They can't rein it in. These accidental billionaires are in a very tough spot.
Football is a great game to watch. I go back to NYG home games at Yankee stadium, Kyle Rote and Frank Gifford.
But the game live, like a high school or even most college games, and the game on TV, are different games.
It's TV that made the owners billionaires. But, watching the plays on TV, you can't see the whole field and you can't watch 22 athletes in motion. What you CAN watch are one-on-one high speed collisions, replayed over and over. Live, these collisions don't seem like such a big deal. On TV, they are a much more important part of the game, or, to state it better, of the show.
The owners have tumbled to the fact that at certain positions, thugs excel at generating this kind of excitement. So, slowly over about 40 years, the minor leagues (college football) have been transformed into thug finishing schools to produce the meat the NFL owners need to put on their show. College football is still fun to watch, because the vast majority of the players have zero NFL appeal and many of them, by the way, belong in college.
The UCLA QB Josh Rosen generated some heat recently when he said, "OK, raise the SAT requirement at Alabama and see what kind of team they have".
But of course, he was right.
Now, there's nothing illegal or immoral about the thug development system the NFL owners have created. The NFL owners are billionaires, and I'm not, so they must be doing something right.
But they are now so wealthy, and move in such social circles, that they have adopted the values of the overwhelmingly Leftist entertainment and academic communities to the center of their worlds - at the expense of losing touch with the real world their fan base moves in (the same is true of the NBA, by the way).
As long as they could maintain the illusion that the members of the team would, or even could, reciprocate the admiration and respect the fans showered on them, their business would grow and prosper.
But Kaepernick (thank you, Colin) pulled away the curtain to demonstrate what low-IQ thugs think about America, the core population of America, and their values - and what this season shows clearly is that Kaepernick is by no means alone.
The NFL business model is no longer viable. When you add in the fact that football players in college who actually belong in college are copping on to the fact that getting whacked in the head repeatedly at ages 18-22 may not be such a good idea after all, and with youth football leagues starting to shrink all over - man, if you could sell NFL stock short, it would be a hell of a play, in my opinion.
Much wisdom in your post. You make a good point that the curtain has been raised on what NFL players really think of their fans... and it ain’t good.