Some Thoughts on the NFL

I'm an NFL football fan. I'm the type of person who would plan their Sunday based on which games were playing and then would camp out in the living room from 1:00pm to 7:30pm every Sunday for the season.  The playoffs have traditionally been akin to holy days and the Super Bowl a major holiday.  That was me for twenty years and then last year something started to change.  Last year I cut my consumption down to only one game a week and sometimes not even that and then all the games in the playoffs.  This year I've watched only a portion of one game on Thanksgiving.  I have no interest in watching the playoffs or the Super Bowl this year.  I keep up on the sport via articles and sports talk radio.  I just don't feel a need to actually watch a game anymore.  So I'm one of those missing viewers. 

I'll state straight off that I support the players who are taking a knee during the national anthem.  They are practicing a quiet and respectful form of protest.  And I agree with the position they are supporting. 

There are other reasons that I've stopped watching and a lot of it has to do with the league itself.  The NFL itself is hard to continue supporting.  When the league decided to be morality police and penalize players for things that happened outside the game and off work hours I found it to be a negative.  In a lot of cases the league has penalized people for being accused of something even when they aren't found guilty by a court or even officially charged.  The league hires it's own investigators and lays down penalties based off closed room decisions by executives.  I really don't like the idea of employers punishing employees for things that happen outside the workplace and that's exactly what the NFL is doing.  It's a slippery slope between what the NFL does and another corporation firing someone for private behavior.  It sets a bad precedent and I don't like supporting an organization that does that. 

The league itself isn't likable.  You have 32 billionaires all scheming on how to extract public money to build stadiums and take stadium revenue for their own bank accounts.  You have teams playing communities against each other in order to see which will provide the largest kickback to the owner.  The NFL provides a profit sharing to each team of over $200 million a year, but the owners also want free stadiums.  I'm not a fan of corporate welfare and the NFL owners are the worst of the bunch.  They spend years building a fan base in a community and then leverage that fan base against elected officials and communities in order to extract payments or they threaten to leave and go somewhere that will offer them a bigger kickback.  These are supposed to be billionaires, but for some reason they act like they need public charity in order to be solvent.  If your business isn't profitable on it's own then you should go out of business.  Stop extracting rent from the community. 

I'm also not a fan of how jingoistic the league has become. In a lot of respects they have have become a public relations outfit for the US military. 

I guess my last major issue with the league is the rules and instant replay.  The rules in the NFL have gotten so bloated that they aren't understood by anyone including the referees.  Instead of allowing some ambiguity into the rules and allowing the referees some ability to interpret some things they've decided to codify everything.  No one really knows what a catch is in the NFL anymore because there are so many rules that define a catch.  And then you have the replay system.  No one can celebrate a score anymore because the New York office may decide that it sees something in a score and then require the referee to review it.  The referee then scrutinizes the play in fine detail and oftentimes overturns the original ruling.  Touchdowns and catches get overturned regularly for things that aren't clear on the video.  The officials in the NFL are a major part of the game and often a game will hinge on the officials instead of the players. 

At the end of it all I'm not watching the NFL because of the NFL.  I still like the game.  I like the players and they do an admirable job in a demanding sport.  They put their bodies into incredible stresses in order to perform at a level that a very small sliver of a percentage of the human populace can achieve.  The game itself and the players are worthwhile, but the NFL is a problem.  Football is no longer about the players of the play on the field.  Football is about the owners and the league.  The games are secondary and I'm not really interested in the NFL as an institution.  I don't see that being addressed and until it does I'm not that interested in contributing to their bottom line.