Men's Journal

So what if pro football is nearly flawless? There’s always room for improvement. Here, free advice from an NFL fan on what he’d love to see from the upstart UFL.

by Matt Taibbi

The United Football League (UFL) is coming!!!
Created to fulfill the unmet needs of football fans in major markets currently underserved by professional football…. The UFL will provide every fan with an affordable, accessible, exciting and entertaining professional football experince [sic]!
—From the website of the United Football League, a new league scheduled to start play next year

So the UFL is coming to “fulfill the unmet needs of football fans in major markets.” What unmet needs would those be?

Is it too much to hope that the inaugural halftime show at the opening game between the Hartford Assdragons and the Orlando Mesothelioma will feature the long-overdue throwing of Dennis Miller into a shark tank? Borrow the best ideas of the XFL and attach helmet-cams to the sharks! Train them to attack at the first too-long joke about Chad Pennington involving a Titus Andronicus reference. What could be better?

I have dim hopes for the UFL, the six-team competitor to the NFL slated to begin play on Friday nights next fall. It seems to me that the “experince” we’re in for is watching franchisee-in-waiting Mark Cuban and his pals hemorrhage money for many painful years in a desperate attempt to greenmail the NFL into absorbing six new franchises in dubious locales.

But as this season is proving, the NFL experience still has a few rough edges. The game itself is just about perfect, and the league is so consistently entertaining and so brilliantly organized that even born-to-lose yutzes like Bengals owner Mike Brown have a hard time not making piles of money. It’s the giant marketing apparatus around it that has drifted into too many irrelevant or absurd directions; there are too many non-football people sticking their fingers into the pie.

So it seems there are a few itches to scratch after all, and the new league could do so easily enough if it did just four simple things.

1) Say no to China.

One of the key aspects of the NFL’s appeal is its status as a last bastion of unreconstructed patriotic male stupidity in America. The league is a place where the American male can, without fear of incurring societal scorn, wear a rubber dog mask in public, drink gigantic quantities of really shitty beer, stare unrelentingly at the camel toes of teenage cheerleaders named Mindy, and listen keenly to the idiot advice of neckless hormone freaks like Mark Schlereth. The American male is also invited to sink into a controversy-free fascist daydream in which players must obey the coach or die, and the only authority above the commissioner is the president of the United States, who, as it happens in this fantasy, is the absolute ruler of the Earth and the author of the only three books ever written: the Bible, the NFL Digest of Rules, and North Dallas Forty.

The NFL has always pushed Obedience and Patriotism as the twin pillars of its entertainment fantasy, and there isn’t a true fan alive who doesn’t love seeing some sweat-drenched rookie cornerback out of Georgia stammer out some clearly agent-composed soliloquy about “supporting 100 percent of what the troops are doing over there” when clearly “over there” might be the University of Alabama–Birmingham or the moon, as far as the poor kid knows.

It was maybe a little much when they showed films of Jack Kemp, Don Shula, Bill Cowher, and Emmitt Smith reciting the Declaration of Independence before the Super Bowl that one year — among other things, Cowher’s sneer made the Declaration sound like some stalker’s threatening phone message — but on the whole the always-explicit tie between the NFL and dumb American nationalism is one of its more endearing qualities. And that’s going to go to shit if the league follows through with its threats to expand to China. The most notorious steps in that direction have come, ironically, from the Patriots, who actually put out a team website in Chinese and tried to arrange an exhibition game in China.

Let the NBA — so shamelessly promiscuous in its business relationships, it’s the sports version of Goldman Sachs — become the symbol of bloodless international capitalism if it likes. Football and China just do not go together. It’d be like trying to mate a moose and a tree sloth. Can you imagine the league trying to explain Al Davis to the National People’s Congress? I envision nightmarish international incidents: Kyle Turley hurling the iPhone girl through a bar window, Bill Parcells calling Wen Jiabao a “little yellow guy,” and so on. We need that why, again?

One would think that of all the businesses that might buck the China-expansion trend in the name of free speech, the vote, and other would-be American ideals, it’d be the meat-eating patriots of the NFL. But since they seem to be giving in, the onus for resistance might fall on the UFL, which could shame the old league just by being satisfied with the domestic fan base. Maybe Mark Cuban will be the first businessman in America to not listen to the inevitable Wharton-educated consultant whispering in his ear about the “staggering promise” of China and its “1 billion potential T-shirt customers.”

2) Ban ringmaster agents.

The UFL should use its formation as a golden opportunity to write a bylaw into its coverage agreement with its broadcast partners:

Section 7-BB, Article 14: Even if a wide receiver’s agent stays up all night concocting a brilliant publicity stunt while bumping rails with strippers, ESPN is still not automatically obligated to send a camera crew to said wide receiver’s house the next day to film the agent’s “great win-win PR idea.”

No longer will the networks have to keep a phone line open at four in the morning every night so that someone can be there when Drew Rosenhaus calls and says, “Listen, I’m calling you guys first, so you’re going to owe me for this. But tomorrow afternoon I’m going to get T.O. to fuck a mandrill in his backyard. You’ll want to have a crew there.”

And because no one will be taking that call, no one will have to ask: “Uh, why is T.O. going to fuck a mandrill?” Or wait around for the inevitable answer: “Because he’s unhappy about his contract. And he’s making a statement about racism.”

