Men's Journal

Matt Taibbi Photo credit: Illustrations by Victor Juhasz

For one thing, there’d be no more of these keep-your-hands-off-the-receiver, high-octane-offense, no-lead-is-safe mockeries of a football game. Oh, and fewer talking-baby ads. 

By Matt Taibbi

Three years into the reign of NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, here is what we can say about the record of America’s second most important chief executive: nothing. Goodell is so boring that ESPN has to use special cameras just to capture the light he faintly displaces in space; in his press conferences he looks like a little piece of blond fuzz hovering tumbleweed-like above the lectern. There is not a single person alive who can remember anything Goodell has ever said, except maybe Pacman Jones, and even he only remembered that thing about trying not to get arrested anymore for a few weeks.

Goodell’s major contribution to the nation’s most popular sport has been to expand the league’s personal conduct policy, using the pulpit of the commissioner’s office to hand out slightly longer suspensions than we’re used to for players committing serious crimes. While his predecessor, Paul Tagliabue, was only willing to suspend a player (Leonard Little) eight games for killing an actual human being, Goodell showed guts by suspending Jones for a whole year after his involvement in a shooting that merely left a man paralyzed. That’s basically the major policy change in the NFL over the past 10 years. 

The game otherwise is essentially unchanged, which is too bad, because it could use a wrinkle or two; the pleasure we get from the league has started to feel mechanical and insincere, like a weekly front-seat hummer from a rest-stop prostitute. While it’s true that the NFL’s popularity is at an all-time high, a lot of that has to do with the fact that Americans have no lives and will watch pretty much anything, even Howie Do It or The Real Housewives of New Jersey. If the NFL weren’t a bastion of extreme reactionary conservatism even more violently change averse than, say, the John Birch Society or the pharaonic dynasties, it would recognize that there are problems with the game that could use fixing. Here are some simple changes it should make but almost certainly never will:

ADD A SECOND LEAGUE. Football should build a two-tiered system like the British soccer leagues, and in this case bounce the crappiest first-league team every five or 10 years and replace it with the best second-league team. This system would quickly ferret out plainly incompetent owners like the Bengals’ Mike Brown and give any market with a 50,000-seat stadium and a decent set of investors a chance to earn its way into the NFL, instead of relying on the hideously unfair, secretive, subterranean expansion system that gives overgrown bus stations like Jacksonville and Charlotte new teams while the nation’s second largest market, Los Angeles, suffers through UCLA games. Unfortunately the current owners would never agree to this system, as it would make it much harder for assholes like Brown to ransom desperate fan bases for public stadium money by threatening to move — and also puncture the socialist paradise of antitrust protection and guaranteed TV revenue, forcing the league to operate like a genuine meritocracy instead of a very expensive welfare program for Detroit Lions executives.

IMPOSE A WEIGHT LIMIT. It would be one thing if watching all these 320-pound guys run into each other at full speed were nature meeting nature, a sports wonder of the world. But it’s not: It’s a whole bunch of 260- and 270-pound guys who spend their off-seasons mainlining chocolate pudding, cheeseburgers, and Stanozolol because their position coaches told them they had to make weight or hit the waiver wire. While fans can’t be expected to care about all these lab-fattened players getting sleep apnea, high blood pressure, musculoskeletal problems, and enlarged hearts (that was what killed former Charger lineman Chris Mims, who was 38 and 456 pounds when he died shortly after retiring), they should at least theoretically care about all the time lost to on-field injuries thanks to the extra weight. In whose interest is it, really, to stack 50 or 60 unnecessary pounds on some poor dumb kid from Nebraska or Alabama just so that he can fall on Peyton Manning or Tom Brady, break the starting quarterback’s kneecap, and torpedo the league’s ratings for the year? Not that the genuinely fearsome ass size of players like Grady Jackson isn’t itself a worthwhile attraction, but the NFL wouldn’t lose much with a 300-pound weight limit. And while it wouldn’t end steroid use, it would give us a game that was faster, more athletic, and less likely to feature clashes of limping third-stringers by week 11. 

SUSPEND THE RIGHT GUYS. Pittsburgh Steelers linebacker James Harrison hit his girlfriend in the face because she refused to baptize their child, but he wasn’t suspended. (“He was doing something that was good,” said the Steelers owner, referring to Harrison’s motive.) Meanwhile Jets safety Eric Smith had to sit out a game for accidentally breaking star receiver Anquan Boldin’s jaw in an end-zone collision. It’s great that the league has started to market pink, glittery, tapered Reebok jerseys, but if it wants more female fans, it might want to, you know, actually ban wife beating. Just a thought.

