EDITOR'S NOTE: The NFL and the Democratic Party have a lot in common

What’s been the worst non-strike, non-lockout NFL season in my lifetime comes to an end this Sunday when the New England Patriots take on the Philadelphia Eagles in Super Bowl LII.

It’s about the best match-up the league could hope for in a season where ratings were down by a whopping 9 percent, a figure many more than just President Trump attribute to the wave of players kneeling during the national anthem.

While the protests didn’t help any, it’s absurd to think they played any significant role in the decline in viewership and interest.

Many of the factors that do contribute to the decline do have political relevance, but not in the way that Trump, or any other blockheads who think players on the sidelines for the anthem was a thing before 2008, when the U.S. Army — a major advertiser for the NFL then — threw a bunch of money at the league to force the players on the field in hopes of driving up enlistments. The players themselves would surely much rather be in the locker room making last minute preparations.

NFL ratings have fallen because they had reached an apex that was unsustainable. That ascent began about a decade ago and coincided with the almost fad-like rise in fantasy football, which was buoyed by the universal distribution of smartphones.

Everyone was playing fantasy football. It allowed gamblers to gamble legally to their hearts content and coworkers, friends and family members could season their relationships with friendly competitions complete with silly team names and boobie prizes treated like chalices.

More than anything, though, fantasy football got everybody into every game.

This may not seem like a political factor, but if you look at it a little more closely, it most certainly is.

The NFL’s ascent came at the expense of the NBA, NHL and especially Major League Baseball, which captured so little national interest, its playoff games drew lesser ratings than preseason NFL games.

Today, however, baseball’s postseason viewership is booming. Why? Because all that while it was sowing seeds in local markets, winning over fan bases town by town, county by county, state by state. The NFL, on the other hand, sought only to win over the entirety of the country as a whole.

Sound anything like the 2016 Presidential race?

The Democratic Party today acts exactly like the NFL, assuming what speaks to fans in Chicago speaks to fans in Jacksonville. Before the Trump shock, Dems concerned themselves only with winning the Presidency and retaining at least a filibuster force in the Senate, eschewing the House, and especially forgetting about governorships, state houses, city councils.

Meanwhile, Republicans, like baseball, drove their message home on the local level, and managed to get country mouse to drive the perhaps the ugliest city rat in history to the White House.

As pop culture philosopher Chuck Klosterman observed, football is unique because it is all at once the most conservative of sports and the most progressive of sports. By that he means it always gives the impression of being very masculine and Spartan — in line with standing for the anthem like good soldiers, while at the same time being the most progressive in terms of innovation in technology, artistry, rules and strategy.

Ironically, the player in the cross-hairs of the anthem protest movement, is the poster child of what Klosterman means.

For at least three seasons, Colin Kaepernick was virtually impossible to defend because he ran the read-option better than anybody. The only advantage the defense has — especially as rules against contacting downfield receivers get stricter — is that the quarterback is really not a movable chess piece. He’s like the king, the object of what you need to attack, but not really a piece you have to account for in your defense.

Like no one else before him — including Michael Vick and Randall Cunningham — Kaepernick played quarterback like a queen, forcing you to account for him horizontally, diagonally and vertically.

A tough guy, three-yards-and-a-cloud of dust mindset could never solve a puzzle like defending Kaepernick. It took progressive thinking, and just two years after Kaepernick was one play from winning the Super Bowl, he was a shell of his former self. Opposing defenses had figured him out.

Only after he was already washed up did he become a political lightning rod and force for social change.

Thus ended the era of the mobile quarterback — especially as the NFL enacted progressive workplace safety measures to prevent players from playing with any signs of concussions.

That, coupled with even more rules protecting quarterbacks from taking hits, made the quarterback position even more valuable.

With value comes fragility, which goes to the other reason this was such a lousy year in the NFL.

More than half of the Week 1 starting quarterbacks were injured, including stars like Aaron Rodgers of the Packers and second-year player Carson Wentz of the Eagles. Wentz, who, like Klosterman, grew up in North Dakota, apparently never got the memo that the age of the running quarterback was over.

Week after week, until he was injured in Week 13 against the Rams, Wentz would plow his 6-foot-5, 240-pound frame into linebackers like he was trying to prove a conservative point that football was a game to be played toughly by tough men.

When he crashed into two Rams defenders at the goal line and tore his ACL on a play that didn’t count anyway on account of a false start penalty, he got back up and played two more downs, throwing a touchdown pass on a gimpy left leg before hobbling into the locker room — his MVP season over.

So for the Super Bowl, we get Wentz’s backup, Nick Foles against 40-year-old legend Tom Brady. You couldn’t find two passers more steadfastly at home in the pocket.

Neither will be running and nobody will be kneeling.

That will change, especially once Brady’s gone, which could happen as soon as Monday. The game is progressive.

The league is another matter. Will it find a way to connect with fans on a local level, the way other sports have?

Likewise, will Democrats find a way to do the same?