The NFL is just rage-farming from Refball, since institutional failure is highly marketable.
Refball is an NFL revenue stream in the attention economy. Or: how I learned to stop yelling games are rigged and just ROTFL when blown calls help the Dallas Cowboys and hurt the Detroit Lions.
The Detroit Lions and Dan Campbell were screwed without so much as a proffer of whether they would like the Jeter or the Piazza gift basket.1
And it’s not like the Lions, like my Minnesota Vikings, ever need help with their stepondickitis flaring. New Year’s Eve, after a Controversial Finish that benefited the Dallas Cowboys and hosed the Lions, is opportune to word-weave some strands in my miswired brain for some time. Consider it the toy department making a contribution to 2024, which needs to be the Year of Unapologetic Truth-Telling.
The first whelpful hint is that one has to watch the NFL like your team is a long-running TV series that cannot be canceled since it is profitable for the Corporation. It might have hit a level of creative bankruptcy equivalent to a 3-13-1 season, but whatever, you still look forward to it. That is the critical distancing that alleviates the guilt for spending a dozen or so hours a week mainlining this intoxicating sport that permanently dents the bodies and brains of the athletes.
Strand No. 2 is that any sports product that now requires a ‘rules expert’ on broadcasts probably needs to simplify — or so Big Minimalism would have you believe.
Thirdly is a realization check on whether people know it is not illegal for a sports league to rig the outcomes of its games. It is only bad for its cred when it is someone acting alone, and then the whistle must be blown on the whistle-blowers, as it were. Fourthly, in this attention-economy age, the NFL wants to keep people guessing on whether the games are on the level, and whether a ruling is conspiracy or sheer incompetence.
Within point one, some teams are soap operas. Some are midbrow prestige dramas that are ratings getters, even though you do not understand what anyone sees in them. The Dallas Cowboys, within that, are Grey’s Anatomy …? And Dak Prescott and the divisional round of the playoffs do not seem likely to get together?
Their mere moniker is a punchline around the table in that writers’ room depicted in a recent NFL promotional campaign that pokes at the suspicions of game-rigging. “Oh, fans of the Chargers / Texans / Vikings / Bills / Browns / Lions / Jaguars / Falcons thought it might be different this time?!”
For instance, whether my Vikings play in a dome or the great outdoors, the field is the rug that always gets pulled two minutes before the credits roll. The obvious symbolism of Vikings quarterback Kirk Cousins appearing in that ad campaign and then suffering a season-ending non-contact injury is just too obvious.
Irony is more of a feature than a bug when you cheer for the Vikings. They got me way back when since there was something about their style, those purple-and-gold uniforms, the connection Bud Grant and then Warren Moon had to the CFL, their logo that appears on more and more of my belongings with each Lombardi Trophy-less season, and how their modicum of success has built grandeur all their own without a Super Bowl. I am probably failing to explain it well, but that matters not since eff anyone for judging.
Over time, the Vikings, Buffalo Bills, and Detroit Lions have become själsfränder. Or soulmates. One reference, “0-4,” bonds the Bills to the Vikings. The Lions and the Vikings are divisional rivals who play twice each season. Neither is a darling of the NFL mythmakers. They don’t play in a place like Lambeau Field, and no footage of them winning a Super Bowl exists ’cause it has not happened.
That would not rate attention if either was a Create-A-Team in some place such as Atlanta, Houston, or Jacksonville. But the Lions and Vikings live within the Old Soul Belt of football, in regions where playing football at all means surmounting the weather, economics, and population trends. Places where football shares the space or even takes the backseat to hockey as the alpha sport, which does not happen in the South or Texas.
As imagined, the map of Turtle Island is turned 90 degrees to resemble the gridiron. The Old Soul of football takes the form of a brooding inside receiver who is the complete package, right down to the boundless confidence and raging trust issues. It moves like a weather system, conveniently all through places I have experienced.
At the 110th Meridian, the great play begins — as the first draft of The Tragically Hip song says.2 Our receiver is in motion along the approximate border between the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan, a relative football hotbed in Canada. At the snap, hard off the line on an option route across the Great Plains. Then down through the Upper Midwest, pumping the legs through the cornfields of Iowa and Nebraska, through those Rust Belt states.
At the top of the route, somewhere near Buffalo, our dude reads the coverage. They either make an out-cut through the Pennsylvania coal country that ends at a tailgate party with Philadelphia Eagles fans, or cut over Lake Ontario, through eastern Ontario, and end tailgating with French-speaking fans at a Laval Rouge et Or-Montréal Carabins game.
That route takes in places where football started during the Industrial Revolution before the game spread south and west . It takes in the Canton, Ohios and Pottstown, Pennsylvanias of a Canadian introvert’s football-lovin’ mind. It hits Detroit, Buffalo, Cleveland if it has to, and the post-industrial and university towns in Ontario such as London, Hamilton, and Kingston, just to torture the analogy.
Words fail a bit here, eh? So I drew a diagram.
There is more skilled football played in places with a longer growing season and bigger schools. Football is blended into the paramilitary-industrial complex. And, in the boardrooms in New York and L.A., the NFL is a programming and marketing Death Star designed to develop mass persuasion. Insert your Kansas City Swifties conspiracy theories here!
That, hopefully, is enough exposition for why a Vikings fan empathizes with the Lions. Empathy is needed. A sense of irony works better than any pass protection scheme. As an ethos-as-operating system, it conflicts with the gamified, transactional way the NFL is fully wired into it.
Bad officiating, like that which boned the Lions, is Tremendous Content.
