Mark Leibovich - Big Game - The NFL in Dangerous Times

Network cameras focus on the bespoke Caligulas in their owner’s boxes at least once a game. This is a strange NFL custom. We as viewers must always be favored with reaction shots from the owner’s ­box—­their awkward high fives and crestfallen stares. It is as if we could never fully appreciate what we’ve seen on the field unless we also witness its ­real-­time impact upon the presiding plutocrats. The human toll! Do owners in any other sport receive this much TV time during games? Maybe horse racing. There is something distinctly Roman about this.

THESE LEAGUE CONVOCATIONS ARE HEAVILY ANTICIPATED AND carefully planned. In the NFL’s perennial season of external hype and internal ­hand-­wringing, they are compulsory retreats. Every prime and middling mover from the league is here, though the actual ­players—­with a few scattered ­exceptions—­are not invited. Club executives with team lapel pins cavort with coaches, ­front-­office types, and their hangers-on; agents, “friends of the league” and various appendages, stooges, functionaries from the 345 Park Avenue league headquarters, and TV “insider” types in their perpetual pancake makeup. League meetings are the NFL’s Super Bowl without jockstraps.

Boca represented its own special ­NFL-­through-­the-­looking-­glass spectacle for interlopers like me. In the context of today’s NFL, there was something elemental about watching the league ­self-­examining and ­self-­celebrating its efforts. The Shield credentialed 310 media members for its 2016 league meeting (compared with 1,711 for the next month’s draft 8), though it seemed like half the people “covering” it either worked for the NFL or one of its team websites or an outlet (ESPN, NBC, Fox, CBS) that paid billions of dollars to the NFL for the rights to televise its games and to be a “valued broadcast partner.” Everything feels so perfectly symbiotic.

Perhaps the biggest drawback about Boca is that the grounds get congested. Unlike ­you-­know-­where. But apparently the Breakers had decided this year that it could do better charging regular rates during a peak spring break week than by offering the NFL a group package. Insulting! Who said no to the mighty NFL? Was the Breakers making a statement?

League meetings are typically held between the Super Bowl and the NFL Draft. They represent the first official event of the new NFL year, which officially began on March 9 at 4:00 p.m., 345 Park Avenue time. Big Football is such a force that it abides by its own calendar and revolves around its own sun. Execution matters. 345 Park Ave (simply “345” as the entity can be known in shorthand) must demonstrate to its internal ­audience—­particularly the most important internal audience, its ­thirty-­two ­owner-­bosses—­that it is vigilant about all threats, foreign and domestic and homemade; that it is capable of striking a proper balance between aristocratic fun and the ­all-­business collusion of gathered mob factions. And this could be such a perfect sunny environment for an existential crisis. So, game faces everyone.

And Shields, many Shields. The grounds were properly decked out with the ­star-­studded, ­upside-­down medallions with a football floating on top. Large golden Shields dominated walls. They were slapped on doors, carved into ice sculptures, and etched into cuff links. The Shield is a symbol of almost mystical power. It stands for big notions, like ‘‘Respect,’’ ‘‘Resiliency,’’ ‘‘Integrity,’’ and ‘‘Responsibility to Team’’ (imprinted in big letters on the glass entrances at 345 Park). Hotel personnel wore tiny Shield pins (valet lady: “They made us wear ’em this week”). The Shield might be a commercial insignia, but at league meetings they also function as icons among the initiated, like Scientology crosses.

It had been a rough few months for the Shield, if not the coffers of those in charge. Fans were craving football more than ever while at the same time finding reason to despise the league. A messy ­intra-­mogul tangle had just culminated over which team, or teams, would win the right to move to Los Angeles, home to the ­second-­biggest TV market in the country (made up of millions of actual people who had seemed perfectly content without an NFL team, let alone two NFL teams, for ­twenty-

one years). Bad feeling would linger between owner factions loyal to the competing stadium projects. Fresh generations of embittered fans were being turned out into the world via the spurned cities of St. Louis and eventually San Diego and Oakland.

The ­just-­completed season began with the Patriots hosting the Steelers in the NFL Kickoff Game, which occurred one week after a federal judge vacated Goodell’s ­four-­game suspension of Brady over his alleged role in the Deflategate saga, which still had a whole season left to run. Deflategate was the consummate NFL reality show featuring perfectly unsympathetic perpetrator/victims (the most loathed franchise in the league), as well as an even less sympathetic Keystone Kop (the sanctimonious commissioner) at the controls. But then (plot twist!) the judge overturned the suspension and the ­pretty-­boy quarterback got to play the entire season and the commissioner was nowhere to be seen at his own NFL Kickoff Game. Robert Kraft strutted before the bloodthirsty crowd on Opening Night and hoisted the Patriots’ latest Super Bowl trophy, WWE style.

Joe Thomas, an ­All-­Pro offensive tackle for the Cleveland Browns, compared Goodell with the ­professional-­wrestling impresario Vince McMahon. He called the commissioner’s tactics ‘‘brilliant.” ‘‘He’s made the NFL relevant 365 [days a year] by having these outrageous, ridiculous witch hunts,’’ 9Thomas said of Goodell in the midst of Deflategate. ‘‘It’s made the game more popular than ever, and it’s become so much more of an entertainment business, and it’s making so much money.’’ He added: ‘‘It’s almost like the Kim Kardashian ­factor—­that any news is good news when you’re in the NFL.’’

THE NFL IS TOO SELF-SERIOUS TO ACCEPT ANY COMPARISONS with Kim Kardashian or Vince McMahon or Donald Trump. But it’s also obvious that even embarrassing ­episodes—­like ­Deflategate—­can provide helpful “entertainment” that diverts from Existential Issue One in football: concussions. Reports of players leaving the game with mangled brains, or prematurely retiring over safety concerns, or the latest retiree discussing how compromised his mind and body are at a young age, have become boilerplate accompaniments to your weekly betting lines, injury reports, and fantasy stats. At what point would fans of the game become rattled? Lawyers, parents, and the media had taken notice. But based on TV ratings and league revenues, customers to this point had proven immune from any repetitive trauma. Denial is itself a powerful shield.

At his Super Bowl “State of the League” press conference the month before, Goodell was asked about a spate of youth football players who had died the previous season. “Tragic,” he said, and then touted all that the league is doing to teach safer tackling techniques. “There is risk in life,” Goodell concluded. “There is risk in sitting on the couch.”

“Roger’s couch remark,” as it became known, did not go over well among the increasingly vocal set of crippled former players and the surviving family members of dead ones. “These men and their families deserve better,” said Tregg Duerson, son of the Bears safety Dave Duerson, who committed suicide in 2011 at age fifty and was later diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, the degenerative brain disease found in scores of deceased players. Duerson spent eleven seasons on the couch.

Goodell is always touting the league’s virtues as a moral force. ‘‘The game has so many elements I think our country admires and respects,’’ he told me. Football provides a belief system at a time when faith in so many community, religious, and family institutions is weakening. ‘‘It unites people,” Goodell continued. “It gives people a chance to sort of come together and enjoy people around this country today.’’