Randy Fast
Published 28 May 2016I know that this video has already been posted on YouTube, but for those of you that have never seen it, here’s a great documentary by NFL Films on the 1969 Minnesota Vikings season. I was only seven at the time, and professional football wasn’t quite yet on my radar, but for hardcore Vikings fans, the finale of this season must have been a pretty hard pill to swallow. Anyway, I hope YouTube/NFL Films allows me to keep this video posted, so until then…
Peter Jacobsen refutes the claim that the NFL Draft is like socialism:
Once we recognize that teams aren’t really business competitors, and insofar as there is athletic competition it’s tempered to maximize profit, the claim that the draft is socialism rings pretty hollow.
But, as if this weren’t enough, history also debunks the claim that the draft is a socialist institution.
In 1934, Minnesota Gophers’ senior running back, Stan Kostka, led his team to an undefeated season and made himself the top prospect for professional teams. As a result, teams engaged in a bidding war which ended in Stan going to the (no longer existing) Brooklyn Dodgers.
As a result of the bidding war, Kostka became the highest paid player in the NFL (with a $5,000 contract).
The owner of the Philadelphia Eagles was so mad about losing the bidding war that he proposed the idea of the draft to the NFL the following year.
So, in other words, the NFL draft started as a way for team owners to cooperate to keep player wages below where they would be if bidding wars were allowed.
To be fair, I haven’t read everything Marx wrote. But something tells me a system where capital owners cooperate to keep employer bidding wars from occurring isn’t praised in some obscure work he and Engels published. In fact, this is about as opposite to Marx as you can get.
In the modern day, players have formed unions to combat owner cooperation, but the point remains the same. The NFL is a highly sophisticated organizational structure that allows athletic competitors to cooperate in the goal of making money.
So, insofar as Americans enjoy the exciting games created by the draft system, they don’t have socialism to thank. Instead they should thank the cooperation facilitated by self-interest channeled through the free market.
The NFL Draft is not socialism. It’s capitalism on steroids.
NFL scouts can (and do) measure just about everything about a prospect prior to the draft, but they can’t quantifiably measure heart and leadership, two of the most important yet undervalued skills a quarterback can possess.
Every year they draft these big, strong, good-looking guys that can chuck it a country mile. And three years later they turn out to be Joey Harrington or Tim Couch or Jeff George or some other bust who couldn’t lead a hungry lineman to free barbeque, let alone an entire team to a championship.
Dan Wetzel, “Follow the Leader”, Yahoo! Sports, 2006-04-27.
In his (mostly) weekly mailbag post, Severian at Founding Questions considers the latest NFL scandal and some of the insane requirements to be a really great NFL quarterback and how few can both play and coach at that high level. First, the Romney Rule scandal:
I see that some black coach has sued the NFL for racial discrimination, and I must say I hope he takes them for every cent they’ve got. From the very little I’ve seen, his case is airtight, because of the NFL’s astounding stupidity. For those who don’t know, the NFL has been using what’s called the “Rooney Rule” for at least two decades now. This states that whenever a head coaching job comes up, the team must interview at least one (and I think two are mandatory now) black candidate.
Since there’s a serious dearth of black coaches at all levels of organized football (we’ll psircle back to that in a minute), this means that the same three or four guys go through the same pro forma interviews every time. As far as I understand it, then (which is not very, admittedly), this particular coach was actually told to his face that this interview with whatever team was just pro forma compliance with the Rooney Rule; we’ve already got our guy, so just fly out here, we’ll buy you lunch, have a nice chat, and put you back on the plane lickety split.
That’s one part of his airtight case. The other is that whatever team he interviewed with also has a Diversity and Inclusion Officer — because of course they do — and the DIE Officer is on record as saying all kinds of typical sanctimonious virtue-signaling shit, e.g. “We are a systemically racist organization and have to do better,” blah blah blah. Put those together, and what else can you conclude except that this coach got screwed out of a job because of explicit racial animus?
