On Sunday, Super Bowl LII will close a troubling year for NFL football. The protest against law enforcement abuses started by former San Francisco 49ers backup quarterback Colin Kaepernick in 2016, metastasized into a national issue after President Trump called out the protesters last September. ‘‘Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners… say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now!’” the president said. “’Out! He’s fired.’” The following weekend more than 200 players took a knee. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell criticized the president for being “divisive” and maintained that “the NFL and our players are at our best when we help create a sense of unity in our country and our culture.” But they were doing the exact opposite.
Players said they were protesting over police violence and race relations, but many fans saw it as an insult to the flag, the national anthem and the military. A September 2017 poll showed that 64% of respondents thought players should stand and be respectful during the national anthem, and half of respondents said the protests made them less likely to watch the NFL. Television ratings were down almost 10% in the 2017 season, after an 8% slide the previous year, in part due to the protests.
Meanwhile the NFL, not content with needlessly politicizing pro football, is helping encourage social activism at the college level too. In February the league will cohost a three-day “Advocacy in Sport” workshop at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia. The workshop was designed to train “the next generation of athletes who wish to use sport as a powerful platform for advocacy,” according to NFL executive vice president of football operations Troy Vincent. And even though the workshop is “a direct extension of Colin Kaepernick’s activism,” the university says it “will not support or promote kneeling during the national anthem.” Which is more than pro football can say.
Combat Football
Sports and politics rarely mix well, as the NFL is learning. But what if instead of downplaying social issues the league went all the way? In 1973, science fiction writer and futurist Norman Spinrad published “The National Pastime,” a story about what happens when football embraces America’s national divisions and makes them part of the game. In the “Combat Football” league he imagined, there are six teams, not based in cities but organized around social-demographic categories: a black team, a Hispanic team, one for “frustrated Middle Americans,” one for “hippies and kids,” one for gays, and “a team for the motorcycle nuts and violence freaks.” The sport becomes a more accurate reflection of divided America, and also allows identity groups to work out their frustrations by proxy on the field.
The rules of Spinrad’s fictional football league are altered to make it more, not less, violent (the ball carrier may slug defenders for example), and helmets and shoulder pads are discarded. The result is a bloody, on-field national catharsis in the guise of a sporting event. And when the violence on the field begins to be replicated in the stands, the Combat Football league simply coopts it, reporting official scores of both weekly team play and fan casualties. The sport becomes so popular that the NFL is forced to adopt combat football rules or go out of business.
Spinrad told me his story was inspired by British soccer hooligans, “very violent yobs who went to the games to get into fights with each other.” He said that even though “American football on the field is the more violent sport,” American sports fans are “seldom violent, at least so far.” But when you have “the left versus the right, the center versus the coasts, cops versus Black Lives Matter, Christians versus metrosexuals, getting down to men versus women,” some type of conflict is “potentially just a shot away.” A dystopian future football league might also borrow from the 1975 film “Rollerball” and cut back on rules and time limits in the post-season to make it that much more interesting.
Maybe Vince McMahon might consider the “Combat Football” model for his XFL reboot. Granted, he has mandated that in his league there will be no on-field politics, and players will be judged by “the quality of human being they are” and not allowed to play if they have criminal records. But aren’t those just hopelessly old-fashioned American ideas that have no place in these increasingly “woke” times?
No one wants a future like the one Spinrad imagined in “The National Pastime,” but if we want to avoid sliding in that direction, we should stop with all the politics, salute the flag, and just play the game.
James S. Robbins, a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors and author of the forthcoming Erasing America: Losing Our Future by Destroying Our Past, has taught at the National Defense University and the Marine Corps University and served as a special assistant in the office of the secretary of Defense in the George W. Bush administration.