A great example McCambridge gives involves an interview he had with now-NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell 16 years ago.
I can vividly remember my first meeting with Goodell. It was the summer of 2002, and I was in my third year of reporting for my book, America’s Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation, which would be published two years later. I was having lunch with Goodell, at the time a rising figure in league circles, and the NFL’s canny veteran PR man Joe Browne, trying to get some sense of how the people at the league office viewed the game.We have found out in the last few years that yes, there can be too much football. I mentioned a few years ago that the league felt bloated to the point that it was in danger of being uninteresting, and it's gotten worse since then. But instead of logically cutting back on the overexposure and working to improve an often-iffy product, the league has gone the other way. Now we not only have nationally-broadcast NFL games on Thursday, Sunday and Monday nights every week, far too many of them are substandard matchups that people have no interest in watching.
I mentioned my idea that there was perhaps a market for making the All-22 “coaches’ tape” available to the general public, because there was a small but attentive subset of fans eager to better understand the game and their favorite teams’ strategy and tactics. They both seemed skeptical of that idea. Then I mentioned that it would be nice if the Sunday Ticket package was more widely available, so that millions of dislocated football fans would have a choice besides sitting in the corner of a sports bar, watching an out-of-market game on a small screen with no sound.
This issue Goodell took up with more interest. “We’re not doing enough there,” he said. “We need to do more to monetize Sunday Ticket.”
I may have winced. I had never heard the word “monetize” before, but I knew exactly what he meant. In 2014, DirecTV renewed its exclusive distribution deal with the NFL for Sunday Ticket—at $12 billion for eight years—so history would show that Goodell was right about further monetizing the service....
But there is a point when “monetization” becomes a parody of itself. Everyone has their own outrage, the moment when, as one club executive put it, “all the advertising, sponsorship, and clutter” begins to get in the way of the game itself, in distracting and ludicrous ways. Mine occurred the first night of the 2018 NFL draft, as Fox and the NFL Network and ESPN were broadcasting the league’s 83rd annual selection meeting. During the first round, we got glimpses into the “war rooms” of several NFL teams. The league had sold sponsorship for even these discrete shots to a Japanese automaker. Standard practice in this era.
Even worse, it underscores how little the league cares about player safety, in a time when the long-term debilitating effects of the game are increasingly at the front of people's attention. McCambridge notes that the players despise the lack of rest that happens with the Thursday games, and the fans aren't tuning in to them anyway.
Richard Sherman put it more bluntly in his Players’ Tribune column in 2016: “Thursday Night Football is just another example of the NFL’s hypocrisy: The league will continue a practice that diminishes the on-field product and endangers its players, but as long as the dollars keep rolling in, it couldn’t care less.” Ad Age’s NFL TV expert Anthony Crupi described it as “crummy, dangerous football.”The owners clearly view the players as disposable pieces of meat, and it makes their words on player safety seem empty and insulting, and it manifests in the owners refusing to have an accepting mentality on players speaking their minds and showing their personalities. The NBA is a the direct opposite of this, with players almost encouraged to being accessible and outspoken on social issues (interestingly, the NBA also got their Players' Association to agree to not to do anything during the anthem. Funny how cooperating instead of imposing authority does that). And even Major League Baseball has become much more accepting of having its players perform with flair and emotion, with bat flips, fist pumps from pitchers, and silly walk-off celebrations from all teams.
In the face of this pushback, Goodell has persistently suggested—and the Cowboys’ Jerry Jones reiterated last week—that the league’s regular season should expand to 18 games, often under the guise of reducing the number of preseason contests from four to two. Jones went so far as to argue that playing two more regular-season games at full-speed would be “safer,” the sort of statement that could be made only in a postfactual world.
As a volley into the marketplace of ideas, this is oblivious. The public isn’t clamoring for an 18-game regular season, and the players won’t go for it. With the league trying to reassure fans and players alike about the safety of this dangerous and at times brutal sport, the answer cannot be more games. A league that was aware of its self-image, or had connected its desire for player safety to the larger marketing of the game, would come up with a different solution.
Speaking of baseball, I love this last segment of McCabridge's article, where he says football is making the same mistakes "America's Pastime" made back in the '60s and '70s.
At the end of America’s Game, [baseball writer] Bill James makes an insightful point about baseball’s decline in popularity in the second half of the 20th century. “Baseball in 1960 was run by people who loved baseball,” he said, “but it was run by people who, because they loved baseball so much, assumed that there was something ‘special’ about baseball which had propelled it to its predominant position in the American sports world. And because they made this assumption, they allowed the game to drift. They didn’t really think about the game, as a commercial product.”...And you know what else will make me less interested in football? Watching the Packers get dominated by the Bears in the first 15 minutes of the season.
In thinking business first, the people who run the NFL have it backward. The league’s salvation does not rest with the successful marketing of the desks in the New York Jets’ war room. Instead, the truth that existed for decades remains true today: The things that are good for the game of football—to make it safer, more watchable, more absorbing—will also, eventually, be good for the business of football.
Football will always be a dangerous sport. But it’s also a great game. The challenge for the people who are running the NFL is how to make it a safer sport while ensuring it remains a great game. In the process, the league has to find a better way to cut through its own clutter, make a case for itself, and try to get a new generation of people to fall in love with football.
It's already hard enough to like this uncomfortably violent game that has so many meatheaded dimwits associated with it (on the field, in the stands, and in the owners' boxes). If the Pack start sucking, and the greatness of Aaron Rodgers doesn't matter (or worse, doesn't exist), what point is there in using hours of my free time and having my emotional energy go toward watching a game that its overseers don't care about improving?
