All right, let’s see what we’ve got here. How many guys are on the line? Odd or even front? Is this a pressure look—is that Will ’backer coming on a blitz? How many DBs are on the field? Is this dime, nickel, or base package? Single-high safety or two-deep? Are the cornerbacks up in press-man or playing off? Do I need to audible out of this play?
Considering that these are just some of the thoughts an NFL quarterback must process before the ball is snapped on each play, it doesn’t seem like too much effort for us to perform a far simpler mental contortion. As a new NFL season gets under way, let us bear in mind that it is possible to enjoy—indeed, to love—this game, America’s real national pastime, even if we object to many of the greedy old plutocrats who run it. It is possible to celebrate the athletes, even as we worry about the toll the game is taking on them.
When I quit football after my sophomore season in college, my father wept. But I was done with the game. Or so I thought. My first gig in the real world was covering prep football for the Bucks County Courier Times, outside Philly. Just when I thought I was out, football pulled me back in. It never did let go.
During 33 years at Sports Illustrated, I covered football at every level, from the Oakland Raiders to the Raiders of Glades Central High, on the edge of the Everglades in Florida. Their crosstown rivals are the Pahokee Blue Devils, in whose locker room I stood nine years ago in the moments before their annual clash, the Muck Bowl.
A coach named Rick Lammons delivered a sulfurous pep talk that ended thusly: “These people asked for a goddamn war! So guess what, fellas, we’re gonna give ’em a goddamn war!” Then, after the roar in the room had died down: “Okay, now let’s say a prayer.”
We love this game because it is semistructured mayhem, sanctioned by the authorities and, apparently, the Almighty. Much has come to light over the past 20 years about the dangers presented by football. What has remained constant is my respect for the gladiators—the vast majority of them, at any rate: their talent, of course, but also their jaw-dropping level of commitment, their discipline and willingness to put their bodies on the line for our entertainment.
And yes, we are entertained.
Notwithstanding doomsday reports to the contrary, the NFL is flat-out cleaning up right now. For as much as football has become a political and cultural third rail, it is still the most popular sport. It’s still the most popular programming on television. NFL games accounted for 37 of last year’s top 50 broadcasts — 74 percent of the most watched programs on TV. Sunday Night Football was the most watched show in prime time in 2017, beating the top scripted series (CBS’s The Big Bang Theory). Throw in Monday Night and Thursday Night Football and the House of Gronk earned more eyeballs than the House of Stark.
The league’s 32 teams divvied up more than $8 billion in 2017 via its revenue-sharing program, an increase of 0.9 percent from the previous year. As Tommy Lee Jones says of the evil pharmaceutical giant in The Fugitive, “That company’s a monster.” Like any legit monster, the NFL has wreaked considerable collateral damage. When a doctor asked him late in his life if he’d ever been in a car crash, Steelers Hall of Fame center Mike Webster famously replied, “Oh, probably about 25,000 times or so.”
The players know the risks. Devonta Freeman, running back and vest-pocket Hercules for the Falcons, has suffered multiple concussions, and he’s described them as “part of football.” But players also know the upside.
Right now, Antonio Brown is too focused on working his way back into the MVP conversation. The Steelers All-Pro wideout was arguably the league’s best player through 14 weeks last season before injuring his calf. For the third time, the MVP was won by — yawn — Tom Brady. Houston Texans sackmeister J. J. Watt has been preoccupied with attacking his rehab after suffering two consecutive season- ending injuries. This package also includes an account of the big brain in one of the league’s smaller quarterbacks, Seattle’s Russell Wilson.
I’ve met too many proud NFL veterans who now struggle to put together sentences, so it’s great to see the league cracking down on helmet-to-helmet contact and essentially swathing its quarterbacks in Bubble Wrap. None of that changes the fact that this sport, as currently contested, will always be more MMA than ballet. No instructional video can make NFL football something other than what it is: a brutal, high-speed, forward-colliding game played by some of the fastest, biggest men on the planet. It is always going to be dangerous.
Yet today’s players—and team doctors, coaches, and trainers—are armed with far more knowledge than their predecessors. They know what they’re getting into, are more familiar with the risks, and are better equipped to manage them. Football isn’t safe. But as a coach recently told me, “It’s as safe as it’s ever been.” To give an example, starting in December 2011, the league put independent “concussion spotters”—athletic trainers without ties to either team—in place at every game to watch for potential injuries.
Yes, today’s players are making more bank than ever, but the game offers something more, whether it’s the feeling of “laying it all on the line” that Watt craves or the incentive Rashard Mendenhall talks about: the chance to be great, to be remembered, to be Hall of Fame. But more is required of them, too. To an extent unknown by their forebears, including but not limited to Da Bears, they must be armchair nutritionists and pharmacologists, politicians and cultural commentators prepared to field loaded questions along the lines of “Do you agree with Colin Kaepernick?” and “Will you be joining the team when it visits the White House?”
Despite the league’s ham-handed efforts to penalize anthem kneelers, players will continue to find ways to protest. Those acts of conscience will drive some people away from the game. But as we are seeing, the number of defectors—like the accounts of the NFL’s imminent demise—has been greatly exaggerated.
There’s only so much hand-wringing and moralizing you can do before curiosity kicks in and you step off your soapbox and turn on the tube to watch Wilson work the two-minute drill.
As a coach admonishes Gary Harkness, the pensive running back and narrator in the Don DeLillo novel End Zone, “People don’t go to football games to see pass patterns run by theologians.”
This sport has problems, but they aren’t big enough to keep us from tuning in to the NFL to escape our own problems. That would be like throwing out the Brady with the bathwater.