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.

[Alberta's Child]

Any NFL fan -- or at least a male fan -- who stands and links arms like this has a real problem.

[Alberta's Child]

Thanks! I know for sure that they’ll never get ME back.

[Jane Long]

I’ve yet to see a GOOD business model taught that teaches disrespecting the American flag or anthem or putting the obvious customer last.

These business owners have sullied their brand beyond repair.

[1Old Pro]

I’ve yet to see a GOOD business model taught that teaches disrespecting the American flag or anthem or putting the obvious customer last. These business owners have sullied their brand beyond repair.

Well said and succinct.

[Jane Long]

Amen. Thanks very much for that story and thank you for your service.

Thanks for this post, AC!

[reasonisfaith]

Thanks for taking the time to put together an excellent analysis.

[reasonisfaith]

Ideology is the primary behavioral driver here. The kneeling would never have caught on like it did without decades of propagandizing by schools and media.

[reasonisfaith]

You mean all blacks?

And if not all blacks, then your post is meaningless.

[reasonisfaith]

Just as your comment on stupidity gives no sign to the detached observer that intelligence exists in this world, I must remind your audience that the stupidest of all stupid thinking is that which has motivated western communists, most of whom are white.

They’re the ones blinded by their own thinking, a paradoxical outcome—if thought is expected to produce vision.

One of the best definitions of stupidity is the propensity to deduce from an unexamined premise.

[Alberta's Child]

Thank you, both!

[reasonisfaith]

Maybe we’ll find out days or weeks after the event, if we remember that it happened while we were very busy ignoring it.

[reasonisfaith]

Those players have only one audience—themselves. This explains why the NFL problem can’t be fixed in time.

[MCH]

Definitely. I plan on finding out what happens tomorrow at the Cravens-Kneelers game on the Interwebz. Certainly not in person or by live TV!