By Andre Pegeron

For a time, drinking was reserved for “the fun days,” Fridays and Saturdays. In many states, you couldn’t even buy alcohol on a Sunday. ¹ The NFL has changed all of that: Sunday is now safe for drinking. (So are the rest of the days, if you’re in college.) West Coast fans have reason as early as 10am to crack a beer. Maybe 9:30, to soothe the nerves for kickoff. Marcus Mariota’s friends in Hawaii can start as early as 7:00 and be passed out in front of the 4th quarter of Sunday Night Football by dinnertime. If you don’t think football has opened up the world of drinking, consider how depraved any of this behavior would be on any given non-football Tuesday.

Alcohol enhances emotional expression, allowing fans to invest even more in the games they watch. Especially for the emotionally-repressed men of modern society, the drink can be a key to unlock honest emotional expression. Whether it’s a cheers after a touchdown, a scornful sip after a bad penalty, or a fifth after a loss, as we paint the emotional picture of our Sunday, the drink is our paintbrush. ² It’s almost essential: Without beer, what would we crack open with the boys? ³

In biology, a symbiotic relationship is when two species benefit from a cooperative behavior. For example, when a bird cleans the teeth of a crocodile, or when a moth befriends a lightning bug when it’s trying to quit the lamp. These situations are a win-win: the bird gets a free meal, and the crocodile doesn’t have to go to the dentist where he will be shamed for not flossing. The NFL and drinking form a similar symbiotic relationship: the NFL encourages people to drink on Sundays, and drinking brings out the die-hard fan inside our hearts.

But biology is no one-trick pony. ⁴ Biology also brings us Darwin’s theory of natural selection, named after its discoverer, biologist and running back Darwin Thompson of the Kansas City Chiefs. Darwin realized that the animals on the various islands of the Galapagos had a tremendous capacity to evolve and change, coining the phrase “survival of the fittest.” Darwin said: “It is not the strongest of the species ⁵ that survives, nor the most intelligent, ⁶ but the one most responsive to change.” And while the symbiotic relationship between alcohol and the NFL is an enduring one, it has not been very responsive to change. ⁷ To prevent the NFL and Alcohol’s tag-team belt from being taken by a challenger (most likely candidate: trampolines and quaaludes), it must evolve. Much like how birds developed wings, or humans developed a tolerance for people who hike, the league must develop a new capacity that allows it to reach new heights. The logical step? A drinking game.

For this drinking game to work, it needs add excitement to your Sunday. It needs to appeal to hardcore fans and newbies alike, so nothing too complicated. (“Oh, the offense just ran ‘FB West Right Slot 372 Y Stick!’ Everybody drink!”) And for it to have staying power, it needs to center a star of the league. Someone young and well-liked. Someone like Patrick Mahomes.

Which brings us to the…

PATRICK MAHOMES DRINKING GAME
Rules:
Every time Patrick Mahomes throws a touchdown pass, he takes a shot.

That’s it, that’s the game.

FAQ

Q: That’s it? That’s the game?
A: Yep.

Q: Don’t drinking games usually involve everyone drinking together?
A: Yep.

Q: So can I drink during the Patrick Mahomes drinking game?
A: Sure.

Everyone loves tuning in to watch Patrick Mahomes air it out to his speed demon receivers. ⁸ The Chiefs played some amazing games last year where we got to see Patrick Mahomes snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. But even for the league’s juggernauts, not every game is exciting. The Chiefs’ 26-3 drubbing of the Bears was a snoozefest. But if in the 4th quarter Mahomes’ BAC was hovering around the legal limit to operate a motor vehicle? ⁹ Must see TV.

We’ve seen Mahomes do it all: throw, run, jump. Now we get to see him drink. Mahomes already has a gunslinger mentality when sober. What will he do a couple drinks deep? We know that Mahomes has lobbied Andy Reid to let him throw behind-the-back passes. And that’s just the thing that got published! What else is he thinking? Tactical fumble? Two footballs? Try to break the jumbotron at Jerryworld? The sky’s the limit! Mahomes’ creativity and playmaking ability would be truly unlocked by the drink. ¹⁰ Also, Andy Reid isn’t allowed to yell at him or sub him out. Them’s the rules.