But as to why there are so few black NFL coaches, part of it is due to the way young quarterbacks are trained — he discussed this in detail here — which very frequently diverts talented young black quarterbacks away from learning the skillset they would need to make it in the NFL. The other thing is that the skills you need to be a good coach don’t often appear in a person who has the physical ability to be a good player:
If you haven’t met any high-caliber pro athletes, think of professors. The third-rate knockoff cow college I went to had a pretty big league chemist on staff; if he hadn’t won the Nobel he was at least in the conversation, something like that. This guy was a terrible teacher, because he just couldn’t grok that other people couldn’t follow him. Your brain couldn’t fire fast enough to keep up with his, and he couldn’t slow his down enough to let you catch up. The best chemistry teacher was still pretty smart — no dummies in Chem PhD programs, at least not back then — but because he was nowhere near the top guy’s level, he was so much better at explaining the nuts and bolts.
You could ask the low-end guy “What do I need to do to get better at chemistry?” and he could give you some solid, practical advice (I know, because with his help I squeaked out a C-). You asked that of the high end guy, and he’d reply “Be smarter”. (Not really, he was actually pretty cool, personally, but nonetheless that’s really all he could say).
Sports works the same way. While I was there, this same college also hired a former NBA player to coach basketball. Not a Hall of Famer, but a Hall of the Pretty Good-er; if you know basketball from the late 70s, you’ve heard of him. They thought having this guy as a coach would boost recruiting and ticket sales (he was a local notable, too), and it did … for a time, but under his stewardship the team got much worse, and for the same reason the Nobel-candidate chem wiz was the worst teacher. Billy Bigshot would tell his guys “Just go out there and do this and that” … but his guys couldn’t do this and that. Billy could, which is why he was a very good player at the highest professional level; but he couldn’t grok that not everyone could do the same genetic freak shit on the court he could, because they weren’t genetic freaks like him.
Psircling back to the NFL, if you want a race-neutral entry point for discussing this stuff, there you go. Good players are generally terrible coaches, because pretty much by definition good players are genetic freaks who have no idea how they do the things they do; they just do them. Good coaches, on the other hand, tend to be nerdlingers with people skills … another fairly rare combo, it must be said, but nowhere near as rare as a 6’4″ chess master with a big arm. If pro teams really wanted to start thinking outside the box, they’d start recruiting potential coaching candidates at video game tournaments … or straight from high school, where guys have to do much more with much, much less.
Tom Pelissero, “Vikings rediscover winning ways”, KFAN Sports, 2005-01-10.
Severian talks about the surprising statistical results when the NFL introduced “instant replay”:
I was a big NFL fan when they first started debating the now-standard “instant replay challenge” rules. Like most people, I was all for it — geez, these refs are terrible, video’s the way to go. My only worry was that if every call those numbnuts obviously screwed up got reviewed, games would last 12 hours …
But a funny thing happened: As with most people, my respect for the refs went way, way up once they put in the video challenge rules. Yeah, they screw up one or two calls per game, the challenges prove that … but that’s one or two out of hundreds, which is a phenomenal success rate. Not only that, even the very toughest calls — the ones that draw the red flags — they get right, or at least not-wrong (football is nothing if not Hegelian), about half the time. Put it through all the techno-whizbangery you want — slow it down to molasses-in-winter speed, run it through one of those Blade Runner image enhancers — and it’s still pretty much a coin toss, at least half the time. And the refs are making those calls at full speed, from dramatically different angles.
In other words, I learned a lesson in applied statistics. Before instant replay, if you’d asked me to guess, as objectively as possible, how many calls per game the refs blew, I’d have said something like “four or five, tops”. (I suppose we must pause here to note, for the benefit of anyone who still follows the NFL for some reason, that I’m not talking about bullshit like the “tuck rule” or whatever the fuck a “catch” is supposed to be these days, which even the refs don’t seem to understand; I’m talking stuff like “Did he fumble?” or “They missed the ball spot by a yard or two”). I certainly wouldn’t go any higher than that, and if you told me that an independent auditing firm had reviewed ten seasons’ worth of game tape and came up with a hard number of 2.6 calls per game, I’d roll with it, no problem.
