Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times. Mark Leibovich
looked to be a historic advantage.
This is why it can be hard to turn away from football. The most unlikely of performers can electrify on the biggest of stages, and when you least expect it. This game was just deranged. Thrills came nonstop—except when it all stopped.
A terrifying episode nearly ruined the whole party. In the second quarter, Patriots receiver Brandin Cooks caught a 23-yard pass over the middle, danced around for extra yardage, and never saw Eagles safety Malcolm Jenkins charging at him and BOOM! The helmet-to-helmet hit—deemed legal—elicited another category of football gasp, the sickened kind. Everything went quiet and Cooks was not moving and holy shit. Things got solemn fast.
Football is the “secret vice” of the civilized, wrote William Phillips in the journal Commentary in 1969. “Much of its popularity is due to the fact that it makes respectable the most primitive feelings about violence, patriotism, manhood.”5 This is true enough, but the notion is predicated on damage staying within bounds. The year had been filled with serious injuries to star players (Aaron Rodgers, J. J. Watt, Wentz, and a host of others). But none of them threatened vital organs or functions, with the catastrophic exception of the Steelers’ young linebacker Ryan Shazier, who suffered a spinal injury in a Monday night game against Cincinnati that jeopardized his playing career and (as of early 2018) his ability to walk normally again. Otherwise, even in the season-ending cases, the injuries remained in bounds. As long as the gladiator is still breathing—maybe favors us with a thumbs-up while being carted off—we know we’ve remained safely on the right side of what our football stomachs can digest. Pass the bean dip.
But Cooks was motionless for two, maybe three minutes. The silence in the stadium was becoming gruesome. Not respectable. To state the unspeakable, and at the risk of sounding glib: the Super Bowl would be a most inopportune stage to have a player die on—the NFL’s worst nightmare. My colleague Joe Drape, who covers horse racing for the New York Times and sat next to me in the press box, mentioned at this moment a tragedy from 2008 in which a filly had died on the track after finishing second in the Kentucky Derby. Since then, the sport’s leadership has lived in fear of a replay, believing horse racing might not survive another televised extravaganza that turned into a thoroughbred snuff event. It was obvious why Joe mentioned this now. Would they keep playing this game if Cooks died? Again, maybe this was needlessly glib and morbid (press boxes bring out the glib and morbid). But the NFL had almost certainly game-planned for this scenario, figured out some contingency in the event of sudden death.
Thank goodness, Cooks survived the ground and the blow that planted him there. He finally picked himself up and walked off and we could all get on with our fun. Cooks was ruled out the rest of the night with a head injury, but everyone else was free to resume pounding. It took just a few seconds to feel the game rumbling back to life, like a restarted locomotive. Drape headed off on a beer run.
Spoiler alert: The Eagles won, 41–33. Brady, who had been named the league’s MVP for the third time the night before, was his usual New Age Ninja self, finishing with 505 yards and three touchdowns. His last-ditch 51-yard heave, intended for Gronk, was batted away in the end zone. As soon as the leather hit the turf, everyone’s first instinct—mine, yours, Brady’s—was to glance up at the clock to see if ticks remained. The zeros confirmed that time and Philly had beaten Tom, at least for this season.
“We never had control of the game,” Brady was saying afterward to punctuate a season in which the NFL had itself felt at the mercy of uncontrollable events and actors—protesting players, rogue owners, and, not least, a U.S. president using our most popular sport as ammunition in the country’s culture wars. Football no longer felt safely bubbled off from the messiness and politics of the larger American reality show.
This would all take time to process. The sport felt exhausted and unsettled, even as the Big Game euphoria spilled onto the arctic streets. Eagles fans were delirious and also dumbfounded. They were the underdogs who caught the car, and now what? Reckoning and redemption stories are always getting tangled up in football, boom versus doom in a grudge match. It felt strange to experience Peak Football and have it also feel like the end of something.
April 28, 2017
Goodell is a Douchebag!
—SIGN AT THE NFL DRAFT
PHILADELPHIA
Again, Philly.
The season ended here with a parade and started with one, too—a parade of soon-to-be rookies ambling across a stage. The first NFL Draft ever to be held outdoors took place on a warm spring night, ten months and a very different identity ago for this proud and prickly town. Philadelphia had yet to achieve its unlikely Peak Football status. This was before Crisco poles and doggie masks and Nick Foles had also become celebrated Philly “things” (Foles had previously been a Philly “thing,” for sure, but mainly just a thing to heckle).
I joined a sweaty throng outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art, near the Rocky statue. The City of Brotherly Love had been conferred by the NFL with the 2017 edition of its annual cattle call, kicking off a new tradition of the draft’s being held in alternating cities (it was in New York for decades, then Chicago for the previous few years). Philadelphia, of course, makes a curious welcome center for a nervous young man. The town owns an ignominious reputation for drunken and derelict fan behavior—home to a population that allegedly booed Santa Claus and pelted him with snowballs during an Eagles game at Franklin Field in 1968. Local fans have disputed L’Affaire Santa/Snowball for years (thus “allegedly”), or at least the intensity of the invective aimed at the bearded saint. They can get pretty worked up about this alleged libel, too (as they do), but the city’s reputation for fan loutishness has very much endured and been affirmed over the years. In 1997, the Eagles even established a court and jail in the bowels of Veterans Stadium to more efficiently deal with their unruly darlings.
Nearly two decades later, the prospect of an NFL Draft in Philadelphia shaped up as a potential dream matchup between the country’s most abusive fans and the sports world’s most abused commissioner.
My view was blocked by a guy in a Carson Wentz #11 jersey hoisting the aforementioned goodell is a douchebag! placard. Revelers chanted, screamed, and booed Commissioner Douchebag with impressive bloodlust. They included many drunken Eagles fans (redundant?) chanting “E-A-G-L-E-S EAGLES!” in responsive intervals. Face-painted toddlers chased around little green footballs. It was quite a scene, especially for a tableau whose primary action involved a stiff man in a suit reading young men’s names off index cards and then hugging them.
NFL drafts have become like solstice festivals to mark the unofficial peak of the football off-season. “Off-season” has in fact become a misnomer and even a dirty word inside the modern NFL. “Off”-anything is an affront to the manifest destiny of a sport whose mission is predicated year-round upon the conquering of American downtime. No hour of the year should be safe from the league’s revenue grabs. Previously low-key events like the NFL Draft, NFL Scouting Combine (March), and Hall of Fame inductions (August) have now become jacked-up merchandise and media extravaganzas unfolding over several days. The NFL is no longer just training camps, coaching carousels, and football games, but a series of highly produced set pieces, jubilees, and roving “fan experience” exposition parks in revolving venues.
The 2017 draft would be watched by 4.6 million people on two networks over three days, universes removed from the last time the draft was held in Philly, in 1960, when a few chain-smoking sportswriters showed up at a hotel ballroom. “C’mon, Philly, come on!” Goodell implored about twenty seconds after he took the stage, inciting louder boos. At an aide’s suggestion, Goodell had considered a Santa-themed joke, something