Haters will say that playing the Patrick Mahomes drinking game is irresponsible. It’s dangerous, unnecessary, and promotes reckless behavior. However, this same thing is true of getting a college degree, and yet our nation’s 18 year-olds saddle themselves with debt just to take part. Haters might also ask: Why would a team willingly hurt themselves competitively? It won’t be a choice: Think of it as another measure to enhance the parity of the league. Teams that win the Super Bowl get worse draft picks. Teams that have Patrick Mahomes have to play the Patrick Mahomes drinking game. We already handicap the top teams in the league, and it hasn’t stopped Tom & Bill ¹¹ from winning an annoying number of games year after year. Let’s handicap teams until the super bowl odds are an even 1/32 across the board, and we can start with alcohol.

Another question: Will Patrick Mahomes’ liver be able to take the beating? Andrew Luck retired at age 29 just because he had some boo-boos on his rib cartilage, kidney, throwing shoulder, abdomen, and ankle. Luke Kuelchy retired at 28 after multiple head injuries too serious to write jokes about. Could Patrick Mahomes retire at 27 because he’s too effing hammered? Would this game cut short the career of one of the league’s potential legends? Solution: We could always just pick another player to get drunk instead.

Perhaps the crown could get passed around. Perhaps the previous year’s MVP should be tasked with trying to repeat his stats with both a Super Bowl hangover and a literal hangover. They’re probably going to regress to the mean anyway, ¹² so why not have some fun with it? Perhaps fantasy teams can get bonus points for the number of shots that player takes. There’s a variety of paths forward for this rule, but we will never be able to optimize it if we don’t implement it. While there will undoubtedly be some initial growing pains, I have faith that the NFL will find ways to adjust this rule to the league’s benefit as time goes on, until ultimately alcohol is such a part of the game that we wonder why it took so long to introduce this rule in the first place.

I can picture it now:

“Kansas City with the ball, down 3. 4th and 9, the Chiefs need a big play here or they’re going home. Mahomes lines up in shotgun, trips right with Kelce on the short side of the field. He takes the snap, three step drop, trips over his own legs…oh boy. OK, he’s back up, good protection from the offensive line. Evades the defender. Scrambles to the sideline. A pump fake, not very convincing but it does the trick. Jukes another defender. He’s running around back there. I don’t think he’s even looking downfield? It looks like he’s just playing tag with the defense… OK, he finally winds up. Huge windup! Drops the ball. Scoops it up, winds up again! And what’s this? HE JUMPS IN THE AIR! A 360 SPIN! HE RELEASES THE BALL UNDER A LEG WITH HIS EYES CLOSED! WHAT AN ELECTRIFYING DISPLAY OF ATHLETICISM! …And it hits his offensive lineman square in the back and falls to the ground. Incomplete pass, turnover on downs.”
“You gotta make plays to win the game, but that one just wasn’t there for him. You love to see guys get creative, but the 360 blind between-the-legs pass is gonna be something he has to unlearn as he matures as a quarterback.”
“You can see the disappointment in Mahomes’ eyes as he cries over the gatorade jug on the sideline.”
“I believe he’s puking, Buck.”
“Right you are, Clyde. So there you have it, folks. The Rams get the victory, 52-49. Mahomes ties Foles’ record with 7 touchdown passes in the game, but he couldn’t get the big one when it counted.”

Legendary.

