I’ve been kind of disgusted with the NFL for a while now, both due to factors within the league’s control and out of it.

One thing is that I just don’t feel the product is as compelling anymore without the quarterbacks I grew up with—Brady, Manning, Brees, Rivers, Eli and Ben are all now retired, and the only one remaining is Aaron Rodgers. The NBA is going to hit this point eventually too when LeBron, KD, Steph, Harden, Kawhi, etc. retire. Similar thing. 

It’s not just that the NFL feels different, or like a party that all your friends have left and you don’t know anyone else there. It’s not really that because we know most of these players in the new generation very well. And in fact I’m a big fan of pretty much all of them—Burrow, Allen, Stroud, Caleb, Trevor, Goff, Purdy. 

It’s not that I don’t like them or I’m not as invested in them as I was with the previous generation of headline QBs. 

It’s that none of them are good enough to challenge Mahomes other than maybe Burrow, but we have no idea if his wrist will heal correctly and allow him to be the same guy he was before the injury. We still need to let the younger guys develop, and I have really high hopes for both CJ Stroud and Caleb Williams especially, but the QB position is truly Mahomes and everyone else. He’s in a class of his own. And it’s making the product suffer because it’s taking all the uncertainty out of the game. Literally nobody can stop him.

I fucking hated the NBA when Kevin Durant went to Golden State because it took all the uncertainty out of the league. The championship was preordained. When they were healthy, there was literally ONE playoff series in two years where they were in jeopardy of losing, Houston in 2018. The only reason they didn’t threepeat in 2019 is because KD blew out his Achilles and Klay Thompson blew out his ACL in the Finals. Otherwise they were going to cruise to a threepeat. 

Right now, the triple whammy of Mahomes, that excellent defense, and the refs saving their ass makes the Chiefs unbeatable. It’s sucked all the uncertainty and intrigue out of the sport. Yeah, the regular season is fun and fantasy football serves as a distraction from the fact that we already know how the season is going to end, but personally, I need that uncertainty and parity. 

The NFL actually trained me to think like that, believe it or not. Goodell in the 2000s and 2010s yapped constantly about parity parity parity parity. 

Now that’s gone from the league, because nobody is good enough to beat Mahomes. And in the rare instance that somebody does beat Mahomes, the refs will bail him out somehow. 

In 2022 it felt pretty obvious the NFL had the refs rigging shit for them. I’m still not over that holding call that gifted the Chiefs the Super Bowl over the Eagles. That was the most disgusted I’ve ever been as an NFL fan. I’m still pissed about it, and I’m not even an Eagles fan at all.

If you noticed, I basically stopped writing about the NFL entirely after that. All I really write about is the draft, and that’s just because I love college football. It felt so obviously rigged that I could no longer be as emotionally invested in the NFL as I once was. How could I be emotionally invested in a league that feels rigged?

I’ve calmed down on that a bit since, but by no means am I over it, and I think it  permanently damaged my love for the NFL, sadly. I no longer care as much as I used to for basically my entire life. 

My conspiracy theory on that Super Bowl is that the NFL wants Mahomes to get close to Brady in rings so they can have a “GOAT debate” like the NBA has with LeBron and MJ. Goodell’s greedy ass saw Skip and Shannon screaming about LeBron and MJ 12 months out of the year and said “I need that.” 

The NFL isn’t satisfied with being far and away the most popular sport in America, and even being enormously popular IN THE OFFSEASON (via the Draft and free agency) to the point where it dwarfs other sports like the NBA and NHL and MLB that are literally in season at the time. 

No, the NFL wants to dominate and be your singular focus 365 days a year. Nothing less will suffice for the gigantic money vacuum that is the NFL’s corporate office in midtown Manhattan. In fact it’s beyond a vacuum, it’s a black hole of money, a gaping maw. It’s an insatiable beast that must devour everything in sight.

It’s not enough that regular season NFL games absolutely obliterate the ratings for even the World Series and the NBA Finals. That’s not enough for the 345 Park Avenue, as Mike Florio often refers to the league’s corporate office. 

Roger Goodell now wants you to be balls deep in a manufactured “GOAT debate” from May to August. He wants your focus to be on the NFL even then. 24/7, 365.

I truly believe this. The NBA Goat Debate is so powerful that it could be a random day in August or July or something and people will be screaming at each other about Jordan and LeBron as if they just played a game last night (and as if Michael Jordan hasn’t been retired for over two decades.)

