Townhall:
Victor Davis Hanson: The National Football League celebrated its 100th anniversary last year. This should be a time of self-congratulation for the brutal sport, which has no similar counterpart outside the United States.
The NFL’s megaprofits dwarf those of other professional sports in the U.S. The Super Bowl, not the World Series, is America’s national sports event.
The league has survived all sorts of crises in the past. It was one of the first professional sports to integrate its teams, doing so in the 1920s. But the integration unfortunately ceased, and the NFL didn’t reintegrate until the mid-’40s, becoming one of the last sports leagues to embrace fully a racially-blind meritocracy.
The NFL successfully absorbed the rival American Football League in 1966. So far, the NFL has avoided federal safety regulations that could curb the incidence of physical trauma inherent in the sport.
The league’s owners are a cross-section of America’s most successful entrepreneurs and old-money families — many of them politically well-connected.
Yet the NFL is in deep trouble like never before.
In 2016, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for the national anthem. He claimed he was protesting the treatment of African Americans.
Kaepernick was an odd revolutionary. His mother is white, his father is an African American of Ghanaian-Nigerian ancestry, and he was raised by a middle-class white couple. Kaepernick’s only prior controversy was being accused by another player of using the N-word. He denied it but was still fined by the league. read more
lol, just finished reading this a few minutes ago
& VDH is spot on … as usual
” … millions of Americans will quietly shrug and change the channel.”
I don’t change the channel because I’m not there in the first place …
been through since ’17 … sad, really … was a fan since Johnny U & the Baltimore Colts
Blacks can’t swim. They sink.🥴
Oh please, I stuck a fork in the NFL the second those spoiled brats decided to kneel. When the PTB of the NFL decided to ignore their own rules in favor of woke virtue-signaling and support an anti-american stance backed by virtue-signaling millionaire players crying about all the oppression THEY suffer it solidified the FACT that I and millions of other former fans will NEVER watch them again or spend one thin dime on ANY of their merchandise and look forward to them moving to another country because that is the direction Goosmell is taking them and is why he demanded a brand new G5 for his very own in his latest contract and is currently butt-kissing countries that hate america.
I prefer the LFL, stadium football, canadian football, and vinnie-mac’s new version of football to the dead-to-me NFL.
Besides the LFL has some really hot babes that play the sport better than the spoiled brats in the NFL ever did. check them out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxK-AguBHAQ
Do kids ( Elementary school, Jr. High) even care about football now?
I can remember being in 5th grade and boys wearing football jerseys or hats or carrying around notebooks with team logos on them. They were so into it, you’d swear you were in a bar and they were knocking back beers instead of pints of milk. 🤣 And the girls were like- Oh the Cowboys are sooo cuuuute! lol. And nobody gave a shit about the cheerleaders then either.
Death by a thousand cuts, and well deserved.
Ghetto b.s. kills everything except rap music. Though it did kill music.
It’s amazing to watch an industry kill itself, all in the name of proving a point that is totally irrelevant and even contrived for political purposes – again, totally irrelevant to the sport.
The downside to COVID and kneeling Communists killing the NFL is that all the bills are still due on the publicly-funded stadiums around the U.S. Don’t know what to do about THAT. Oh, I know! Congressional bailouts!
@MJA ~ same w/ baseball … I do see the youth leagues in my county still playing football, but there is very little baseball … there are 2 little league teams in the county, but that’s it … no one plays on the baseball & softball fields anymore … only @ school
back in the day (up to the ’90’s) it was hard to schedule field time … now, they’re all abandoned
another observation: I never see a sandlot baseball, football game anymore. they are only played under ‘organized’ conditions … back in the day (again) we played one of those sports practically every day (when we weren’t on an organized team for game or practice), after homework, interspersed w/ basketball, lacrosse & a little hockey when the lake froze over
Hmm. Should I comment on this?
No.
It’s a matter of public record.
Now, if we were sitting on my patio with a bottle of bourbon…. shit be fly in’ on NFL.BLM mutha ingrates and their idiot league. Or what was once their league but has been turned into another smoldering and looted inner city.
