What the Mueller Report Doesn't Have to Tell Us

A brand, some logo stretched tight and bright across a grinning robot skull, sidles up to you with clomping, revving robot footfalls. It turns to you and, in the weird chirpy phonetics of a voicemail menu, says something like, "Pizza Hut's new XXXL Chicken Wheezers are bae." What do you do?

It feels almost cruel to laugh at it, which is not to say that it isn't funny. This is a multinational corporation attempting to speak like a 15-year-old's Instagram comment, after all, and brands are not teenagers. Brands are brands, and must exist as such. They can't experience heartbreak or delight, they do not feel feelings, and when they attempt to broadcast a sentiment beyond "here, buy this," there is an unavoidable dog-standing-on-its-hind-legs aspect to it. For all the things that an empowered brand can do, it cannot effectively project authenticity, because it is fundamentally inauthentic.

You would not ask a brand to engage in insight or analysis; you could, but it would just respond by saying "pancakes on fleek, bruh [100 Emoji]" and trying to steal your email contacts. That's all it knows how to do, and that wouldn't help much. For these reasons, it's maybe unrealistic to expect anything more from the NFL--perhaps the brandiest brand in sports, and certainly the one in purest communion with its own batshit brand truths--than what it keeps on giving us.

On Thursday, the NFL gave us a 96-page report detailing the NFL's epically drowsy serial mishandling of Ray Rice's domestic abuse case and the resulting fallout, and assuring those that needed assuring that everything happened exactly as the NFL said it did. It then gave us some forceful circularities from commissioner Roger Goodell to the effect that lessons had been learned.

For all the work that's in the report--overseen by a former head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and which clearly involved subjecting the first-year associates of the law firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr to a massive amount of impossibly trivial investigative labor--it reveals nothing much, and virtually nothing that was not known months ago. The closest thing to a surprise is the report's flubby and unsuccessful attempt to re-report the Associated Press story asserting that a copy of the video showing Rice knocking his fiancee unconscious had been sent to, and received by, the league offices by a law enforcement source. The report unsurprisingly backs the league's stirring None Of Us Knew Anything At Any Time defense, the AP unsurprisingly stands by its reporting.

If there are no real surprises in the report beyond the technicolor splendor with which it portrays the NFL's determined refusal to give a shit, there is also a broader unsurprise here, and an increasingly unmistakable element of uneasy comedy. For all the real reasons for outrage that have been studded through this unusually nauseous NFL season, it's increasingly difficult not to see the NFL as a lumbering and hugely expensive workplace comedy. It's not just that the NFL continues to be categorically incapable of getting basic things right, but the outlandish and grandiose way in which it gets them wrong. After a season spent filling one diaper after another and holding stern press conferences to the effect that the latest round of self-beshittery stands in opposition to all the league's values, is nothing less than unacceptable, and fundamentally isn't us, the NFL has settled, ridiculously and predictably, on the one thing it already knows doesn't work--doing just what it was doing.

The result is something like that stomach-drop feeling that accompanies Larry David meeting a man with a bad wig or a woman in a wheelchair in an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm--the uncomfortable certainty that something is going to go wrong because one party just doesn't know how to act in anything but the worst and most self-defeating way, and the giddy curiosity at just how luridly things are going to get fucked up. The NFL, as a brand, can bring only Successories-grade sloganeering and its own self-justifying hugeness to bear on any situation. It doesn't work any better than it seems like it would in terms of governance, but the more we come to know the rhythms of it--the ham-headed confidence that leads to the flailing pratfall that leads to the press conference and the blue-ribbon panel of scotch-blooded grandees convened to get to the bottom of it all--the more clearly its comedy has come into focus.

The NFL is obtuse enough to be genuinely startled that people would be upset by its refusal to take serious things seriously, and that is bad. It is isolated and arrogant and fundamentally stupid enough that it is incapable of any adaptation or adjustment, and that is worse. But the NFL is, despite this whole shameful year, still delusional enough to believe that accountability looks like a former FBI director recommending--at the end of a report that reveals the NFL office as three frazzled functionaries blasting out Waylon Smithers-grade "please advise" emails while everyone else takes an extremely long lunch--arrogating still more disciplinary power, and not relying so much on law enforcement. And that, while also pretty bad, is hilarious.

In terms of revenue and ratings, the NFL is not quite suffering. But there is more than one way that the NFL might decline, and as the league comes to seem not just arrogant and unaccountable and authoritarian--there is, after all, a constituency that likes it all the more for that--but laughable and clueless and deeply, obliviously ridiculous, its authority will erode even further. The NFL has always been power-addled, cynical, and cruel, if perhaps not uniquely so among corporate citizens of this size. But if it finally succeeds in hurting itself after this season of so many attempts, it will be because it has revealed itself to be not the proud warrior-state that it imagines itself to be, but as just another bumbling, thirsty-ass brand.

And this, more than anything, is the weakness that the Mueller report shows us. The NFL, brand that it is, can only really communicate one thing, in one way. Goodell, Ruxpin-grade animatronic leadership droid that he is, can only extrude these sorts of stern executive nonsense-koans that he did after the report's release; "[We] expect to be judged by how we lead going forward," Goodell said, which is doubtless a thing he really expects.

The report was always going to sound like this, and if it is still easy enough to be outraged by the NFL's florid refusal to give a shit and the fumble-thumbed arbitrariness of its disciplinary process, it's tough to muster much beyond weariness where the rest of it is concerned. It's characteristic of the NFL's grandiosity that it would take nearly 100 pages and the oversight of a former FBI head for the league to say, "#Pancakes is bae tho." But they were never really going to say much else, because that was never really an option. Brands are not ever sorry, because they do not ever really feel anything. Brands can't listen, either, which means they don't know, until it's too late, that they're being laughed at.