Rambling Thoughts about the NFL and their "Dixie Chicks Moment" (Vanity)

Self | 9/27/2017 | Alberta's Child

[Alberta's Child]

After all the excitement and the flurry of media coverage and great posts I've read here on Free Republic in the last few days, I thought I'd post this series of random, rambling thoughts about the self-inflicted demise of what had once been one of this country's iconic cultural institutions: the National Football League.

I gathered these from many of the things I've posted in recent days, and I wanted to share them with anyone (everyone) who wants to chime in on this unfolding disaster. I was going to post it as a more serious, formal article, but I figured it would be easier to read it this way ...

• I never thought I’d see the day when standing up for the national anthem before a sporting event would be considered such an ordeal for professional athletes, and the source of so much controversy.

• I find it comical, ironic, and pathetic that foreign-born Major League Baseball players who aren’t U.S. citizens and may not even speak any English always stand respectfully for our national anthem. A Japanese-born player, for example, would set himself on fire in the on-deck circle before he ever did anything to disrespect any national anthem – in Japan or anywhere else.

• Speaking of which … Do you think the leftist media in this country would be carrying on with all this nonsense about the "constitutional rights" of these athletes to kneel during the national anthem if this involved U.S.-born baseball players who refused to stand for the Canadian national anthem before a World Series game, or American soccer players who refused to stand for the national anthem of a Latin American team in the World Cup?

• Talk about a horrible messaging strategy for the NFL players who began this stupid "taking a knee" protest. Does anyone even know what they’re supposed to be protesting about? Great way to get your message completely obscured by the controversy around your protest, you morons.

• Interesting Point of Trivia ... Based on my research, the entertainment sector in this country collectively comprises about a $1.3 trillion industry. There are only about 12 countries in the world that have a national GDP larger than that. And this is all discretionary, folks.

• There's nothing more dangerous for a major U.S. entertainment business enterprise than to screw around with people who can easily spent discretionary dollars anywhere. The problem many of these professional sports teams face is that they have almost no hard assets of any value. Take away the NFL's TV and merchandising contracts, and most NFL teams probably have a net worth of almost $0.

• If you want to know why the NFL has a problem right now, just look at that list of advertisers. The NFL used to be known for advertising to a core fan base comprised of younger to middle-aged men. You'd have ads for beer and pickup trucks. Later, you had luxury cars and Viagra added to the mix as this fan base aged and retired. Now, the NFL is advertising to TV viewers who don't fit into any major demographic group at all. Their advertisers are hardly any different from what you'd see on Olympic figure skating, or weeknight TV sitcoms. That's a mark of the NFL's success over the years, but the problem is that most of their viewers now are casual fans at best, and will quickly get bored of a TV broadcast that has 11-15 minutes of football in 3+ hours of television commercials. This is why the NFL is so desperate to avoid even a hint of a "boycott" by football fans. These fans aren’t going to boycott the NFL at all. They’re just going to walk away and find something else to do on Sunday afternoons.

• The media and some political figures have been predictable in slamming President Trump for comments that allegedly had a racial overtone. This item is very telling because Trump never mentioned anything about race in his comments about the NFL. But his comments are viewed by his critics in a racial context because the NFL players he criticized have already publicly stated that their silly antics are about nothing BUT race.

• Captain Obvious Chimes in Here … Listen to the public address announcer before any NFL game when they are getting ready to play the national anthem. Every announcer gives some variation of the directive: "Now, please stand, remove your hats ..." OK – so we all stand and remove our hats. Am I missing something here?

• When are NFL fans going to figure out that they are the middle-aged equivalent of white kids wearing their hats on sideways and playing hip-hop sh!t on their iPods?

• A BIG Indicator of the NFL's Probem Here … Rush Limbaugh started off his Monday morning show this week by announcing that he didn't watch any NFL games the previous day. It was the first time that has happened in 45 years. He didn't even react that way when he was forced to resign from ESPN under political pressure, or when the NFL wouldn't let him own a franchise. Just think about that for a moment. Even more telling in Limbaugh’s monologue was that he presented this as an issue that had been simmering for some time and was the culmination of a lot of things he didn’t like about the NFL. The national anthem debacle was simply the last straw. Yes – the NFL has a very big problem, folks.

• I really can't fault Roger Goodell and NFL owners for all the public statements they issued in the aftermath of President Trump's epic rant at the Alabama political rally last Friday night, even if these public statements were botched, uniformly pathetic, and delivered the absolute wrong message for the occasion. You can't fault them for their desperation in these circumstances, since it's not often that the President of the United States tells your customers that: (1) it would be great for some of your employees ("sons of bitches" that they are) to be fired; and (2) they should just get up and leave your place of business until you and your employees get your act together. What President Trump did last Friday was the equivalent of telling the world that McDonalds hamburgers taste like garbage.

• Having said that, the NFL and its owners must be sitting there praying for fans and the media to keep focusing on the allegedly "divisive" comments about any "son of a bitch" on an NFL roster who refuses to stand for the national anthem. This means they won't be talking about the OTHER part of President Trump's rant that didn't get a lot of coverage – namely, his complaint that the NFL has ruined football by turning it into a dull game with penalty flags for silly, stupid infractions. I'm sure more than a few NFL owners must have been dragged into an emergency room after that one.