Goodell in his infinite greed wants that. He wants Brady vs. Mahomes to crush LeBron vs. MJ. I know he does.

Because Goodell is not a “football guy.” Goodell is a money guy. He’s a “business side” guy. He operates like a private equity guy. It’s just money money money in his eyes. That’s all he cares about. The only thing he’s concerned with is how can he make more and more money for Jerry Jones and Stan Kroenke and all the rest of the owners. How can I squeeze every last penny out of the NFL fanbase? And then, once I’ve done that, where can I find more people outside the NFL fanbase to squeeze money out of? (That would be you, Swifties.)

He doesn’t care if the game suffers, or if he alienates his core audience. His greed is so boundless and out of control that football has become secondary to money.

Maybe it always has been, maybe I was just naive. But it’s never felt as obvious and glaring as it does nowadays. It’s just so blatantly corporate.

The league literally drew up the schedule to ensure Taylor Swift could attend the maximum number of Chiefs games:

If you were laboring under the delusion that the Season of Swift was a one time thing, guess again. Taylor Swift will be a fixture in the upcoming season as well. Probably to an even greater degree than last year now that the league has time to plan it out.

The league just keeps squeezing and squeezing and squeezing and squeezing, and for me, they’ve squeezed too much. 

I think businesses will often hit a point of maximum profitability, and then go past it and start to lose money because they got too greedy. Even quasi-monopolies like the NFL. They know they have you by the balls, but I think they will learn that there actually is a point where they can no longer keep mistreating and alienating their core fanbase and still expect them to line up at the trough for more slop.

What if as a football fan I don’t want to see Taylor Swift all the fucking time? This is nothing political at all, I don’t mess around with that bullshit. I just don’t care about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s relationship one way or another, yet the television networks act as if their audience is comprised primarily of 13 year old girls who are only tuned in for Taylor.

I know the NFL always says “football is for everyone” but you cannot be all things to all people. You cannot cater to everyone. If you try to market your sport to Taylor Swift fans, you should not be surprised when your core audience of beer-drinking, chicken wing-eating men start to get annoyed.

And truth be told, it’s not even about Taylor Swift personally. I actually think she’s really talented and don’t mind most of her music at all. What it’s really about is that when I watch a football game, I’m there for football. I’m not watching the NFL for US Weekly supermarket tabloid gossip. 

I mean for fuck’s sake, there is not a whole lot of overlap between people who watch the NFL religiously and people who religiously follow which celebrity is dating which celebrity and all that shit. 

In fact, those are supposed to be mutually exclusive. Pro sports is the guy version of US Weekly celebrity gossip. The women have their celebrity gossip, we have our football. They’re separate for a reason.

We don’t want US Weekly in the NFL. And when you try to inject US Weekly into the NFL, a lot of people aren’t going to be happy about it.

Goodell doesn’t see it like that. He wants the whole enchilada. The way he sees it, the core audience is so addicted to the NFL that they’re going to watch it anyway. You’re gonna sit there and bitch and moan about Taylor Swift, but you’re gonna watch anyway. And my ratings will skyrocket to even greater heights. 

The NFL, again, in its greed, decided that being the biggest and most popular sport in America by leaps and bounds—that wasn’t enough. They wanted to widen the gap even more. They want that gap to be the Grand Canyon.

They already go to great lengths to promote “inclusivity” and do all that “football is family” stuff to widen their appeal as much as possible. Now I think they’ve widened the tent too much. 

You can’t appeal to everyone. And I think a lot of businesses eventually hit a point where they try to appeal to too broad an audience, but they forget about and eventually alienate their core audience. They assume their core audience is always going to be there. They think they will be able to just add and add and add to their audience without it ever costing them customers.

But they’re wrong. The NFL is trying to appeal to too broad a market and in doing so you eventually have to cater to mutually exclusive groups. Is it such a shock that a fanbase dominated by straight, majority republican beer-drinking men is going to grumble when you start shoving Taylor Swift down their throats on every broadcast?

They don’t want US Weekly!

You can’t just add and add and add to your base of support. You will eventually hit a point of diminishing returns. Eventually you will start cannibalizing your core audience.

