Mark Leibovich - Big Game - The NFL in Dangerous Times

Thank goodness, Cooks survived the ground and the blow that planted him there. He finally picked himself up and walked off and we could all get on with our fun. Cooks was ruled out the rest of the night with a head injury, but everyone else was free to resume pounding. It took just a few seconds to feel the game rumbling back to life, like a restarted locomotive. Drape headed off on a beer run.

Spoiler alert: The Eagles won, ­41–­33. Brady, who had been named the league’s MVP for the third time the night before, was his usual New Age Ninja self, finishing with 505 yards and three touchdowns. His ­last-­ditch 51-yard heave, intended for Gronk, was batted away in the end zone. As soon as the leather hit the turf, everyone’s first ­instinct—­mine, yours, Brady’­s—­was to glance up at the clock to see if ticks remained. The zeros confirmed that time and Philly had beaten Tom, at least for this season.

“We never had control of the game,” Brady was saying afterward to punctuate a season in which the NFL had itself felt at the mercy of uncontrollable events and ­actors—­protesting players, rogue owners, and, not least, a U.S. president using our most popular sport as ammunition in the country’s culture wars. Football no longer felt safely bubbled off from the messiness and politics of the larger American reality show.

This would all take time to process. The sport felt exhausted and unsettled, even as the Big Game euphoria spilled onto the arctic streets. Eagles fans were delirious and also dumbfounded. They were the underdogs who caught the car, and now what? Reckoning and redemption stories are always getting tangled up in football, boom versus doom in a grudge match. It felt strange to experience Peak Football and have it also feel like the end of something.

Prologue

RESPITE

April 28, 2017

Goodell is a Douchebag!

—SIGN AT THE NFL DRAFT

PHILADELPHIA

Again, Philly.

The season ended here with a parade and started with one, ­too—­a parade of soon-to-be rookies ambling across a stage. The first NFL Draft ever to be held outdoors took place on a warm spring night, ten months and a very different identity ago for this proud and prickly town. Philadelphia had yet to achieve its unlikely Peak Football status. This was before Crisco poles and doggie masks and Nick Foles had also become celebrated Philly “things” (Foles had previously been a Philly “thing,” for sure, but mainly just a thing to heckle).

I joined a sweaty throng outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art, near the Rocky statue. The City of Brotherly Love had been conferred by the NFL with the 2017 edition of its annual cattle call, kicking off a new tradition of the draft’s being held in alternating cities (it was in New York for decades, then Chicago for the previous few years). Philadelphia, of course, makes a curious welcome center for a nervous young man. The town owns an ignominious reputation for drunken and derelict fan ­behavior—­home to a population that allegedly booed Santa Claus and pelted him with snowballs during an Eagles game at Franklin Field in 1968. Local fans have disputed L’Affaire Santa/Snowball for years (thus “allegedly”), or at least the intensity of the invective aimed at the bearded saint. They can get pretty worked up about this alleged libel, too (as they do), but the city’s reputation for fan loutishness has very much endured and been affirmed over the years. In 1997, the Eagles even established a court and jail in the bowels of Veterans Stadium to more efficiently deal with their unruly darlings.

Nearly two decades later, the prospect of an NFL Draft in Philadelphia shaped up as a potential dream matchup between the country’s most abusive fans and the sports world’s most abused commissioner.

My view was blocked by a guy in a Carson Wentz #11 jersey hoisting the aforementioned goodell is a douchebag! placard. Revelers chanted, screamed, and booed Commissioner Douchebag with impressive bloodlust. They included many drunken Eagles fans (redundant?) chanting “E-A-G-L-E-S EAGLES!” in responsive intervals. ­Face-­painted toddlers chased around little green footballs. It was quite a scene, especially for a tableau whose primary action involved a stiff man in a suit reading young men’s names off index cards and then hugging them.

NFL drafts have become like solstice festivals to mark the unofficial peak of the football ­off-­season. “­Off-­season” has in fact become a misnomer and even a dirty word inside the modern NFL. “Off”-­anything is an affront to the manifest destiny of a sport whose mission is predicated ­year-­round upon the conquering of American downtime. No hour of the year should be safe from the league’s revenue grabs. Previously ­low-­key events like the NFL Draft, NFL Scouting Combine (March), and Hall of Fame inductions (August) have now become jacked-up merchandise and media extravaganzas unfolding over several days. The NFL is no longer just training camps, coaching carousels, and football games, but a series of highly produced set pieces, jubilees, and roving “fan experience” exposition parks in revolving venues.

The 2017 draft would be watched by 4.6 million people on two networks over three days, universes removed from the last time the draft was held in Philly, in 1960, when a few ­chain-­smoking sportswriters showed up at a hotel ballroom. “C’mon, Philly, come on!” Goodell implored about twenty seconds after he took the stage, inciting louder boos. At an aide’s suggestion, Goodell had considered a ­Santa-­themed joke, something to the effect that “now I know how Santa felt,” but opted against ­it—­in keeping with the commissioner’s general approach to humor (essentially nonexistent). He waved his hands toward his chest in the universal “bring it on” taunt. And it was on.

Sustained howls of derision. Greg Aiello, the NFL’s longtime flack, scolded the ingrate masses via Twitter for their unpleasant reception. “If those 70,­000+ fans in Philly like the Draft being there, they should cheer Roger Goodell,” Aiello tweeted. Apparently we were all doing this wrong. “He’s the reason the Draft is on the road,” Aiello continued in defense of his battered boss. This did nothing to stop the booing.

Next to me on the grass stood a Cleveland Browns fan named Mike Carr, who had driven fifteen hours from his home in Lansing, Michigan. Carr was intent upon learning in person the identity of the player his team would select first overall. He could have watched from home, as he did over hours and days of coverage devoted to the previews, player capsules, and mock drafts in the run-up. He could have learned, in real time, what scouts were saying about the drafted players; that Ohio State cornerback Marshon Lattimore, for instance, was “genetically gifted,” according to an NFL Network chyron.

But Carr preferred to be here, both to represent his native Cleveland and to shout down ­Goodell—­the latter being as basic to this experience as candy on Halloween.

Carr does not care for the commissioner for many reasons. He mentions his bungling of the Ray Rice ­fiancée-­battering episode from a few years ago. But mostly he spoke of jeering Goodell as a civic duty, a kind of proxy for the ­love-­hate addiction our ­adrenaline-­addled country has for this sport (that so many love) and this league (that so many love to hate). This was a Maximum American moment, courtesy of your favor­ite pro sports league and oligarchy.

“Freedom of association is a powerful thing,” Michael MacCambridge wrote in America’s Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football ­Captured a Nation. “Every organization in America is someone’s version of utopia.” Even the Cleveland Browns. Carr will love them through thick, thin, and Johnny Manziel. He wore a johnny rehab T-shirt to memorialize his team’s train wreck of a ­first-­round pick from a few years ­ago—­a ­one-­man reality show in his own right. “I hope the Browns take Myles Garrett,” Carr told me, referring to the defensive end from Manziel’s alma mater, Texas A&M. “But I’m mostly really looking forward to booing Goodell.” It would prove a satisfying night all around.