On Super Bowl Sunday, can we save America without fixing the broken NFL? | Will Bunch

I’m old enough to remember when a few hours with the National Football League felt like an escape from America’s big problems. In the Watergate Summer of 1973, at the awkward age of 14, a fluky chain of events forced my (then, not now) beloved yet hapless New York Giants to play five games in an appropriately decaying venue — New Haven’s ancient Yale Bowl. That meant my dad and I could finally get tickets.

Those traffic-clogged autumn Sundays cemented the bond between my father and me — both of us, I now understand, were going through some things. They also created a bubble where for a few leafy afternoons, the depressing hum of Richard Nixon’s Watergate or the wind-down of Vietnam didn’t penetrate, where the only scandal was: When were the Giants going to finally fire coach Alex Webster with his 2-11-1 record?

It’s taken me a half-century to see some of the things I missed with my youthful naiveté, along with the things that no one knew at the time, like the brain injuries that would later plague NFL stars of that era such as Ken Stabler or Bubba Smith. The mediocracy of Giants’ quarterback Norm Snead should have sparked more questions about why there were no regular Black quarterbacks (or, heaven forbid, coaches). How much did I notice that the era’s giant-American-flag-draped fighter-jet flyovers with the “missing man formation” were all a psy-op for saving U.S. militarism?

Ever since the NFL exploded in the 1950s and ‘60s with the leisure time and newfound consumer cash of a then-rising middle class, pro football didn’t just serve as a metaphor for the ambitions and flaws of its homeland. Instead, the league has somehow transubstantiated into America itself. After a year in which the nation reeled from the violence of an attempted coup on Capitol Hill, burned with the angst of an endless pandemic, and dodged the bullets of record gun sales, no one is looking to the NFL as a relief valve for that tension. Instead, the most popular U.S. sport is testing positive for all of our society’s worst viruses.

Football’s big day, Super Bowl Sunday, is finally here, and yet there’s been little discussion about what should be the compelling drama of a swaggering second-year quarterback — the Bengals’ Joe Burrow — trying to lead Cincinnati to the promised land of a first-ever Vince Lombardi Trophy. Instead, the NFL’s embattled commissioner Roger Goodell has spent the week of Super Bowl LVI on his back heels, defending the league’s overlapping scandals around racism, sexism, and a grab bag of other sordid stuff.

It’s all so ... American.

The NFL’s rank hypocrisy around race has been ripped wide open during this Super Bowl run-up. The slick TV ads trying to “Inspire Change” and the league’s pledge to spend $250 million “to end systemic racism” did nothing to alter the status quo in a league where 57.5% of the “essential workers” — yet not one of the primary owners — are Black. Nor did it change the warped mentality of those who would rather spend those millions than end the purposeful exclusion of social-justice fighter Colin Kaepernick.

You know how American universities cling to affirmative action promises while the actual number of Black students declines and slots are saved for the unspectacular “legacy” kids of white alums? That broken system’s got nothing on the NFL’s Rooney Rule requiring teams to interview would-be African American coaches but not necessarily hire them. The scheme was exposed as a complete farce in the stunning new lawsuit from Brian Flores, who’d been one of just five Black coaches in the league when the Miami Dolphins inexplicably fired him — even as the league continued to recycle mediocre white coaches.

The NFL’s preference for PR over progress has never been more blatant that the recent hype over the franchise with a formerly racist moniker toward Indigenous Americans becoming the Washington Commanders. Within hours, any new goodwill toward the league’s last franchise to integrate (in 1962, some 15 years after Jackie Robinson!) evaporated in the allegations by six former cheerleaders of sexual harassment by billionaire team owner Dan Snyder, including a charge that he spliced a video showing off their various private parts. Washington’s name change did nothing to paper over either its sordid past or a tawdry present.

And yet, all of these negative headlines that have completely dominated Super Bowl week have obscured an even worse way that the NFL may be fundamentally and irredeemably flawed: that football’s physical impact on the men who’ve played it can have catastrophic consequences. One study found evidence of CTE — the debilitating brain disease linked to memory loss, depression, and erratic behavior — in 110 of 111 deceased NFL players studied. The league has no real answer to growing fears that such injuries are endemic to playing the sport the way that its loyal fan base — 91 of last year’s top 100 TV shows were pro football games — demands it be played.

“The way we watch football today feels like a capitulation that’s interesting because of how common this kind of giving in has become in modern life,” the writer Jay Caspian Kang wrote last month in a New York Times essay on how the concussion crisis didn’t go away, people just stopped caring about it. “We, the concerned public, may flare up our indignation for a short period when faced with an obvious problem — from school shootings to [COVID-19] — but there’s no real sense that we can do anything about these issues that make us mad.”

We probably don’t talk enough about how the problems of football which are the problems of America are so often the problems of capitalism — at least in the unfettered ways that owners spend billions on PR instead of the health of their essential workers or questioning the white supremacy and misogyny at the top of the pecking order. No one believes facile solutions like the Rooney Rule or the Washington Commanders can undo the racism and sexism so deeply embedded in the bloodstream of these organizations.

And yet, as Kang wrote in his essay, we can’t look away. Part of the reason for that is — at a moment when America has never been so desperate for a diversion, much more so than during Watergate — none of the NFL’s multitude of social and moral failings have taken away from the game on the field. That was driven home by last month’s remarkable marathon weekend when all six games were decided on the last play from scrimmage. Across America, families texted about those fantastic finishes, creating the kind of close ties that even rich bozos like Dan Snyder or Miami owner Stephen Ross can’t mess up.

» READ MORE: I nearly quit watching the NFL. The humanity of Malcolm Jenkins and Chris Long brought me back | Will Bunch

For me, this will be my 56th straight Super Bowl. This last one, just like the first one, will be in Los Angeles, in a $5 billion pleasure dome covered with a translucent roof which — given Southern California’s near-perfect weather — seems a weirdly fitting monument to pre-fall-of-Rome excess. The first one — in a one-third empty L.A. Coliseum, on January 15, 1967 — was marked by the futuristic promise of flying jet packs and the release of 300 pigeons as a marching band played “This Is My Country.”

I’d love a return to that almost-hokey optimism. The NFL, for all its recent awfulness, is a project worth saving. Like America writ large, its structural problems don’t hold back many of its best people, whether it’s the social-justice crusading of Malcolm Jenkins or the epic philanthropy of Houston’s J.J. Watt. And in victory or defeat, football has a way of bringing together folks from every walk of life (remember 2018, Philly?) that almost nothing else in modern American life seems able to do.

This may also sound hokey, but — since the whole world is watching — maybe a better NFL could show us the path to a better America. But that will mean real change, not hiring another PR firm and cutting one more empty check. It means systemic reforms that break down the barriers and the prejudices that have festered for decades, that value the health — physical and mental — of its workers over profit. Those off-kilter “Inspire Change” ads begin with a reality: “Football is a microcosm of America.” Fix yourself, NFL. Your country needs you.