Football

A new football season has fans reaching for their wallets and e-wallets. Americans now bet more than $100 billion a year on the NFL through legal sportsbooks like FanDuel and DraftKings. Illegal gambling adds billions more. According to the American Gaming Association, 73.5 million bettors will make an NFL wager this year. Fifty million of us have skin in the game thanks to fantasy football teams that pay off in cash and bragging rights. Until recently, the men who run pro sports pretended that fans loved the Lions, Bengals and Bears out of sheer team spirit and a love of tailgating.

Deion “Prime Time” Sanders is not a household name. The reserved and introverted former NFL and MLB player has long avoided the spotlight, the media and shit-talking in general. This approach served him well during his first few phases of his life, allowing him quietly to find his way into the College Football Hall of Fame, the Pro Football Hall of Fame and to fat stacks of cash. After retiring from baseball and then from football, as he played both concurrently for much of his career, he decided to start building some name recognition for what has become his next act — coaching. He started small, quietly serving as head coach for his own Prime Prep Academy, a collection of charter schools in Texas.

This has been a busy offseason for the Chicago Bears, between the blockbuster trade that brought them D.J. Moore and also — more under the radar — their contract negotiations with cities in and around Chicago as the team considers leaving Soldier Field, the smallest NFL stadium. For months, those tracking the Bears’ decision-making felt that a racetrack in Chicago’s northwestern suburb of Arlington Heights had the inside track to host the storied football team. However, a confluence of bad timing and a progressive county assessor has allowed other cities to argue that the Bears should relocate to them instead.

Over the past few years, the NFL, a professional sports behemoth built largely on the backs of broadcasting deals with the major TV networks, has thrown its lot in with Big Tech to grow its game. In 2022, it was Amazon securing the broadcasting rights to Thursday Night Football. Now, in 2023, it's YouTube TV — and parent company Google — getting in on the pigskin profits. YouTube TV has just landed one of the juiciest plums of all: NFL Sunday Ticket.  From its debut in 1994 until this past year, Sunday Ticket was the domain of satellite cable provider DirecTV. The service was a way for NFL fans to watch every game on the Sunday slate, as opposed to just the two or three offered by the networks in local markets.

Somehow an off-season for Aaron Rodgers that began with a multiday stop in a darkness retreat isolation chamber to decide his next career move has only gotten weirder now that Rodgers has announced his intention to be traded to the New York Jets. Immediately, Rodgers's decision to go to Gang Green triggered a big storyline: that he's following in the footsteps of his legendary Green Bay quarterback predecessor, Brett Favre, whose departure from the Packers to the Jets following the 2007 season was similarly fraught. Favre lasted only one tumultuous year in New York, during which he made headlines for texting dick pics to broadcaster Jenn Sterger. The Jets that year started 9-5 only to lose their final two games and miss the playoffs.

America's appetite for football is seemingly never satisfied. A couple leagues are still working to crack the code on maintaining a professional alternative to the NFL. Even with the NFL adding a seventeenth regular season game in 2021, the league's off-season is significantly longer than the other major team sports. Whereas there is typically a four-month layover from the end of the NBA Finals and the Stanley Cup Final and the beginning of the next basketball and hockey seasons respectively, and Major League Baseball has about five months off from the close of the World Series to Opening Day, the NFL is dormant for nearly seven months. And college football's off-season is roughly a month longer. That's a lot of blank space for a sport that routinely draws huge interest.

Republicans are in disarray... over the outcome of the Super Bowl, where they’ll be watching and even if they’ll be watching it at all. In the days leading up to the year’s premier sporting event, I spoke with dozens of House Republicans to get the lowdown on their plans. A bitterly divided House Republican caucus is siding with the underdog Kansas City Chiefs by a vote of 17-10 (five who won’t be watching). One congresswoman thinks this because “Patrick Mahomes is fucking hot” while others back them as they have Mahomes and Travis Kelce as constituents. But some GOP reps are picking the Eagles, because of spousal pressure in Marc Molinaro’s case, or simply because “it’s the Eagles’ year,” according to Darrell Issa.

Hosting a Super Bowl party is always challenging, but every now and then — four times in history to be exact — the Philadelphia Eagles represent the NFC in the big game, introducing a next level complication: namely, Eagles fans. As a lifelong Birds fan, this comes from a place of love — brotherly love even — but let's face it: we are jerks. As such, if you have invited any Eagles fans over to watch their team play for a ring, there are some things you should know and be prepared for. I know what you're thinking: Debbie, and Joe, and Hakeem, they’re really nice people, how bad can it be? That isn’t how this works. Oh sure, at work or in the pick-up line at school they're lovely, but put them in front of an Eagles game and that goes out the window.

