James Swift: After Deadline: A Whole New Ball Game

Jan. 23—I got sucked down a YouTube rabbit hole recently and ended up watching a 1982 game between the Los Angeles Raiders and the New York Jets.

At one point in the game, Lyle Alzado tackled Chris Ward, yanked the helmet off his head and threw it at him like a torpedo.

Now, if somebody did that in the National Football League today, they'd get ejected, fined and possibly banned for life. Heck, they might even have aggravated assault charges filed against them.

But back in '82, the only thing it cost Alzado and the Raiders was a 15-yard penalty.

My, how the times — and the game of football — have changed.

The NFL in 2024 isn't the NFL it was in 1984. Or 1994. Or even 2004. So many rule tweaks and modifications are in play that it's hard to even tell what is or isn't a forward pass anymore.

This much is incontestable fact. Since the Tom Brady era, the NFL has completely retooled its rule set to do two things: minimize the likelihood of quarterbacks — i.e., the literal poster boys of the league — from being crippled on live television and hamstring defenses so that more passing yards and passing touchdowns are a foregone conclusion.

In short, they completely manipulated the game to create a specific kind of product. The kind with more scoring, more screen time for quarterbacks and the ability for offenses to put up a touchdown with just half a minute left in regulation no matter where they are on the field — primarily, because coaches are too scared to call a blitz 'cause the odds of getting a roughing the passer call is about 50-50 on any given play.

And don't even get me started on pass interference. How many playoff games have we seen over the last few years that were LITERALLY decided by a referee's hanky?

With the modern NFL product, the lines between sports and entertainment are blurred more than ever. The biggest "storyline" of the year so far hasn't been any actual team or player, but how many breakup songs Taylor Swift is going to include on her next album about Travis Kelce.

The NFL today is driven by television. Indeed, of the league's estimated $20 billion in revenues last year, close to $10 billion was derived from media rights alone. There's a lot of eyes on NFL games, which is one of the reasons why a mere 30-second commercial for the Super Bowl is going to cost a cool $7 million in 2023 dollars.

Basically, NFL games are hardly anything more than Trojan horses for beer and truck advertisements (and a surprisingly high number of upstart deodorant brands — surely, I haven't been the only person to notice this, have I?) Over a four-hour NFL broadcast, you're probably getting more commercials than an actual sporting event.

And as that great philosopher and gangsta rapper Method Man once sang, "Cash rules everything around me ... dollar, dollar bills, y'all." Heck, that might as well be the theme song for Thursday Night Football, the more I think about it.

The funny thing about the NFL is that despite its seeming hyper-capitalist business model, at heart, it's the most well-oiled socialist empire in history.

The league's revenue sharing agreements ensure that the Super Bowl champions and the team with the worst record in pro football more or less get the same amount of cashflow each year. And despite being a multibillion-dollar leviathan, NFL teams are STILL able to convince municipal governments to fork over hundreds of millions in taxpayers dollars for new stadium deals. Maybe if the Soviet Union had a Sunday Package contract, it would still be around these days, too.

I can't help but wonder where the NFL is headed in the next 50 years. Are there going to be teams in London and Mexico City? Are ticket prices for cheap seats going to shoot up into the quadruple digits? Will the entire concept of a "running game" be phased out of existence? Are even mediocre quarterbacks destined for 500-yard passing games every week? Will sacks become illegal?

Think about how much the game has changed from 1974 to 2024. By the time 2074 rolls around, the sport could be totally unrecognizable by today's standards.

Forget complaining about targeting and offsides penalties. I'm ready to have existential debates about whether or not the Falcons should use their pick on a robotic quarterback in the first round of the 2063 draft.

James Swift is the managing editor of the Dalton Daily Citizen in Georgia.