by Glenn Stout
Fans will put up with a lot, but such overt and unapologetic indifference is an insult that’s hard to ignore. The NFL has always prioritized the profits of the men who own the league’s teams above any other end and has only rarely bothered to conceal that fact. In its simultaneously sincere and delirious self-performance, the NFL rhymes perfectly both with our Trump-y moment and the man himself, from its valorizing of not just money but greed, its blank devotion to bigness, its endless capacity to take offense at every outrage against itself, by “anti-football” doctors revealing the damage the game does to the people who play it, to the kneeling Kaepernick. It makes sense that Trump once owned a football team of his own, the New Jersey Generals of the short-lived USFL; it’s a nice Trumpian touch that the USFL only realized a modest financial return when Trump and his fellow team owners negotiated a buyout at the expense of their far richer NFL counterparts. That the same NFL owners who donated more than any other sports executives to Trump’s inauguration celebration, according to FEC filings, recoil righteously from Kaepernick vulgarly “politicizing” their American Sunday tradition is, mostly, unsurprising. That Trump, in a characteristically beefy ad-lib at a late-September rally for Alabama senator Luther Strange, said he would “love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now, out, he’s fired,’” was, in retrospect, probably inevitable. That he kept mashing away at that (popular) sentiment whenever his poll numbers turned down in the months afterward spoke not just to Trump’s well-documented animal shamelessness but also to the risks of the NFL’s long, strange campaign against its players.
It’s not quite sufficient to say that the NFL is an owners’ league. It absolutely is, in the sense that every decision the league makes is made to advance the financial interests and flatter the various vanities of the owners. But, on a more mundane level, the league’s current deemphasizing of the game of football in favor of oafish executive theater—the protean expansion of the league’s metastatic rulebook, the endless rounds of stern but vague disciplinary action that issue from the commissioner’s office—is more than the owners dictating the way that their sport is overseen and organized. It is the owners making the league more explicitly about them: not just what they want, but what they do.
From a fan’s perspective, this is a bad choice for a bunch of reasons, starting with the fact that the people playing football in today’s NFL are stronger and faster than any people who have ever played the game before and that the owners are interchangeable soft pink guys whiffing on high-fives in their luxury boxes. Those are the bosses, though, and so the league’s appeal to fans is increasingly less about strength than power—less about the physical geniuses tossing or catching 40-yard lasers than the proper management and, where necessary, punishment of those players. The fantasy the league sells is less about the vicarious experience of a superhuman specimen like Odell Beckham Jr. than the vicarious experience of controlling such a specimen—whether on a fantasy team or through taking a hard line in real-world salary negotiations.
It’s possible to see this collective will-to-power as part of a slick and subtle bit of anti-labor propagandizing on the part of a caste whose most deeply held ideal has always been paying players as little as possible. But it’s just as easy to see it as a simple failure of imagination by rich men who have come to believe that they are more important and more interesting than the strange, violent, astonishing game on which this is all leveraged. Again, you may detect a Trumpian echo to all this.
The Bosses Barrel Downfield
A certain significant subset of NFL fans plainly has no problem with owners taking a high- and heavy-handed approach to the league’s labor relations and disciplinary enforcement. The relationship between the league’s owners and its players—who are, at the risk of pointing out the obvious, both the league’s labor force and its product—has been characterized by enmity and aggression for generations, and remains notably lopsided. For a certain part of the league’s fan base, this reflexive authoritarianism is more feature than bug.
The formal expression of that authoritarianism might have changed through the years, but its underlying substance is as unyielding as, well, the language of the Declaration of Independence. Where Dallas Cowboys president Tex Schramm told NFL Players Association head Gene Upshaw, “You guys are cattle, and we’re the ranchers,” in 1987, today’s owners prefer the involuted Trumpian rhetoric of outrage and redress. “We signed a shitty [labor] deal last time,” Jerry Richardson, the owner of the Carolina Panthers, told his peers at the NFL’s annual owners meeting in 2010, exhorting them toward a 2011 lockout that lasted for 132 days. “And we’re going to stick together and take back our league and fucking do something about it.” Documents later revealed that, in the season before Richardson and his fellow owners succeeded in reducing the share of league revenues devoted to player salaries from 50 to 47 percent, the Panthers showed an operating profit of $78.7 million. They went 2-14 that year.
Some of the NFL’s current crisis of mediocrity can be attributed to the league’s owners standing on their debauched principles to the detriment of the teams they put on the field. The Houston Texans, for instance, began the 2017 season without star offensive tackle Duane Brown in large part because they refused to guarantee his salary for this season. But, strange as that decision is when considered on its own dubious merits, it’s neither new nor remotely unique to the NFL. While we can probably assume that owners would rather win games than lose them, they will only put themselves out so far to that end.
