Big-time football has problems beyond "kneeling"

A Star Tribune columnist outside the sports department has wondered if our new Vikings stadium was justified. He cited the expense. His main concern is that we may have put up this obscenely elaborate facility for a sport "that may be losing its cultural relevance."
Initially it seems like a long shot - I mean, to suggest that football could become like Goliath and fall to the ground. We feel some natural skepticism about the columnist's point. Our cultural habits tend to be very strongly ingrained. Now I have to wonder. The columnist's point may finally be bearing fruit in terms of our behavior and orientation.
Can we shift our attention elsewhere on Sunday afternoons? The "conservative entertainment complex" - term coined by David Frum - would have us believe the anthem protests are alienating the public. It's ironic to think this is at work. The normal conservative position is to leave private business alone. People in the top echelons of government should not be hassling a private business.
We have a president who refers to the protesting NFL players as "sons of. . ." I don't want to finish typing it. Could you imagine George W. Bush using terminology like this from a podium? Trump seems to be leading the charge encouraging fans to turn away from the NFL. While this may be part of the mix afflicting the NFL, I do not feel it is a primary factor. It may be a quite distant factor.
Certain other factors are now catching up to the NFL, factors I sensed quite a while back. Troy Aikman was quoted about one: saturation. It is common for people my age to comment about the ubiquity of pro football compared to when we were young. "Monday Nigh Football" was once a huge deal because it gave us a little extra dose of football. "Monday Night Football" was an entertainment phenomenon for quite a long time. A movie was made about it.
I should probably add Division I college football to what I'm talking about here.
We yawn as we channel-surf and find all kinds of football from all sorts of places on TV. There is nothing wrong on the face of it, with having more selection of anything. The whole institution of big-time football should be worried some, though. Whistling past the graveyard?

Marketing 101
There is a well-known principle in entertainment that scarcity or the perception of scarcity is an important factor in determining the value of something. I was about 19 years old when some friends and I made the trip to the Twin Cities to see "The Exorcist" at the Gopher Theater. We went to these lengths because of perceived scarcity. Compare that to if the movie opened on screens all over the U.S. at the same time. We saw the movie because it seemed like a phenomenon. Johnny Carson told jokes about it. Watching the movie was supposed to be a very troubling experience. That notion was really just a product of all the hype and hoopla. I was not that impressed with the movie. I thought it was a garden variety horror movie. But the perceived scarcity in the early weeks of release made us feel certain it was a must-see. It was like a status symbol to be able to tell people we'd seen it at the time we did. Ah, marketing.
Pinch yourself and realize what's going on. The old NFL "blackouts," which grew controversial, reflected the model I'm talking about. Politicians felt they had to get involved there too. They harangued the NFL about how citizens had some sort of "right" to see the games. The tone went up a couple notches when the Washington D.C. Redskins got involved in the conversation. Remember George Allen and his "over the hill gang?" Billy Kilmer was their quarterback. He beat out Sonny Juergensen who was a darling of the sports broadcasting class, sort of a "good old boy" in their ranks. I remember Del Sarlette saying "The Redskins will only win if they have Billy Kilmer at quarterback." He was right.
Today the NFL has invaded Thursday night with results nothing like that Monday night phenomenon of many years ago. Thursday night football has seemed like "a bridge too far." We assume we can watch pro football from noon all the way through bedtime on Sunday. NBC has the Sunday night game. Monday night football has gone to ESPN, the network that has now become a whipping boy for that "conservative entertainment complex." Jemele Hill aroused ire among others.
We can easily yawn when we see any sort of football on TV as we channel-search. Channel 22 on Mediacom brings us high school football from Iowa!

Better entertainment options
Here's another factor I see: Our family has "cable TV" but whether you have that or satellite, you have such wide entertainment options. Of course, this has existed for some time. What seems different now is that the quality of entertainment over the whole spectrum is better. It's about time. The entertainment industry waited too long before developing products that can compete with live football. We have the "binge-watch" phenomenon for programs that are clearly just as "addicting" as football. They can make us forget about football.
Starting maybe five years ago, I found I'd watch some football mainly as a "default" choice. "Well, there's nothing better on." Football has had advantages, such as 1) it's live, 2) it has suspense, and 3) it has human interest elements. Fine. The entertainment industry can take a look at that, evaluate and come up with products to compete. This ought to be a given because of the commercial incentive. I do feel it is happening, and in the back rooms of the NFL offices, I do believe they're talking about this.
Entertainment products are famous for running their course. We the public have an attention span.
I read an analysis once that suggested a danger sign for football: the game has become over-managed, in the sense that "the element of chance is eliminated." That sounds like hyperbole. But I fully understood the point. I remember during the Bud Grant years with the Vikings, he called for a double-reverse play that had receiver Bob Grim getting the last handoff. Grim took off around end into a wide open field. The defense was clueless. Very unlikely for that to happen today. See the point?
I will risk sounding like a conspiracy theorist here, but indulge me and allow me to point out that we don't have boring Super Bowls anymore, not like when the Vikings played in them. Consider the Patriots' comeback against the Falcons last year. It seemed suspicious to me. I'm not saying a script was followed as in pro wrestling. But maybe there's an agreement between the coaches that if you get a lead of a certain number of points, play a certain type of defense that will increase the odds of the other team catching up. My theory isn't outlandish: I remember Dick Cullum of the Minneapolis Tribune theorizing this way after the first-ever Fiesta Bowl, a game that was suspiciously high-scoring (by the standards of the time). The Bowl was trying to get established and couldn't risk a boring game.
In the NFL's case, there is such a staggeringly high amount of money at work with advertising, it is essential to keep as many eyeballs as possible.
I refuse to be a lemming and go along with this entertainment. And I haven't even gotten to the biggest reason for turning away from big-time football. That of course is the revelations we are receiving constantly about the horrible health consequences for players of the sport. Years can pass before symptoms develop. Read a few of these horror stories like for the late Fred McNeill of the Vikings, and your outlook on football will be moved.
So all in all, we need to take a very hard look at this "addicting" pastime of watching football, show some intelligence and shift away from it. This includes college football and even high school.

Football in regional newspaper
Now that I have broached high school football, I'm wondering: has our local MACA football team vanished from the West Central Tribune? It wouldn't bother me if it has. The Osakis game didn't show up there at all: a win. I theorized that maybe the halftime ceremony for Homecoming went so long, the game went too late for the coaching staff to call in. But then the BOLD game didn't get in either. Of course we lost that game badly. The coach should not not develop a pattern of calling in just after wins. What would the paper think or do? That's an interesting question because I don't think the Willmar paper has any power to make coaches do anything. It's strictly an honor system. The newspaper probably has to grovel at their feet.
I have been waiting for coaches to take a skeptical look at this practice of calling in sports news. It must be a source of stress for them at the end of a long day. If several were to simply stop doing this, would it be like a house of cards coming down? I suspect an athletic director has no power to direct a coach on this. The West Central Tribune is a private business. The coaches have no contractual obligation. They risk having parents complain if there's an alleged misreporting of information, which believe me does happen.
So we'll see. I have advocated a long time for schools putting sports news on their own web pages.
 
Addendum: What in God's name did Bill O'Reilly do to Lis Weihl, in order to get him obligated to pay her $32 million to get rid of a sexual harassment suit? What in God's name? I'm sure it's not the kind of thing I could describe on a family blog.
 
- Brian Williams - morris mn minnesota - bwilly73@yahoo.com