If you then told me that this represents a “failure rate” of well under 1%, well, I’m not sure I want to go through all the math to check you, but I’d believe it, because I know something about how the game is played. I don’t want to get too far off track here, but for the benefit of casual fans and especially non-American readers, there are 11 men on a football team, and all of them have the opportunity to do all kinds of illegal stuff on every single play. Call it 65 plays per game (the first rough number I could find with a five second internet search), and that’s … well, my math doesn’t go that high, but let’s just say it’s a lot of opportunities for fouls. And that’s not counting all the other stuff refs have to do — that they have the opportunity to get wrong — on nearly every play: Marking the ball spot, determining where a guy went out of bounds, and so on.
The important thing to note is how far my emotional perceptions of the game diverge from statistical reality. Let’s stipulate that all the math up there results in a “success rate” of 99.993%. I’d buy that … Intellectually I’d buy it, because I know a bit about how math works, and a lot more about how football works, but note my first impression when they started talking about instant replay: “Oh God yes, these guys suck, they blow so many calls that games are going to last 12 hours if they review all the calls those lousy refs obviously miss.”
Emotion beats math, every time.
And note that I’m talking about refs in general here. In general, they blow calls all the time (the emotional me said), but when it comes to my team in particular, well, they’ve obviously got it out for us. They screw up an entire season’s worth of calls every time my team plays, and all those screwups go the opponents’ way!
I’m kidding, but I’m not joking. I got to see this process firsthand, and that’s the second lesson instant replay taught me: “Indisputable video evidence,” as the phrase is, don’t mean squat when you’ve got your heart and soul in it.
Every NFL fan knows that the refs hate their particular team and love their most hated rival, and no amount of indisputable evidence will shake that belief. NFL fans are rather like progressives in that way …
Again, this is emergent behavior. If Brady is carving his defense up, the defensive coordinator is under immense pressure to do something, anything, to change the dynamic. He knows that every yahoo in the tv audience is yelling “blitz him!!”, so that’s what the coordinator does, even though he knows full well that a) that’s stupid and counterproductive, and b) so are the yahoos urging him to do it, because if they knew anything worth knowing, they’d be wearing a headset instead of jockeying a barstool. Same goes for the yahoos at ESPN, from the bimbette who’s going to shove a mic in his face at the postgame press conference to the hair-gelled dipshits on the shout shows. “Why didn’t you blitz him?” is going to be the first thing out of their mouths, so again, even though he knows it, and they, are stupid, the coordinator dials up a few blitzes … with predictable results.
Football is a great metaphor for politics, especially in the sense that it’s the supposed experts, the guys who get paid millions of dollars to be innovative and analytical, who are the most allergic to actual analysis and innovation. I guess Tom Brady doesn’t play for the Patriots anymore, but for the sake of rhetorical continuity let’s assume he does, and look at legendary coach Bill Belichick. Much smarter, more knowledgeable folks than me have pointed out that he’s really not all that innovative, in the sense of “coming up with wacky new schemes.” Nor is he a particularly shrewd judge of football talent — for every Tom Brady who falls into his lap (Brady was famously a 6th round pick that Belichick had nothing to do with), or Randy Moss that he seems to rehabilitate for a few seasons, there are other big name free agents who join the Patriots and flame out, or highly touted draft picks that don’t do anything. The two secrets of Belichick’s success seem to be: 1) he actually knows the rules, and 2) he fits his game plans to the game.
#1 seems weird, I know, but here’s an example: A decade or so back, he was facing a rival, Pittsburgh or someone, who had a ferocious defense. Belichick knew that the said ferocious defense would be geared up to stopping TE Rob Gronkowski, who had burned them for a million yards last time. To defeat this, Belichick made sacrifice to his strange and awful gods, meditated in a secret Himalayan ashram with the Black Lotus society, and … checked the weather report, which told him that it would almost certainly be cold and rainy on game night. So then he broke out the rule book, in which he learned that there’s no rule against putting out as many offensive lineman as you want — it’s called a “goal line formation” — and so he simply swapped out Gronkowski for a sixth lineman, and ran the ball all night.