Despite being dramatically more popular on TV than the NBA, NFL players are way less famous. NFL games get ten times the viewers of NBA games. A game deciding the NBA champion gets comparable viewership to an NFL regular season game.
¹
But a quick glance at social media shows that viewers care more about their favorite basketball player than their favorite football player. Lebron James is the Instagram king, with over 67M followers. His NFL counterpart is Odell Beckham Jr., with 15M, less than a fourth of the number required for the crown. In fact, if OBJ played in the NBA he would rank 5th, just behind eternal freshman philosophy student Kyrie Irving.
²

To some degree, it’s simply easier to emotionally connect to basketball players. A football team has 11 men on the field, a basketball team only 5. A fan doesn’t have to sift through nearly as many players before settling on a favorite.³ Basketball players play both offense and defense. It’s not uncommon for a star player to play all 48 minutes of a playoff game. Football keeps offense and defense separate. After including special teams, the stars are on the field for less than half the game. During games, you simply get to see your favorite basketball player⁴ more often than your favorite football player. Not only that, basketball players have close-ups of their faces shown throughout the broadcast. We get to see them emotionally process every moment of every game. Football, like the backyard fencing league I’m organizing, requires a facemask. While watching basketball we get to see the full spectrum of human emotion. While watching football, we’re limited to only the most obvious emotions: “shaking head sadly,” “flexing while yelling at the moon,” and “rapidly eating cereal.”

 

The game of football is inherently anti-individual. Success relies on 11 men moving in perfect unison. A wide receiver who catches a touchdown doesn’t do it on his own. He relies on a throw from a quarterback behind blocking from an offensive line on a play designed and called by an offensive coordinator. If any single person does something wrong, the whole play falls apart.⁶ A wide receiver runs the wrong route? Now nobody’s open. A running back doesn’t commit to a fake? The QB gets sacked for a loss. Sean McVay’s friend doesn’t hold onto Sean McVay’s hips? Great, now Sean is unconscious near the logo, suffocating under a growing pile of flags. Football culture is soaked in the idea of sacrificing oneself for your team. New England and Alabama, the two most successful organizations within the NFL and NCAA, respectively, live and die by the mantra “Do Your Job.”⁷ Their teams are made up of smart players executing their specific role over and over again. This has led to a combined eleven championships in the past 20 years. 

But the NFL goes above and beyond their game’s natural limitations on individuality: They actively quash their players’ fame. Of course the team must come before the player while the ball is live, but the NFL has codified this mentality as law throughout the sport, stifling self expression on and off the field.⁸ Look at touchdown celebrations, an exercise in enforced boredom. The most famous non-QBs of the 2000’s were wide receivers with showman instincts: Ochocinco making his own oversized Hall of Fame jacket, Terrell Owens bringing a sharpie to sign the ball after a touchdown. The NFL cracked down. “No using the ball as a prop! No falling to the ground! No fun or we’ll send you to camp to dig holes!”⁹ The league finally relented, but only by allowing group celebrations. The result is that the most creative, fun, and memorable celebrations contain only units, no individuals. Don’t get me wrong, I love “Duck, Duck, Goose,” “The Electric Slide,” and the “Keg Stand.” But I also loved Joe Horn pulling a phone out of the goalpost. Why won’t you let my entertainment entertain me? 

This stamping out of self expression isn’t limited to in-game action. When Colin Kaepernick began kneeling during the national anthem, it was an attempt to draw attention to the constant infringement on the rights of black Americans. When the media noticed Kaepernick’s actions, he became a symbol.¹⁰ When President Trump began vehemently decrying those actions, Kaepernick’s symbol became bigger than football, elevated to the stage of National politics, the same weight class as “President of the United States.” Suddenly a 29-year-old QB with a Super Bowl appearance, three NFC Championship Game Appearances, and a career TD/INT ratio higher than Peyton Manning and Drew Brees couldn’t stick to a roster as a backup.

 

The NBA, on the other hand, is a shining example of a league that embraces their players’ individual fame. A common talking point among older commentators is that younger fans have traded out “favorite teams” for “favorite players”¹¹ as the reason they watch. LeBron James is the poster child for this movement. He has changed teams three times in the last 12 years. Following each change he has led the league in jersey sales as LeBron fans clamor for up-to-date threads. For each LeBron jersey burned by a spurned city,¹² the nomadic tribe of LeBron-ites purchase roughly three trillion new ones.

