Chiefs Bye - The NFL Desperately Needs a New Commissioner

This is the bye week for the Chiefs, and after a sizzling start to the season, we've dropped three of the last four games. Much of that is because our offensive line is playing so poorly, Alex Smith is reverting back to his dancing days, and we simply don't have Eric Berry in there. There are other reasons for all of this, some related to the Chiefs themselves indeed.

This post isn't about those.

It is about the reasons the Chiefs are debilitated by other factors having nothing to do with what happens on the field.

Yet those things impact the Chiefs negatively just as much as the on-field failures, and they have for years. It is now that these things have been screeching toward critical mass. It is now that I should finally get around to articulating the things that simply drive me crazy about the NFL. I love my Chiefs, but I really don't have a lot of affection for the NFL.

And yeah, a lot of that is because of the leadership. It is as sure as sure can be that some owners now are grumbling and rumbling about finally, finally dumping Roger Goodell. OH but he's done so much to get us gazillions of dollars in ad revenue and whatever revenue -- he's a dealmaker in the Pete Rozelle mold!

Really? As far as I can tell the gravy train is going right into the crapper, for the reasons I'd like to share with you now. Please, anyone with any of the tiniest marketing savvy could hold up the NFL in front of rich people's faces and barely have to say a word.

So, what are those things? In no particular order -- although the last one is of particular significance to me because it most adversely impacts our beloved Chiefs.

1. Injuries. Yes injuries have been a common part of NFL football for eons, understandably. But with the NFL suffering financially I can't for the world see how it can continue to give lip service to protecting players. Yes there are new rules against head shots and stuff. Yes there is an emphasis on keeping bone-crushing type hits from happening, especially against the vulnerable quarterback and receivers trying to catch passes.

But it isn't enough, by far. I simply refuse to believe that much more meaningful constraints against injury-causing hits will make everyone ditch the sport.

Look at what's happened to two of the NFL's biggest stars, players who aren't Chiefs so I don't think one way or the other about them as players, but they're still humans and they should be important to the NFL, and as such there is no way they should've been injured the way they were.

Aaron Rodgers had a 900-pound behemoth lineman drop on top of him, breaking his collar bone. He's out for most of the season, if not all of it. How about we make a new rule, no defensive player can drop his body on top of anyone, especially a quarterback. I even think we should consider limits on how large players can get, really. Once you reach a certain weight, say 300 pounds, you can't play. So keep the diet going and let's see if you can play well anyway -- isn't that the point after all?

So tell me, think the NFL is happy without Aaron Rodgers playing?

Then there's Odell Beckham Jr. Even though he's been a yutz with his rants and rages and generally boorish behavior, he's a mint to the NFL. Sure enough, after he leaps for a ball some defensive back yanks him down onto his foot gruesomely mangling it, and he's out for the season. So yeah, we need a rule that says any tackle like the one this D-back made is illegal, with the penalty not just yardage but ejections and suspensions.

I've heard people say you can't do that.

Sorry, yes you can. These guys are expert athletes who can control their bodies any way you ask them to. Oh but you can't help yourself when you're on the field doing it. Yes, you can! And for those who think the game will be changed dramatically, yes, it will. In fact I'd think it'd be something that'd increase scoring and thus would be something the NFL would like!

It was recently revealed that Aaron Hernandez, the former Patriots tight end who committed a murder then killed himself in prison, had a horrific form of chronic traumatic encephalopathy. It is now a given that this is caused by repeated severe blows to the head, so how about the NFL make more helmet-to-helmet hits illegal, again followed by ejections and suspensions. They should also be making the helmets themselves safer with much more advanced technology employed to do that. Please don't give me excuses -- they can do all these things.

They won't because they don't have the stout leadership to do them.

One of the troubling aspects of NFL football today is that the players are either not trained enough or training too much. They are faster, stronger, beefier, quicker, fiercer than they've ever been and they simply cannot handle it all. Look at the Chiefs! Eric Berry and Chris Conley were lost for the year with non-contact Achilles injuries. I truly believe Berry was lost partly because of his weakened body from the cancer he endured, but partly because he hardly played in the preseason to get into game-playing shape. I even wonder if he'll even ever be back at a level we need for him to be as effective as he's been.