Which feeds into #2. Weather reports aren’t top secret information, and the rule book is literally right there, but everyone watching the game — most especially including the Steelers’ defensive coordinator — acted like Belichick had pulled his game plan straight out of the Necronomicon. They had no idea what he was doing, or any clue how to stop it. Here again, it’s not as if the Steelers’ d-coordinator had never seen a goal line formation before, or the announcers had never witnessed a game being played in the rain. It’s just that … well, he’s Rob Gronkowski. They pay him millions to catch balls and wreck worlds, and he was barely on the field. No other coach would do what Belichick did, because who else would tell a zillionaire glory boy to ride the pine, and expect to be obeyed?
See what I mean? Belichick’s “system” was that he didn’t have a system. He figured out what was most likely to win the game, then did that. Note too that nobody seemed to be baffled that an even richer, even more important glory boy, Tom Brady, was also pretty much useless that night. And again, who but Bill would have the sheer brass balls to tell a surefire Hall of Famer to just hand the ball off over and over and over and over and over …? There’s no question that if it should ever happen that Bill believed he had a better chance of winning a given game without Brady than with him, Brady’s ass would’ve been benched for that game, future Hall of Famer or not.
That’s what I mean about emergent behavior. Both Belichick and the Steelers’ d-coordinator thought they were trying to win the game. Hell, I’m willing to believe that both of them would swear in the very throne room of God Almighty that they did everything they could think of to win. It’s just that Belichick could think of a lot more “anything” than the other guy could, because the other guy felt he had to worry about the dudes on barstools, and the sideline reporterettes, and the jock sniffers on the ESPN rant shows, and Belichick … didn’t. That’s all.
Severian, “Are They Trying to Lose?”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-15.
Severian at Rotten Chestnuts looks at the early career life-cycle of football quarterbacks:
At all levels of American football below pro, the “option” is a major facet of the game. This is an offensive play where the quarterback can either run the ball himself, pitch it to another player, or throw it downfield, as he thinks best. It certainly helps if the quarterback is a strong-armed, accurate passer, but the key criterion here is speed. If you get defenders cheating up in order to stop the run, you don’t have to be as strong or accurate with your throws. What matters is that the QB can pass — meaning, he can throw it X yards downfield, within a few yards’ radius of a given spot — not how often he does so. The closer he can get it to the spot, and the further downfield that spot is, the better, but so long as he’s in the vicinity the option system works well.
This starts very, very early in a player’s career. The lower down the skill ladder you go, the more prominent the “option” offense. In “Pop Warner” leagues — kids below age 12, basically — the option pretty much IS the offense, since few kids can throw the ball very far, much less with accuracy. Throwing a football with both velocity and accuracy is extremely difficult, and it doesn’t help that sound throwing mechanics feel brutally unnatural — you know you’re doing it right when it feels like your shoulder is going to pop out of its socket at the very instant your elbow ligaments snap and hit you in the face … which, unfortunately, is exactly what it feels like when you’re doing it wrong, and your shoulder IS about to pop out at the same moment your elbow ligaments snap.
What happens, then, is that kids generally learn how to throw with very poor form … but coaches generally aren’t going to correct them, either because they don’t know the proper mechanics themselves, or because they are focused exclusively on winning games. Who cares if little Kayden, Brayden, or Jayden is going to blow his arm out hucking it like that when he hits high school? That’s Coach Smith’s problem. All that matters now is that he can get it to X spot with radius Y.
Thus the possible career path of any kid who can throw a football reasonably well quickly diverges. If he’s too slow to run the option effectively, his coaches will try to turn him into an “air raid” style quarterback, which means he throws on every play, mechanics be damned, because we need to win now, and what the hell, he can get it there, can’t he? But even the “air raid” style of play is enormously more difficult to coach, because that means you need to be able to coach a whole corps of wide receivers to run a whole bunch of increasingly complex routes. Here, look:
That’s what’s known as a “route tree”, and all of your receivers — five guys, usually, on every play, plus their backups — need to know how to run every one of them, every time. Which means your playbook is going to be huge, because you (theoretically, anyway) need a play for each one of those routes, for each receiver on the field. And obviously your quarterback has to have something going on upstairs, because he needs to memorize five different guys’ routes for every single play, plus audibles and checkdowns (changing any given player’s route, or even the entire play, on the fly), and so on.