Eight hundred words of exposition later, we are at The Play in Question. Some review is necessary since this is not a space for game-recapping and one cannot assume the reader watched the moment that lit the spark to write. Briefly, Dallas shaded Detroit 20-19 after the Lions failed on a game-winning two-point conversion try with 23 seconds left. Both teams are still headed for the playoffs.
Dan Campbell, head coach of the Detroit Lions, has that Dude In A Good Way mien, at least for essaying purposes. You may disagree and say his all-or-nothing thinking backfired big time on the Lions.
A Dude In A Good Way shares the cooking and does solo dadding. He knows cold beverages should not be divisive. He also knows that all the Mathing that has changed our sports and games is for the greater good, and does not fill comment sections with whinge about how the Nerds have ruined it. He’s also not trying too hard to burn down the institutions that might need burning. It is called gradualism!
He also has the back of his fellow Dude brethren.3 There is only so much change we can handle. That includes football’s embrace of fancystats-based strategy. That explains why Campbell and other American throwball coaches buy into going for it on fourth down more frequently, but do not try more two-point conversions.
That is too much math for the North American male mind. We mainline sports to get the glaze.
The first place our eyes go after putting on a game in progress is the scorebug on the screen as the blue light of the screen provides the same warmth as a bath. Seeing an 11-8 scoreline instead of 10-7 will seem weird and scary.
So, I am a fan of Dan Campbell being Dan Campbell. It made sense why he chose to have the Lions go for two points instead of going to overtime.
Just explaining the blow-by-blow betrays why a lot of sensible people avoid throwball and its rules on top of rules that make a mockery of the word “play.” After a touchdown, an NFL team has the option of trying to score 2 points from scrimmage at the 2-yard line. Or it can go for the boring but nearly automatic 1-point, 33-yard kick.
Another bit of rulebook minutia is that players whose jersey number is between No. 50 and No. 79 are ineligible to directly catch a forward pass. They have to “report eligible” to the referee before a play, so that info can be shared with the defensive players.
Those 50-79 numbers are worn by offensive linemen. But Dan Campbell knows those giant humans can use their hands for more than their blocking technique.
Taylor Decker, the left tackle of the Lions, has two career receiving touchdowns. Last season, Lions right tackle Penei Sewell made a pass reception to sew up a win against the Vikings, and all I could do was tip my cap at the play-calling.
Fortunes favours the BOLD. The Lions scored a touchdown to pull to 20-19. Of course, That Dude Dan Campbell would opt for the all-or-nothing try for two. Of course, That Dude Dan Campbell, et al., would decide the best bet was a pass to Decker, who is a blocker.
Calling on Decker (No. 68) still required having five O-linemen to block. So Dan Skipper (No. 70) ran on the field as a substitute.
Afterward, ESPN rules expert John Parry, and other well-remunerated football knowers, noted that Decker seemed to “report eligible” to referee Brad Allen. Sewell also went over to explain. Three offensive tackles used their words. And the only guy paid to read the rulebook did, well, whatever.
Parry noted that Allen skipped away to get into position before declaring Skipper the eligible receiver instead of Decker. Why rush, the expert added? The game clock is stopped during the point(s)-after play,
Campbell told access media he “explained to a tee” what the Lions might do in such a situation. The Lions should have been ahead 21-20 with a win expectancy of around 97.1 percent. Instead, since Refball rigamarole must reach an apotheosis now, the Lions were penalized 5 yards for illegal touching.
The second try, from the 7-yard line, did not count since Dallas was offside. Half the distance to the goal for Do-Over Part Deux. The problem that might have posed for the Lions is that hyper-prepared NFL teams practice their specialty two-point plays from the 2-yard line, not the 3½-yard line. So the pass from quarterback Jared Goff to the No. 2 tight end was underthrown.
20-19 Dallas. Like how the score of the 2000 U.S. presidential election was 5-4 for someone else from Dallas? Okay, maybe that is a stretch.
That is a piece of how sports institutions do not work for fans. Like everything else! Be slow-moving and change-resistant but decide quickly.
The kicker, about the Lions not sending out the kicker, and not getting their reward, is this is what the NFL wants. It is not about keeping one particular team down or getting one team over. The league just wants to rage-farm and lose sight that you only need to WATCH THE GAMES. At Casa Sags, the NFL is turned on a minute or two after the hour. Everything else is wallpaper.
The league could have better officiating. It could make the game better to officiate. But there is a market for pointing out conspicuous misapplication of the rules.
It all adds up to institutional inertia that is so much like life, and how it can break you if you don’t do your shrugs. One Rich Cohen observation that lives rent-free in my head is that the way North America works now is that someone invents a crisis, so then they can sell a solution.4
Fix the problem at the source? But how would we profit off the crumbling of civil society? It also sounds like it requires humility and brutal honesty. Hard pass!
So the solution for the NFL is to have a ‘rules expert.’ The skewed priorities always cover.
That is more than enough for now. Please stay kind, and stay safe.
Dec. 30-31, 2023
Hamilton, Ont.
Brockmire, Season 2 Episode 1, “The Getaway Game.” Worth seeing along for Hank Azaria monologuing about how the Incited States “went from a boob nation to an ass nation.”
“At the Hundredth Meridian,” off the Hip’s 1993 album Fully Completely. Hip guitarist Paul Langlois is the son of a football coach, and a Canadian gridiron is 110 yards goal line to goal line…
Never to be confused with Dudebros.
From “Pee Wees: Confessions of a Hockey Parent” (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2021).