Fame is an ever more powerful tool in society. When the NFL limits their players’ fame, it is limiting their ability to influence the world. Social media allows an individual to directly reach their fanbase, to leverage the increasingly scarce commodity of attention into more attention, and sometimes even action.¹³ To, dare I say, influence them. With great power comes great responsibility, and James is happy to play the part of friendly neighborhood mega-icon.¹⁴ He’s long been a vocal supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement. He shepherded the “I Promise School” into existence: An experimental school focused on helping underserved students by supplying support systems to their families in the form of job guarantees, food pantries, and housing. “The Decision” was a TV special James organized to announce that he was leaving his hometown Cavaliers to form a superteam in Miami. It was widely derided as cruel to his Cleveland fans, and pushed James into the role of NBA villain for the next several years. It also raised over six million dollars for charity. The worst thing LeBron has ever done raised over six million dollars for charity.

LeBron is the most powerful individual in his sport, operating as a sort of NBA mafia don.¹⁵ He wants a specific player on his team? Hi there, Tristan Thompson! He doesn’t like his coach? Bye bye Luke Walton! He wants a horse head in his bed when he wakes up in the morning? Sorry Seabiscuit, the King has a better agent and a thin understanding of mob movies. As much as it wrinkles their seersucker suits to admit it, NFL owners are likely uncomfortable with the idea of players wielding anything close to that amount of power. Former Houston owner Robert McNair came out and said it, stating during the Kaepernick-led anthem protests that “We can’t have the inmates running the prison.” A truly beautiful insight into an owner’s brain, as the colloquialism is “inmates running the asylum.” 

 

Why should NFL owners change the way they do business?¹⁶ The NFL is the most valuable sports league in the country. In the last decade alone, the NFL has increased its collective value by 2.8 times. Pretty successful, right? Not when compared to the scorching 5.9x growth that the NBA has seen.¹⁷ Since the inception of Twitter and Instagram, the NBA has grown at over twice the rate of the NFL. If the NFL isn’t careful, in ten years America will have a new favorite sport.¹⁸

The NFL has been dramatically more valuable than other leagues up until this point because of their ability to dominate TV ratings. More viewers means higher ad prices which means networks pay more to air games. But as baby boomers shrivel up and retire to that little Tucson in the sky, TV is becoming less and less important. The world is going through a paradigm shift,¹⁹ and paradigm shifts kill giants. Freeways and trucks killed the railroads. Planes killed luxury ocean liners. And luxury ocean liners killed manic pixie fuck boi Leonardo Di’Caprio.²⁰ Everyone younger than CBS’ target demographic²¹ has cut the cord, and before long the NFL will find itself in the battle for streaming attention with everyone else. As more and more entertainment options come into existence, fame becomes more powerful. There are literally too many things to watch, and media companies rely on the fame of their stars to direct people to their product. If the NFL wants kids born today to choose football as their sport of choice twenty years from now, they will have to start planting seeds today. They have to take a few lessons from the NBA, and I’m not just talking about shorter sleeves to show off those sick muscles. The NFL has to start helping their players become more famous:

 

Mic’d Up

At any given time there are 22 men on the field talking to each other. At best, ONE of those players is mic’d up. The potential viral energy falling by the wayside each week would make Osmosis Jones blush.²² Mic up everybody. You don’t have to air everything that gets said, but it’s crazy not to have a team of people whose job is to pore over the audio each week and release it as extra content.

 Matthew Stafford insisting on throwing a game winning touchdown with an injured shoulder? Brian Cushing headbutting someone without his helmet on then telling everyone how dumb he is? Keelan Cole being annoyed he has to give his towel to a baby? We have these delightful moments because of good luck– because those players happened to be mic’d up that day. For each gem we catch the audio of, statistically, we’re missing out on 21 others.

