Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times. Mark Leibovich
years, no one in America will play football,”2 said Malcolm Gladwell)?
Are we witnessing the NFL’s last gasp as the great spectacle of American life? I’d probably put the game’s long-term survival as a slight favorite over the doom scenarios. Pro football has prevailed too many times to bet against, in spite of itself.
Beyond that, I’m punting, or turning the question back on ourselves—the hundreds of millions of us who have made the National Football League the superpower it is. Why does this game still mean so much, and why are we still here?
THE WORST THING ABOUT PRO FOOTBALL IS THAT A LOT OF IT HAS nothing to do with football. It has so much business and hair spray crusted over it: so many sideshows and expert panels “breaking things down for us” and a whole lot of people you don’t want to deal with or watch on TV—and then you supersize all of it, stretch it over a week, and here we have the Super Bowl.
Our hosts did not disappoint. Neither did the weather. It was a frigid week in the “Bold North,” as Minnesota is apparently now calling itself, courtesy of its Super Bowl 52 host committee. I hadn’t heard “Bold North” before, just like I had no idea why Philly fans had taken to wearing German shepherd masks as their trademark identifiers instead of something, say, more majestic and birdlike (apparently the canine masks were meant to evoke the Eagles’ underdog status—got it). This 2018 gridiron carnival played out in a dream sequence that featured the various parading werewolves of the NFL: “I saw Bud Grant walking with the queen. I saw Odell Beckham Jr. walking with the queen. I saw (Boomer) Esiason drinking a Starbucks at the Loews Hotel. And his hair was perfect.”
Both the Eagles and Patriots, and most of the international media, were based out at the Mall of America in Bloomington, next to the airport. By Friday, the warring Taliban factions3 from Massholia and Phillystan had descended on this retail colossus—big enough, by the way, to fit 7 Yankee Stadiums, 32 Boeing 747s, or 258 Statues of Liberty. The MOA also has its own in-house counterterrorism unit for our safety. Fans pestered players at the food court, a Chinese TV crew broadcast from the Splat-O-Sphere (at the Mall amusement park), and armed SWAT teams prowled among the Buffalo Wild Wings, Kiehl’s, and Benihana. Philadelphians were warned, as a security precaution, not to don their German shepherd masks inside the complex or to break into their menacing renditions of “Fly, Eagles, Fly.” They appeared undeterred by the counterterrorism unit.
As happens whenever large bunches of media people assemble in one place, there was no shortage of bitching about something or another. This week’s über-complaint, obviously, involved why on God’s frozen earth we were here. As in, why would the league plunk down its marquee event in this NFC North Siberia? The consensus is that pro football has been overtaken by a “biblical plague of dickheads,” to paraphrase the late writer Richard Ben Cramer (granted, he was talking about journalism).
Like many things with the NFL, the real answer included dollar signs. This was all bribery fodder, essentially, or a Bold North variant on the civic blackmail and corporate welfare model that’s gotten many grand NFL edifices built and paid for. Football had awarded its grandest pageant to the Twin Cities in order to sweeten an already sweetheart deal in which state officials had agreed to subsidize a new billion-dollar stadium for the billionaire owners of the Vikings. And taxpayers would foot about half the bill for a football Versailles whose primary beneficiaries—a pair of New Jersey real estate barons—cared little about the cash-strapped predicament of Minnesota schools, roads, and “essential” services that were less essential than football.
And then came the extra point: local fans/taxpayers were also forced to play host to the marauding followers of the team that two weeks earlier had defeated the Vikings in the NFC Championship Game in Philadelphia—and, for good measure, had pelted their kindly midwestern visitors with a Philly Special of profanity, hurled objects, and beer showers as they attempted to flee their beating.
All that said: the “Minnesota Nice” thing is legit. People are unfailingly friendly, even to outsiders who don’t deserve it. “I will always live in Minneapolis,”4 Prince once told Oprah. “It’s so cold it keeps the bad people out.” Prince, however, did not live to see this invasion of Eagles and Pats fans at the Mall of America.
Yet just when you’re ready to pronounce the NFL dead beneath an avalanche of its own greed and bullshit—hell, even declare the Super Bowl to be a trope for the decline of America—you hit the payoff. The game starts, and with it the best part of pro football: football.
THERE IS AN HONESTY ABOUT FOOTBALL THAT MY DAY JOB—politics—could never match. No one tries to dress up or excuse a loss, which was refreshing after being lobotomized by so much political spin. No one tries to argue against numbers on a scoreboard, or convince a coach they deserve to start because they went to Harvard (or Alabama). “Football was an island of directness in a world of circumspection,” Frederick Exley wrote in A Fan’s Notes. “It smacked of something old, something traditional, something unclouded by legerdemain and subterfuge.”
Super Bowl 52 was a glorious jailbreak. Both offenses ran circles around the opposing defenses. There was just one punt, few penalties, lots of big plays, and a few sandlot calls back and forth. The Pats tried a double-reverse pass intended for Brady, who had run wide open down the right sideline—only to drop the damn pass. This felt fateful, if not ominous.
Eagles coaches might have sensed the same because they called a similar play later in the half that Foles caught in the end zone. Philly fans were now beside themselves. They had dominated the stadium all night, outnumbering and outcheering smug Pats rooters by a ratio of about three to two. (We got totally owned, as the bros say.) Foles threw three touchdown passes, each requiring replays to confirm the balls were “possessed,” the passes were “controlled,” and the receiver “survived the ground.” But it was Foles’s touchdown catch that kicked the hysteria in the giant room up to decibels rarely heard from a Super Bowl audience in a neutral city.
At the start of halftime, I saw an older Eagles fan in a throwback Wilbert Montgomery jersey wheezing outside a men’s room. He was resisting an oxygen mask from a paramedic and wanted no part of an ambulance. He had suffered too many years with the Eagles to miss this reward. Air is overrated.
I came to respect Eagles fans, grudgingly—very, very grudgingly—as their desperation added a visceral edge. Could they handle ultimate victory? What would the city look like in the aftermath? Philadelphia police slathered Crisco on city poles to discourage celebratory climbing after the Eagles’ win in the NFC Championship Game. The precaution—which based on news photos appeared not to work—joined an instant pantheon of nationally recognized “Philly things.” Before the game, I spoke to many Philadelphia fans who fully expected calamity to intervene to ruin the ride. This is what being a Red Sox fan used to be like before we won in 2004, back in our lovable loser days (we are now neither).
In December, I was at the Eagles-Rams game in the Los Angeles Coliseum in which the Eagles’ brilliant young quarterback Carson Wentz hurt his knee on a third-quarter scramble. The injury did not appear serious at first, but Wentz was replaced as a precaution by his backup, Foles, who managed to hold a late lead. Philly fans—a vocal majority in that stadium, too—were joyous as they filed out of the Coliseum after a 43–35 victory over the NFC West–leading Rams, only to get the news upon checking their phones that Wentz’s injury was in fact a season-ending ACL tear. Elation to deflation, just like that. People were actually in tears. It was hard not to feel for the poor hooligans.
Nick Foles? Maybe a serviceable backup; but when posited as a viable Super Bowl quarterback, his name became a punch line. Foles had performed well as the Eagles’ starter in 2013 and part of 2014, but had worn out his welcome by season’s end—to the extent anyone ever gets “welcomed” in Philly to begin with. Not a single Eagles fan I spoke to believed that the team had any hope without Wentz and with Foles. But somehow Philadelphia kept on winning with the journeyman backup. They were underdogs at home in the playoffs against Atlanta and Minnesota, but won both games. New England was solidly favored in the Super Bowl, despite