“Football is back.”
With that one quote, Roger Goddell summed up everything that is wrong with the NFL.
Football never went anywhere. Football was going to happen in September no matter what. Over a hundred division-I college teams and hundreds more at lower levels. Thousands of high schools. Tens of thousands of pee-wee teams. Hell, the CFL and Arena leagues have been chugging along for weeks already.
But the NFL firmly believes that it is the only football in the world and that there is no substitute for the NATIONAL. FOOTBALL. LEAGUE. The smugness, the institutional arrogance, the sheer ego of a league whose bloat encompasses almost every month of the sporting calendar – fortunately for them, they have pulled their nuts out of the fire before the opportunity for autumn without the NFL could be realized. Which might have demonstrated that there is more to sports than one single hidebound, conservative, stick-in-the-mud league with no creativity and no soul.