You Are Witnessing the Slot-Machine Death of Pro Football

Turning every play into a profit-or-loss transaction

Back in the Day

The year was 1972 and my beloved Washington Redskins were in the playoffs for the second year in a row.

Normally, I would have watched the game at home on a 24-inch TV in the Maryland suburbs, with my father and brothers — yelling and throwing objects across the den.

But not this time.

Seven days earlier, my dad took my brothers and I to witness the ‘Skins defeat the Green Bay Packers, live at RFK Stadium. And now, he had miraculously scored four more tickets in the mezzanine section, near the fifty-yard line.

Needing a victory on this day to advance to the Super Bowl, the hometown team faced their dreaded rivals, the much-despised Dallas Cowboys…

One Tribe on Sunday

Although we lived just four miles from the city line and 12 miles from RFK Stadium, as an 11-year-old I rarely entered the city, much less walked through a black neighborhood like the one where the stadium stood.

It was on the outskirts of Capital Hill, during the period after the great riots and before gentrification of huge swaths of DC, sometimes referred to back then as “Chocolate City.”

The only black people I had seen up close and in person up to this point were a maid named Viola, who rode a metrobus from the city to clean our house (and who cooked killer fried chicken) and a dignified man named John Love, the janitor at my Catholic grade school.

(Of course, I had seen many black folks on TV, including some of the best Redskin players whom my brothers and I adored, like the great running back Larry Brown and the brilliant wide receiver Charlie Taylor.)

On this frosty winter day, we marched through the blighted neighborhood towards the stadium among a steady throng of fans converging on foot from all points of the compass.

The residents here were accustomed to the boisterous, Sunday afternoon swarms of outsiders who chanted and sang the team’s fight song, “Hail to the Redskins!” strutting through the neighborhood like cocks of the yard.

Many of the local inhabitants were ‘Skins fans too, of course, and didn’t seem to mind all the hoopla. Some of them set up tables on sidewalk corners, selling brown lunchbags full of warm, home-roasted peanuts in the shell that smelled fantastic in DC’s chilly December air.

Strangely, with all the excitement and noise of battle cries and banging drums, that afternoon the city felt like one tribe, united in support for their hometown warriors who were preparing to take the field, clad in burgundy and gold, to battle the interlopers from Texas.

From Heroes to Corporations

As an old man now, it’s tempting to fall into the things-were-better-back-in-my-day nostalgia trap.

In some ways, though, it’s true.

And yet, most of the forces contributing to the soul-sucking influence of money on the instinctually human, communal aspects of sports, were already set in motion when I was a kid.

The crony-capital, legal-cartel origins of the NFL should have alerted anyone who was paying attention in 1942 — when the league was laughably granted nonprofit status by the US Congress — that it was a corrupt enterprise from the start, bound to evolve into the full-blown scam it’s becoming today.

It’s all hiding in plain sight now. Just consider the names of most NFL stadiums.

Unlike RFK Stadium, for example, named after a murdered political hero — or Soldier Field in Chicago and Memorial Stadium in Baltimore — today nearly all 24 of the league’s arenas bear the brand names of large, for-profit corporations in big, bright lights: M&T Bank, Mercedez Benz, Nissan Stadium, etc., etc…

Meanwhile, the scope and scale of total annual revenue made by NFL teams combined has grown from $326 million in 1979 to $4.3 billion in 2001, to $20.2 billion in 2023, driven by an explosion of 24/7 media channels with extremely high production values, married with sophisticated marketing and advertising operations.

There’s a third rail converging now with the sports media and advertising conglomerates that will complete a cybernetic feedback loop to tap humans’ natural passion for sports and take them for every penny they’re worth, and then some.

I’m referring to the rapid emergence of legalized gambling and the technologies that enable a person to just push a button on their smartphone and instantly bet on just about any game — even on single “propositions” served up live, such as whether a kicker will make a field goal he’s about to try that moment.

The Early Signs

Looking back, it was only a matter of time and next-generation interactive tech development before we got to this point.

Three decades ago, the rapid rise in popularity of Fantasy Football signaled the day was coming, when participants would “compete” by trying to predict the performance of individual players rather than their whole teams.

Enabled by Web 1.0 technology, this phenomenon pointed to the impending death by atomization of what makes team sports so transcendingly enjoyable in the first place.

Yes, the performance of great players can add to the thrill and excitement of a game between teams. But exceptional feats by individual players occur in relationship to the actions of fellow team members, and in the context of two whole teams matching up against one another.

When played at its best, for a couple hours the game of football produces a pair of competing, eleven-appendaged organisms that are greater than the sum of their parts, magically unified by a shared purpose, each vying for ritualistic turf.

Twenty-two men and may the best side of eleven win — all together!

Suspension of Disbelief

I’m not saying you can’t still enjoy an NFL game and the elite professional athletes who play it with outstanding skill — and passion, even.

Of course you can.

But for me, at least, getting anywhere close to the transcendent type of football fan experience that I recall vividly from my youth requires a strenuous suspension of disbelief today about the basic nature of the NFL as an enterprise.

And this is before the technologists behind the converging sports media-advertising-gambling conglomerate have managed to achieve their current ambition to place an interactive “BET” button in the corner of every screen during a live game.

When that day comes in the not-too-distant future, a great game involving organic ebbs and flows, and sudden dramatic shifts of fate, will be sliced-and-diced into a series of “live” betting propositions.

And I don’t think I’ll be able to watch anymore.

Dissecting to Death

At the risk of sounding like the priest character played by Spencer Tracy in the cornball movie from 1938, “Boys Town,” the value of team sports like football are about building character, learning to cooperate for the greater good, and coping together with losses when they inevitably come.

Our culture’s current alienating condition (some call it “late-stage capitalism”) reflects Western Civilization’s centuries-long pursuit of ultimate truth by attempting to continually reduce reality down to its smallest possible particles.

That’s not an original idea from me, but what I understand from studying the late-great, self-described “philosophical entertainer” Alan Watts, whom I consider one of the most insightful thinkers and cultural critics of the 20th Century.

While our impulse to dissect every living thing into its various parts ends up producing a lot of splayed corpses with their organs detached and pinned to a board, it also generates a massive amount of “data.”

In the emerging Age of AI, our fetish with keeping stats about player performances (once done traditionally by coaches or managers with paper and pencil) now enables real-time tracking of live games and the algorithmic generation of instant “proposition” bets, as the action unfolds.

The effect will be a dehumanization of the game, turning the organic drama of competition into something more like watching the statistically “random” spinning of fruit symbols in a slot machine.

Every play is reduced to a potential financial transaction and its significance in relation to the whole flow of the game diminished to an immediate question of profit or loss.

The complete and utter corruption of the game by money will be complete.

Sailing the Straits

On the bright side, it’s important to remember that the NFL­­ — or NCAA, or any other organization for that matter — doesn’t own the game.

Nobody does.

There’s nothing to stop any of us, young or old, from grabbing a ball and going out to the park to chuck it around, however lamely. Maybe even run (or limp) a down-and-out route, or two.

If you still want to watch an NFL game, assumedly through wisdom or sheer willpower you will be able to ignore that BET button on the screen and survive its siren call, like Ulysses tied to the mast.

And, hopefully, all my doom-and-gloom will be for naught and the sirens — the FanDuels and DraftKings of the world — will be drowned by enough public foresight to see what they’re up to and do something about it.

Before it really is too late to save the game.