The NFL’s brand of controversy makes for a tedious football product
Bengals quarterback Andy Dalton takes the field for an NFL football game against the Steelers.
COMMENTARY
I hate to oversimplify to such an all-encompassing degree, but the NFL sucks.
Let’s face it, whether we’re simply boiling down the endless hours of pathetic football, especially after a Sunday on which the New England Patriots didn’t play, or considering that “he said, he said’’ characteristic of the league as a whole, a place that has seemingly become a festival of griping fit for Sweet Valley, it’s not difficult to wonder why the hell we care so much.
Indeed, the NFL’s product has become a penalty-driven display of incompetence, run by a duplicitous group of individuals who bastardize the game in the name of fantasy sports gambling and television revenue while putting their employees at risk with hardly a message of regret from their public relation firms. Yet we embrace it all. We thirst for it, pine for the next game on the schedule, and generally ignore the league’s long list of improprieties.
That last part, where we stick our fingers in our ears, eyes, and mouths like the three wise monkeys, may not be sustainable for much longer. Each week, there seems to be another reason to lose interest in the NFL, another search for a reason to continue to watch even in the absence of enjoyment. When the games were good, the competitors not paranoid about each other, and the talk of X’s and O’s wasn’t obscured by the day-to-day soap opera, ignorance was bliss.
But the NFL saturation point we’ve reached — one the league’s leaders were all too quick to welcome, of course — has also managed to open our eyes and consciousness to the reality that what we’re being sold is creeping closer to WWE status than it is retaining its stronghold as America’s real pastime.
While Sunday’s levels of exasperation should have been reserved for the plodding approaches of the Bengals, Steelers, Cowboys, Jets, Seahawks, and whatever other team invaded your living room, instead our antennas have been attuned to the outrage on the periphery. New England fans were all too quick to find schadenfreude in the misgivings of the Indianapolis Colts, who seemingly misplaced the medical reports on quarterback Andrew Luck, and the New York Jets, who were embarrassed in Oakland only a couple days after reports that the team requested the NFL check the visiting locker room for bugs prior to their Oct. 25 loss to the Patriots.
Hey, it’s all pretty compelling mud on the faces of everyone involved, particularly if you’re presently extending your middle finger in the direction of Park Ave. wearing your torn and tattered “Bruschi’’ jersey. But how did we get to the point where the NFL has become more about beating each other in the headlines and psyches of the fan bases rather than on the field? Look no further than the fact that 75 percent of the league is on par with The Walking Dead, and we don’t mean in the TV ratings.
Anyone with even the slightest shred of football acumen who watched the Bengals-Steelers game, a contest that delivered only a tad less wincing than a visit to the dentist, had to agree that Cincinnati, now 7-0 with a mind-numbing, 16-10 win, a victory that came despite the performance of quarterback Andy Dalton, was lucky to remain one of the league’s handful of undefeated teams. THAT was one of the best squads this watered down, putrid collection of franchises has to offer?
Gone are the days when you drooled over a collection of games on a Sunday afternoon by the time you realized what your local affiliate was carrying. Bengals-Steelers looked good on paper, but it ended up being only further proof that, coupled with New England’s win over the Dolphins Thursday night, as well as the Denver Broncos’ impressive defensive shutdown of the Green Bay Packers later in the evening, the AFC is a two-team race.
You can already feel free to disregard the rest of the landscape until those two meet in late November for what’s shaping up to be a fascinating showdown. Oh, sure, the Giants-Saints game was historic and fun. Unfortunately, it seemed far more attuned to the needs of a DraftKings addict than those of a football purist. Buccaneers-Falcons keep you riveted? 49ers-Rams? Titans-Texans? Vikings-Bears?
Yuck. Yuck. Yuck.
Granted, not every team can be on the same football plane as the Patriots, Broncos, Packers, and…Cardinals (maybe?), leaving pettiness and child’s play as the remaining factors to even the playing field.
This is, of course, all the fault of the NFL, under the letter of its despot Roger Goodell, whose brand of “integrity’’ brings new levels of hyprocisy and deception to football. In today’s NFL, espionage is treated as a more viable factor than talent or scheme for determining the winners and losers on any given week. Never is the mundane taken as an everyday occurrence in the game any longer, never does one team win simply because it happens to be leaps and bounds better than the opponent.
Nope.
The game has begun to suffer simply because the league seems happier to focus on the game outside the gridiron, the reality show that will really get the sidewalk fans buzzing about who cheated when and where. When we do get to focus on the contest, we get Bengals-Steelers, but not before this flag, and a word from your local daily fantasy sports outfit.
Then, another flag.
The NFL is still fascinating, but not for the same reasons it was a decade ago. These days it’s about maximizing multi-platform consumption, as if the game itself weren’t enough.
But ratings and advertising dollars can always be larger. That’s what is most important to the commissioner and his legion of single-minded owners. The league is now fraught with “Gotcha!’’ tactics that do wonders for the egos of the overlooked.
What we’re left with is a joyless enterprise catering more to the winners on the couch than in the locker room. We’re left with a sport with declining participation numbers at the high school level where kids are dying.
If the NFL isn’t careful, it’s going to meet its own demise, and after the sorry excuse for what it’s trying to sell as football.
Contact Eric Wilbur at: [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter: @GlobeEricWilbur.
Photos from the Patriots’ Week 8 win over the Dolphins
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