I’m sure y’all see where I’m going with this, but it’s important to note that the key selection — whether a given kid shall be an “option” quarterback, or an “air raid” quarterback — has been made by someone else, much lower on the skill ladder. It would be great if one and the same kid could do both to a high degree of skill, but since human neurons apparently don’t work like that, it’s natural for everyone involved to take the path of least resistance.
And again, I’m not blaming coaches for this. Forget things like “getting fired for losing too many games”, and just consider the sheer amount of work. Stipulating for the sake of argument that you’ve got 50 man-hours in a week to get ready for a game, how do you best allocate them? Getting your QB to throw with proper mechanics alone probably takes a significant chunk of that time, and even though he’ll have to do a lot of it on his own — throwing passes at a tire in the backyard until his arm feels ready to fall off — you’re still spending a LOT of time on something that will make no appreciable difference to the game’s outcome this Friday night. And then throw in the other stuff — how much time does it take just to “install” (as the term d’art is) a game plan that has all those routes in it, much less coaching all the receivers up to where they can run them all?
Nah, brah. Just hand Jonquarious the ball and let him run it, and if he has to huck it downfield every now and again, let him do it his way. Again, this will make no difference at all to the outcome of this week’s game — he’ll either run it or he won’t; make the throw or not — but it frees up a lot of man hours to do all the other stuff a coach has to do that we haven’t talked about yet, such as defense.
The Orthogonians’ base was among Whittier’s athletes. On the surface, jocks seem natural Franklins, the Big Men on Campus. But Nixon always had a gift for looking under social surfaces to see and exploit the subterranean truths that roiled underneath. It was an eminently Nixonian insight: that on every sports team there are only a couple of stars, and that if you want to win the loyalty of the team for yourself, the surest, if least glamorous, strategy is to concentrate on the nonspectacular — silent — majority. The ones who labor quietly, sometimes resentfully, in the quarterback’s shadow: the linemen, the guards, the punter. Nixon himself was exemplarily nonspectacular: the 150-pounder was the team’s tackle dummy, kept on squad by a loving, tough, and fatherly coach who appreciated Nixon’s unceasing grit and team spirit — nursing hurt players, cheering on the listless, even organizing his own team dinners, entertaining the guests on the piano, perhaps favoring them with the Orthogonian theme song. It was his own composition.
Nixon beat a Franklin for student body president. Looking back later, acquaintances marveled at the feat of this awkward, skinny kid the yearbook called “a rather quiet chap about campus,” dour and brooding, who couldn’t even win a girlfriend, who attracted enemies, who seemed, a schoolmate recalled, “the man least likely to succeed in politics.” They hadn’t learned what Nixon was learning. Being hated by the right people was no impediment to political success. The unpolished, after all, were everywhere in the majority.
Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, 2008.
Despite the headline, this isn’t really about the NFL, Tom Brady or the S*per B*wl, it’s about a key factor in free market economies: creative destruction.
“Blockbuster store closing sale” by Consumerist Dot Com is licensed under CC BY 2.0
Consider some of the names that bought Super Bowl airtime during Brady’s first rodeo in January 2002: AOL, Blockbuster, Radio Shack, Circuit City, CompUSA, Sears, Yahoo, VoiceStream Wireless, and Gateway Computers.
The Titans of Yesterday
Notice a theme? That list features some companies we saw in Captain Marvel, the 2019 hit movie that nailed 90s nostalgia and reminded us how fast the world had changed. Like when Blockbuster Video stores were still a thing.
For those who may not recall, when Brady was winning his first Super Bowl, Blockbuster was approaching its peak. In 2004, it operated 9,094 stores and employed some 84,300 people. The company was pulling in $6 billion in revenue annually and looked invincible. Today, a single Blockbuster store remains open — in the world.
Remember RadioShack? Once upon a time, it seemed as if you could find one of their brick-and-mortar stores in every corner of the USA. Not anymore. In 2015, RadioShack filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, in large part because of those many store locations, which cannibalized revenues.
