Southpaw 20: The Super Bowl Sunday Scaries
Tonight’s game might look a little bit different. But the league behind it hasn’t changed at all.
Dear Readers,
Welcome to the 20th edition of Southpaw! We’ve been doing this now for 20 straight weeks which, depending on your relationship with time, is either a lot or a little. For us, it’s something of a minor milestone, so thank you for sticking with us thus far. If all goes well, we plan to be doing this for a whole lot longer.
As some of you may have heard, today is Superbowl Sunday. As of yet, we haven’t dedicated an entire issue to football, so we thought it would be appropriate before the Big Game to take a look at America’s most watched sport.
-Calder and Ian
The Washington Football Team is getting woke. What does that mean for the rest of the NFL?
Believe it or not, the Washington Football Team is . . . kind of woke. As the Washington Post’s Barry Svrluga wrote this week, in the span of two short years, the WFT has gone from one of the league’s most reactionary and reviled organizations to one of its more progressive—at least as far as its hiring practices are concerned. The team’s head coach, Ron Rivera, is of Puerto Rican and Mexican descent, making him one of only five head coaches of color in the entire league. General Manager Martin Mayhew and Team President Jason Wright are both Black men, and Assistant Coach Jennifer King is a Black woman. King is the first Black woman to be a full-time NFL assistant coach, and Wright is the first Black person of any gender to become an NFL team president.
Of course, Washington’s push to diversify its leadership might just be a cynical ploy by owner Dan Snyder to change the narrative around the team. On December 20 of last year, we called Snyder a “rotten, cynical shell of a man,” and we stand by that. Aside from running the WFT into the ground, Snyder has for decades created a hostile and abusive workplace for women, and he’s deflected blame and dodged responsibility for more scandals than we can count. Snyder’s only other seemingly enlightened decision—jettisoning the team’s racist former name—came after one of the team’s major sponsors threatened to pull their support. This, rather than the years of work by activists and fans, was what ultimately changed Snyder’s mind.
But when it comes to diversifying the WFT’s front office, we must begrudgingly give Snyder some credit. As we’ve written before, how minority executives get into positions of power matters far less than the fact of their being there. Diversifying front offices is a rare win-win in the sports world. As Jason Wright said recently, “We’ve brought in women, we’ve brought in people of color, not just for those purposes but because we know if we have a diverse team, we actually get the better outcomes.”
The question looming over Washington’s transformation is this: how much change can a single organization generate in a league as thoroughly broken as the NFL? As The New York Times’ Kurt Streeter wrote this week, the rest of the league apparently does not share Washington’s commitment to hiring more Black people for leadership positions. Of the seven head coaching jobs that opened up at the end of last season, only two were filled by people of color, and only one of those coaches is Black—the Houston Texans’ David Culley. This despite the fact that numerous qualified Black candidates remain on the coaching market, including standouts Eric Bieniemy in Kansas City and Byron Leftwich in Tampa Bay. Following directly on the heels of the league’s months-long anti-racism marketing campaign, the failure of teams across the league to hire more coaches of color was so glaring that even Roger Goodell, the league’s usually reticent commissioner, spoke out against it. In a league where 70% of the players are Black, only three of the last 27 new head coaches hired have been Black.
The NFL’s problems extend far beyond its hiring practices. Five years after being forced out of the league for having the temerity to take a knee during the national anthem, Colin Kaepernick is still without a job, despite being ten years younger than Super-Bowl-bound Buccaneers' quarterback Tom Brady. Domestic violence remains endemic among current and former players, and the league refuses to acknowledge that this might have something to do with brain trauma that football inflicts upon its players. In fact, Goodell refuses to admit that football shortens the lives of its players, despite widely-accepted science that proves exactly that. In January, Kansas City cleared star quarterback Patrick Mahomes to play in the AFC championship game only seven days after he was literally unable to stand on his own after hitting his head on the turf against the Cleveland Browns. Rather than calling a concussion a concussion, the team dubbed Mahomes’s injury a “tweaked nerve” and passed him through concussion protocols. When Mahomes takes the field at the Super Bowl tonight, he will still wear the symbol of Kansas City’s racist mascot on his helmet, and the fans who cheer for him will still participate in degrading chants. We would root against Kansas City if that didn’t mean rooting for Tom Brady.
As former Pro-Bowl tight end Martellus Bennett wrote in a shocking Twitter thread this week, the emotional toll that professional football exacts on its players can be almost as devastating as its physical toll. “To really play the game of football you have to [have] some fucked up wiring in your head,” Bennett wrote. “. . . We were groomed from a young age to care a little less about humans.”
Suspended in this all-encompassing web of stupidity and deceit, what does any stand-alone act of decency by an NFL team really signify? In Washington, Snyder faced a serious public relations fiasco, but at least it was one of his own makings. Because he was so obviously culpable for Washington’s failures, it was easy to point the finger at him and blame him for his misdeeds, and now that he has rectified at least a few of them, it is easy to applaud him for his successes. But the problems that plague the NFL as a whole are of an entirely different species than the problems that plague Snyder. No name easily attaches itself to these failures (though “Goodell” is a pretty good candidate). We can debate his motivations for doing so, but Snyder did manage to solve some problems on a micro level. The conditions that create an environment for these actions to flourish, though, exist at the macro level—the level of organizations’ cultures, the sport, the nation.
For years, the NFL has made tweaks at the margin of the sport, expecting the cumulative effect of these adjustments to eventually sanitize the rot that festers at its core. Fans from across the political spectrum have largely accepted this course of action, not knowing what a real reckoning might look like, or simply not caring enough to ask what one would look like. Progressive fans object to the micro incidents—Bieniemy passed over for another coaching job, Kaepernick not getting interest from workouts—while most everyone else just keeps their eyes glued to the game itself. To acknowledge the real depth of the NFL’s problems—and ultimately address them—would require a willingness on the part of all kinds of stakeholders, from the league’s safety officials to the media covering the players to high school football coaches, to agree to change the way they do business. There is no singular villain to serve as a scapegoat. There is simply the broad influence of the National Football League.
While neither of us is a huge football fan, our plan tonight, as is tradition, is to watch the Super Bowl and root for Tom Brady to lose. His opposing quarterback, Patrick Mahomes, is young, fun, hopefully does not have permanent brain damage from colliding with the ground three weeks ago, and is a vocal supporter of Black Lives Matter. Maybe, with enough changes at the margins, the whole league can eventually transform itself. Public relations justice might slowly become real justice. Or maybe it won’t.
RODNEY’S ROUNDUP
Do you want to read about . . .
. . . Congressional Democrats’ new push to protect the rights of NCAA athletes? “Democrats introduce most progressive plan yet to help college athletes earn money,” by Rich Maese in The Washington Post (February 4, 2021).
. . . Senate Republicans’ new push to ban transgender athletes from women’s athletic competitions? “Sen. Mike Lee seeks to ban transgender athletes in women’s sports,” by Lee Davidson in The Salt Lake Tribune (February 5, 2021).
. . . the Super Bowl in the time of COVID? “The Chiefs, the Buccaneers and the Elephant in the Room,” by John Branch in The New York Times (February 4, 2021).
. . . mounting opposition to the 2022 Beijing Olympics over China’s violence against its Uyghur population? “Human rights groups call for Winter Olympic boycott,” by Dan Roan and Alex Capstick for BBC News (February 4, 2021.)
. . . Bomani Jones’s war on the sports media? “Bomani Jones thrives where race and sports collide. Can he be a star at ESPN?” by Ben Strauss in The Washington Post (January 25, 2021).