I think I will tune in today’s NFL playoff games, if only to get a chuckle over the league’s messaging conflict.
The increasingly woke NFL finds itself straddling a fence on such things. On the one hand, the league is eager to court leftists, many of whom don’t watch and don’t know whether a football is blown up or stuffed.
This metamorphosis is well illustrated by Super Bowl halftimes, which have gone from Up With People and the like in the past, to Bad Bunny this year, an unmistakable leftward lurch.
The few remaining rational individuals in the NFL hierarchy, realizing their money-printing machine exists on the back of an antitrust exemption, attempt to court the political right. We have “America 250” stenciled on the sideline of fields, admittedly not in places of prominence. It’s vintage NFL, giving a passing nod to a huge American celebration, and trying to make a buck by selling merchandise honoring it, but not embracing it enthusiastically.
Could the woke NFL be attempting to curry favor with the non-woke guy residing in the White House?
Somewhere along the line, the NFL figured out the football fields were merely huge billboards, a place to post messages with the added bonus of not just relying on foot traffic for people to see them, but instead having them beamed to millions via the magic mirror of television.
Say after me, “Choose Love” and “It Takes All Of Us,” the messages your NFL masters chose for the white strips beyond each end zone for this weekend’s games.
The Associated Press, which used to be reputable news organization, put out a story quoting an NFL “social responsibility” officer explaining that the messages this weekend were designed to honor Dr. Martin Luther King.
That story was accompanied by a photo with the “Choose Love” stencil, beyond an end zone that read Cowboys. We presume that was a reference to the Dallas Cowboys, who didn’t even make the playoffs this season, let alone remain standing this weekend. Clearly this was a very stale file photo, actually from more than a year ago, a reality that was admitted in very small type in the caption.
Typical AP.
This inadvertently illustrates the sleight-of-hand nature of NFL visual indoctrination.
I’m curious – and can’t easily find an answer on the internet – why of all four teams playing Saturday, only the San Francisco 49ers didn’t toe the line and have “Choose Love” messages on the back of their helmets. Their helmets instead had in that space a more traditional “49ers” in stylish type.
Denver, Buffalo and Seattle all dutifully fell into line on the matter of choosing love for helmet messaging.
Surely the 49ers, who admittedly play in Santa Clara, 40 miles south of the San Francisco that is their very leftist franchise namesake city (sort of like the New York Giants and Jets both playing in New Jersey) were not bucking NFL hierarchy.
But, if they were, imagine the joy at NFL offices along New York City’s Park Avenue that the 49ers came up on the short end of a 41-6 score. Yo, Western Pennsylvania yinzers, this means the 49ers lost by a larger margin in these playoff than your Steelers!
Today, the NFL propaganda machine will be on display as the Houston Texans and the New England Patriots play in an early game large with symbolism.
Texans linebacker Azeez Al-Shaair ran ahead of accepted NFL wokeness during his team’s lopsided playoff win over the Steelers, his eye-black patch reading “Stop The Genocide.”
This message referred not to the ongoing string of one-sided Steelers losses in the playoffs, but to the code the left uses to define Israel calling Palestinians to task for murdering thousands of Israelis in terror raids. Al-Shaair is a practicing Muslim.
We might well see such sideline messaging from the NFL in the future. But this individual callout was a violation of NFL “uniform and equipment” rules and has resulted in a reported fine of $11,593 for Al-Shaair.
The world breathlessly awaits Al-Shaair’s eye black message today, in a game ironically being played against the Patriots. Their logo is a stylized combination of the American Flag and a revolutionary war type with a tri-color hat. The old Patriots logo was of a revolutionary war soldier in full uniform hiking a football.
The NFL finds itself with a thorny messaging problem.
My advice: Choose Love. Go Patriots.
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