PERSONAL FOULS
NFL can't help but give fans more reasons to tune out permanently
THERE’S an old gag about the fellow asked why he keeps banging his head against the wall. “Because,” he explains, “it feels so good when I stop.”
That’s what the NFL has become under his Royal Negligence, Roger Goodell. Every week we’re presented with more sensible reasons to cease watching, to stop banging our heads against the wall.
So what was this week’s greater scandal:
The coach of a 4-11-1 team showing little to no interest in winning his flexed-toprime-time game against Washington, Sunday? Or the “robbery” of a 6-10 team eliminated from participating in the playoffs and competing for the Super Bowl despite a highly undeserving season?
Then again, such realities are grasped slowly. In January 1815, the Battle of New Orleans erupted after the British and Americans signed the Treaty of Ghent, ending the War of 1812 in December 1814.
Well before the Eagles seemed to surrender to Washington despite trailing by only three, two other games with playoff eligibility significance were lost, not to football the sport, but to malfeasance by players who apparently had no idea that football is — or was — a team game.
In the first quarter of the Cowboys (6-9) at Giants (5-10), Giants WR Sterling Shepard was head-butted to the field by CB Trevon Diggs. It was unsettling to witness, as if the hit were designed to maim. But it went undetected or at least unpunished.
Meanwhile, away from the play, DB Jourdan Lewis hit unsuspecting TE Kaden Smith in his helmet with his helmet. Lewis didn’t even try to avoid detection. Fox’s Troy Aikman said Lewis wasn’t “smart” to have done this, “and the fact that he’s laughing, I won’t even comment on it.”
Why not? Here was a chance to scream about the NFL again collapsing under the weight of its senseless brutalities. Yet Aikman chose to take a pass?
And it changed the game, helped make losers out of winners. Instead of thirdand-10 from their own 18, the Giants had a first down from their 33 and Dallas next got the ball at their own 20, before punting.
Then, just to emphasize matters — that the Cowboys refused to win — in the second quarter, DT Randy Gregory was hit with an unnecessary roughness 15-yarder that gave the Giants strong field position from which they soon scored a TD to take a 13-3 lead in a 23-19 final.
Remarkably, after Gregory’s mindless foul, Aikman said, “Both teams understand the urgency of this game,” when all we saw was vivid, repetitive proof to the contrary.
And not once were these brainless, game-altering penalties mentioned in the second half of the telecast, as if selfish, self-inflicted defeats are standard, excusable elements of every game.
A league that wants its fan base to bet on its games as much and as often as possible, increasingly can’t ensure the integrity of its games.
The Cardinals went deep to re-sign WR DeAndre Hopkins — $54.5 million over two — after procuring him from the Texans.
Sunday, with the Cards down eight, 5:30 left and in desperate need of a win to make the playoffs, Hopkins was hit with a 15-yard penalty for unsportsmanlike conduct. In all, he was called for consecutive penalties — the first for offensive pass interference — totaling 25 yards. The Cards were soon forced to punt, then pack it in for the season.
How does the NFL respond to such rotten, nonfootball results? Who knows? Goodell doesn’t like to make waves; he likes to pander to those who leave the league in disrepute while unwisely taking the NFL’s wiser fans for fools.
But this week in Gotham was devoted to Philadelphia coach Doug Pederson, whether he tanked for a draft pick, whether he intentionally lost a game to deprive the Giants of reward for losing 10 of 16 games. And so Goodell’s Nero Fiddles League presented another week of lost credibility: suspicion of scandal, draft-tanking, NFL-invited gambling fixes and games determined by the misconduct of college-delivered me-firsters.
And the league, even more than last week, is in need of an industrial cleansing.