SOFTEN THE CHUCK RULE. Here is a haiku that succinctly explains the problem with the current rules: 
Corners are helpless 
Arena football is gay 
Bring back pass defense 
Thanks to the defensive holding rules, the league has made passing so easy that Sage Rosenfels looks like Dan Marino. I get that league ratings took off in the late ’70s after the NFL legislated the end of the Steelers dynasty with the so-called “Mel Blount rule,” which prevented corners from touching the apparently brittle wideout ballerinas after five yards. I get that scoring soared each time the league overreacted to successful defensive teams and tightened the five-yard chuck rule, first in the early ’90s (after the Giants’ Super Bowl upset of sexy, high-powered Buffalo) and then again in 2004 (after the Patriots mugged Marvin Harrison and the Colts). But it’s reached the level of absurdity. No lead is safe. The 1985 Bears and their meanest-ever defense would have been 11-5 last year. Add in the fact that offensive tackles are allowed to hold on virtually every play, and you have a game that’s more and more like basketball every year. Football should be like watching a slow, painful death, and not in the “I’ve had to watch 500 Subway five-dollar footlong commercials in three hours” sense of slow, painful death, but real, terrifying, on-field death.

ESTABLISH NEW RULES FOR SPONSORS. The Soviets used to chain political prisoners to big logs and then roll the logs down long flights of marble steps. Likewise, the guy who created the E*Trade baby ads should be lashed to a knotty redwood and rolled down the steps of the Chichén Itzá pyramid. No more talking-animal or talking-infant commercials during NFL broadcasts. It has to stop.

INTRODUCE NCAA END-ZONE RULES. If a guy can catch a ball, hold on to it while getting hit, and get one foot down in the end zone, it should be a touchdown. In fact, one foot in should be good enough anywhere on the field. On the flip side, the league has to change the defensive pass-interference penalty from a spot-of-the-foul infraction to 15 yards. There are way too many offensively challenged teams whose coaches openly beg for long PI penalties, the worst being the Vikings’ Brad Childress and his “Please, my job is at stake here!” three-down strategy: Adrian Peterson left, Adrian Peterson right, have Tarvaris Jackson overthrow a bomb to a stone-handed receiver who falls into the cornerback. Teams should be rewarded for catching the ball and penalized for flopping, not the other way around. On a related topic, has anyone ever seen Childress and former Simon & Simon costar Gerald McRaney in the same room? 

LET PLAYERS SMOKE WEED. The league suspended Patriot running back Kevin Faulk a game for getting baked at a Lil Wayne concert and sent peaceful treehead Ricky Williams into a full-year exile. If the NFL really wants to see fewer off-field violence arrests, it should be a little more liberal in its pot policy: Players who drink alcohol tend to punch police horses and drive Escalades into retirement homes; players who smoke stay home, watch old Star Trek episodes, and drool on their shag carpets. The math isn’t too tough here.

DO SOMETHING ABOUT PETER KING. It’s not really the commissioner’s job, but someone needs to break the news to this poor fucker that nobody wants to hear what he thinks about the relative merits of the different types of lattes on the Starbucks menu, or what bland-as-fuck PG-rated movie he watched on his laptop the last time he rode on the Acela. It’s time for an intervention. 

BEEF UP THE FACE-MASK PENALTY. Ever since Dennis Miller (may Allah strike him dead) left the booth of Monday Night Football, the worst thing about the NFL is the about-once-per-game paralysis lottery ritual: The crowd sits hushed after a big hit while the cameras zoom in on the leveled player’s hands, waiting for signs of movement in the extremities. Minutes pass and you start having terrible thoughts like, “He’ll never be able to wield his own unregistered handgun again!” And yet…while all face-mask infractions are 15-yard penalties now, players still gun for the head way too often. The best way to stiffen the deterrent is to add a loss of either a time-out or a replay challenge, because I guarantee if you make the coach suffer, the player will suffer 10 times as much later on. 

CHAIN BRETT FAVRE TO A ROCK IN THE MIDDLE OF THE INDIAN OCEAN, WHERE HE CAN SPEND THE NEXT 30 YEARS GETTING HIS LIVER SLOWLY PECKED AWAY BY HUNGRY SEA BIRDS. Self-explanatory. 

IMPOSE A ROOKIE PAY SCALE. Matthew Stafford makes more than Tom Brady. Nobody on the Lions should make more than Tom Brady, least of all a rookie. The league is already desperate to rein in rookie salaries, but the union is balking, and the owners will likely fold on this in order to get the next collective bargaining agreement passed — a major mistake, since rookie contracts are killing the NFL. Virtually every single one of the league’s struggling franchises owes its failures to an eight-figure bonus paid to a top-five draft bust sometime in the past 10 years, usually a quarterback. There hasn’t been real football in the Bay Area for half a decade because of two of those guys, Alex Smith and JaMarcus Russell. The system basically eliminates free agency for bad teams, since they need to reserve 60 to 70 percent of their cap room for some overmatched 20-year-old campus rapist whose pro career will generally be considered a success if he isn’t insane from the pressure or wrapping Porsches around telephone poles by his third season. Watch and see if Mark Sanchez isn’t sobbing on Oprah and writing memoirs about his struggles with glue addiction and autoerotic asphyxiation five years from now. Not that it isn’t funny for the rest of us, but it sucks for the league. 

—-

This article originally appeared in the September 2009 issue of Men’s Journal

Print this article