Two Democratic lawmakers in Tennessee have introduced a bill that, if passed, would make the day after the Super Bowl a statewide holiday. The initial version of the bill also proposed removing Columbus Day as a holiday. With Republicans dominating the state legislature, two Democrats offering a popular, seemingly apolitical holiday in exchange for eliminating a more controversial, clearly politicized one was unlikely to fly. So it's unsurprising they've dropped that stipulation. The idea of a holiday the day after the Super Bowl has been a pipe dream for NFL fans for almost as long as the Super Bowl has existed, and the subject comes up just about every year around this time.

It’s Super Bowl Sunday in New York. You’re at a bar having some beers with your friends, watching the youngest quarterback matchup ever. You think the Eagles have got this in the bag. In fact, you think they’ll win 33-28 — so you hand the bartender five bucks and enter the establishment’s squares gambling pool, where you’re betting on the final digits of what the score will be. Suddenly, the door bursts open. The cops are here. They shout “we hear there’s gambling going on in this establishment!” and slap the owner with a massive fine. A nightmare? Sure.

Few things whip American sports fans into a frenzy more than a downtrodden franchise finally about to get off the schneid. Baseball especially in recent decades has gloried in this, first with the Boston Red Sox ending their eighty-six-year championship drought in 2004 and then the Chicago Cubs breaking the Curse of the Billy Goat that had lasted over a century. That the NFL has its own version of this flies in the face of the league's gushing about its parity of talent. If several teams have gone the entire modern era without sniffing the promised land, surely that parity isn't all it's cracked up to be. Nevertheless, there are a small handful of teams that NFL fans recognize as especially tortured, and few would deny the Buffalo Bills their place as a top woebegone franchise.

At long last, Father Time and the Dallas Cowboys have caught up to Tom Brady. When the seven-time Super Bowl-winning quarterback retired for 40 days in early 2022, there were ample reasons to believe it would be short-lived. Brady, like any athlete thought to be the GOAT in their particular sport, is a hypercompetitive freak. What's more, he was coming off a season in which he led the defending champion Buccaneers to a 13-4 record, topped the NFL in passing yards and touchdowns, and was only narrowly eliminated by the team that ended up winning it all that year — all at the age of 44. It would be nigh impossible to look at Tom Brady's football résumé and think he has unfinished business.

There was a time, not long ago, when any NFL franchise with a coaching vacancy was desperately searching for the next Sean McVay. This was explicitly spelled out: we want the next McVay, a literal clone if possible. Now, only six years into his head coaching career and following his first losing season, Sean McVay isn't entirely sure he wants to be Sean McVay anymore; at least not Sean McVay the football coach, at least not for a while. That McVay spent years representing the mold that coaches aspired to had something to do with the cult of the wunderkind. Every few years, there's a new hotshot coordinator or ascendant college coach who is said to be taking the NFL by storm.

Another bowl season has come and gone. For a college football fan such as myself, bowl season has typically been its own holiday. Taking trips to popular vacation destinations like Miami, New Orleans, or Southern California if your program is pretty good, or slightly less popular destinations like Shreveport, Mobile and Birmingham if your program is mediocre. Hanging out with family and catching up with old school chums and seeing who’s getting fatter and who’s getting richer. Participating in low- or high-level alcoholism, depending on your preference. (Like the Air Force, I prefer to Aim High.) I loved bowl season. For years, I used to watch practically every game.

Argentine soccer legend Diego Armando Maradona died in 2020, at that time still the last man to lead his nation’s team to a World Cup championship. On Sunday, in some sense Maradona passed away again, as Lionel Messi lifted the golden trophy and his own legacy as not only the greatest Argentine player of all time, but possibly the greatest to ever lace up boots in the world. Tuesday has been declared a national bank holiday in the South American nation, not that anyone there has stopped partying since the famous win on Sunday. The heroes' welcome will be for this band of players, especially Messi, who snapped the thirty-six-year World Cup drought. But make no mistake, the image of Maradona will also be on display far and wide.

The hapless Washington Commanders can’t do anything right. And I do mean anything. In September, a first-time Washington Commanders season ticket holder won more than $14,000 in a charitable raffle. After about six weeks of pestering the franchise, he finally received the check. It bounced. Of course, Washington’s football team — whose new name I can hardly muster the energy to speak, let alone write — is having yet another lackluster year on the gridiron. The team enjoys a miserable, if predictable, losing record. Coach Ron Rivera, who all things being equal is better than many of his predecessors, earlier this month seemed to throw shade at underperforming (and now injured) quarterback Carson Wentz.