Think about it like this: Pat McAfee is extremely popular, one of the biggest sports media personalities in the country that people actually like. (Stephen A. Smith is probably the most well-known, but nobody actually fucking likes his dumbass, he just gets shoved down their throats 24/7 by ESPN and half of his ratings are from people who just have the TV on in the background on mute.)

But what if one day, Pat McAfee said, “You know what, I need more. I need to expand my audience. I need to be even bigger. In fact, I need to be much bigger. You know what’s popular? Politics. It’s an election year. I’m going to start talking about politics because a lot of people are interested in politics. That’ll double, maybe even triple my audience.”

Would talking about politics expand his audience? Maybe. But he would also lose a lot of his core audience because people don’t tune into him for politics. In fact they go to him to escape the political world. Now perhaps McAfee could get some detailed data on his audience, which is probably pretty heavily Republican-leaning, and if he just went all Republican, I bet he wouldn’t lose many viewers, in fact it would probably be a net positive.

But that’s besides the point here, because what the NFL is doing is not trying to appeal to both political conservatives and football bros. Those two audiences have a lot of overlap. No, the NFL trying to cater to both Taylor Swift fans/US Weekly readers and a bunch of red-blooded, beer-drinking straight men. That’s like oil and water.

I’m sure the NFL sees it as a family thing: the husband and son watch for the football, the wife and the daughter watch for Taylor Swift. I get that.

But I just don’t think you can appeal to both at the same time without pissing off the other.

The point is, you cannot just start catering to a radically different clientele without alienating your existing core clientele.

Even if the core audience continues to watch, it’s possible, and in my opinion likely, that their enthusiasm and attachment to the NFL wanes. They’ll watch, but they will no longer love the NFL. And in the long term, that’s a big problem for the league. Maybe it’ll be in a year, 3 years or potentially 10 years down the road, but it will be an issue for the league.

To grow as big as the NFL has, you not only need lots of customers, you need them to be loyal customers. You want them to love your product. Those are the type of people that will crawl over broken glass to watch the NFL.

The way the NFL is going, they’re going to get to a point where a lot of people merely put up with the bullshit because it’s the only way they can watch their favorite team. That’s the point where people stop crawling over broken glass to watch the NFL. That’s when they conclude it’s not worth it.

Over the long term, that’s how you hollow out your core audience. You can keep expanding the tent if you want to, but eventually people are going to fall out of love with the product. It’ll become a transactional relationship at that point. Football fans will merely tolerate the NFL, rather than love it. And then they’ll start just doing the bare minimum, which will really start to have an impact on the bottom line over the long term.

Just because your TV ratings are great doesn’t mean all is well. TV ratings only tell you how many people watch, not how many die-hard, passionate fans you have.

But Goodell doesn’t care because he’s a private equity guy at heart, and guys like that can’t see anything past the next quarter in the fiscal year. That’s how they think. They will sacrifice the long run to boost quarterly profitability every time.

I can just picture him in the league office presenting a power point to a room of suits in Midtown Manhattan saying some shit like, “Yes, we project that once Mahomes wins his fourth Super Bowl in Q1 2025, our new ‘GOAT debate’ media campaign will increase fan engagement in the offseason and we’ll see a 13% boost to our bottom line. And our new ‘Swiftie Outreach’ efforts will add a further 15%.”

Can’t you picture that? Is it just me? Am I crazy? I don’t think I am.

The worst part about this is that for the first time basically in my life, I’m excited about the NFL as a Bears fan. I’ve pretty much always only watched the NFL as a general fan. The Rob Lowe “NFL logo hat” meme—that was me because the Bears have been pathetically bad my entire life. 2006 was the first season I really remember, and it’s been all downhill since then, with brief respites in 2010 and 2018. But really there has never been any sort of extended amount of time where I was emotionally invested in the Bears, excited about their games each week, my whole week revolved around them in the season—it’s just never been like that. I follow the league on a general level, but the idea of living and dying with my team like Chiefs fans or Steeler fans or Bills fans or Bengals fans or Niners fans or Rams fans—completely foreign concept to me. I’ve often thought about what it must have been like to be a Patriots fan the past 20 years. Completely unfathomable to me. I legitimately don’t know what it’s like to live and die with an NFL team and have your entire life revolve around them in the fall and winter. 

Now with Caleb Williams as the Bears quarterback I think I might finally be able to understand that.