So how about radically reevaluating how players train and then reinventing it terms of making it more likely they'll stay on the field and actually be out there playing the game. Even more importantly, they won't be severely debilitated by CTE related conditions and may live rich, meaningful lives well after they finish playing football.

There are several other things that can be done to limit injuries. Get rid of any and all artificial turf and do more to make sure the grass turf is maintained properly with the right drainage and whatever else is needed to make it as safe as it can be. Get rid of Thursday night football games which do not allow players enough rest between games. I'm sure there are a dozen other significant improvements for pro football that could be made if it had the courageous leadership to do so.

2. Commercials. For years and years and years I've been sick and tired of the ding-dong commercials they show over and over and over again. You know, they'll have a break in the action with lots of commercials, then show a punt, then have more commercials.

It now seems they are showing even more commercials. Come on! After eight minutes of football, another four minutes of commercials show up. Sorry, Roger Goodell, if your product was good enough, you could get a lot of money from a few committed advertisers and have fewer commercial breaks. The games would move along much more briskly -- actually providing the entertainment we tune in to see.

This is not even to mention the idiocy of the commercials to begin with. If I see another ad with a gecko in it I'm going to go crazy. Yeah, I just mute them, but still. I want to puke whenever I see the most idiotic commercials of all -- the beer ads. And please know it isn't just these. Almost every commercial is ridiculously inane, many of them full of racialism and virtue signaling, shamelessly going on one after the other after the other -- stupidity for dollars. No wonder the NFL is in trouble, it reduces itself to its lowest troglodyte denominator.

Which means much of the issue with the NFL is the simply plain idiocy it enables. But then this leads to another critical factor...

3. Enabling. This has to do with what many see as the politics invading the NFL, but really, politics is not a bad thing. Everyone is political. I really don't care what political views my players have, as long as they're contributing to lots of Chiefs touchdowns on the field. Now I am interested in what people feel about things, but I have to confess I'm not really thinking about Travis Kelce's position on tax reform if he's scoring the game-winning touchdown, I'm just not.

The issue is how much the NFL is promoting issues the players spout about and how much that spills on to the field, and yes, let's not fool ourselves, it does matter what those things are. This is really the issue. And what more is there to demonstrate this than this whole national anthem mess.

What makes it enabling is that the players are making their racialist declarations based on New York Times-generated disconceptions -- yes, not misconceptions but disconceptions, meaning these players are hypnotized by asinine racialist poisons that are pounded into their minds by powerful people bent on keeping them, really, on the plantation -- and they don't even know it. They don't even know how exploited they are by those powers whenever they kneel or sit or stay out when the national anthem is performed.

I personally don't care what the NFL expects with the national anthem. I'm not a rah-rah patriot guy -- I'm pleased to live in this country and always honor those who've served and do serve, but I'm relatively indifferent to what is done with the flag or the national anthem itself. I also encourage any player to enthusiastically support positions about which he feels strongly, doing everything he and his cohorts can do to make the world a better place, that's terrific.

The problem is many of the NFL customers do care about how they shove this particular stuff they believe into their faces, and it is a slap in the face of those putting dollars into these players paychecks. People who want to see them respect the flag are essentially being told by these players, "Keep paying us gobs of money even while we brazenly scold you for being viciously racist even though you're not but the New York Times keeps insisting you are and I need to look good as I'm appearing to be crusading for something the Times says I need to keep crusading for." I'd venture to say several of them would add, "In the mean time I can't upset my brothers so that's also why I feel I have to do this."

Really, that's what they're doing even if they have to spew the standard racialist pap.

And many, many of the once stalwart NFL customers very reasonably despise it.

It'd be one thing for the fans to respond with a harmless adversarial sentiment, it's wholly another for them to take their money with them, which is what they're doing in droves.

This is why Roger Goodell is a magnificent fool for not going to every NFL team right after Colin Kaepernick first did his thing to tell them, "Look, we'll set up an 'NFL Office of Sensitivity to Race Issues' or something really important like that, really, let's do that, but you have to stand for the flag during the national anthem. If you don't, you're fired." If long ago Roger Goodell said that to every single player and made the statement uniformly across the league -- simply, personally, graciously, considerately, meaningfully -- then we wouldn't be having to deal with any of this.

But he didn't, because he doesn't know what he's supposed to do to lead with wisdom and courage, with insight and boldness, with truth and grace. Let's be honest -- we've all known this for years. So who's really the fool? The owners and the players and yes, the fans for just following along with the idiocy.