Why? Well, because they don’t have to. NFL owners are fundamentally unaccountable even to their team’s fans, and that means that they’re free to do whatever they want. And so they do: the Rams and Chargers ditched St. Louis and San Diego, respectively, for Los Angeles, where they now lose games in front of a smattering of apathetic fans in a city that never seemed especially enthused about bringing even one team to town. Here, too, we can readily document the warping effect of all this compounding unaccountability in anemic ticket sales. In-person game attendance represents a small and decreasing portion of how teams make money—and despite that trend, Rams owner Stan Kroenke saw his team’s valuation double immediately upon making the move; the franchise’s last winning season was in 2003, but they are now the sixth-most-valuable team in the league.
This summer, though, NFL owners showed off their ability to do whatever they want by deciding, in a soft sort of blackball, not to do something they didn’t want to do. And that was sign Colin Kaepernick.
Anyone but Kaepernick
Kaepernick, of course, has been a symbol of athletic and celebrity protest against police killings of black Americans for more than a year. But in terms of the NFL’s oligarchic structure, he represents something broader—the notion that players possess not just their own voices but their own dissenting opinions in the debate over the administration of apartheid-style justice in America. To paraphrase Schramm’s simile, it was like awakening on your ranch to hear your cattle not only talking, but loudly plotting your overthrow.
So the obvious solution for the NFL cartel was to transform an accomplished quarterback into a league-wide pariah. Consider the surreal course of Kaepernick’s off-season. In late July, the Baltimore Ravens signed a quarterback out of an arena football league that exists a notch below the actual Arena Football League. David Olson spent four years as a backup at Stanford and never threw a pass in an actual game; he graduated and transferred to Clemson, where he spent one season with the team as a graduate student and completed one of the three passes he attempted. This is the sort of thing that happens at the end of July when teams need extra arms in training camp, and as it turned out, Olson only lasted three days with the Ravens. On the last day of July, they released him and signed a similarly obscure quarterback named Josh Woodrum. The Sporting News headline for the transaction—“Ravens waive David Olson, sign another QB who isn’t Colin Kaepernick”—succinctly tel
ls the story of why any of this was even briefly and tenuously news.
By that point in the off-season, the league’s all-but-official omerta on the hiring of Kaepernick had long since exited its plausible deniability stage. Kaepernick had, after an early career flirtation with stardom upon taking the 49ers to the Super Bowl in 2013, settled in as a middling NFL quarterback. This looks like fainter praise than it is; only a couple dozen people on earth can capably play football’s most important position at the highest level, and while Kaepernick was at the lower end of that group, his production and his game tape both suggest that he was indeed in it.
Given that the NFL has 32 teams, and given that Kaepernick was coming off a solid season, it remains hard to understand his unemployment as anything but the result of the understated protest he began staging on NFL sidelines in 2016. When NFL teams rolled out the honor guard and an American flag the size of a football field for the National Anthem, Kaepernick sat. He did this for a while without anyone noticing; when NFL.com reporter Steve Wyche eventually did take note of the gesture and asked him why, Kaepernick said, “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street.”
Kaepernick then decided to kneel during the anthem and was later joined in this protest by players throughout the league; police unions and owners issued the statements you’d expect, and the usual sports media wind machines roared at jet-engine volume. At the end of the season, Kaepernick opted out of his contract with the 49ers and became a free agent. Well into the new NFL season, he still was.
“He’s a really good football player,” Ravens coach John Harbaugh said of Kaepernick right before his team signed Olson. “I believe he’s a really good person. It all depends on a lot of things. It depends on Colin first of all and what’s his passion, what’s his priority, what’s [sic] he want to do.” This was less of a mystery than Harbaugh seemed to think. Kaepernick was both clear about his desire and readiness to play in the NFL and consistent in his determination to use his public role in the service of social activism. And while Kaepernick reportedly planned to end his anthem protest in 2017, he has remained active on social justice issues as a donor and an advocate. “I don’t think it’s different for us than any other team,” Harbaugh concluded.
It’s hard to argue with that last bit. The Ravens, and every other team, have found excuses not to sign Kaepernick; the Seattle Seahawks were the only team that invited him to compete for a backup job. It says something about how the league went about performing its slow-motion blackballing of Kaepernick that Harbaugh’s perfectly circular comment qualifies as an unusually forthright statement. Owners were dismissive; those same anonymous front-office types offered quotes framing Kaepernick as an enemy of the state at worst and a “distraction” at best. The Seahawks, for their part, explained their decision to bring in an inferior player after working out Kaepernick by more or less saying Kaepernick was too good to be a backup. Overall, it was a lot of work to avoid speaking aloud something that was otherwise quite easy to grasp—the NFL’s owners are not going to do anything but what they want to do.
Sudden Death
In the grand scheme of the NFL, the unjustified unemployment of a mid-tier quarterback wouldn’t seem to be a terribly significant story. It’s not really a new one. Chris Kluwe was a solid punter for the Minnesota Vikings until his activism in favor of gay rights drew criticism from his coaches. When the Vikings let him go in 2013 he spoke out against his homophobic coaches; he hasn’t worked in the NFL since. Kerry Rhodes was an above-average NFL starting safety for eight seasons, but never even got a tryout with a NFL team after a man claiming to be his ex-boyfriend outed him on a gossip site. (For whatever it’s worth, Rhodes, who’s now a successful film actor, was married to Australian actress Nicky Whelan this spring.)
