The National Football League’s monumental inability to do anything but make money for its 32 owners has been discussed for, well, years, and as a shark-jumping exercise, it has finally reached landfall.
Thus, the Miami Dolphins’ decision to first issue a nine-page discipline doctrine to its players that included a four-game suspension for protesting social issues during the National Anthem, and then walk it back within hours of the predictable outrage reminded us again of that first paragraph:
That the NFL is only succeeding despite itself because America isn’t yet ready to abandon its football habit.
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But that’s not today epistle. The real question here is what the league’s owners perceive as the benefit they derive from never getting this right – as to give it its proper name, always looking foolish whatever side of the social protest discussion they hold at any point.
There must be an up-side for the owners here because they are either smart people or have hired smart people, and they have met incessantly about this issue. There must be some profit in looking like dithering cowards and cowardly ditherers all at the same time.
I’m just damned if I know how they’re doing it.
The 32 owners, from Mark Davis and Jed York to Jerry Jones and Bob Kraft, are magnificent at making money where none could be found. It’s how billionaires become multibillionaires – having a seventh sense that allows them to divine massive piles of cash where everyone else finds sand.
So there must be cash in self-embarrassment, and if there is, these 32 folks are the best ever at rooting it out and seizing it.
Typically this level of persistent failure is accompanied by loss of money, and in some cases the end of the business itself. Football, though, is still in its too-big-to-fail stage, so there is no chance of imminent collapse.
But dealing with issues this poorly for this long seems to come without punishment other than ridicule, and ridicule is still free. The owners must see some financial advantage in not only refusing to deal with something this simple, but dealing with it by deliberately misunderstanding the nature of social protest, allowing politicians to hijack the topic, punishing players while allegedly supporting them, and ultimately looking like that rarest of nature’s beasts, the cynical spineless bully.
There’s cash in this stance somewhere, and it is up to a bold forensic accountant to figure out how they do it. My guess is, some yammering owner (my money’s on Jones, because he can’t shut up on any subject) will blow the whole gaff. Owners who used to be religious in their devotion to omerta, the Mafia’s vow of silence, now leak and preen and brag and strut their stuff as though they were the athletes they pay, and Jones is usually the worst at it.
So I guess we’ll just have to wait until he cozies up to one of his favorite medioids and spills the story of how this seeming failure was actually a success, and how the owners knew what we mere humans could never comprehend:
That there is money in seeming eternally dumbfounded by something so simple, and wearing that persistent bafflement like a highway worker’s vest and a light-up fez.
They do that, and we will take a knee in honor of their brilliance. Until then, we’ll just continue to assume their bumbling fecklessness is purely accidental.