 

Celebrations

Look at JuJu Smith-Schuster, wide receiver for the Pittsburgh Steelers. Despite being considered by most experts to be no better than a top 20 player at his position,²³ he has nearly the same number of followers as Patrick Mahomes, the new face of the league.²⁴ How? He’s spearheaded some of the most fun celebrations of the last several years. From playing hide and seek with Le’Veon Bell to Kamehameha-ing on these fools, Smith-Schuster has capitalized on every touchdown as an opportunity to be meme-ified. This isn’t to take away from the fact that JuJu is a wildly likable man who puts a lot of hard work into his web presence. He continually cranks out content on Youtube and Twitch, but he had to do something to get people to start looking at his social media pages, and what he did was take his moments in the sun and turn them into highly shareable gifs. 

Celebrations are a way for players to build themselves a brand. By limiting what celebrations can take place, the NFL is limiting the number of ways players can build that brand. Unless containing hate speech or lasting longer than 90 seconds, I don’t see why celebrations should be limited in any way. The very things the NFL is trying to stop are the things I want to see!²⁵ Celebrations directed at the other team? Give me the entire Eagles’ roster performing the final dance battle from “You Got Served” in front of a seething Cowboys sideline. Sexual imagery? Hell, let a player thrust wildly while holding up a link to their OnlyFans. Props? I want Tom Brady to throw a game-winning touchdown, climb into his custom TB12 palanquin²⁶ and be carried off the field by four of the retired white receivers he dragged to a Super Bowl Championship. Let your stars print money for you with jersey sales, dingbats.

And for God’s sake, let your players take off their helmets when they score a touchdown. After the whistle blows that facemask isn’t doing anything other than robbing an individual of an opportunity for notoriety.²⁷ Facemasks are ankle weights in the race to fame.²⁸ Hollywood directors and reality show producers are paid millions of dollars to coax out the type of unfiltered emotion that comes pouring out of your players when they score a touchdown. Don’t let it go down the drain.

 

Interviews

STOP TELLING YOUR PLAYERS TO BE BORING! Postgame interviews are like watching beige paint dry on growing grass.²⁹ Nothing interesting is ever said. Players are trained on the rules of post game interviews like 19th century aristocrats were trained in dinner party etiquette. You are expected to regurgitate some combination of your belief in your teammates, your coaches, hard work, execution, and God. Anything else results in a champagne flute smashing to the ground and a series of gasps into white gloved palms.

Start interviewing people right after a big play or a big game. Athletes are at their most compelling in the moments of pure emotion immediately after success or failure. Picture LeBron James breaking down after winning a title for Cleveland, Richard Sherman telling everyone what he thought of Michael Crabtree, or Lightning McQueen being a dick after winning that first race in “Cars.” All obviously more compelling moments than Russell Wilson stepford QB-ing his way through another media session.³⁰

If you must continue with post game press conferences, encourage your players to be themselves. The only person who’s gotten attention by “saying all the right things” is Tebow. And that was because he was such a goodie two-shoes³¹ it was unnerving, like a 245 lb version of the kid who would show up to sleepovers with a bag of fruit leather because “it’s just like candy!” The fear is that honest expression at the podium will drive away viewers. The truth is the exact opposite. We love brash assholes on our team. When they’re not on our team we hate them, but we can’t look away. For a group of people that love Trump so much, you’d think NFL owners would have picked up on the media lesson he embodies.

 

Retirement

NFL stars’ fame is limited to the context of the field. The second they retire, they fade into obscurity. Likely the most famous NFL-er to play in the 90’s and 2000’s was Brett Favre, and he was only able to parlay his years of on field dominance into Wranglers commercials and the occasional welfare scandal. Compare that to his NBA equivalent, Shaq, a cultural mainstay who regularly appears on late night talk shows. I can just say “Shaq” and you know who I mean. I can’t just say “Brett.”³² There hasn’t even been the potential for a mononymous NFL player since Bjork went undrafted. The League invests a lot of energy and resources into its players. It seems foolish and wasteful to let the flame of fame go out the second they walk off the field. The NFL should invest more in helping their players walk from one spotlight to the next. 