• Surveys taken by various polling firms and market research outfits in the last couple of days show that a solid majority of Americans (and I'm sure this majority is enormous when you only include football fans) support President Trump on this one. Why am I not surprised at this? And why am I not surprised that the NFL and its media partners ARE surprised by this?

• Speaking of which … Do you get the sense that the NFL commissioner's office and the owners of every NFL team have all been on one long, continuous conference call since Friday night?

• Roger Goodell and a lot of these owners really come across as befuddled dopes in a number of ways in their response to this disaster, but one common theme among their public statements really takes the cake. How can any of them keep a straight face when they bloviate about the importance of "unity" on their teams, while the scenes we saw unfolding last weekend demonstrated anything BUT unity? Unity? Seriously? What kind of "unity" are you showing when the national anthem is playing in various stadiums, and you have players standing, kneeling, stretching, locking arms, or even cowering in the locker room? You'll find more unity in a prison recreation yard.

• Speaking of which … Is it just me, or is anyone else surprised at how quickly unity replaced diversity as the stupid, faddish corporate buzz-word of the moment?

• I give Pittsburgh fans a lot of credit here. I've seen a number of videos on the internet showing NFl fans burning their team merchandise in a public show of disgust, and it seemed like a disproportionate number of those videos were posted by Pittsburgh fans. This isn't just because the team has a passionate, hard-core fan base, but because those fans surely noticed something else that didn't get a lot of media play in all the coverage of the team's "protest" last Sunday. After engaging in that stupid, cowardly, embarrassing charade for the national anthem, the Steelers went out on the field and lost to a Chicago Bears team that a lot of folks were picking to be one of the worst in the NFL this year. These Pittsburgh fans surely assumed – CORRECTLY, I might add – that the team spent more time and energy preparing for their pre-game temper tantrum than the actual game. As a fan I'd feel not just insulted, but ripped off by the team.

• Speaking of which … I think the videos posted all over the internet of fans burning their NFL merchandise have stunned a lot of people in the NFL. The one from that Pittsburgh Steelers fan in Texas whose great-uncle is entombed at the bottom of Pearl Harbor was epic.

• Speaking of which … I wasn't surprised to see Ben Roethlisberger come out and express public shame (even if it was contrived) over what happened before the Steelers-Bears game. He's been in Pittsburgh long enough to realize that the disgraceful stunt they pulled at a road game in Chicago is never going to be tolerated in "Deer Hunter Country" back in western Pennsylvania.

• I may have had a dream that I read a public statement released by Hillary Clinton on this matter, in which she thanked NFL commissioner Roger Goodell "for standing up to that racist, sexist, nationalist, misogynist, white supremacist Russian agent in the White House." She also reminded him that after the NFL goes down in flames and he loses his ass like she did, he should note that when he writes his memoirs, the title What Happened has already been taken.

• Do you get the sense that business schools will be using this whole disastrous sequence of events as a textbook case study in how NOT to address a public-relations nightmare? This was the NFL's one chance for a "Dixie Chicks Moment," and they sure didn’t miss the opportunity to foul everything up as badly as they possibly could.

• I knew the NFL had run its course more than 25 years ago when people spent as much time talking about Super Bowl commercials as they did about the Super Bowl game itself. Think about the stupidity of that for just a moment. I have to give the NFL credit for milking that idiotic sh!t for as long as they did.

• I saw a quote in a media report the other day from NFL spokesman Joe Lockhart. The name was familiar, so I quickly checked on it and confirmed that it's the same guy who served as the White House spokesman and lying propagandist for Bill Clinton in the late 1990s. I also learned that Barack and Michelle Obama bought his house in D.C. when they left the White House earlier this year. Does anyone think that's a coincidence, or does it just confirm that the NFL's primary focus for the last 18 months has been on currying favor with the Federal government rather than on football?

• Lockhart was hired by the NFL in February 2016, which coincides exactly with the start of the primary season for the 2016 presidential election? Does anyone thing THIS is a coincidence, or was this part of a strategy for the NFL to leverage its political connections with a major political party that has received enormous piles of money and political coverage from a media empire like NBC/Comcast? Do you think maybe the term "crony capitalism" was made up specifically to describe a business-political relationship like this?

• A hundred years from now, when they look back on this period of U.S. history they’ll be in utter awe of the remarkable ability of this New York City billionaire to wage a populist crusade on behalf of all the "bleacher bums" of America.

[CincyRichieRich]

So what you are saying is Trump himself has made these missteps?
...
Not sure what you mean...but, black people do care what other black people think of them behind closed doors...that is why peer pressure in close knit groups is so high to wear the right clothes, have the same political views, avoid acting white and making good grenades...and, ta da, standing for the anthem...peer pressure, plain and simple.

[Midnitethecat]

Another reason for so many flags,with so many blacks who are so g damned stupid they can not grasp what the rules are.

