The Only Thing Left Is The Super Bowl

It's unlikely to rank with the variously ill-advised guarantees of Super Bowl victory through the years, and it lacks the dada defiance of Marshawn Lynch's scorched-earth terseness campaign, if we're being honest. All the same, there was a certain majesty to the moment when New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft—shortish, roundish, suited and be-sneakered and spray-tanned to the color of a well-done Cheez-It—stormed the podium at what was supposed to be a press conference for his team's coach and quarterback. Kraft was there to make clear that he was displeased with various things having to do with the league's characteristically grandiose duffing of the Ballghazi Affair, and he succeeded in making that clear. His appearance was unannounced either because it was spontaneous (or as spontaneous as any public reading of a two-page statement can be) or because Fuck You, That's Why. Possibly both.

None of what's memorable about this moment, to be clear, is related to Kraft's performance in it. Kraft is the 128th-richest man in the United States and probably the most powerful owner in the NFL, but he is also as charismatic as a pair of cashmere dress socks. While he succeeded in making clear that he 1) does not approve of the NFL's leaky investigation of the case and 2) will be very upset regardless of the conclusion it reaches, Kraft did so in the tones of someone dressing down a waiter who has just brought him a slightly overcooked steak. Anyone witnessing Kraft's performance of grievance would have to strain hard to find any heat beyond the usual rich-guy entitlement. This was just a peevish homunculus in a bespoke suit sternly demanding an apology for a perceived inconvenience. There is nothing dramatic about that. Which is to say that it was perfect.

Not good, not really good at all, but perfect. While the NFL is handling the investigation of it with its traditional comic gravitas—the league retained the super-lawyer who defended New York Governor Eliot Spitzer to run a weeks-long investigation into how 11 footballs got deflated—this was always a tough story to care about. As it fades from view, there is the increasing sense that the only reason anyone spent last week pretending to care about it at all was to avoid having to confront the existential dread that accompanies the Pro Bowl. The various little blurps of non-information leaking from the investigation this week—the discovery of a "person of interest," who might also have been just a "person taking a leak," and the various half-assed conjectures that followed—felt stilted and stale. Kraft is free to continue scowling and insisting and demanding, but this story, which was always more meme than news, is not coming back to life. Kraft might as well have bum-rushed that press conference to show everyone a "Harlem Shake" video on his phone.

And then, quickly, it was gone. The story was about Marshawn Lynch's continued refusal to answer questions shouted at him by media grumps, and those aforementioned media grumps' continued refusal to be anything but howling thermonuclear hemorrhoids about it. Eventually, we'll get to the Super Bowl itself, which will be nice. At the end of all this, these two weeks of manufactured outrage and pettiness, we will receive our reward: a regulation-size football game with some Katy Perry costume changes in the middle.

The game will, as it often does, feel like a mercy. But before that sweet relief, let's take a moment remember Robert Kraft's brief, fuming moment of umbrage, forgettable though it is. There are whole defective universes in it.

***

The most striking thing about Gabriel Sherman's comprehensive portrait of the NFL's year of concurrent crises in GQ is how unrevealing its various revelations seem. While there are little moments of startlement to be found—at the extent of the influence that Kraft exercises over Goodell; at the off-the-rack dipshittery of owners like Houston's Bob McNair, who reveals a tobacco executive's capacity for self-justifying denial on the NFL's brain trauma epidemic—there's just not a lot of surprise left. We know the NFL, by now. Over the last season, the most enduring mystery about the NFL has been how stubbornly the NFL resists that knowledge.

We know what this looks like, too. Sherman colors the picture in well, revealing an authoritarian and multiply curdled corporate culture dedicated in equal parts to punching down and sucking up. The impression left is that the NFL itself, in its state of well-heeled grievance and merciless avarice, is culturally indistinguishable from the comment section on a Wall Street Journal article about the minimum wage. Goodell himself is presented as slavish with his betters and dickish with everyone else. All very damning, as far as it goes, but all very familiar.

But if we already knew that the NFL was like this—and after a year in which the league's usual approach of puffed-up posturing and punishment delivered only shame, we know it—there's still the question of how it will go about the performance of it. We see the failure of the league's alternately hyperactive and myopic disciplinary program, and we see its persistence. We see the ridicule that the league has absorbed because of its rigidity, cynicism, incuriosity, and wild lack of empathy on baseline things like domestic violence and child abuse, and we see that persist, too. And while there are moments when the comedy is closer to the surface than others, there's still the matter of getting our heads and hands around the idea that any organization can really be so disordered.

The NFL, to its everlasting credit, is doing its best to help with this. In its every response to each new crisis, the NFL has fluffed its plumage and gone about serving the most powerful—and, generally, least-injured—party. Ultimately, and to the league's great detriment, this serves the league's 32 billionaire owners more than it serves the league itself. There is a resolute and retrospectively puzzling inability on the part of the NFL to recognize that the success of the league could be a separate or more important thing than the spit-shine loafer-buffing of its most privileged and protected interests. "We obviously as an organization have gone through adversity," Goodell said in his alternately prickish and stilted State Of The League address on Friday. "But more importantly, it's been adversity for me."

This is not really all that new, either, in the NFL or elsewhere. What is new, and what brings us back to Robert Kraft's incoherent umbrage, is the extent to which the NFL has become incapable of doing anything but serving its own best-served and most powerful stakeholders. The decade-long current of money has corroded the NFL's familiar edifices into weird and gnarled new shapes, and the perverse eddies and natural bridges to nowhere are truly strange to behold. It has been clear in the Goodell years that the NFL he has made will destroy itself—and perhaps destroy the strange and violent and beautiful game and the breakable superhumans that give the game life—before it inconveniences any of its most powerful parties. Said parties have become champagne-swollen and batshit crazy after their long immersion in this broader, unaccountable unreason, and now they are arguing with each other, and everyone else. They are not making sense, and do not know that they're not making sense. There is no one to tell them, or at least no one they could hear or believe.

In Kraft's umbrage and Goodell's arrogance, we can see why these last two weeks of the NFL without football have been so exhausting. Football is as awful and as great as it has ever been; the game itself is in rude health. But the relief we feel as kickoff approaches isn't just the anticipation of a good game between good teams. It's the return of football, the only thing that the NFL has ever had to sell, and increasingly the only thing about the NFL that makes any sense.