NFL

Fans of the NFL’s thirty-two teams don’t agree on much. You’ll get a broad range of opinions on who the best and worst teams are, who should be the league MVP, who should be the first pick in the next draft and a host of other football questions. But there is broad agreement on one thing: NFL officiating stinks worse than maggot-infested roadkill and the league has no plan to fix it. PolitiFact might brand me a conspiracy theorist for this opinion, but, like many other football fans who think their teams never get the pivotal calls, I’m pretty sure the league is committed to preventing my beloved Buffalo Bills from ever winning the Super Bowl. Take one game we played against the Eagles this year, for example.

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.

After ten years of dating artsy Brits, Miss Americana has finally returned home. The affections of Taylor Swift, national sweetheart, have been claimed by one of our own — the vital, bearded, heartland hero, Travis Kelce. The Achaeans have at last returned from the bloodied shore of the Hellespont, bearing Helen among their prizes.  Whether Swift’s latest relationship with the Kansas City Chiefs tight end is a victory for the country depends on your political persuasion, but regardless the drama surrounding Swift and her latest beau has been a wild ride.   Rumors began to swirl about the singer's new romance after she was spotted cheering on Kelce at a Chiefs game this Sunday and — this seals the deal for Cockburn — sitting next to his mother.

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.

The early months of the NFL off-season are typically flush with intentionally misleading and openly manipulative media reports about how teams, free agents and draft prospects regard one another. This year, with an embattled franchise owner weighing his options about a potential sale, it's the billionaires, and also the millionaires, who are having their plans and motivations guessed at. Since November, Washington Commanders owner Dan Snyder has been making moves indicating that he's trying to unload the team he's owned for nearly twenty-five years. For many, the logical buyer is Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

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.

In Sunday's AFC Championship game, the refs played a role in the outcome, as they sometimes do in the NFL. Most glaringly, at least according to some fans, the officials in the fourth quarter gave the Chiefs an additional attempt at a third down when they ruled they'd whistled the action dead before a failed Kansas City play, citing the fact that the game clock had begun to tick again despite the Chiefs' second-down play being an incomplete pass. On the Chiefs' next attempt at third down, quarterback Patrick Mahomes was sacked. However, Cincinnati cornerback Eli Apple was called for defensive holding, extending the drive. Kansas City ended up winning the game 23-20 to advance to Super Bowl LVII.

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.

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.