And yet at the same time the NFL’s greed is just too much. I’ll feel like a bitch for continually cowing to them at a certain point, you know?

It’s like every year they ask us to put up with more and more bullshit and they know I’ll do it because we’re hooked on their product. 

Well at a certain point we have to have some fucking self respect, don’t we? A man’s got to have a code. We have to grow a spine here and say enough is enough with this shit, you can’t just keep squeezing us.

Nah, man—I’m not fucking doing it.

$850 for the NFL this season.

I’m not paying $350 a year for Sunday Ticket. Redzone is enough for me.

I’m not paying for ESPN+. I already have ESPN through YouTube TV, now Mickey Mouse wants to charge me $11 a month for… what exactly? I really don’t even know what ESPN+ gets me in terms of television content, all I know is a lot of articles are behind a paywall on their site, and I’m not paying $11 a month to read articles. I paid for the Athletic but only because they gave it to me for $2 a month. $11 a month for articles and, I guess now, maybe a handful of NFL games a year—not worth it. 

And I’m not paying for Netflix either. Netflix is a total ripoff now. The only worthwhile plan on Netflix is $22.49 a month. Get the fuck out of here. And they’re so fucking stingy with shared logins too now, Netflix. They’re such a bitchass company nowadays. Back in the day, Netflix was like “yeah it’s $7 a month and you can share your login with like 80 people, fuck it.”

Now Netflix is charging you triple that and every 5 days they’re like “Um, excuse me, they/them, can you please verify that you are a part of this household? We’re gonna need you to re-enter your password again.” 

Fuck Netflix. I’m out. 

So I’m just gonna have to miss those games, then. Fuck you, NFL. You think you can continually take advantage of us and we’ll just always come crawling over shards of broken glass for your product, but no.

I’m not fucking doing it. 

If the game isn’t available through my YouTube TV with Sports Package (which includes Red Zone) or Amazon Prime, which I have been a subscriber to for years and far predates the NFL having games there, I’m not fucking watching your game.

The NFL just thinks they can squeeze and squeeze and squeeze, well not with me.  

You expect me to pay out the ass just so I can see the Chiefs threepeat and have Taylor Swift shoved down my throat? You think you can charge me even more for that “privilege”? Suck a dick. 

Roger Goodell’s calculation is that he can just say, “Fuck you, if you want to watch these games, you’re going to pay for Netflix and ESPN+ now. I’m going to ask you for more money, and you’re going to say yes, because I have you by the balls.”

I’m just not gonna go there with you. I’m good over here. I’m at my line and I’m not fucking crossing it, dickhead. 

I’m going to have my main TV set to Redzone, I’m going to have my secondary TV showing the Fox and CBS games. And I’ll flip over to NBC for Sunday Night Football once Redzone is over and I wake up from my weekly scheduled “Cardinals vs. Seahawks” afternoon nap. 

I’ll watch Monday night football on ESPN as I’ve always done. 

And on Thursdays I will watch on Prime, because I’ve always had Amazon Prime and would be a subscriber to it with or without Thursday Night Football. 

But that’s it. I’m not watching a game on fucking Netflix. I’m not watching a game on ESPN+. If I really want to, guess it’s time to bust out the trusty old StreamEast. 

But I’m not fucking paying any more. Roger Goodell can suck a bag of dicks.

I’ve found my line in the sand, and I’m not crossing it. I am now that fan that is doing just the bare minimum.

And while I’m sad about that, I don’t see it changing anytime soon because I don’t see Roger Goodell and Jerry Jones suddenly becoming less greedy.

If it’s all about the money for them, then that’s how I’m going to treat it, too. A few years ago, my passion as a fan would’ve driven me to spending whatever it took for the NFL, price be damned. Now I’m looking at it from a bottom line perspective. The NFL is now just a number on my monthly budget spreadsheet. I’m going to view the league the same way it views me.

And I haven’t even mentioned the subject of sports gambling, either. That’s another way the NFL has gone way too far with greed—everywhere you look they’re instructing you to gamble your kid’s college fund away on behalf of their good friends at DraftKings and FanDuel. That shit sickens me, too, and I’ve got plenty of thoughts on that as well, but I’ve gone on long enough for this post.

The NFL is just too transparently corporate and greedy for my tastes. Goodell milked the cow dry and he still wants more. It won’t come from me.