If the Thanksgiving trifactor and last Monday’s Rams-Chiefs bonanza told us anything, it’s that the NFL is all … the … way … back. Not that it really went away. But the dark clouds that have circled the league for the past 24 months or so seem to have lifted. Football feels, well, fun again. Listen closely enough, and you can hear the deep sighs of relief coming from 345 Park Avenue. Or maybe it’s the cash registers.
On-field play took somewhat of a back seat in recent years as Scandal piled on top of scandal. There was the Ray Rice saga and Deflategate. Fans squabbled over the powers of the commissioner, not their latest draft pick. Meanwhile, the ongoing discussion about links between football and brain trauma lingered in the background. Young players, in fear of their long-term health, retired early. Study on top of study crashed ashore. There was a growing sense that every time you tuned into the Red Zone on Sunday, you were treading into a moral quagmire; entertainment trumping ethics.
Players protested social injustice during the national anthem, and the president of the United States moved his political battleground from healthcare to the football field, calling protesting players “sons of bitches”. Suddenly the league’s owners were holding emergency meetings and the league’s conservative customer base was at odds with the workforce that provided its Sunday entertainment. Perhaps most worrying for a league that prides itself on its ability to make millions, TV ratings dipped.
And it was all exhausting: exhausting to follow, exhausting to argue.
Then something flipped. Scoring is up league-wide and the NFL is beginning to resemble its younger collegiate brother. We have a new cast of star characters: Jared Goff and Patrick Mahomes; Sean McVay and Matt Nagy. TV executives stopped going out of their way to show players kneeling or raising their fists during the anthem (not that many are doing so anyway). The president seems to have decided there are better targets for his ire. Football shows are now dominated by discussions of run-pass options, whether the Cowboys should fire their coach, and why player X did dumb thing Y. The typical stuff. Discussions have moved back to on-field play: just as the NFL would like it.
Take this week as an example. A year ago, the fact that there is a quarterback opening in the nation’s capital, down the street from the Trumps, with Colin Kaepernick still out of the league, would have dominated the league-wide discourse. Now, it barely registers. Kaepernick is better than Colt McCoy, the man Washington are starting at quarterback after Alex Smith’s horrific injury. I’d bet even McCoy would admit that. But people – defenders and advocates for Kaepernick even – have become fatigued by the whole debate. The outrage has dissipated. Now we move along as though it’s perfectly normal that Washington signed the very average Mark Sanchez as a back-up before the infinitely more talented Kaepernick. It’s shameful, but it’s a new reality.
Ratings are back up across the board. Monday night’s Rams-Chiefs slugfest was ESPN’s highest rated game in four years. It may have been the best regular season game in league history. We’re not talking about all those cord cutters now.
Things are about to get even more interesting on the field. We’re heading towards a postseason full of intriguing possibilities and storylines. The Patriots no longer look invincible while the Rams and Chiefs are irresistible. All three sit behind the Saints in whatever power ranking you look at. Heck, Phillip Rivers may make the playoffs.
There are those who will nitpick. They will bemoan the officiating. They will take issue with the volume of scoring. They might even skip the games altogether, spending their time cutting the ticks off their socks. Still: most of those complaints are about issues on the field.
Roger Goodell and his band of merry men must be giddy with joy. After a couple of down years, the NFL is trending back upwards. News this week that Amazon wants in on more sports properties couldn’t have come at a better time.
It would be foolhardy to think the league has solved its underlying problems for the long-term (or indeed that the societal issues Kaepernick brought attention to are any closer to being solved). The NFL has merely papered over the cracks with outrageous scoring outputs and fresh-faced stars. Yet somehow, knowingly or unknowingly, the NFL has changed the entire conversation surrounding football, even when subjects like Kaepernick’s absence and the brain trauma scandal are urgent and vital. No team will score a bigger victory than that this year.