[danamco]

The MAN’s sport got spoiled and feminized on the sideline and in the sports media !!!

[oblomov]

I quit watching years ago. As President Trump said, the games have gotten boring, driven by fussy, complex rules.

It's by design, I think. In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, he describes the games of the future society, such as Obstacle Golf, Escalator Squash, Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy, and Riemann Surface Tennis. As Director Mostapha Mond says:

Imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games which do nothing whatever to increase consumption. It’s madness. Nowadays the Controllers won’t approve of any new game unless it can be shown that it requires at least as much apparatus as the most complicated of existing games.

[JohnEBoy]

Well it is a big thing to change a lifestyle. I have chosen, after being a follower since about 1964, to no longer have anything to do with the No Flag Love League.

I have been a Miami Dolphin fan since they started in 1966. I have hosted super bowl parties in my home ... but no more.

Some things which have brought this to a head:

1. I totally disagree with cities and counties using tax money to pay for billionaire’s arenas.
2, I disagree with teams that paid for stadiums having their team yanked away from them on an owner’s whim. (Houston Oilers, Baltimore Colts, LA Rams, St Louis Rams, St. Louis Cardinals, Oakland Raiders, LA Raiders, SD Chargers and so on.)
3. Replay has become ridiculous ... the umps and refs can no longer be relied on for a call ... we need to review and re-review, ad nauseum.
4. We go to commercial. Then there is a kick-off. THEN, ANOTHER COMMERCIAL! Enough said.
5. Pink shoes and armbands.
6. Players who are thugs to women and others ... and are treated like they’re victims.
7. And now ... the final straw. Not honoring the flag, pledge or anthem, for some reason that they can’t even articulate (at least, beyond “because of Trump”)

So, enough is enough! And to whatever degree possible, I will avoid doing business with the major sponsors.

I doubt that I will have any real effect on a multi-billion dollar business, but I feel better having taken this stand.

[Jmouse007]

I posted this to another thread, but it is Germain so here goes.

The anti-American National Felon League can "spin"/lie, retreat, take a step back, and "backtrack" all it wants, it makes no difference because it is too late, the die has been cast.

The NFL has crossed the Rubicon and to quote Admiral Yamato: "awoken a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve".

We are at war; the NFL started this cultural war against US, against America and they are attacking EVERYTHING WE STAND FOR, BELIEVE IN AND HOLD NEAR AND DEAR.

Like WWII, there can not be any, truce, or "compromise" for the sake of their false notion of "unity", no "cessation of hostilities" with those who have made themselves our enemies with out a cause.

We Americans who love our county more than any game have now taken up the fight forced upon us and like "the greatest generation" we too will settle for only one outcome: NOTHING LESS THAT THEIR TOTAL SURRENDER!

We choose to STAND; we choose to "Live Free or Die", rather than "bend the knee" and subugate ourselves, our families, and our beloved nation to the racist, socialist, PC tyranny and perverted ideology of the National Felon League.

[Captain Peter Blood]

One thing about the endless commercials, every instance they call time for a commercial break is that not giving both teams extra time outs on top of the time outs they get per half???

[Captain Peter Blood]

I certainly agree with the valid point made on assets of the teams. They are all franchises and really have no hard assets, unless you as the owner own the stadium. The only real assets as such are the TV contracts and the good will.

Does anyone think the Dallas Cowboys are worth around $5 Billion, what do you really get for that money???????

[Alberta's Child]

Wow — thank you! :-)

[Alberta's Child]

Yep — I hear ya.

[Alberta's Child]

You’re welcome. Thank YOU!

[Alberta's Child]

You’re welcome. It was actually fun writing this. LOL.

[Alberta's Child]

I had a big smile even just typing that “prison yard” line. LOL.

[Alberta's Child]

This is one of the best vanities ever.

Holy smokes -- thank you!

[Alberta's Child]

All great points there, Larry. Thank you!

[Alberta's Child]

Thanks! You’re absolutely right ... the NFL and the owners were completely unprepared for this, and they still haven’t figured out how much damage they’ve done to their own brand over the last couple of years.

[Alberta's Child]

Good post. I agree that Goodell and the owners are just acting like business people do, but I also think their business has gotten so complicated that they don’t know how to deal with what they’ve got on their hands. The biggest problem they face is that they have too many different kinds of “customers” (fans, TV networks and sponsors), and they may not be able to keep all three of them happy at the same time.

[Alberta's Child]

I agree with all seven of your points there. Thanks!

[MCH]

Lots of very good points & insights.

[MCH]

So, you focused on the Steelers. A real bellwether as to how this is going to play out is the typically very high visibility Sunday matchup between the arch divisional rivals Steelers & Ravens in Baltimore. Keep an eye on that one.

It's two teams that were very much in the limelight in this latest disgusting fiasco, with lots of hardcore blue collar, true-blue American type fans. Both are 2-1. Both were utterly destroyed in the last game, after starting 2-0. Karma.

VERY curious how many turn out for this one. It would normally be a packed house, with a typically very large number of Pittsburgh fans showing up as well due to their ubiquity and proximity. We'll see...