Sears, one of the historic giants of retail, managed to make it to 2018 before announcing its bankruptcy. Its stores continue to close so fast, it’s hard to tell how many remain in operation. (The best guess is about 60.)
It’s sometimes difficult to remember that the titans of industry aren’t always the same companies from year to year, and the sector-dominating company today might well be begging for a bailout (or demanding protection from uppity new competitors) only a few years down the way.
Some might see the collapse of Blockbuster, Sears and company as a sign of something terribly wrong with our economic system. After all, Blockbuster alone paid rent at tens of thousands of properties and employed tens of thousands of workers. Sears was the largest American retailer (by far) for decades.
Watching the companies we once shopped at flounder and fail can be surprising, jarring even. But a closer look shows this cycle is not unusual and is actually the sign of a healthy market economy, not a dysfunctional one. What may seem like pure destruction actually clears the way for economic innovation and renewal. “Creative destruction” is how the economist Joseph Schumpeter (1880-1950) characterized business failure in a free market.
As economist Mark Perry points out, companies on top have a very hard time staying on top. Perry, a scholar at the American Enterprise institute and a professor of economics at the University of Michigan’s Flint campus, compared the 1955 Fortune 500 companies to the 2019 Fortune 500. He found that just 52 were still on the list six decades later.
I spent most of my working career in the software business, and many of the companies I’ve worked for over the years aren’t in business any more (my first job out of school was with Northern Telecom … remember them?). Software is a particularly fast-cycling industry, but it’s true of the economy as a whole at a slightly more sedate pace.
I did watch the S*per B*wl on Sunday, although as the Canadian broadcast carefully replaces almost all of the expensive, creative, one-off ads with exactly the same ads the network showed all through the rest of the season, I watched it on my computer, and kept my mute button handy to silence the roughly 2/3rds of the broadcast that wasn’t actually football-related. (Although I’ve read many people commenting that the “special” ads aren’t as good as they used to be, I watch so little TV that I’m hardly qualified to judge personally.) In Monday’s NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh used the old “there’s two kinds of people” device to talk about Tom Brady:
You can easily have an opinion about Brady, and you probably do, even if you’ve never watched a whole football game. But I have no way of predicting what that opinion is. Do you see him as a cheerful, intelligent family man who has transcended his natural limitations through hard work and study? Or is he just the jammiest SOB who ever lived? There was definitely something cruel in watching the immobile Brady dismantle the Chiefs of Patrick Mahomes, a passer equipped with physical gifts whose possibility was inconceivable before he broke into the league.
That’s probably part of how Brady has driven such a fault into North American bedrock. If there were a stat representing handsomeness-to-physical-impressiveness ratio, he would dominate the NFL. When you see photos of young Brady, who famously dropped to the sixth round of the draft, you no longer wonder how he dropped so far but why he was taken at all. Did the scouts fall in love, as they are known to do, with the “good face”?
Ancient Brady is young Brady with less mobility and accuracy. Mostly, like a relief pitcher with nothing but a fastball, he just darts the ball very efficiently at nearby targets. (Trading New England’s targets for Tampa Bay’s was, obviously, shrewd to the point of genius.) He is becoming as specialized, as optimized for one function, as a punter. But in his case the function seems to be “winning Super Bowls,” and we can’t attribute one iota of that to innate gifts denied to ordinary mortals. What’s not to hate?
Speaking of the ads, I do think the Babylon Bee got it exactly right here:
As a comment at Ace of Spades H.Q. related, the S*per B*wl has lost a lot of its cultural capital over the last few years:
49 — I work at a somewhat woke company. While talking about some projects we were working on the new guy asked me “hey why isn’t anyone talking about the superbowl?” and I remembered that even last year everyone was talking about the superbowl none stop the monday after.
Well you’ve finally done it lefties you’ve killed the NFL.
