My Year Without the NFL

by Duane N. Burghard
©2015


As almost everyone on the planet knows, Superbowl 49 was this past weekend. The game marked the official end to the 2014 NFL season. What is substantially less known is that I watched less football this past season than I have at any time since I was 12 years old, and this week's essay is all about why.

For my entire adult life, I had been a rabid football fan. I always remember enjoying the game, but I became a BIG fan in high school, and by the time I graduated from college I was hooked. My wife will tell you that the one warning I gave her about marrying me was, "I don't drink, I don't smoke, I don't do drugs, I don't stay out late ... I watch football."

So what happened? Two things. First, the scandals, controversies and problems of the NFL finally became just too big and too bad to ignore. And second, I found a better sport.

The words scandal and NFL are hardly new companions (there are literally so many that there are entire websites dedicated to merely listing them). The NFL has a long and sad history of having its players involved in all kinds of criminal activities. From drug abuse to dog fighting to rape and murder, the league has consistently demonstrated a staggering either unwillingness or inability to get a grip on and control the behavior of its players. So why did I boycott now? What took me over the edge this past year? Well, it's difficult to identify one particular "last straw" that made me say, "that's it, no more, I'm done" to my lifelong favorite sport, but I can tell you how it started and which ones led me to impose my ban.

Over the last several years, the number of NFL players committing suicide (particularly high profile players like Dave Duerson and Junior Seau) has escalated, and there is evidence that many of these players were suffering from traumatic brain injuries (which is easy to understand given the frequency of the high speed, high energy collisions they have with other players). In late 2013, the PBS series Frontline aired a documentary called "League of Denial," in which it exposed an extensive, detailed and intentional coverup on the part of the league. According to the film, the league had significant knowledge regarding the causal link between play in the NFL and the serious medical issues being faced by these players years later (and, far worse, was intentionally hiding that information). That was a last straw, not because it was any revelation to me or anyone else that football is an incredibly violent game, but because the league knew about this particularly horrific side effect for a LONG time and chose to intentionally hide that information.

And then there was Ray Rice. Sadly, sexual assault and the NFL are also hardly new to each other, but two things about the Rice situation bothered me far more than any other scandal. First, the severity of the initial punishment was to suspend Rice for a couple of weeks. When quarterback Michael Vick was found to be involved in a dog fighting ring, he was suspended indefinitely (that suspension was eventually lifted and a couple of years later, Vick returned). When Ray Rice beat his then fiancé unconscious, he was initially suspended by the NFL for TWO GAMES. The message to me, a father with daughters, was clear; the NFL thinks more of dogs than it does of women. Secondly, it later became clear that the NFL had once again lied and attempted to cover up the truth regarding details of the Rice case (specifically that they knew far more about it than they had initially indicated and had seen detailed video of the incident before they said they did).

Now the truth is that I'm not a big political activist (yes, I did run for Congress, twice in fact, but I don't have any great history of taking part in boycotts etc.), but I am a believer in putting your money where your mouth is, and as an NFL Sunday Ticket holder on DirecTV, there was no question that I was spending money that was going directly to a group of people who I felt were behaving in a reprehensible way, and if I continued to give them my money, then the clear economic message I was sending was that this sort of behavior was acceptable, and that was NOT a message I could tolerate any more. There comes a point where you realize that you're participating in a system that is rewarding behaviors and actions that you find untenable. In years past I'd been able to hold my nose and look away because I enjoyed watching the sport so much, but each time I looked at it now I saw myself as a participant and contributor, and I couldn't do it. So I called DirecTV and I canceled my Sunday Ticket and, even though they couldn't care less and don't track the data on why people cancel, I told them why anyway. And I stopped watching. For the first time since I was 12 years old, I went through the entire pre-season and the first 8 weeks of the regular season without watching a single moment of a single game (even on network TV).

But halfway through the season I told myself that I was being ridiculous, that I was taking it too far. I'd canceled the Ticket, I wasn't giving them money any more, I'd made my statement, what harm could there be in watching part of a game. So I tried. I watched about 5 minutes of a game ... and then I changed the channel. The spell was broken. Everything I saw now seemed to be symptomatic or seemed to be an example of a cultural problem that needed to be addressed. Even the NFL's own acknowledgement of the problem of domestic violence in which it shows players and Hollywood stars near or in tears trying to start the discussion ... but unable to, seemed to me to be the perfect example of what was wrong (you need to SAY "it's not OK!" ... over and over, LOUDLY, and you need to severely punish the people who do it to create a strong enough disincentive to alter behavior).

I have since watched pieces of a few games, and I have kept up a little bit with the game through the news (apparently, as an avid fan of my beloved Chicago Bears, I couldn't have picked a better season to completely tune out ... and I have to say that I was amused and not at all surprised by "Deflate Gate"). I even watched part of the Superbowl (although, let's face it, most of us are watching it for the commercials now anyway), but clearly, my days as a rabid and die hard NFL fan are over.

I mentioned earlier that I had also found a better sport. Two years ago I was in my basement on a Saturday morning riding my exercise bike and, as I sometimes did, I turned on the TV and went surfing around to find something to watch while I peddled to nowhere. As we all know, one of the most frustrating things about cable and satellite TV is that we now have access to hundreds of channels of content, and yet we frequently can't find anything good to watch. Well, as I scrolled through screen after screen of channels, I stumbled on a sports channel I didn't recognize, and found myself watching a live rugby game between a team from South Africa and a team from New Zealand. I was extremely cooled out by the fact that I was watching a live sporting event on the other side of the planet (I love stuff like that, it makes me feel like I'm actually living in the 21st Century), but more than that, I found the game genuinely interesting. As I watched, I learned that there was an entire league called Super Rugby with teams from South Africa, New Zealand and Australia. The game was not unlike football in that it was full of fast action, very physical play and some pretty violent collisions, but with no helmets or padding there's a limit to how hard you can hit someone without doing serious damage to yourself (thus there are concussions etc., which their league takes a LOT more seriously, but there are fewer major injuries). In any case, a number of players would end up bleeding from the head at some point during the game (which, after watching for a few weeks, I suspected was a criteria for being interviewed afterwards). As I watched the game (and subsequent games) though, I began to see some interesting differences as well. The first was the level of respect that the players exhibited towards the officials. There are no overt disagreements, and when the referee feels the players are misbehaving, he calls the captain of the team and warns him, and invariably whatever minor issue is going on, stops immediately. During instant replays, viewers get to hear the conversation between the official (whose microphone is always on) and the replay official. The interviews after the game were also fascinating. It was quickly obvious that it is culturally expected that the winners of the game be gracious and magnanimous. They always have something positive to say about their opponents. Every now and then we see this in American sports too, but here it's sadly unusual, there it's literally expected every time (the losers are also usually very complimentary and gracious in losing).

The end result is that I don't really miss the NFL. I found another sports league, one with a game that's also enjoyable to watch and doesn't come with the moral issues that the NFL has allowed to infect and tarnish its image.

The Super Rugby season starts on DirecTV channels 489 and 490 next weekend (Feb 12) and runs well into the summer. And when it finishes, DirecTV also carries the Currie Cup and ITM Cup Rugby league games (which are the intra-national leagues of South Africa and New Zealand respectively) through October. Check it out.