At any given moment there are nearly 2,000 players in the league. At least one of them is worthy of a reality show. You’ve already got talented options just entering retirement: I speak for all of America when I say I would sell the state of Delaware in exchange for a travel-buddy show that follows Jay Cutler and Marshawn Lynch’s globetrotting adventures.³³

How about all the players who already make music in their freetime? The music industry has a long history of taking medium-talented musicians and building them the career of very talented musicians.³⁴ Pick the five most talented rappers, r&b singers, and country singers and set them up meetings with record labels. Let that satanic blood cult do the rest.

Do the same thing with the movie industry! We’re gonna lose Cam Newton to retirement in the next five years. That’s a real loss! Make him the next Captain America instead. Bless America with exposure to his grin on the big screen all while teaming the NFL up with the only company in the world capable of sending them new young fans.³⁵

 

Conclusion

As fame grows more valuable, the NFL has to change how they interact with their players’ notoriety. From limiting players’ actions on the field, to limiting their voices off of the field, to even limiting how often we see their faces, the NFL has stomped on players’ fame whenever possible. At every level players are incentivized against drawing attention to themselves out of fear that their self expression will hurt the team. The result is that the NFL is a cult of “We Over Me.” Ironically, the league brass needs to learn this lesson themselves. NFL owners are so worried about holding a bigger piece of the pie than the players, they fail to see that they’re keeping the whole pie from growing. If the NFL was a football team, the owners would be an aging star receiver, threatened by the arrival of a first round pick at their position. Rather than fitting into their new role on the team, they’re on the sideline throwing their helmet and complaining about touches, and it’s going to cost the team a playoff win.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Footnotes

By Daniel O’Connell

In 2017 Tony Romo exited the game of football as a player and entered the booth as an announcer, becoming an instant sensation. Finally unencumbered from having to perform as a mediocre quarterback, his elite mental talent could shine. ¹ He explained in real time how the quarterbacks on the field were dissecting defenses and, much to Twitter’s delight, regularly predicted plays before they happened. Two things were made exceedingly obvious: One, Tony Romo is incredibly gifted. Two, everyone else sucks ass. 

An announcer’s job consists of 3 parts: 

1. Communicate what is happening on the field to the viewers at home.
2. Be entertaining.
3. Occasionally pronounce the players’ names right. ²

With this in mind, Announcers can be separated into three tiers:

Tier 1: Tony Romo – Consistently achieves excellence in all three categories.

Tier 2: Chris Collinsworth, Al Michaels, and Charles Davis – Consistently achieves competence in at least 2 categories.

Tier 3: Sucks ass. 

The game has evolved dramatically over time, but the broadcasters haven’t. Today’s broadcast booth looks much the same as it did 50 years ago: two boring older dudes tasked with explaining what is happening to the audience at home (although they’re no longer allowed to call the intern “that Jewish kid.”) ³

One is the “Play-by-Play” guy, usually a non-athlete who verbalizes the action on the field in real time, like a toddler pointing out animals at the zoo. A former athlete usually steps in as the “Color” guy. Slouching slightly, as to not tower over his partner, he’s tasked with filling time between plays by providing “color commentary.”  He explains the strategy behind the play we just witnessed, and the reasons for its success or failure. In the case of a 3 yard run, which is neither a success nor a failure, he’s obligated to provide a TV-appropriate anecdote about the realities of being in a pile of sweaty men. ¹⁰

This model made sense for a very long time. For new fans, announcers are an invaluable resource for understanding the George RR Martin-ass tome of NFL rules. ⁴ But the fans of today are not the fans of yesteryear. The internet has changed the audience dramatically, and it’s time for broadcasting to catch up. Back in the 1990s, even Brett Favre didn’t know what a nickel defense was. Nowadays, there are twelve year-olds on Youtube breaking down the weaknesses of the cover 2 robber scheme. ⁵ The old knives just don’t cut it anymore. We Fix the League has the solution: multiple announcing teams that the viewer can choose from. 

