The Playmakers show debuted 20 years ago
Twenty years ago, Playmakers arrived. One year later, Playmakers died.
Chris Vannini of TheAthletic.com has taken a close look at a show that was good enough and popular enough to continue, but that went away for one simple reason.
The NFL didn't like it.
It was the most blatant example of the NFL turning the "customer is always right" mantra on its head, with the league's customer changing its behavior at the behest of the supplier. Regardless of whether the order was express or strongly implied, the NFL wanted ESPN to dump it. And ESPN did.
"Everyone feels that it’s a rather gross mischaracterization of our sport," Commissioner Paul Tagliabue said at the time.
“I don’t know that a hit show’s ever been pulled,” former ESPN executive vice president Mark Shapiro told Vannini. “A hit show doesn’t get pulled when it’s just getting started.”
It wasn't easy for ESPN to lose the show. It debuted on August 26, 2003 with 2.6 million viewers. It averaged 2.2 million for each episode. Per Vannini, that was five times the size of the audience that previously visited that specific time slot. And the show became ESPN's highest-rated program, other than live pro and college football.
Shapiro told Vannini that the success of the show irritated then-ESPN president George Boedenheimer.
"If he was getting a cup of coffee or picking up his cleaning, all anybody wanted to talk about was Playmakers," Shapiro said. "Rather than talk about games, they wanted to talk about where Playmakers was headed. . . . We knew we had a hit on our hands."
It wasn't a hit with the league. It also wasn't a hit with at least one specific player.
Marcello Thedford, who played offensive lineman Kevin "Buffalo" Jones, shared this anecdote with Vannini: "I had words with Warren Sapp! It almost turned ugly. I don’t know if he remembers, but it was about to be on. He felt I was being him on camera, that I was making him look bad, but also looking good too, being around girls and flashy. He told me I’m telling too much truth. Well, I don’t write the show. I’m an actor, not a football player!"
For the league, it was indeed too much truth. And Tagliabue wasn't the only member of the power structure to be vocal about it.
As noted by Vannini, Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie said this to the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2003: “How would they like it if Minnie Mouse were portrayed as Pablo Escobar and the Magic Kingdom as a drug cartel?"
But not every owner felt that way. Said Shapiro to Vannini: "There were some owners quietly coming forward, looking for cameos in the show, but didn’t want to be reported to have interest. It was like the forbidden fruit."
It was far from fake fruit. And if it was fake, it was only because it lacked sufficient fructose.
As Deion Sanders told the New York Post in 2003: "For guys to pretend it is not real, they underestimated the show. If they did the show with my old Cowboys or old Falcons, it was worse than that."
Indeed, some of the scandals that emerged after Playmakers disappeared (e.g., Michael Vick's dogfighting situation) suggest that the show was a "gross mischaracterization" only because it was too tame.
Twenty years later, no one has attempted to create a similar product, despite the popularity of Playmakers. Which is no surprise. Whether it's networks or streamers that currently broadcast NFL games or networks or streamers that currently don't but possibly hope to do so, very few are willing to poke Big Shield in the eye by opening up everyone else's eyes as to how things really work.
Or perhaps as to how unprecedented situations could play out, given the way past situations have played out.
The dynamic continues to amaze. And with its ever-increasing power to bring a live audience together like nothing else, the NFL actually has more influence over its current and prospective broadcast partners now than it did 20 years ago.
The book called Playmakers was given that title as a nod to the bizarro customer-relations reality of the NFL. Now that the hack who penned Playmakers is dabbling in fiction, maybe it's time to do a little dabbling in the world of pro football.