If the UFL acts quickly, it can head off this stuff before it gets started. The NFL should have acted long ago to decertify agents who turn their clients into buffoons for self-serving reasons.

3) Give know-it-all “experts” like Gregg Easterbrook coaching jobs and see how they hold up on the field.

For a real football fan almost nothing is more irritating than waking up and scanning the columns of staggering asshole/occasional sportswriter/Brookings Institution fellow Gregg Easterbrook for the inevitable “After watching 40 minutes of my son’s high school football game last weekend, I have some really good play-calling ideas for Bill Belichick” quote. The self-styled “Tuesday Morning Quarterback,” whose column is notable mainly for its mind-blowing eight-figure word counts and not-rare-enough digressions into scientific/political minutiae of the “Let me impress you with the breadth of my knowledge through a 390-word tangent about prehistoric Paleo-Indian reed-boat voyages” variety, can be counted on at least once every two weeks to rip NFL coaches for not following his brilliant ideas about things like punting on fourth-and-short (TMQ considers this cowardly!) and throwing wide flare passes (TMQ believes passes should be thrown on the “imaginary line” between the quarterback and “where the center snapped the ball”).

TMQ also thinks tailbacks shouldn’t look left and right but straight ahead at all times (he points out: Adrian Peterson doesn’t do that!), and that many NFL quarterbacks don’t realize that “winning teams” throw to the tight end a lot and therefore too often ignore the underneath pass to the big fellas (TMQ thinks this is because quarterbacks in practice get addicted to the applause that comes after completing long bombs to wideouts). TMQ even used the experience of seeing his son’s team score 35 points in a half using a spread formation to expound upon a theory of NFL offense in which teams are either “pass-wacky” (i.e., the Patriots) or “balanced” (i.e., the Giants).

His thesis: The 2007 Patriots scored the most points of all time, so “pass-wacky” offenses work, but the Giants won the Super Bowl, so “pass-wacky” offenses also don’t work. Any minute now Easterbrook is going to write a detailed analysis of a Jags-Colts game in which he concludes that Maurice Jones-Drew runs more effectively when the Jaguar linemen block. Somebody call Jack Del Rio, quick!

A “guest coaching” gimmick in the UFL could allow us to see people like Easterbrook (or maybe a similarly outrageous backseat driver–type like Skip Bayless, who once called Tom Coughlin’s decision to play his Giants starters against the Pats in week 17 last year the worst pre-playoff coaching decision ever made) pitted against people who actually know what the fuck they’re talking about. Wouldn’t it be a blast to give Easterbrook a chance to coach an actual pro football team against some longtime pro like Bill Callahan or Mooch Mariucci? Just hand over the Orlando franchise to him for a couple of weeks so we can watch his quarterbacks trying to throw in straight lines, and his tailbacks trying to run without looking right or left while 300-pound linemen sent by the opposing real coach on inside stunts run straight ahead, not worrying about passing lines or peripheral glances, and knock the eyes out of his players’ heads.

4) Open the jails.

The UFL is planning on making a big play for Michael Vick once he gets out of jail on dogfighting charges, which is a great start but doesn’t go nearly far enough. If the new league wants to build around football’s most famous criminal talent, it might as well go all the way and bring all the real football criminals back. Arrange furlough deals for people like former Dolphins running back Cecil “the Diesel” Collins (doing 15 years for breaking into a home to watch a woman sleep) and former number-six overall pick Lawrence Phillips (busted a few years ago for trying to run over three teenagers with a car in a Los Angeles park). Bring back Todd Marinovich, last seen being arrested for meth possession after trying to hide from police in a Newport Beach carport. Put them on the field, hand them big game checks, and then follow them with cameras as they try to make it through each of the six long days until the next game without, say, hitting women with bricks or driving pickup trucks into old-folks homes.

If there’s one problem with the NFL, it’s the see-no-evil attitude of the commissioner’s office toward the nearly daily appearance of NFL players on the pages of local crime blotters. The league slaps the bad apples on the wrist here and there, hands out a suspension or two, and then tries to market clean-cut pray-to-Jesus types like Shaun Alexander and LaDainian Tomlinson as the “faces of the league.” It then quietly lets serial offenders like Chris Henry and Adam “Don’t Call Me Pacman” Jones back on the field after short absences even while bristling at any suggestion that the league is a haven for wife-beating badasses and drug addicts. Witness the mass front-office freakout inspired by the darkish ESPN series Playmakers.
The rank hypocrisy of the NFL is part of what makes that league great. The marketing of savage violence as wholesome American entertainment provides an immensely satisfying comic undertone. But if the UFL is serious about meeting our “unmet needs,” it should be honest about the off-field reality of pro football. Since it probably won’t survive anyway, it might as well use its short time on Earth to document the dark underbelly we all know is there. It should show its players starting fights in strip-club parking lots and buying trash bags full of weed. It should show them jacking themselves full of nandrolone in training rooms before games. It should take us inside that prosecution for $178,000 in overdue child-support payments. Then maybe we won’t have to hear about ancient reed-boat voyages in between UFL game reports.

This article originally appeared in the November 2008 issue of Men’s Journal.