Posted by: 18-1
I tuned out the halftime show, even though the performer was kinda-sorta a local boy (born in Toronto), and I was a bit nonplussed with the visuals (I had the whole thing muted, natch). James Lileks found the show to be oddly reminiscent of 70’s SciFi movies:
The halftime show had a strange 70s sci-fi aesthetic; for some reason I kept thinking of The Black Hole and Logan’s Run. The most interesting part was picking out the buildings in the New York skyline arrayed in neon. Ah, it’s the AT&T Building, Philip Johnson’s famous po-mo Chippendale tower! And that would be the Met Life tower, which is actually the base for a much-larger tower unbuilt after the Crash of ’29. Hey, everyone, let’s pause this elaborate routine and destroy its momentum so I can wax pedantic!
Then there were all those dancers in masks, looking like victims of surgery in an old movie where a gangster got plastic surgery. A way of incorporating the pandemic zeitgeist, right? Last year: EMPOWERMENT AND SEX AND SEX EMPOWERMENT! This year: faceless people moving in mass to choreographed steps, then dissolving into random panic. There was something wrong about it, like some dank gas blown up through a fissure, filling balloons that looked like the humans who populate the shadows of a nightmare.
Previous years, the Super Bowl event was pure excess — mad, crass, exuberant, American overdrive, American overkill, a mix of skill and brute force. Something about this one felt desperate and shellshocked. I suppose I’m reading too much into it. But I don’t think we need fever dreams and worried-looking buskers in empty fields, at this point. It would be nice just to have some Clydesdales again.
I saw on another site (sorry, forgotten where I noticed it) that the bandages were an in-joke for The Weeknd’s fans, who’d been teased with several social media posts about him recovering from some sort of mysterious plastic surgery procedure leading up to the performance.
J.J. McCullough
Published 22 Jul 2017Let’s take a look at a couple of weird things only Canadians will understand.
O Canada ending music care of SuperNIntendoGameboy, check out full version here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0qmP…
Anything that happens in the United States tends to also happen later in Canada. The Washington NFL franchise has abandoned their “Redskins” nickname (although to many the “Washington” part is at least as offensive) but have not yet announced their new moniker. Edmonton is in the same situation, with no new name yet decided upon:
“Edmonton eskimos wordmark” by Pabstheiniker is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
I said an anticipatory farewell to the name of the Edmonton Eskimos football club in this space in 2017; on Tuesday the team’s front office executed the sentence, announcing that the team’s nickname, in use for Edmonton sports clubs for over 110 years, will be retired. (Note that the Canadian Football League is only 62 years old.)
But there is always some kind of minor surprise on the scaffold, and in this case it was that the team has not yet decided on a new name. This, I see, is where I made a mistake back in 2017.
I saw that getting rid of “Eskimos” was a relatively simple problem with an affordable cost that would have to be paid eventually. In the event, the final push was supplied, unsurprisingly, by corporate sponsors — themselves all in a state of vulnerability and panic in conditions of pandemic disease. The CFL team had played public-relations defence whenever the issue was raised aggressively before; they were, self-evidently, playing for time.
I noted in 2017 that the same P.R. apparatus was obviously trying to propagate “Empire” as an alternative by-word for the team, and it filed a trademark application for “Edmonton Empire” in 2018. The team can start selling new green-and-gold gear to fans as soon as it settles on something, and a new nickname beginning with “E” would preserve the team’s stylish double-E logo. “Empire” might even work well with the team colours if “gold” were interpreted more literally in the uniform, rather than serving as sales talk for “yellow.”
[…]
Speaking as an Edmonton-born fan of Edmonton Ellipsoidal Ball Sport Sodality, I see now that I may have prepared adequately for the end of the Eskimos, but my heart didn’t anticipate the dual nature of this decision any more than my brain did. I know — hell, my friends and my readers know — that I will dislike whatever they pick. Contests and polls of the public produce embarrassments like “The Toronto Raptors,” so the mere thought of any such exercise plunges me into despond.
At FEE, Jon Miltimore explains what the league’s officials are thinking based on the announcement earlier this week:
Football fans around the world have been anxiously waiting for signs as to whether the NFL season will kick off in September despite concerns about the COVID-19 pandemic.
This week, they got the “burning bush” of signs.
The NFL on Tuesday had a soft opening of sorts, opening a number of facilities around the country to personnel, owners, and players rehabilitating from injuries. But it was in a post-meeting conference call with media that NFL officials delivered a bombshell of sorts.
