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Sports

Yahoo! Survey Shows 44 Percent Of Fans Would Stop Watching NFL Games Over Protests, Are Liars

The survey, conducted September 13 and 14 by Yahoo! Sports and YouGov, proves that 44 percent of NFL fans are definitely not red and mad and yelling.
When you see the poll numbers. Photo by Orlando Ramirez-USA TODAY Sports

A poll of 1,128 Americans by Yahoo! Sports and the pollster YouGov revealed that 44 percent of NFL fans say they would stop watching NFL games if protests like the one first undertaken by Colin Kaepernick continue, and also that 44 percent of NFL fans are hilarious lying beet-red babies whose diapers, presently filled to capacity, demand an urgent changing by the nearest minder. The survey, which also featured wide disparities between vinegary, delusional older authoritarians and younger fans, was split right down the middle, 42 percent to 42 percent, on whether the NFL should allow these protests to continue.

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If you are familiar with the NFL, neither these numbers nor the wheezing, hilariously transparent bluster of the laziest people on earth will be surprising. Football has its problems. These problems are often self-created and generally self-evident and most of them have to do with how careless and thoughtless and luridly dumb the NFL is with the game it sells. But of all the things that could conceivably kill football, it's hard to think of anything more likely to do it than the NFL itself.

Given stewardship of a great and fascinating game that people love to watch, the NFL decided—for reasons that could only make sense to the dour regional billionaires that own its franchises, and which are best expressed by the thick ginger oaf they hired as their factotum—to focus on the gnarled and grandiose aspirations of its singularly boring owners. You see the result on Sundays: games that are swamped by heedless branded bullshit, slowed by an obsession with refereeing all expressiveness out of the game, and governed by cheesy power rhetoric and authoritarian posturing. Of all the things the NFL could be, and all the ways it could be interesting, it has somehow wound up exactly as boring as the curdled, peevish, deeply dull people that own it. Out of all the things the NFL could sell—and these are some of the most astonishing athletes in the world, playing this violent and magnetic sport better and faster than anyone has ever played it—the NFL sells the itchy baronial pretensions of its owners. It's a stunning failure of imagination, and the league's popularity despite this is a testament to both how dazzling the game itself is and how much some Americans love this sort of executive cosplay. Not necessarily in that order.

This is not to absolve the amazing cowardice displayed by the salty wimps that want the NFL to prevent players from making a silent, subtle protest on behalf of the dignity of black lives; the polls splits show that these fans tend to be older and whiter than the rest, which will surely surprise someone. ("When a guy takes a knee, you can ignore it, you can say he's not patriotic, you can say he's not honoring the flag," Richard Sherman told the press on Wednesday. "[I'm] doing none of those things. I'm saying, straight up: this is wrong, and we need to do something.") It's just to say that in their unwillingness not just to engage the substance of these protests but even to be reminded of their existence, those fans are mostly just buying what the NFL is selling. The fantasy at the core of that sales pitch is not Cam Newton's mastery or Aaron Rodgers' calm or Odell Beckham Jr.'s virtuosity, and it's not even the ambient politics of J.J. Watt's stolid country strength. The fantasy the NFL is selling, because it's the only one its most powerful figures really care about, is to be these players' boss. The NFL's fantasy is fantasy—the power of the owner's box, the ability to fire all those fungible geniuses for whatever reason the boss desires. It's not just about being in charge, it's about saying no and having that be the last word.

This fantasy doubtless resonates with certain (older, whiter) NFL fans; 44 percent sounds about right, and threatening to stop watching NFL games if the players won't stop reminding everyone of inconvenient realities is very much what those people would threaten to do. But these fans will never give it up, because the fantasy matters too much and also because they are so addicted to taking this sort of offense, and to striking these very poses in their NFL pajamas. The subsidiary irony, here, is that nothing but the NFL gives these squeakers a better chance to huff and puff in just this sort of righteous and fundamentally neutered way. Of all the things these fans would miss most about the NFL, if they were by some miracle to give it up, the one they'd miss the most would be complaining about it.