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David Roth's Weak In Review: The Game At The Eye Of The Storm

A difficult and dull NFL season is shrinking towards its end. The four teams left offer a good reminder of why we care about all this in the first place.
Illustration by J.O. Applegate

If you spend enough time wading through the vinegar swamps of the NFL discourse, which is a thing you should not do, you will start to notice some things. You will notice adult males who have somehow been trolled by sports radio for their entire lives, interrupting what we must presume to be workdays to hop onto social media and angrily accuse strangers of being Jets fans. You will see a game talked about as if it was war, and the laughably flub-prone league that administers it talked about as if it were a nation state. You will see, probably, some dude in the comments who thinks everyone should be fired and replaced with somebody tougher. There are furious pink men raging about creeping pussification in response to news that some player or other has sustained a concussion. It is a choir of men singing, in the bassiest voices they can muster, "there are some things I seriously need to work out."

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What unites these disparate idiocies, from the pettiest partisanship to the most grandiose globalizing goofiness, is a particular type of grievance—a conviction that someone who is not them is getting away with something they should not, that someone who is not them needs to stop, that someone (again, not them) needs to stop whining. Ordinarily, when people communicate with this level of vengeful pop-eyed saltiness—or, because 'communicate' isn't quite the right word, here: when these types of sounds are made at this volume—they are arguing about politics. In this case, it's because they are arguing about politics.

Weak In Review: The NFL In LA, Or The Deep Out

The NFL as it is talked, tweeted, written, and screamed about, is a proxy for any number of luridly unresolved national issues, and that's not any more fun than it sounds. It's difficult to imagine a happy, healthy nation deciding that the paranoid, violent, overcompensatory, and self-defeating NFL was its favorite thing, but the United States is not presently that kind of place. In a country struggling with a strange and aspirational case of Stockholm Syndrome, the NFL is exactly what we want (or need).

Over the last few years, the NFL has appeared to be engaged in an elaborate campaign of self-sabotage, striding purposefully into one open manhole after another, re-emerging with stern assurances that We Must Do Better, and then doing it all over again in the most integrity-rich way possible. It's kind of funny, except when it's totally disgusting, but it's always at least a little bit of both. This has not looked good—it has looked, mostly, like a much more formally dressed Sideshow Bob attempting to negotiate a parking lot full of rakes—but its incompetence has not really hurt the league in any obvious way. If something seems untenable about the NFL's invincibility, both because the people running things are too venal and dumb and because of how cruelly the game burns through the people who play it, that only makes its appeal as a proxy for America more potent. The weaker and more uncertain the world makes us feel, the more appealing the NFL's parodic vision of power and Potemkin rectitude seems.

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The variously wrecked players, the ghoulish quacky fixes for the game's unfixable problems, the constant blaming of victims for those problems—these are undeniable and bad things, and somehow instead of forcing the league to reckon with itself, they only seem to serve as battle cries, rallying Football's Defenders before the shield. The ways in which the football discourse tries to talk itself into belief—blaming outside agitators and a broader cultural rot and whatever feminized boogeymen fit the part from moment to moment—is familiar, but not at all in a comforting way. In all the worst and least ennobling ways, the NFL is just the thing for an anxious and unhappy time; a fake war fought on television by good guys and bad guys, standing in for the realer, dirtier, longer ones fought out in the cold, everywhere.

The good news, though, is that there's still some actual football left to be played. This weekend's games won't fix what's wrong or rotten, but they should show us something better than what we get the rest of the week.

It's a new dance, they call it the Gano, and it's honestly very offensive to the spirit of the game. — Photo by John David Mercer-USA TODAY Sports

The NFL season is, finally, something like the right size, and yet it still feels somehow too big. After a baggy and bloated bummer of a regular season, there are no insignificant or unappealing games left to play, and there is no combination of the last four teams left alive that wouldn't make for a Super Bowl worth watching. There is nothing in professional sports quite so enervating and claustrophobic to watch as a shitty football game, and this NFL season—most NFL seasons—had more of those than it did of any other kind. There is the sense, finally, that those narcoleptic, shapeless, Sisyphean games are over for the season. There simply are no bad teams left to play them.

The AFC Championship game is promising as a contest between football teams, but is also a prisoner of ancient debates that were long ago humped to death—imagine a thousand neckless men dourly circling the word "elite" on a Telestrator, forever. Even if this game is not close, it will have the compelling mania that all New England Patriots games do, and be watchable for that reason. The Patriots have not gotten any less loathsome, but the old mechanized loathsomeness has a new and admirable depth to it, and their berserk precision has attained a sort of blunt art. They are better and more beautiful heels than the league deserves.

The NFC Championship feels newer, because the teams in it are newer, and free of the musty discursive baggage that has the Patriots and Broncos riding so low in the water. The Arizona Cardinals play with a bold brightness that is all the more welcome amid the usual rote rhetoric and ad hoc virtue; they are vital and fun to watch, their quarterback is enjoying a career renaissance at an age when most of his peers are considering getting their real estate licenses, and it is good. The Carolina Panthers, too, are swaggering and precise and alight with self-belief; their quarterback is the most consistently astonishing player in the sport, and exists not so much outside the seething NFL discourse as above it.

And here, maybe, is where football solves the NFL's problems, at least for another couple of weeks. What's rotten in the NFL is not getting any less so; the league is breathtakingly cynical and bottomlessly ambitious and extremely fucking stupid, and that is not a combination that bodes well for anyone involved. The ways in which the NFL has corrupted itself in its pursuit and performance of power are probably fatal, if only in the sense that most corruptions are in the long run. The curdled NFL discourse is a reflection of all this, and there is nothing appealing about the way that conversation has touched upon Cam Newton. The appealing part is the way he reveals, when in motion, how insufficient and silly and small that non-conversation to be; the football he plays unwinds and overpowers all the blustering transference.

In the NFL's discourse, Newton is reduced into a debater's point, repurposed into perfect proof of one thing or its opposite by one aggrieved party or another. But the redeeming thing, and the thrill of watching Newton play, is to see how easily all this is undone in the moment. As a quarterback, Cam Newton is not a stand-in for anything. He represents nothing. He simply moves forward, at the head of a team that is overachieving in selfless unison, and it is all so logical and so transcendent, so intricate and so simple, that the only thing to do is shut up and watch.