Bernstein: Superficial 'Scandal' Distracts From Real NFL Problems
By Dan Bernstein--
CBSChicago.com senior columnist
(CBS) Football is hard enough to reconcile before it spirals into the bizarre.
It's a terrible game that does enormous harm to the people who play it for our amusement and distraction, damaging the bodies and minds of both those who make it to the Sunday television spectacle and the countless more chewed up by the artificially selective system that begins even before high school. Fueled by Americana and myth and ingrained local micro-cultures still coalescing around the game, football keeps providing enough flesh and bone into the grinder to fulfill our fantasy teams.
Some of us keep playing absurd mental games to find an intellectually coherent place to plant a flag of fandom, navigating shifting sands. Football is all kinds of wrong, at its essence, but I can make myself not care.
That effort alone is draining. And when such a fundamental existential divergence colors every thought about a league that can dominate headlines without playing games, creating cities within cities to publicize it's next disbursement of human traffic over multiple networks for an entire week, it's just hard to muster up high dudgeon over soft balls.
Sexual assaults, child abuse, domestic violence, knockout bounties and class-action lawsuits from crippled players are serious stuff. So too is the NFL's active, pernicious obfuscation of its true physical risks, with the cynical creation of "Heads Up" tackling techniques a mordantly ironic joke about awareness.
Deflategate, comparably, is comic theater.
It's hard to keep a straight face while actually examining the turgid language of the Wells Report. There's governmental-level legalese surrounding text messages and the science of air pressure, as if Kenneth Starr and Earl Warren wrote a textbook for freshman physics. The NFL paid tens of thousands of dollars for these definitive results, and got it's money's worth in the 243 pages that have ultimately resulted in, "Umm ... yeah. Probably, it looks like."
Next are the demands for justice and the ensuing play-acting and wrist-slapping, all signifying nothing. If there were a large, inefficiently run national charity with a colored ribbon raising money to fight the partial deflation of footballs, the league and the Patriots would have already announced marketing partnerships.
For all the talk about legal precedent and rushes to judgement, this is merely a private business entity trying to find a way to pretend to police itself sufficiently enough to not look ridiculous. Everybody involved in this seems to be in complete agreement about the probabilities, going along with pretending that it really matters.
Sorry, but I can't join in. Not about this league.
There is proper time and place for righteous outrage, which has become a national pastime in and of itself. The collective consciousness around sports is particularly good at this, as we become a zeitgeist of locusts feeding on the next crop of scandal. Some stories are worth the effort -- underpinned by real emotion over right and wrong -- while others are not.
The darkly dissonant NFL is conflicted about important things, its proud "shield" more than ever a mirror held up to us, should we even care to contemplate why and how it has become what it is, and what that says about us.
We are easily, willingly, yearningly distracted, and never more so than right now.
Dan Bernstein is a co-host of 670 The Score's "Boers and Bernstein Show" in afternoon drive. Follow him on Twitter @dan_bernstein and read more of his columns here.
