Football Hater’s Guide to the National Football League
But it is one of the most dominant marketing forces ever devised. Do not be fooled. The NFL is not about football. It’s about dominating the noon-7 p.m. marketing hole on Sundays for decades now.
Yes, Rupert Murdoch was not an idiot when he overpayed by billions to get NFL rights to his Fox Network affiliates some years back. CBS was stupid to just let him have it. NBC was equally idiotic in getting out of, then back into, the NFL.
Men who are 18-34 years of age are the most sought-after market group in the universe. It’s not a sexist thing, to be sure. It’s all about money. Men dominate the building trades, automotive markets, investment firms and you name it. Women don’t. Just sample the commercials during an NFL game. That pretty much says it all.
So the Sunday slot is critical and the NFL has that slot. Period. End of story.
Take it from someone who was a full-time sport journalist in another life: The NFL has change radically. It used to be an interesting game to watch, professional football. The players had diverse physical abilities.
Unlike today, not all of them were giant brutes – machines who are supposed to do anything their offensive or defensive coordinators tell them to do. Robots, not people. One of the big reasons why bad-boy wide receiver Terrell Owens sticks out so much is that he is one of the few NFL players who won’t surrender his personality, no matter what the cost, just to keep a job.
That’s the way most players were in the old days. There were lots of T.O.’s in the 1960s and ’70s. They weren’t paid enough then to give up on their personalities. Not by a long shot
I remember one year I covered an exhibition game between the Oakland Raiders and Pittsburgh Steelers when John Madden was still coaching the Raiders. George Blanda, then 47 years old, was still playing football. Kicker and backup quarterback, believe it or not.
Ken Stabler and his wispy hair and beard dominated at quarterback. Crazy Fred Biletnikoff was a receiver, and massive Otis Sistrunk played on the defensive front.
All these guys except for Blanda smoked openly in the locker room after the game. They didn’t give a damn. Screw health and fitness. They were football players. To hell with manners. They had personalities and they kept them.
Now you can get in deep trouble for just mouthing off about something. Poor T.O. has no chance, where he might have been right at home in the 1960s or ’70s.
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But now, take a serious look at the present-day NFL. Quality of play is awful, because it is way too expensive to field a skilled team. Quarterbacks, good ones, cost $10 million a year or better, and some teams pay that much and get a sucky quarterback. Look at the San Francisco 49ers, for instance. Ten million bucks a year for Alex Smith, who threw one touchdown pass all of last year? Yeah, right.
The defensive side is all about beating the hell out of the offensive players. The NFL is dominated by defense, nasty, pass-rushing, quarterback-crunching defense. Look at the history of the NFL and you will see running backs who have average careers of five years. That’s it. Recently, great backs like Marshall Faulk of the St. Louis Rams, who’s finished. Just a couple years ago, he dominated. Too many hits.
People don’t realize this, but many NFL teams are bled ny injuries even before the season starts. Summer workouts are stupid, with the rookies all wanting to make a name for themselves by trying to take on and hurt the veterans so they can take their jobs. Teamwork? What’s that? This ain’t high school, pal. It’s big bucks and the young usually survive to make it.
Games have become bizarre. Coaches are very conservative because, one, they don’t want to get their starters hurt and, two, they don’t want to turn the ball over. Nobody throws deep any more. The NFL secondaries rule the game right now. You either get your receivers beaten all to hell, or you get intercepted umpteen times.
Owners like Jerry Jones of the Dallas Cowboys and Al Davis of the Raiders like to throw deep, but they can’t get their own coaches to go along with it. Too risky. Too expensive.
So the short pass dominates. That might be OK in high school or college ball, but not in the NFL. Only in the day of Bill Walsh and the 49ers teams who won five Super Bowls on the so-called “West Coast offense” did the short pass make any sense.
The “West Coast offense” was simple. Take four receivers, send them all out five yards deep spread out across the entire width of the field, and throw to one who was open. No secondary could cover all four of these guys if they were all going out five yards and stopping. That’s why Joe Montana became a star with a mediocre arm and patched-up backbone.
But there was a little problem with that offense: Receivers and running backs would almost always get a crunching blast from a strong safety or a linebacker right after catching that short pass. The receivers often were stationary when they caught the ball, sitting ducks for the human torpedoes referred to as cornerbacks or “nickel” backs. The nickel back is a headhunter, inserted into the game to replace a linebacker on passing downs just to obliterate the poor bastard who actually makes a catch.
Faced with third down and, say, four yards to go, almost every coach ion the NFL elects to go exactly for that amount of yardage. They don’t go deep, too risky. They don’t run, no faith in their offensive line or running backs. But the biggest reason why coaches do what they do is injury. They don’t want to risk a blown knee on their star running back by trying to run a sweep. They don’t want to have their receivers elbowed in the face on long patterns, or hamstring pulls.
They just chicken out. Hence, the present-day spirit of the NFL. Enjoy.
