By Chase Frederick – Special to InHale Sports
Deflated footballs and smashed phones, brutal wife punchings caught on video, DUI’s, child abuse. This is professional football today. The list of troubles for NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell would be a public relations catastrophe of Enron proportions, spelling demise of nearly any other organization on this wildly weird planet.
Except, this IS the National Football League. I mean c’mon. Could anyone actually think pro football could disappear? You’d be a heritic, lunatic, committed to purgatory for suggesting something like that in America.
Doom to the NFL? I don’t think so.
Is it not wonderful? The male population of crazed football fanatics have more fodder, more gossip, rumors per-scale under the tutelage of Goodell to high-five their fantasy football comrades in the office, more excuses and perhaps even something that modulates man-crazed emotions, a new connection, if you will, with their National Enquirer reading spouses.
Can you imagine?
Let’s take for instance the latest saga of Aldon Smith, the San Francisco pass rusher who makes mince-meat out of opposing offensive line. The embattled 25 year-old had already been in trouble with the law and the league with two DUI arrests. Now add a third, compounded with hit-and-run and vandalism charges. Smith getting let go for yet another run-in with the law was a hot water cooler topic in my Bay Area place of employment, with men and women alike discussing the downfall of the once proud organization with as much as discussing Trump’s hair.
Troubles for driving-under-the-influence and Smith are the least of the leagues worries. Deflategate, Ray Rice, Adrian Peterson all will be substance for chatter as the season gets underway.
Which is perhaps one reason why the litany of on-and-off the field troubles by NFL players will not spell the demise of America’s favorite sport. Like watching ancient Roman gladiators with more money than entire countries, we the public relish in epic story of rise and fall. It’s the epitome of living vicariously through stardom, watching the literal insanity of failure, only to rise up again. We love our football and ladies and gentlemen we love our gossip. Are you ready for some football?