But the confluence of a number of factors worked to turn Kaepernick and his protest into the target of an inquisition unlike any prior crusade in NFL history. The nature of Kaepernick’s grievances and the pointed symbolism of his protest; the broader spirit of unease in the country and the specific impunities of the NFL and its corporate culture; the strangeness of seeing a player in the most popular and theatrically authority-positive league take such a stance—any one of these things, by itself, would have been enough to attract notice, and probably enough to seal Kaepernick’s fate. But taken together, they created that strangest of NFL spectacles: a league-wide backlash against Kaepernick as a thought criminal. This was no small irony, of course, for a sport that had appointed itself the televisual guardian of the very idea of American independence. As is often the case with the NFL, the tangle of hypocrisies and contradictions and weird umbrage unravels cleanly when you remember that this is all mostly about power. For the NFL’s most powerful people, being seen to be in charge isn’t everything—it’s the only thing.
And, for better or worse, they’re still very much in charge. But Kaepernick’s protest and banishment, more than any of the NFL’s other indicators of decline, point to divergent futures for the league. On the one hand, there is the nascent movement of protest among African American players that Kaepernick left behind, which is modest but expanding despite the disapproval of the league elite—indeed, there was no small tremor of discontent within that elite when the early weeks of the NFL season saw white players joining the National Anthem protests. Meanwhile, the NFLPA, long the most ineffectual union in pro sports, has lately shown at least a rhetorical disposition to organize another work stoppage around the expiration of the next collective bargaining agreement in 2021. In a league as change-averse as the NFL, even these vague stirrings qualify as progress.
And on the other hand, there is all that familiar unaccountability. The NFL that we have serves its owners much better than it serves anyone else, and those owners’ refusal to budge from their feather-bedding management style has clearly done the league a great deal of harm in a number of areas, from the way the league’s long-running quest for parity has settled into sludgy, shrugging mediocrity to protecting the safety of their players and the long-term viability of the league. The owners aren’t likely to recognize any of this, of course, until the flailing status quo starts costing them money. But that inability or unwillingness to reckon with the NFL’s increasingly untenable present becomes more risky by the day.
There’s a new pomposity—to say nothing of a perverse and shortsighted shamelessness—to the league as it wheels past its peak, but the NFL remains fundamentally what it has long been. The league has been retrograde and proudly plutocratic for as long as it has existed, and it’s hard to picture a future in which its owners act like anything but who and what they are. It’s more difficult, though, to imagine a future for the NFL that looks like the present. The league’s signature corruptions have unmistakably diminished both the quality of the games and the broader health of the sport; things just can’t go on this way. It does not take a fighter jet flyover to be reminded of how discomfitingly well this feeling lines up with our broader American moment.
It couldn’t be any other way. As the league’s patriotic play-acting so stridently reminds us, football is a uniquely American game, in ways that both flatter and put the lie to a number of treasured national myths. But after its decadent zenith, the league is showing signs of a very particular and very particularly American kind of decline. In the ways that blank greed and unaccountability have warped and weakened both the league and the sport itself, we can see a funhouse refraction of what corruption does to societies. In both cases, rich men’s self-serving smallness and single-minded dedication to their own narrow interests have put a broader future at direct and dire risk. In both the NFL and the similarly beleaguered American republic, change has never seemed more urgent or necessary, or more difficult to bring to pass. And in both venues of bloated, wobbling patriotic spectacle, the last and greatest reason for ho
pe is the certainty that a present that so poorly serves so many cannot also be the future.
Tyler Tynes
There Is No Escape from Politics
from SB Nation
I. “By the way, everyone wanted to be here today”
It is the day Donald Trump is meeting with the Stanley Cup champion Pittsburgh Penguins, and I am sitting in the basement of the White House with a group of black folks. The group is made up of journalists, cameramen—all here to watch the day unfold.
The mood is light; we talk; joke. But it’s hard not to recognize how surreal this scene is. Here we are on this October afternoon, black, in a house built by slaves—a house where the first black president used to dance with his black wife, laugh with his black kids, and enjoy the company of his black friends.
That was then. Now, upstairs lives a president who is there largely because he is not black, whose campaign was built upon thinly veiled promises to return power to the majority; to make things the way they were before a black man was president.
We eventually walk inside the East Room, listening to the president speak, his words twisting in the pretzel logic we’ve somehow gotten used to. I can’t help but think how weird this all is. Gone are the days of Obama dancing with Northsiders and Cubs on one of the last days of his administration. The White House felt warm, inviting, even loving under Obama for folks like me. This place feels cold, aggressive, and devoid of anything harboring black joy.
“By the way, everyone wanted to be here today,” Trump says, smiling. “And I know why.”
His smile is one I recognize. It’s one that doesn’t quite involve his eyes.