The NFL did not pee in your cornflakes

Fair warning: I’m on fire tonight, kids.

It started when I got called a hypocrite for supporting pro football with my TV ratings and occasional ticket dollars. It got worse when Jezebel mocked the reduction in Ben Roethlisberger’s suspension. And, as I’ve thought about all those things at the same time I’m counting the minutes to the first kickoff this weekend, I got full-on pissed off on behalf of the NFL.

Let’s break it down.

Am I a hypocrite for helping shore up an organization of people who get paid millions for playing a game and executives who earn billions owning and selling the teams that employ those players? Nope. Sorry, but no. I have zero problem with someone earning what the market will bear in exchange for an in-demand skill, which in this case is one that most will only be able to practice for a short time at great physical sacrifice (which I’ve written about). A skill, by the way, that's a hell of a lot more useful to society than the Wall Street skunks who apparently only exist to crash our economy, collect my tax dollars and then sit on them... but I'll get to them later.

Does it suck that these same players are often exploited in college? Yes – so blame the supposed institutions of higher education who’ve willingly turned themselves into football factories. Is it BS that the base pay for an NFL rookie is more than, say, an elementary school teacher will earn in a lifetime? Of course – but whose fault is that? Unless you can come up with a way to pay every teacher $100,000 grand a year without raising your precious taxes, you need to either a) accept market realities, or b) stop calling me a socialist. Put your money where you’d like to think your mouth is.

Am I a hypocrite because all pro athletes are “thugs”? Please. The NFL heavily promotes service opportunities to its players and even to fans. For every player you’ve read about on the police blotter, I could name you 10 who are putting their money and time to good use in their communities. Sure, some of them are probably motivated by PR. But that doesn’t change the fact that they are doing that good work.

Which brings me to Ben. (Sorry, not typing out his last name again.) Ben’s gone from being my favorite NFL player to the top of my shit list, where he’s probably going stay for the foreseeable future. First of all, I’m sick to death of talking about The Incident, and I will personally punch your dog in the face while you watch if you pretend for one second that you have more moral authority to talk about this than I do. I love Jezebel to pieces, but this was not cool.

Roger Goodell said from the beginning that Ben would get a four-to-six game suspension, which was pretty much universally interpreted as four games with an option for another two if Ben did something to piss off Goodell. He didn’t, and Goodell “reduced” the suspension to four games, at a greater financial cost to Ben than most actual convicted rapists would get. And, though I have opinions about what happened in that bathroom influenced by my own biases – Ben wasn’t convicted of rape. He wasn’t even charged.

Remember how many rapists go to prison? About six percent. So, unlike with Ben, there are 94 of 100 rapists whose names you’ll never know. Is there anyone currently alive on the planet who will ever do shots with Ben ever again? Doubtful. And that – that right there – is more justice than most rape victims will ever get.

That’s not the NFL’s fault. Take it up with the idiot cops in Georgia if you think Ben should be in jail now. Then after that, call up the law enforcement agencies who’ve got tens of thousands of rape kits collecting dust on shelves, still unprocessed. And maybe drop a line to the elected officials who don’t seem to think rape is that big a deal.

That’s really what’s pissing me off the most. If you wanted to make a list of people and institutions who need to answer for something, pro sports would be pretty frakking far down on the list. They’re entertainment. What about the corporations who’ve gotten hundreds of billions in public money, but whom the president is now having to bribe to do R&D on their own products? The CEO of Goldman Sachs got a $9 million stock bonus last year. The CEO of JP Morgan got $17 million. The NFL’s highest-paid player, Peyton Manning, made just over $30 million, but half of that was from endorsements (yay capitalism!) and not one damned penny from public bailouts.

So, come Sunday, I’ll come home from church and plan to watch roughly 10 hours straight of NFL football. Then Monday, and probably Tuesday, too, I will spend my entire lunch hour reading game recaps and poring over stats. I will relish every second. Because I frakking love football, and no one’s going to make me feel bad about that.