The NFL's Values Are Always Whatever They Can Get Away With - A 2021 Season Preview
From Deshaun Watson to "race-norming" in head injury lawsuits, there's little use pretending any underlying principles exist in NFL decision-making.
I’ve consumed less NFL media this year than I have at any point since the early Aughts, years before I was dutybound by the Internet to pore over way too of it and report back with the most agonizing tidbits.
This has produced surprising results. For one, I’m actually kind of excited for the Tom Brady return game in Foxbourough in Week 4. A few years ago, I would have reflexively recoiled at the unbearable hype accompanying that contest. And, sure, there will doubtlessly be more than a little trite talk of legacies and the Patriot Way that week, but I’m fine knowing I can disregard most of it.
Another way you can tell my patience for football-related bluster is at its highest level in some time is that I clicked on an Andrew Brandt piece this week. For those unfamiliar with that particular SI pundit, he’s one of those guys who will never fail to mention that he’s a lawyer and a former team executive while also never managing to say anything remotely surprising or insightful, much less challenging to the league’s brass.
True to form, in a listicle laying out his predictions for this coming season, Brandt has the following forecast about the Deshaun Watson situation:
As a lawyer, precedent is everything, and NFL precedent tells me that there is no way on God’s green Earth that Deshaun Watson takes a snap in an NFL uniform in 2021.
Say what you will about the legal system - suggesting precedence matters to the NFL on par with what it does in a court of law is silly sad sack shit. Absolutely nothing matters to the NFL other than what market forces and popular opinion dictate at any given time.
In this case, the precedent Brandt cites is the NFL suspending Ben Roethlisberger and Ezekiel Elliott for allegations that were not accompanied by criminal charges. My beef is not with Brandt’s conclusion; I agree it’s entirely possible Watson doesn’t play this season. What I take issue with is the idea that the ruling would be in accordance with anything resembling principle or protocol - which the NFL does not possess in any measure.
As much as fans - and I’m guilty of this at times as well - like to joke about Roger Goodell being some kind of authoriarian presence, his track record is remarkably wishy washy when it comes to landmark decisions. How many times in recent years has the league been weighing an important matter only for some scoop to get leaked to a preferred access reporter about what the NFL is maybe thinking about doing? They love to float those little trial balloons to gauge how the public will react then proceed accordingly.
That the Watson legal drama has been ongoing for roughly six months before today, the eve of the regular season kickoff, and there’s no concrete decision about his playing status speaks to how the NFL simply has no clue what to do. Admittedly it’s a tricky situation, one made more confounding by the supposed precedent the NFL has created in dealing with alleged sexual assault and domestic violence.
The Roethlisberger and Ray Rice cases were watershed moments in how the NFL approaches these matters. The league suspended Roethlisberger in spring 2010 following his second rape accusation within the span of a few years. Though he hadn’t been criminally charged in either case (police misconduct favoring Roethlisberger was a big question surrounding the second accusation), most fans assumed he was guilty, if not of rape then at least predatory behavior, so few cared whether the league was taking a sharp departure from how it typically handled such matters. Making things even weirder was that the NFL initially issued Roethlisberger a six-game suspension, which could be reduced to four games with good behavior. This understandably made a lot of people ask, “What exactly is good behavior? Not raping someone over the course of a few months?” Apparently so, as the suspension was lowered to four games by the time the 2010 season got underway.
After the NFL spectacularly botched the Ray Rice assault case, the league more or less deemed law enforcement untrustworthy and opted to create its own in-house investigation unit to deal with allegations of violence by players. That the NFL’s investigation team has already had a few tremendous failures of its own - former Giants kicker Josh Brown being an especially glaring example - is almost besides the point. Of course the NFL doesn’t care about getting things right. They simply don’t wish to be beholden to such unpopular and time-consuming processes like the courts when it comes to meting out punishment to satisfy a worked-up public. The NFL’s inability to create an alternate with any credibility means their hands could be tied from a PR standpoint until Watson’s 22 civil suits run their course, which probably won’t be until 2022. In the meantime, he’s on the active roster yet twisting in the wind. It’s a weird limbo that will only get more uncomfortable with each passing week, but of course that gives the NFL ample opportunities to test the water and maybe change their mind if they think they can get away with it.
As much as the NFL publicly aims to show deference and pay lip service to mainstream cultural pieties, especially in regard to the sort of liberal identity politics now dominant in corporate and institutional spaces, the commitment ends at the shallowest point beneath the surface. Watson is one of the sport’s better young quarterbacks. As such, he’s one of the most important players in the game, even if these accusations have dinged him in the near-term. So it should come as little surprise that his accusers reported hostile behavior from league investigators when they cooperated with them.
This say-one-thing-do-the-other when it came to social justice was just as readily on display this off-season when it came to race. As every public-facing corporation did in 2020, the NFL made a big deal about showing support for Black lives. Paint in the end zones exhorted us to end racism. Lots of serious-sounding commercials intoned things about moving the sticks of racial progress forward.
After a year of posturing about justice initiatives, apologizing for how it handled anthem protests, having official team accounts celebrating Juneteenth and the Derek Chauvin verdict, and getting Amanda Gorman to recite a poem on the Super Bowl telecast, the NFL was hit with a discrimination suit filed by former players Najeh Davenport and Kevin Henry. It seems the NFL had been using “race-norming” practices to reduce payouts to retired Black players seeking damages as part of the league’s concussion settlement. This approach assumes lower baseline cognitive function for Black players, meaning they have to demonstrate a greater level of cognitive decline than White teammates to qualify for compensation. The NFL agreed to end the practice, but only after extensive media criticism.
The most dramatic on-field change for 2021 is the 17th regular season game. For the last decade, Goodell and the owners made no secret they’re seeking an 18-game season. The latest step in that direction comes the year after players were forced to play a full season unprotected during the pandemic, as the league offloaded any responsibility for spread of the virus to the players and coaches themselves. For their trouble, players arrived in 2021 with a tighter than expected salary cap, and now an extra regular season game with no roster expansion or restrictions on individual player use.
Offloading responsibility onto players is hardly new or restricted to Covid. The CTE crisis became the concussion crisis, and concussions were policed in large part by creating impossible standards of how defenders can make contact. The bedrock issue is never corrected, because it can’t be without fundamentally altering the game, so instead exacting standards are crafted and enforcement individualized.
Ownership using Covid to ram through changes that fans mostly don’t want and players are only grudgingly accepting evinces a desperation to maximize revenue. Tradition goes by the wayside when the profit motive comes calling. In the span of a few years, sports gambling went from something that was only occasionally hinted at to a fully mainstream, endlessly marketed and integrated phenomenon. Record books are going to be recalibrated with the extra game.
I guess the one heartening thing about the off-season was Carl Nassib’s coming out as gay passed out of the news cycle surprisingly quickly and with little static. Perhaps the fact that people discovered he’s a Republican means his identity doesn’t fit neatly into existing culture wars. As it stands, he’ll likely be mostly an afterthought this season while fans and media are otherwise busy politicizing which players didn’t get the vaccine.
During the years I ran KSK, the opening week of September arrived with a sinking feeling that I was about to effectively turn over my life and sanity to football. There are worse livings, but I’m also enjoying being more casual with this gross little football cartel. I think the Chargers will be fun this year. I hope Jerry Jones doesn’t invite a member of the Taliban into his private suite.