To implement this kind of choice, the NFL would need to move away from cable TV and toward streaming. We Fix the League has certainly never watched an illegal stream, but our sources tell us that it is entirely possible to view an NFL game in this way. ⁶ The NFL shouldn’t be resistant to streaming as viewers watch all the same commercials on a stream as they would on TV. The NFL should take this information to the Networks, tell them to get with the fucking times, and offer to sell a service in which they stream full games to cord cutters (anyone under 45) as if broadcast on their original network. The Networks can guarantee their advertisers their ads will get seen, the NFL can more directly control their content, and everyone under 45 won’t have to message a random dude on Reddit each August to learn the name of this year’s illegal website. ⁷

Now, assuming that the NFL realizes that I am brilliant and they are dumb, and they hire me to wash away their dumbness, let’s dive into the new broadcast options: 

Your Standard National Broadcasting Team

The classic. Comes as the preset on every broadcast so as to not scare away grandparents and other cowards. Nothing to say about them that hasn’t already been said by this picture of mayonnaise.

A Local Duo for Each Team

With the ever increasing pool of podcasts and blogs to consume, the average fan today is well educated on their favorite franchise. In comparison, the national broadcasting team can seem like a High Schooler ill-prepared for a presentation. ¹¹ Meanwhile, the rest of the class has actually read the book, loves the book, and has opinions on how the book needs to MOVE ON FROM MATT PATRICIA ALREADY. 

They’re often working with outdated and shallow understandings of what a team is. I’ll never forget hearing an announcer refer to the Denver Broncos’ “potent passing attack” in the same season that the reanimated corpse of Peyton Manning totaled nine touchdowns and seventeen interceptions. At one point he got benched for throwing four picks in two and a half quarters. Potent indeed.

There is no shortage of local experts that the NFL could try out. Each fanbase has dedicated bloggers who have spent the last decade obsessively consuming all information related to their favorite team. While players spend the offseason pumping iron, these bloggers spend the offseason arguing over which linebacker is most likely to make the team’s practice squad. ¹²

Worried about the bloggers’ ability to speak on a microphone? Choose from the hundreds of NFL podcasts that exist. Or choose one particular podcast. Our podcast. (Have I mentioned we have a podcast?) 

Worried they’ll be boring? They won’t be! There are a plenty of creators out there who have spent years learning to be entertaining while talking about football. The same way that Brandon Perna is mostly useless in a 3rd and 6 situation, Jason Witten proved to be mostly useless in a media role. Stop taking flyers on the Wittens of the world, and start guaranteeing yourself success by hiring people who have honed the skills necessary to thrive.

STILL worried they’ll be boring? Good news! So was Phil Simms! Your worst case scenario is a lateral move. This is a time to experiment. if they’re a success, bully for us. If not, try out a new duo next year, and keep swinging until we have 32 local announcing duos who know which parts of the team are and are not potent.

Experts Being Allowed to Be Experts

Some people aren’t satisfied by simply knowing everything about one team. These sick freaks have an urge, nay, a NEED to know everything about every player in the league. It doesn’t stop at detailed scouting reports. Fans have developed mathematical formulas breaking down catch likelihood given the ball placement, humidity, and whether or not they sent Jerry Jones a birthday card that year. The internet has proven to be fertile soil for obsessives to inhale more information than ever before. They often then exhale that information in consumable pieces for others to stumble upon, resulting in a feedback loop of more and more increasingly obsessive fans. You learn more about QB play in an hour of scrolling through Derrik Klassen’s twitter than in years of watching color commentators draw on your TV. 

So please, NFL, let your experts BE experts! Bring in the best and brightest football minds at your disposal, and tell them not to worry about getting “too in the weeds.” There is no such thing as “too in the weeds.” The “weeds” are responsible for the ever-expanding collection of people most dedicated to consuming your product. Nerds are prey creatures. Give us more weeds to hide in and watch your market share expand.

Podcasters

Here’s where the true experimenting begins! 

Football is at its most powerful when watched with others, like the moon landing, or a documentary about how there was no moon landing. It’s a communal event: witnessing a specific piece of history being made in real time with people you love. 

