Money Talks: The NFL’s Mystery Motive
After a freakishly coincidental Week 6 served as the setting for helmet-to-helmet tackles that sidelined wide-outs DeSean Jackson, Joshua Cribbs, and Mohammed Massaquoi, National Football League officials stated that they would begin to impose harsher fines for the illegal hits and may even go as far as issuing suspensions to the penalized defensive players.
Wait, what?! Are these the same NFL officials that are so adamantly pushing for an 18-game regular season? This can’t be right. These people want to arguably shorten the average NFL career, which is already a miniscule 3.3 years, according to the NFL Players’ Association, but they care enough about the well-being of ball carriers to eject defensive stars who are hitting too hard? That would be like NBA referees presenting players with technical fouls because of grimacing after a missed shot or smirking in order to refrain from cursing… Oh, right… That’s actually happening, too.
Let’s be honest, the day that football becomes something other than the sport that is so beloved in the United States currently, most people will likely either get rid of their televisions or start watching the PBA (Professional Bowling Association, since you probably have no idea what the PBA is) on ESPN on Sundays. It is hard to imagine football flourishing as America’s favorite sport without absolute monsters such as Ray Lewis and James Harrison delivering bone-jarring tackles to offensive skill players, and it’s not like Lewis and Harrison are the first of their kind. The game has always celebrated heavy hitters. Just as the Brian Dawkinses and Patrick Willises of today look to hurt opponents, Lawrence Taylor, “Mean” Joe Greene, and Chuck Cecil were some of the most feared defenders the NFL has ever witnessed. Why weren’t league administrators concerned with the health of ball carriers then?
And is it even a legitimate concern? The NFL is sacrificing the sanctity of the game of football, and potentially one of the most valuable products in the world, in order to save maybe a hand-full of players from getting dangerously injured. According to NeuroscienceNews.com, the chances of sustaining a severe head injury while playing football are 150,000-to-1. That means that one player for every 150 thousand that play yearly becomes catastrophically injured, which equals out to about 7 serious injuries per year between the high school, collegiate, and professional levels. These are the same odds at which a pregnant woman gives birth to identical triplets, or an average golfer shoots a 200-feet long hole-in-one. In fact, it is more likely that a person is struck by lightning and dies, at a probability of about 84,000-to-one.
Did the NFL get its wish, though, when Week 7 turned out to be the second highest scoring week in the league’s expansive history? Week 12 of the 2008 season saw over 800 points scored and is the only week during which the average combined score of both teams in its games was higher than 2010’s Week 7. This is no coincidence. The league sent teams a DVD, comparing examples of legal hits to illegal hits. However, no definitive rules were established. It was unclearly said that players could even be ejected mid-game for their malicious hits. No new regulations were implemented, and no specific advice was given. Because of this, defensive veterans looked like they had never played a down in their lives last Sunday. They knew that the slightest slip-up or incidental contact could cue an early exit to the showers. Not to take away from Darren McFadden’s tremendous performance, but the Denver Broncos defense looked as confused as Wade Phillips does when he… well… does anything.
The fact that “offense sells tickets, but defense wins championships” in the National Football League is old news. Among the NFL’s 25 top-selling jerseys, there are only three defensive players. The New Orleans Saints had the highest scoring offense in the league in 2009 and have sold the most merchandise of any franchise in the past year. It should come as no surprise that offensive firepower is such a high economic priority, but was this anecdote the motive behind the league’s ambiguous warning of defensive players to avoid malicious hits to the head? Maybe it was meant to be a vague explanation.
If so, there can only be one explanation: money. With the structure of the playoffs, someone is always going to win the Super Bowl, no matter how terrible the defense is. So why is it logical to have teams with good defenses, when every team in the league could score 50 points per week and more money would be made? This may sound a bit Marxist, but football is a business, and businesses are created to make as much money as possible.
It will certainly be interesting to see what sorts of statements the NFL will release and what the offensive stats look like during following weeks. This cannot last forever. Money talks, but money is not football, and fans know that.
