity.
Yeah, it was certainly that. They had 7-year-olds yelling “F—- you!” to their faces, as their parents encouraged them, middle fingers flying. They had grown men yelling profanities at them. They stayed out of the parking lots but talked to other 49ers fans who had batteries, eggs and bottles thrown at them as they walked into the stadium. One can only imagine what would have happened if the 49ers actually had a chance to win the game.
Passion for the team? Yeah, that’s what the NFL would like to call it. And it’s not just Eagles fans. That kind of behavior happens all over the league. I think that’s why we were so charmed when we saw the fans in Munich singing John Denver’s “Country Home”; that’s just not the way it is at most stadiums in the U.S.
Am I part of the problem? Sure. Media members, like the fans, are hooked on the league. It rolls out a season-long plot, chapter by chapter, an ongoing narrative that other sports can’t touch for serial-like drama.
We all devour the NFL and we will again Sunday. It’s like a good TV show. The problem is, its problems and consequences are real life.