The National Football League is back, in case you haven't already been lectured, hectored, and badgered into aural submission by the various communication venues that have been screeching about it for weeks. This post-modern Christmas, with all the soul-crushing commercialism that implies, has come five days later than last year, because the league decided it needed one more week of buildup before beginning its full 22-week Advent calendar, and that it wanted to see how strange football might feel on a Wednesday night. You're welcome.
Some innovation was warranted, here, just given the running start that college football's naked greed, maniacal volume, and high level of resting chaos has given it. The NFL is more button-down and billionaires-up by contrast, and as such has struggled to embrace its inner WTF-ness. Sure, the league gave it a reasonable go between the 49ers' criminally eventful offseason and Mike Vrabel's clumsy media relations course, but mostly it stuck to the same menu it has operated on for years—272 big events, then the playoffs. They couldn't even expose any nerve endings with a new contract for Roger Goodell, the Ginger Avenger-turned-bank-manager who is either going to die in the job or already has. College football's first week featured a program that bent the rules of time to suit its immediate needs; the NFL basically announced grand opening of the same old supermarket, only with the big innovation being fewer checkers.
In other words, the NFL is selling you the game, as usual. After the first NFL game of the season last night, you are more than entitled to ask, "Okay, what else ya got?"
The New England Patriots played the Seattle Seahawks, who had beaten them in the last Super Bowl, a deeply forgettable affair that tried without success to convince America that erstwhile meme Sam Darnold is the new hot item in quarterback development. For the number of times the NBC people kept calling back to that game, you'd think it was an epochal moment in league history, and not the 60th chapter of a long pop-up book that has featured many livelier and more enriching pages. But this is the NFL, where a storyline being obviously dull and narratively insufficient doesn't remotely disqualify it.
And anyway, the game makes its own plans. Five plays into the new season, Darnold was done for the evening thanks to an injured hip caused by Patriot linebacker Dre'mont Jones; he would not return, although Seahawks coach Mike Macdonald suggested after the game that Darnold had avoided the worst-case scenario of a fracture. The game itself plunged instantly into worst-case scenario territory, and an ankle injury to new Patriots receiver A.J. Brown sealed the deal. And so the NFL season began with the defending champions being led along carefully by noted fun-crusher Drew Lock and the Patriots looking overmatched in a slightly different way than they did in the Super Bowl. With the exception of one electric play from Seahawks receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba, the game's Designated Moment, it all landed with a resounding thud.
Not that having Darnold around would have made it dramatically spicier. The league is currently in a defense-first phase, with both the Seahawks and Patriots standing out as avatars of that approach. By any standard and for any reason, 13-10 is a tough slog, especially when it was the second highest scoring game of the night; the Mets' 15-14 win over the Marlins had it beat with an inning and a half to spare. Neither the Pats nor Hawks managed 20 first downs or 300 yards in total offense, and the winning team ran only 48 plays and had as many touchdowns nullified (Cooper Kupp) by penalty as actually upheld (Smith-Njigba; say the name, not the initials, you lazy slobs). Taken altogether, the first episode of Wednesday Night Football was just plain hard on the retinas. Even the final gambling line of Seahawks minus-three created only a push, which meant it was a buzzkill even for the nation's degenerates. If you need Jason Myers to save your rent money, you're just doing your life incorrectly.
The point here is not that you didn't get your money's worth last night. That's not the deal, and the NFL operates around the central theory that they're supposed to get your money's worth, and they inevitably succeed at that. It isn't a swindle when you already know the grift and still willingly pay into it. You wouldn't call it a good deal, but it works just fine for the people who set the terms.
But nothing is permanent, and tastes change. If you can't sell order, you'd better be good at bullshit, and in that sense the college game is racing ahead because of how much more willing it is to put its collective tongue on the third rail of your attention span. The NFL hasn't threatened to kick a team out of the league since the Dallas Texans were smothered in their sleep in 1952, but the college guys were offering to exile LSU to the Sun Belt because of Lane Kiffin's avant-garde retro-recruiting after the first week. It fits that Kiffin's 20 games under NFL contract came in the employ of Al Davis, the same man who once employed fellow college football scofflaw Mike Lombardi, another hot mess in sneakers. The NFL hasn't had anything commensurate to what the college game has become since Davis himself, and he's been dead for 15 years.
Meanwhile the NBA is trading teams among billionaires at a rate that would make mobsters blink in amazement and the league's richest person has been revealed as either the dumbest cheat or the last honest dolt in American business by a gaggle of podcaster/journalists. The World Cup gave us the legend of Cape Verde, on-field calls negated days later by political lampreys, and Gianni Infantino as the last gigolo in the shop, willing to do anything to anything for 10 percent of whatever you've got. That's the future—Kiffin and Lombardi and Infantino and various dodgy hustles delivered with sneers, crotch-grabs, and middle fingers in the air to the delight of an audience pretending to be disgusted while desperate to see the next scam.
And what's the NFL's response to America's rude appetite for this sort of pantsless behavior? A heavy dose of midweek Drew Lock, a 13-10 final score, and, tonight, another weeknight game in which the big selling points amount to the biggest signing of the offseason not even being in the country where the game is being played—Aaron Donald and Australia, respectively—and a 53-man experiment in jet lag on the part of the Rams, who will be arriving at the stadium midway through the second quarter. Whatever this is supposed to be, it ain't.
Granted, Sunday's games may provide more sparks; even if they don't, their existence will certainly unleash a new torrent of strangers whining at you about their fantasy teams and bad beats on ill-advised prop bets. The NFL didn't get to where it is today by not understanding the value in the sheer relentless tonnage of its product, and for better or worse there is a lot more coming.
But the path to future glories is clear, and it isn't about preserving safe longterm investments for hedge fund swine and slackjawed failsons, or new stadium construction projects that ensure the poorer half of the people in attendance can't see half the field. The NFL is back, and the face of the new season so far is that of a dazed and grateful Drew Lock. That doesn't sound like much of a future and barely qualifies as an entertaining present, but it's early yet. Let's all wait for the arrests to start.
