Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times. Mark Leibovich
executives with team lapel pins cavort with coaches, front-office types, and their hangers-on; agents, “friends of the league” and various appendages, stooges, functionaries from the 345 Park Avenue league headquarters, and TV “insider” types in their perpetual pancake makeup. League meetings are the NFL’s Super Bowl without jockstraps.
Boca represented its own special NFL-through-the-looking-glass spectacle for interlopers like me. In the context of today’s NFL, there was something elemental about watching the league self-examining and self-celebrating its efforts. The Shield credentialed 310 media members for its 2016 league meeting (compared with 1,711 for the next month’s draft8), though it seemed like half the people “covering” it either worked for the NFL or one of its team websites or an outlet (ESPN, NBC, Fox, CBS) that paid billions of dollars to the NFL for the rights to televise its games and to be a “valued broadcast partner.” Everything feels so perfectly symbiotic.
Perhaps the biggest drawback about Boca is that the grounds get congested. Unlike you-know-where. But apparently the Breakers had decided this year that it could do better charging regular rates during a peak spring break week than by offering the NFL a group package. Insulting! Who said no to the mighty NFL? Was the Breakers making a statement?
League meetings are typically held between the Super Bowl and the NFL Draft. They represent the first official event of the new NFL year, which officially began on March 9 at 4:00 p.m., 345 Park Avenue time. Big Football is such a force that it abides by its own calendar and revolves around its own sun. Execution matters. 345 Park Ave (simply “345” as the entity can be known in shorthand) must demonstrate to its internal audience—particularly the most important internal audience, its thirty-two owner-bosses—that it is vigilant about all threats, foreign and domestic and homemade; that it is capable of striking a proper balance between aristocratic fun and the all-business collusion of gathered mob factions. And this could be such a perfect sunny environment for an existential crisis. So, game faces everyone.
And Shields, many Shields. The grounds were properly decked out with the star-studded, upside-down medallions with a football floating on top. Large golden Shields dominated walls. They were slapped on doors, carved into ice sculptures, and etched into cuff links. The Shield is a symbol of almost mystical power. It stands for big notions, like ‘‘Respect,’’ ‘‘Resiliency,’’ ‘‘Integrity,’’ and ‘‘Responsibility to Team’’ (imprinted in big letters on the glass entrances at 345 Park). Hotel personnel wore tiny Shield pins (valet lady: “They made us wear ’em this week”). The Shield might be a commercial insignia, but at league meetings they also function as icons among the initiated, like Scientology crosses.
It had been a rough few months for the Shield, if not the coffers of those in charge. Fans were craving football more than ever while at the same time finding reason to despise the league. A messy intra-mogul tangle had just culminated over which team, or teams, would win the right to move to Los Angeles, home to the second-biggest TV market in the country (made up of millions of actual people who had seemed perfectly content without an NFL team, let alone two NFL teams, for twenty-
one years). Bad feeling would linger between owner factions loyal to the competing stadium projects. Fresh generations of embittered fans were being turned out into the world via the spurned cities of St. Louis and eventually San Diego and Oakland.
The just-completed season began with the Patriots hosting the Steelers in the NFL Kickoff Game, which occurred one week after a federal judge vacated Goodell’s four-game suspension of Brady over his alleged role in the Deflategate saga, which still had a whole season left to run. Deflategate was the consummate NFL reality show featuring perfectly unsympathetic perpetrator/victims (the most loathed franchise in the league), as well as an even less sympathetic Keystone Kop (the sanctimonious commissioner) at the controls. But then (plot twist!) the judge overturned the suspension and the pretty-boy quarterback got to play the entire season and the commissioner was nowhere to be seen at his own NFL Kickoff Game. Robert Kraft strutted before the bloodthirsty crowd on Opening Night and hoisted the Patriots’ latest Super Bowl trophy, WWE style.
Joe Thomas, an All-Pro offensive tackle for the Cleveland Browns, compared Goodell with the professional-wrestling impresario Vince McMahon. He called the commissioner’s tactics ‘‘brilliant.” ‘‘He’s made the NFL relevant 365 [days a year] by having these outrageous, ridiculous witch hunts,’’9 Thomas said of Goodell in the midst of Deflategate. ‘‘It’s made the game more popular than ever, and it’s become so much more of an entertainment business, and it’s making so much money.’’ He added: ‘‘It’s almost like the Kim Kardashian factor—that any news is good news when you’re in the NFL.’’
THE NFL IS TOO SELF-SERIOUS TO ACCEPT ANY COMPARISONS with Kim Kardashian or Vince McMahon or Donald Trump. But it’s also obvious that even embarrassing episodes—like Deflategate—can provide helpful “entertainment” that diverts from Existential Issue One in football: concussions. Reports of players leaving the game with mangled brains, or prematurely retiring over safety concerns, or the latest retiree discussing how compromised his mind and body are at a young age, have become boilerplate accompaniments to your weekly betting lines, injury reports, and fantasy stats. At what point would fans of the game become rattled? Lawyers, parents, and the media had taken notice. But based on TV ratings and league revenues, customers to this point had proven immune from any repetitive trauma. Denial is itself a powerful shield.
At his Super Bowl “State of the League” press conference the month before, Goodell was asked about a spate of youth football players who had died the previous season. “Tragic,” he said, and then touted all that the league is doing to teach safer tackling techniques. “There is risk in life,” Goodell concluded. “There is risk in sitting on the couch.”
“Roger’s couch remark,” as it became known, did not go over well among the increasingly vocal set of crippled former players and the surviving family members of dead ones. “These men and their families deserve better,” said Tregg Duerson, son of the Bears safety Dave Duerson, who committed suicide in 2011 at age fifty and was later diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, the degenerative brain disease found in scores of deceased players. Duerson spent eleven seasons on the couch.
Goodell is always touting the league’s virtues as a moral force. ‘‘The game has so many elements I think our country admires and respects,’’ he told me. Football provides a belief system at a time when faith in so many community, religious, and family institutions is weakening. ‘‘It unites people,” Goodell continued. “It gives people a chance to sort of come together and enjoy people around this country today.’’
League meetings also give people—needy billionaires in this case—a chance to sort of come together. Would they ever choose one another as business partners? Probably not, but that’s the nature of a cartel. You don’t always get to choose. NFL owners are stuck in a vicious marriage, but no one wants a divorce and why would they?
Really, what signature player of the twenty-first century would not want a piece of the Shield? Put it on TV, and people will watch; stick it on a jersey, they will wear it. The price of television ads during the Super Bowl has increased by more than 75 percent over the last decade.
If greed is ever a topic among owners, the conversation is mostly rhetorical. Is it worth more pie—maybe another billion or two of dollars in annual revenue for a league—for a franchise (say, the Oakland Raiders) to rip the hearts out of some of the most devout fans in the country to grab a much sweeter deal in a city like Las Vegas? Is it the league’s problem that Vegas is willing to shell out three-quarters of a billion dollars to build a stadium even though its schools are underfunded and its roads are medieval? Takeaway: Rhetorical quandaries are tiresome. And they can cost you money.
“You guys are cattle and we’re the ranchers,” the late Dallas Cowboys president Tex Schramm once told Hall of Fame offensive lineman Gene Upshaw during a collective bargaining negotiation. It is an oft-quoted line that encapsulates the whole setup. Players get prodded, milked for all