Yawn
@MJA –
I remember in the 7th grade getting my Junior High’s football jersey with my high school graduation year – 75 – on it. I proudly wore that jersey to school, whereupon my effete, (yes, gay even), snarky Latin teacher asked me, “what’s that number Mr. Stirrin, your IQ?
It was actually pretty funny, but as it turned out it ended up being my grade average for his class. Brittania est insula is all I remember from Latin – that and a whole lot of vocabulary and grammar.
The National Wokeball League will dissolve into the solvent of SJW’s virtue signaling, never to solidify into anything remotely entertaining again. Good riddance you ungrateful, spoiled, manipulated puppets.
Tinfoil hat on:
It’s my belief that this attack on American sports is all part of a Eurof*g Soccer Coup. Call me kooky but if you think about it, soccer is a global sport.
Tinfoil hat off.
You still have some pretty decent players that are not yet retired that have great fan followings.
The NFL will have a serious drop off when Brady retires and the Belichik rivalry evaporates.
Guys like Russell Wilson & Mahomes will still draw crowds, but there are a huge number of whiners that people get tired of listening to.
Ultimately however, they will do much better than most other sports.
It is still better than reality TV, drag queens on every channel, & CNN, MSNBC …
@stirring.
You know Latin?
I once had a woman who said something in Latin to me. Can you translate?
‘Su bologna est disappointium’.
I think it was a compliment.
How easy it would been to put a stop this when old Pat first hit the deck. You would think they would learn? Don’t count on it. They won’t learn until it’s to late and they can’t make the big bucks, but demand it anyway. Then as someone posted before demand a bailout.
PHenry – re-read my post. “Britain is an island” is all I remember – LOL!
But if I were to take a WAG, your woman was, shall we say, a little disappointed at what she got at the deli counter. 😉
Didn’t Vince McMahon start a league? Let him fill the void.
The utter stupidity of letting a bench-warming, half-wit like Colon destroy your league is breathtaking. Should have suspended the idiot right off and none of this garbage would have happened. Amusing that the NFL thinks that the woke crowd will save them since the libtards were trying to shut them down due to concussions right before this nonsense happened. Goodbye to bad rubbish, this goes for the NBA and probably MLB as well. Putting politics into sports is a loser, period.
THE NFL IS NOT VERY SMART.
LIBERALS HATE THEM, THERE WILL NOT BE AN END UNTIL IT IS NO MORE.
THEY ARE SO STUPID, THEY HATE THESES BIG MACHO TESTOSTERONE FILLED MEN KNOCKING EACH OTHER ALL OVER FOR MILLIONS OF DOLLARS A YEAR.
THEY BOWED DOWN TO THE FOLKS WHO WILL DESTROY THEM, JUST FOR ADVERTISERS MONEY.
JIMMY NAILED IT !!!
The NFL greased local politicians
for tax slave $$$ to build their
multi M$ stadiums that made the NFL billions & billions.
Then it cost tax slave $350 for his family of 4 to attend game.
tickets,beer,hot dog,coke,parking,t-shirt,ETC.
don’t support blm/dindu/ebonics/felon/kneeler/nike ball, pointed or round
@BUTTHEADICUS – Jimmy has a nail gun!
The dumbest thing the NFL did was to hire and keep hiring Goodell.
He’s a limousine liberal. He’s probably phoning it in from his summer mansion here in Maine, next door to bad singer Taylor Swift.
Hanson, like many of us here have done points out the players’ hypocrisy. They don’t really want to earn ownership or coaching positions, they want to be handed them. They aren’t interested in equality. They no longer seem to put team and winning at or near the top of their goals.
The NFL is lost.
@ cslamer JULY 17, 2020 AT 9:42 PM – thanks to BFH i learned to play those videos at half speed
The MFL needs a Colin-Oscopy!
Not Football, Leisure.
So what happens if a White or Brown player kneels during…..
“Lift Every Voice and Sing” ……..?
Bye bye Niffle.