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While I grew up playing soccer, like most of you, I grew up watching football — the American kind.
By the time I was in the 6th grade, I could list every team in the NFL, who their coach & best player was, how many Super Bowls they’ve won, etc, etc. Like most kids back in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, football was the sport to watch and it remained that way for some time.
Let me put into perspective just how much football — and more specifically, the NFL — has grown in my lifetime.
I was born in 1993, but four years prior, in 1989, Texas oil tycoon Jerry Jones bought the Dallas Cowboys for $140 million dollars. Now, not even 30 years later, those same Dallas Cowboys are worth $4.8 billion dollars, making them the most valuable sports franchise in the entire world. And aside from the valuation, maybe even more impressive is the fact that the Cowboys are growing in value by 14% annually.
For those keeping score at home, 14% of $4.8 billion is $672,000,000. Just stupid, stupid money.
But for all of the trillions of dollars that flow in and out of the game every year, the NFL still isn’t able to overcome it’s biggest enemy: itself.
Over the last few years, the NFL has been dominated by off the field headlines more than ones created on the field — and deservedly so.
Whether it be domestic abuse, civil rights, concussions, patriotism, protesting, etc — every week there’s a negative story dragging down the game we once loved. And besides all of that: the game just isn’t safe, plain and simple. Sorry, football hardos (cough cough Larry Fedora), but CTE is a very real and very dangerous disease that will exist for as long as the sport itself does.
No longer can you watch a football game without taking a political stance. Greg Hardy threw his girlfriend onto a pile of guns and lined up for the Cowboys that next season. Ex & current football players alike commit suicide what seems like yearly due to the effects of CTE. And don’t even get me started with the kneeling, the national anthem, and President Trump.
Sports are supposed to be an escape from the real world, but instead, the NFL has become a boiling plate for all of the real world issues we were trying to escape in the first place. These days, every time we turn on the NFL — instead of being able to simply zone out, have a beer, and watch Julio Jones hang 200 yards on the Bucs — we’re being confronted and bombarded with political, social, and societal issues.
Whether it be alienating the African American community with their preposterous anthem protest policy, offending regular, decent people for employing the likes of Greg Hardy, or terrifying mothers with the potentially devastating, life-ending effects that CTE could have on their sons, the NFL is not long for this world and will likely cease to exist as we know it by the time our kids are our age.