Now, the NFL is suffering big-time.

4. Duplicity. I've written about this for many years, even a number of times in this blog endeavor.

Doesn't seem to mean much to many, though.

Yes, it does disappoint me, but it doesn't mean I don't accept the reality of the situation.

The situation is merely that large major professional sports enterprises must have the larger-market media-darling teams succeed for them to reach the levels of profitability they expect.

Yes, it does make for very pronounced what-I-call competitive duplicity, meaning that the leagues actually do things or allow certain teams to do things that give them advantages over other teams.

In a nutshell, does the NFL really care whether or not the Chiefs are successful? Ahem. Do they care that the New York Giants or New England Patriots or Green Bay Packers or Dallas Cowboys are successful? Absolutely. In fact, let's just cut to the worst of it -- the NFL really doesn't want the Chiefs to be successful because the Chiefs will never come close to generating the kinds of cash a Cowboys or Patriots can get in any featured game.

Oh you'll occasionally have some non-major-market-darling teams get far in the postseason, I don't think any major sports league can keep that from happening. But the way the entire structure is set up, you will always see plenty of Patriots-Giants or Steelers-Packers Super Bowl matchups. Yes, the NFL has much more parity than other leagues -- this deliberately arranged competitive imbalance is far more pronounced in something like major league baseball, where presently the Dodgers and Yankees have been being groomed for appearances in any or all of the next several World Series.

I like to peek at the franchise values coming out every year, and you can see this phenomenon all over those. Here are the latest top values among all American sports franchises. See if you can see a pattern. For 2017...

1. Dallas Cowboys $4.2 billion
2. New York Yankees 3.7
3. New England Patriots 3.4
4. New York Knicks 3.3
5. New York Giants 3.1
6. Los Angeles Lakers 3.0
6. San Francisco 49ers 3.0
8. Washington Redskins 2.9
8. Los Angeles Rams 2.9
10. Los Angeles Dodgers 2.7
10. New York Jets 2.7
10. Boston Red Sox 2.7
10. Chicago Bears 2.7
10. Chicago Cubs 2.7

These teams all have the most fans (more $$$), the biggest broadcasting contracts (more $$$), the most frequent mentions among sportscasters, sportswriters, and pundits (more $$$), and the largest national followings (more $$$). And please don't let the Knicks, Jets, and 49ers failures detract you. These teams should all be very successful but have been plagued by horrible management.

Should a Chiefs ever even make it to the Super Bowl the NFL power brokers would barely tolerate it, but that's it. I fear looking at what the television ratings would be for any Super Bowl in which the Chiefs appear, because waaay fewer New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Boston fans would tune in.

The powers-that-be know this too well.

Some of the extended advantages come from the officiating. There are other given advantages that reside in the deeper politics areas of the overall league organization, but what referees do out on the field is the most obvious, and Chiefs fans know it too well. I could list all of the critical calls that have gone against us in the most critical moments -- I feel much of it is to make it more likely the Chiefs do not advance. It may be said the officials can only do do much especially with the use of instant replay, and that is true, but the extent they can make an interpretation of a pass interference or holding call turns entire game outcomes, and countless times they have against the Chiefs.

The interesting thing is football fans -- even Chiefs fans -- generally disdain citing those very obvious evidences because we fear being called whiners or sour grapes spouters or whatever.

It still doesn't change the reality of competitive duplicity.

Could new leadership change this? I honestly don't think so, because again, Roger Goodell is there ultimately because the fans want him there. And again, the reality is that there are more New York and Los Angeles fans who really don't mind advantages coming their way making them more successful. Who wouldn't secretly want that?

As it is, I'll still root for the Chiefs even with all that is against them. I'll still hope against hope that they'll emerge as a team many could root for, even with all the geographic demographic autocratic disadvantages. I'll still enjoy them play football and, at least this year, play winning football with a fine head coach and some extraordinary playmakers doing thrilling things.

I committed to this at the beginning of the year -- take each game one at a time, enjoy each one, revel in our proud Kansas City Chiefs. I've even written this here before -- it makes it that much more meaningful when we win when that duplicity stacks things against us.

Should we go all the way and win the whole thing, then we do it with the greatest adversity -- most of it coming from the NFL itself.

Wow wouldn't that be great.
__