When comedy podcasts started, a typical show was an hour long. After realizing that “You’re not my dad!”, they started getting longer. Today most podcasts are two to three hours of comedians thinking out loud, laughing at their own jokes, and shamelessly self-promoting. (Did I mention that we have a podcast?) How is this medium sustainable? Listeners form parasocial relationships with the hosts. They listen to all three hours of the podcast because it gives them the feeling of hanging out with their friends. 

Sometimes we can’t hang out with our friends, and some people don’t have friends. Why not supply the communal feeling by letting us watch the game with people who FEEL like friends? They don’t even have to announce the game, just let them chit chat over the top of it. They’ll naturally pull the conversation over to talk about the game when something exciting happens, and in the meantime they can meander through the myriad topics that are more interesting than a 3 yard run. Why not combine the experience of watching football with the experience of listening to your favorite podcast in one new form of media?

Fictional Characters

Why do announcers even have to be real people? Nickelodeon is hosting an NFL game specifically targeted at children this year. What if it was hosted by Spongebob and Patrick? Sandy as the insightful sideline reporter. A resentful Squidward donning clipboard and headset as the in-studio producer. Mr. Krabbs doing everything in his power to be the featured vendor in the weekly “Look at THIS interesting local food” segment. The ever-scheming Plankton forcing his way onto the field to meet his hero, Bill Belichick.

Nickelodeon isn’t the only one with IP’s to draw from. Now that Disney owns everything short of God (though they’re in talks with his agent) ESPN could have any number of cartoon favorites announce the game. ⁸ NBC is owned by Comcast, which also owns Dreamworks, so how about Shrek on play-by-play, Kung Fu Panda on Color, with sideline reporting by the horse from War Horse? ⁹ CBS could celebrate the NFL’s Salute to Service by bringing in Agent Jethro Gibbs from NCIS. Or Agent Sam Hanna from NCIS: Los Angeles. Or Agent Sarah Murphy from NCIS: Boston. (NCIS: Boston isn’t a real show yet, but I have it on good authority Donald Bellisario has to buy a new yacht after forgetting where he parked the last one.)

Why depend on others’ IP? I know people who occasionally watch football who would watch way more if they knew that Nick Kroll and John Mulaney were announcing as “Buck Dirk and Clyde Flandell.” Start making content that expands beyond the world of live football. Make Buck and Clyde animated, hire a writing team, and in addition to the weekly broadcast, put out a sitcom about their day-to-day lives as broadcasters. It’s “Bob’s Burgers” meets “Game of Zones.” Introduce us to their zany families while they navigate a world filled with animated caricatures of real NFL figures. Drew Brees keeps ringing their doorbell to sell “investment-grade diamonds.” Bill O’Brien tries to trade his son for a totaled Toyota Corolla. Tom Brady always carries a thermos full of unicorn blood, etc.

Nothing would break the complete lack of imagination in how NFL games are presented like abandoning the very idea that announcers be based in reality. 

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If something hasn’t changed in fifty years, there must be room for improvement. Tony Romo proved that the ceiling of the broadcast booth was higher than we knew. Who’s to say it’s not higher still? By adding a variety of announcers, the NFL can capitalize on the shift from cable to streaming, improve the experience for longtime viewers, and bring in new fans.

Hey NFL! If you’re going to be an entertainment company worth $60 Billion, at least try something new. The on-field product is more exciting than ever, but broadcasting still hasn’t instituted the forward pass. We allow corporations of your size to exist for two reasons: One, none of us can find our guillotine (we must have lost it in the move). Two, allegedly y’all are in charge of entertaining us. Step your game up. When you developed your product for television, its chief competition was Lincoln Logs and multi-day hikes to see a dead body. You’re dealing with a new generation, one bored by Lincoln Logs and desensitized to death by marathons of Law and Order: SVU. In 25 years we’ll look back at today’s NFL broadcasts and laugh at their lack of imagination through our jetpack’s oxygen masks. Or, if NFL leadership maintains their current uninspired trajectory, we’ll wonder at how little has changed, our feet planted firmly on the ground.