According to multiple reports, NFL executive vice president Jeff Miller and Allen Sills, the NFL’s chief medical officer, told reporters the NFL fully expects to have COVID-19 cases during the NFL season, and are planning accordingly.
“We have a task force working very diligently on that,” Sills told reporters. “We fully well expect that we will have positive cases that arise because we think that this disease will remain endemic in society. And so it shouldn’t be a surprise if new positive cases arise. Our challenge is to identify them as quickly as possible and to prevent spread to any other participants. So we’re working very diligently on that, and we’ll have some detailed plans to share about that at a later time.”
It did not take long for reporters to process and interpret what the NFL was saying.
“You didn’t even have to read deeply between the lines,” said Charles Robinson, Yahoo’s senior NFL reporter. “What I just heard from the NFL was, ‘Hey, guess what? We are going to open. There is going to be a season. And we are going to have some people test positive for coronavirus once that season begins. And we’re working on a plan to not stop anything. We’re going to work through it.'”
Terez Paylor, a senior writer who also covers the NFL for Yahoo, concurred.
“He’s saying they’re going to play,” Paylor said in a podcast with Robinson. “Basically [they’re saying], ‘People are gonna get it. We’ll try to deal with it the best we can.'”
To be clear, the NFL has made no official decision yet. That being said, it looks like they are heading in that direction.
While some will say it would be reckless to hold the NFL season during a pandemic, it appears the NFL is making its decision based on some of the same assumptions Sweden used in its unique approach to COVID-19.
Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s top infectious disease expert and the architect of its “soft-approach” strategy, said one of the reasons he rejected sweeping lockdowns is because the measures simply are not sustainable, considering COVID-19 is going to be with us for years.
It is usually difficult to muster much sympathy for the National Football League, but the record-setting popularity of the 2020 draft is a huge surprise:
The unique presentation of the 2020 NFL Draft established new all-time highs for media consumption in every category. With over 600 camera feeds from homes across the United States, all telecasts of the 2020 NFL Draft reached more than 55 million total viewers across Nielsen-measured channels over the three-day event, up +16% vs. 2019. An average audience of over 8.4 million viewers watched all three days of the 2020 NFL Draft across ABC, ESPN, NFL Network, ESPN Deportes, and digital channels easily breaking the previous high of 6.2 million viewers in 2019 (+35%).
Each day of the 2020 NFL Draft established new highs as an average audience of over 15.6 million viewers watched Round 1 on Thursday (+37% vs. 2019), over 8.2 million viewers watched Rounds 2 & 3 on Friday (+40% vs. 2019), and over 4.2 million viewers watched Rounds 4-7 on Saturday (+32% vs. 2019).
All seven rounds of the 2020 NFL Draft were presented across ABC, ESPN, and NFL Network – the second straight year that The Walt Disney Company partnered with the National Football League to offer a multi-network presentation of the entire Draft.
“I couldn’t be more proud of the efforts and collaboration of our clubs, league personnel, and our partners to conduct an efficient Draft and share an unforgettable experience with millions of fans during these uncertain times,” said NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell. “This Draft is the latest chapter in the NFL’s storied history of lifting the spirit of America and unifying people. In addition to celebrating the accomplishments of so many talented young men, we were pleased that this unique Draft helped shine a light on today’s true heroes – the healthcare workers, first responders, and countless others on the front lines in the battle against COVID-19. We are also grateful to all those who contributed to the NFL family’s fundraising efforts.”
“This year’s NFL Draft clearly took on a much greater meaning and it’s especially gratifying for ESPN to have played a role in presenting this unique event to a record number of NFL fans while supporting the league’s efforts to give back,” said ESPN President Jimmy Pitaro. “The success of this year’s Draft is a testament to the unprecedented collaboration across the NFL, ESPN, and The Walt Disney Co. in the midst of such a challenging time.”
The unique situation of having the vast majority of televised sports activities suspended clearly made a big difference — when you’re the only game in town, you can expect a wider audience — but the online draft seems to have been popular even among people who normally would have tuned in for the event anyway.
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