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.

[juan_galt]

Well done!! I thoroughly enjoyed all your bullet points. I could probably add several myself, but in particular — How about the cosmic irony of multi-millionaires who wear a uniform that claim to be oppressed not by their multi-billionaire owners, but by others guys in uniforms who make about $30k (average for a soldier) to $60k (average for police officer) per year...

I’ll share a personal random thought I have been thinking about this week. I had the good fortune to serve on a burial detail my last few months on active duty in the Army (although to be honest I probably didn’t truly appreciate at the time). I was stationed at Ft. Bragg and the team I was on would provide military honors to veterans who died within a given radius of the post. As a young sergeant, I was in charge of the pall bearer team. We spent hours in the hot NC sun practicing how to carry the casket in unison and how to fold the flag over the casket. During actual funerals, I had two primary jobs: to inspect the placement of military awards on body of the deceased (most local funeral directors were not up to speed on the proper placement/order of medals) and then to call cadence for the pall bearers carrying the casket and if needed, hand the folded flag to the ranking officer (or ranking NCO) with us. This person would then present the flag to the next of kin. Thankfully, I never had to present the folded flag myself; not sure I could have gotten through it as these ceremonies tended to be pretty moving. But I had to learn what to say in case I had to do it and I have such vivid memories of hearing the officer in charge whisper the words to the veteran’s loved ones, “on behalf of a grateful nation...”

I am so saddened that those that have been so very, very blessed appear to be so very, very ungrateful for those who sacrificed so very, very much so they could play a game they presumably love.

This is why I am not watching the NFL anymore. God Bless.

[Atticus]

Excellent, excellent work. Rest assured: The economic fall out from the boycott of the NFL and its sponsors will be largely ignored and under reported. The boycott of Target Corporation was claimed to be insignificant or treated as nonexistent even as the company’s stock price fell and store traffic visibly declined in the wake of the transgender bathroom fiasco.

[gundog]

Bread and circus may be what’s kept us from revolt. If they take away the big top....what may come?

[Freedom of Speech Wins]

I guess ticket sales, jersey sales, licensing fees, and team and stadium related business. Lose goodwill though and all this potentially decreases.

[Burma Jones]

The owners are in a real bind - between the rock of a largely conservative customer (fan) base and the hard place of a now-radicalized, largely black workforce. The owners’ actions last weekend showed which one they fear more. The coming weeks and years will reveal if they chose unwisely. Although I have to believe that at least a few of the more intelligent ones had an inkling of the depth of their dilemma as soon as they read DJT’s comments. I did, and I ain’t that smart.

[fatima]

They don’t care.

[IMTOFT]

“These national anthem protestors just don’t get it at all.”

No, they don’t, they don’t have a clue, and were you to shove a microphone in any one of their faces and ask, “What exactly are you protesting, can you provide evidence of what you assert, and what good has come of your protest?”, there’d be a lot of “Umm” and dead air...

All I see is my father, who passed away in 2002, served 4 years in the USAF as a fighter pilot and 27 years in the MDANG, retiring as a full bird...and his father who was a Captain in the Army Air Corp in WWII flying reconnaissance in the South Pacific...and my great-great grandfather who served in the 91st PA Volunteers, mustered in before the Battle of Manassas, was shot through the neck at two days before the battle of Spotsylvania, recovered, was at Appomattox and mustered out in July 1865...and my son now who serves in the MDANG as a 35G...

They don’t get it, they say they are protesting, “Inequality”, no, they are putting their middle fingers right up in the faces of those that pay their way...many have fought and died for their right to protest, and I support their right to protest, but just because you have a First Amendment right to speech does not mean that speech is not without consequence...have a good day, NFL, best of luck to you...

[IMTOFT]

“Quite a few people of less than discerning intellect have been persuaded by sheer repetition that America is evil and must be punished, and the peer pressure brought on by others of even less discerning intellect in the popular media has persuaded them into an act of unreasoning vanity.”

Bingo...well put...

[IMTOFT]

Thank you for your service...I did see a meme, a photo of an officer presenting a flag to a crying woman, the caption said, “Those who kneel before the flag have never been presented with a folded flag”...

[HusbandMan]

For the Thursday night game between the Bears and the Packers, Aaron Rodgers is asking the fans in the stands to join the protest by linking arms. What happens in Green Bay tomorrow night may be an earlier indicator than the Ravens Steelers game.

For a true Packers fan, ARodg can do no wrong - he is, after all the best quarterback ever ( although a true Packers fan would also be correct in identifying Brett Favre as the best quarterback ever). And yet even he has managed to anger a large part of his fan base with his stupid actions on the field and his idiotic statements off the field. The word fan is short for fanatic, and that most surely describes the cheese heads who love their team. So it will be real interesting to see what happens tomorrow night.

[justa-hairyape]

A whole lot of football fans that basically could care less about politics, are being woke up with a splash of cold water in their face. Perhaps they will start becoming more concerned.

[Pollster1]

“avoid acting white and making good grenades”

interesting choice of words.

[Pollster1]

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

For $2k or so you can get the same number of people on their knees in any brothel (I assume) - without our country being insulted - and get it from people who are more civilized and a lot closer to law-abiding.

[CincyRichieRich]

avoid acting white and making good grenades”

interesting choice of words.
...
Apparently, “grades” is too uncommon for Google when talking about blacks and good grades...I’d say that proves liberal racism...ha ha...

[TXnMA]

"Am I wrong? Is it racist?"

I dunno... I've read that some black players have taken to making the raised fist "black power" "salute" whenever they tackle a white opponent.

Is that racist?

[Maverick68]

This protest is and always was about hatred against “whitey”, period, end of story.

[alarm rider]

Well said. Thank you. We turned the NFL off last Sunday and will continue NOT to watch. I love football, but they will probably never get me back.

[Alberta's Child]

Thank you! :-)

[Alberta's Child]

Thanks for a very touching story there, Juan. And thanks for the kudos!

[Alberta's Child]

Thank you, Atticus!