Lousy NFL ratings foretold Trump victory

Since the start of the season, TV ratings for the NFL have been down—way down—as much as 12 percent from last year.

There are a number of theories for this sudden decline, among them that of Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman, who contended that ratings were in the toilet because the game “isn’t fun anymore.” This is an argument that dates back to at least the 1980s when critics dubbed it the “No Fun League” for its insistence on curbing crowd-pleasing celebrations and dancing.

There’s always been a subtle racial component to these criticisms, namely that NFL owners are the karmic descendants of plantation owners whose aim is to make sure that the players, who are mostly black, don’t get any ideas of unbridled self-expression and subsequent rebellion.

But if the NFL has been cracking down on “fun” for decades, why only now would that be contributing to falling ratings?

The league, for its part, blamed the decline on the distraction that was the 2016 presidential campaign, which, too, seems improbable, given that the masses ought to have craved healthy, vigorous and honest competition decided by an objective scoreboard, as an antidote to the morass that was Clinton vs. Trump.

Since the election, ratings haven’t rebounded, even though, if the season ended today, the Dallas Cowboys and the Oakland Raiders—two of the most popular franchises, and unquestionably the two most popular among the president-elect’s beloved Latino demographic—would have home field throughout the playoffs.

To find the deeper and truer answer to this phenomenon, you’ve got to look at recent history.

The last time the league found itself in this sort of malaise was in 1999-2000.

John Elway had just won back-to-back titles before riding into the sunset as the last of the 1980s stars (read: white quarterbacks). Tom Brady was holding a clipboard for Drew Bledsoe and Peyton Manning was throwing interceptions at a breakneck rate in Indianapolis.

That year, the Super Bowl featured the St. Louis Rams and the Tennessee Titans—franchises that at the start of the decade had been the Los Angeles Rams and Houston Oilers. The MVP quarterback in that 23-16 affair was a no-name out of Northern Iowa, just up from the Arena League, and before that, a bagger at a Cedar Rapids Piggly Wiggly. A heartwarming story for sure, but not the kind that necessarily engenders a sense of marquee.

Sensing weakness in the NFL’s popularity, WWF godfather Vince McMahon launched the XFL on Feb. 3, 2000, infusing the ethos of professional wrestling into America’s new pastime. The XFL slashed un-fun rules anywhere and everywhere it could, and started every game with a ritual that was part rugby scrum, part dive-for-the-knife prison yard scenario.

Rather than punish players for expressing themselves, the XFL encouraged expression to the point of thuggishness, even putting players’ ghettoized nicknames on the backs of their jerseys. Rod “He Hate Me” Smart of the Las Vegas Outlaws is just about the only thing anyone will remember about the XFL, which was a quick and colossal flop in the spring of 2001, but not entirely out of sync with the national mood.

The fall prior, Democrats should have easily retained the White House. The economy was strong, the world was at peace—or so it felt—and the Dems had a young, wonky vice-president waiting in the wings who knew the rules and had all the solutions.

If the NFL, in all its wonkiness had been popular at the time, Al Gore would have won decisively.

But McMahon was on to something. People were sick of that mystical cleanness, sick of the syllogism: science is rules, science is magic, therefore rules is magic—or as the NFL would put it: “… complete the process of the catch,” “… unabated to the quarterback,” “… perform a football move,” “one knee equals two feet.”

Voters instead elected, albeit by a razor-thin electoral college margin, a candidate they’d rather ‘have a beer with.’ All George W. Bush had to do was say, “fuzzy math,” and that was all we needed to rebuke Al Gore’s un-fun ‘rules’ about greenhouse gasses and the Social Security “lockbox.”

The XFL played its first game two weeks after Bush’s inauguration, six days after Trent Dilfer quarterbacked the Baltimore Ravens to a drowsy 34-9 victory in Super Bowl XXXV. The XFL lasted just one miserable and mercifully short season.

Fast-forward to 2016.

Coincidentally, the Broncos have won the last Super Bowl, again sending a future Hall of Fame quarterback out to pasture with his second Lombardi Trophy. Also coincidentally, the Rams are calling Los Angeles home for the first time since 1993.

Not so coincidentally, NFL ratings are ready to plunge, even as the Democrats look sure to retain the White House. Despite being black and completely out of touch with rural America, Barack Obama owns a relatively strong approval rating.

His rightful successor, or so we’re told, is a former First Lady with really really high negatives, not the least of which is wonkiness and zealous belief in policy as the bread of life.

Despite that and her magnetism to scandal, it figured she was going to win the general election, given that the Republican pick from a field of 17 was a reality TV antihero who, like Vince McMahon, once tried to take on the NFL with a league of his own.

Donald Trump wasn’t an original founder of the USFL, but once he came aboard with his New York/New Jersey Generals, and signed big-name college stars Doug Flutie and Herschel Walker, the league might as well have been his.

Trump almost single-handedly led the league’s antitrust lawsuit against the NFL in 1985, believing that playing in the spring was, “small potatoes,” and that if you couldn’t go head-to-head with the NFL in the fall—nearly impossible on its face because the NFL already had all the stadium leases and TV contracts in the fall—it was pointless to go on at all.

The USFL won the lawsuit, but it paid out a grand total of $3.14, writing the death sentence for the upstart league, which folded a few weeks later.

Trump didn’t understand, or maybe didn’t believe in “rules” then, as he clearly doesn’t now. It’s obvious now that’s what attracted the vast majority of counties and states to go his way, even though Clinton won the popular vote by nearly three million.

Ready for another bizarre connection between Donald Trump and Vince McMahon? His cabinet pick for small business administrator is McMahon’s wife Linda, who in her hey day could be seen jawing with wrestlers in the WWF (now WWE) ring, often kicking them in the groin, just to show ‘em who’s boss.

So to answer the original question, “why are NFL ratings down?” it’s really about the way we, as a people, relate to rules.

Flags for unnecessary roughness are so commonplace in today’s game that if your team gets a stop on third-and-20 you have to hold your breath hoping someone didn’t graze the quarterback’s helmet, an automatic and usually undeserved first down. The league makes an existential argument for these rules, which is somewhat defensible given that generations of children yet unborn won’t take up the sport if their parents believe it’s a recipe for scrambled brains. But what’s really gone too far is flags downfield for illegal contact and pass interference.

The passing game is what makes American football superior to soccer and rugby, but nowadays they call it tighter than basketball, and again make your team’s celebration of a stop on third-and-20 wait with baited breath for a flag coming from the secondary because one of five receivers running patterns was molested in the slightest.

It feels like a game controlled by lawyers and actuaries, and as much as we may claim to hate political corruption, cronyism and incompetence in government, we hate lawyers and wonks much, much more.