Shame on those truly responsible for the debacle in the end zone in Seattle late Monday night.
That would be us. NFL fans.
After all, the league is just a crack dealer and there is not a market for something so fundamentally wrong without buyers. That’s us.
The NFL has a perfect product for a 2012 America obsessed with gambling, violence and sloth. As long as those joneses are fed weekly, the NFL can get away with anything from brain-addled players to incompetent refs.
The league knows us. It knows we have become anti-union as a country, so it can install under-qualified frauds in striped shirts and the discussion point is not the morality of being a scab, but simply whether they are skilled enough to go from the Lingerie League to the NFL.
Even now amid a furor that feels seminal, the NFL can just wait us out. You know why? Because it knows we are addicts. We will cry on endless loop about the refs jeopardizing safety and credibility, and the arrogance that positioned this to happen.
But we also will check out the betting lines, recalibrate our fantasy teams, and come 1 p.m. Sunday, we will line up our nachos and beers and scream for heads to be ripped off. The league has us because no matter the controversy and uproar, we are not going cold turkey off this drug. Boycotts will be threatened, but not enacted on a scale to worry the league. Enjoy, hypocrite America. The league has us figured out. It has provided the perfect product for this society.
We have high self-regard for our knowledge — even in areas in which we have limited knowledge — and low tolerance to shun get-rich-quick snake oil. This is why more lotteries and casinos spring up. We all have a system, you just watch.
The NFL offers the easiest to understand betting line — so and so is favored by six points over this and that. Come on, man. You’re an expert. You know who is going to cover. Throw a few sheckles down.
If that does not quench our gambling/self-regard gene, then how about running a fantasy team or 10, you unappreciated GM genius, you.
Of course, once you have all this invested, you are going to need to sit in front of your TV for 11 hours Sunday, then again on Monday and Thursday nights. We don’t have an obesity problem for nothing. We give ourselves excuses not to push away from the screens to be doers, not viewers. And how can you push away from a league in which you are a fake GM?
For those unfulfilled by betting lines or expanding waistlines, you get another American favorite — violence, as long as it is not violence enacted upon us. As long as it is not me or mine being carted off with their head strapped to a gurney.
We all laugh at the viral videos of the skateboarder crashing scrotum-first into a concrete divider or wait for the next video game that makes the decapitating, blood-spurting action more real than ever.
We pay lip service to all of the ex-NFLers losing their marbles and/or their lives prematurely, we know intuitively that if baseball has a steroid problem, then a league in which faster and stronger matters even more such as the NFL must have a whopper, we sense the league has known much more about head trauma than it has ever let on, but come Sunday we check our morality at the line of scrimmage. Kill ’em. Hit ’em harder. You are a wuss if you pull up.
This league — more than all the others combined — is Teflon. The leaders know America likes a good scream about injustice, so the vitriol will be on high for a few days. But it also knows us as a society of addicts when they see it. Nothing much has to change because we are not changing. We are coming back to the party Sunday, en masse.
This isn’t the referees’ fault. This is about the enablers — us.