Deliverance: The “Chickification” of the National Football League

OVER THE LAST five or six years, I have noticed a trend among the “football cognoscenti.” During the lead up to the season, excitement and interest in examining schedules, prognosticating, evaluating rookie performances, and drafting fantasy teams dominates the zeitgeist.  During the first month, three Sunday games and the Monday constitute minimum required viewing.  The glory of another NFL season permeates the house.

About the middle of October, this all changes. It seems that you cannot watch a game without being exposed to some awful version of “flesh pink” on shoes, gloves, and helmets. Why? Teams are forced to wear uniforms that make them look like bumblebees, teddy bears or worse. Why? Human interest stories begin to clog the pre- game shows and even games.  Why?  Dim-witted announcers feel compelled to share their uninformed and biased opinions on gun violence, Obamacare, “racist” team mascots, and other folderol that have nothing to do with THE GAME. Why?

Ubiquitous female sideline reporters ask ridiculous questions like, “Gee, Tom, how do you plan to stop Peyton in the second half?” This, of a coach trailing 28-0. Why?

You notice that your wife has become interested in the games and often sits and watches with you. On little cat feet, a feeling of unease creeps up on you.  You start skipping the Sunday night game, ostensibly to get more sleep. You miss an occasional Monday night game and blame it on the feeble announcers. What is going on?

The answer lies with the usual suspects: demographics, deconstructionists, trial lawyers, and useful idiots, the same four horsemen of the apocalypse that have sought the destruction of other basic institutions of pre “post modern” America. Football is one of the last things that an overweight, old school, “bitter clinger” can watch on television without being attacked, offended, sickened, or preached to. Reason enough for “change.”

I have been following football more or less continually since 1964.  I have watched every Super Bowl (number three was the greatest). I played football for six years and coached for ten, so I have a fairly decent grasp of the game, and although it has changed, a Rip Van Winkle from 1950 would have no trouble following the action. Football has been a touchstone in my life and has provided me a way to be passionate about something without any of the sticky human mess that arises when passion and people meet in other ways.

I do not want football to be “relevant.”  It is a game! The beauty of the NFL lies in the fact that it doesn’t really matter.  It exists to take us away from our quiet desperation.

I realized why we cognoscenti are developing these feelings of unease, when I heard somewhere that the modern television audience for the NFL consists of 50 percent women. There goes that demographic thing. The government/corporate types have been tailoring the modern “game presentation” to appeal to women for some time—thus the  sideline reporters, “high fashion” uniforms, rule-after-rule against contact, and  the handsome quarterback-o-centric direction of the League. For most of my life, football was a man-cult, where the only women allowed were scantily clad cheerleaders. A festival of the Y chromosome. Read Camille Paglia on football — she gets it.  At some point the NFL is going to pull a Republican Party and run off the base. Football, like our government, will then become something unrecognizable to our man from the past.

Along with feminization, football is also undergoing the old “personal is political” hustle. Race, class, gender, and exploitation memes are injected into “the narrative” and repeated by useful idiots in the sports media who are too ignorant to realize that they are destroying the source of their livelihood. The Incognito/ Martin soap opera would have been incomprehensible just a few years ago. How do you “bully” someone who is paid an enormous sum of money to bully the players of the opposing team each Sunday?  The whole thing is preposterous.

When the NFL transformed itself from a cult of masculinity into a mega-billion dollar traveling salvation show, it began to attract the attention of the legal/political extortionist class. These folks find unprotected piles of money like fish flies find streetlights.  The antitrust exemption (which turned football into a socialist entity) allows the political class a back door into the game, and the concussion class action suit will ensure that the NFL pays a “fair” amount of protection money to remain in business.  Like the tobacco settlement, the money will line the pockets of the lawyers and the actual “victims” will experience true “trickle down.”

Another American institution will bite the dust and the perpetually miserable will look for their next target.  But, somewhere on an old field, a group of young men will pull on their ragtag equipment and “have a game” just like in the old days.