Tom, when you have a willing and complicit media, you can do anything.
HOward Cosell wrote 3 books that I am aware of, and in all three, he spends a lot of time talking about how every time he did a piece that wasn’t flattering to the NFL, he got a call from Pete Rozelle. Or a visit. All the time, to “present their side of the story”, and in not so many words, suggest he may not have his credentials to cover the next event. Now, since he was Howard Cosell, you know darn well there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell he wasn’t getting credentials, but if they do this to him, how many people have caved and kept their coverage positive? The NFL monitors everything written about them.
If someone doesn’t think the NFL doesn’t get positive press, there are more than a few curious items.
The biggest is steroids. The sports media latched on to steroids in baseball, basically deciding it was going to be their Watergate. Now, I’m not here to argue what help steroids do or do not give a baseball player, but there is no way you can think that steroids can’t help a football player. All the reasons given for why they needed to be rooted out of baseball, and why the media had to conduct their investigations(witchhunts was more like it), apply just as much to football as they do to baseball. Yet, there is no investigation going on in the NFL. Apparently it is absolutely normal for a 6’4" guy to weigh 260 pounds and run a 4.5 40. A guy hits 50 home runs and he must be on something, but that linebacker is just training, sayin’ his prayers and eatin’ his vitamins?
Spygate: Plenty was made about it when it first came out. The league issued an edict not to tape signs, and the Patriots violated it. They got fined and lost a draft pick. And then Roger Goodell destroyed the tapes. Destroyed the tapes, right then and there. No chance that anything could ever come up again. And Goodell’s grilling for doing this is scheduled for the day after never. Then Matt Walsh, former employee, says he has evidence that the Patriots taped the Rams walk through before the Super Bowl. All kinds of song and dance, there is finally a meeting, Goodell comes out immediately afterwards, says “he had nothing new”, and the story is dropped. Really? First of all it’s tough to say that it’s nothing new when you don’t even have the existing evidence to compare it to. Secondly, just like that, bam you take the word of a guy who had to quickly destroy the evidence of the issue that got this ball rolling without so much as a question?
Gambling: A lot get smade about how football is head and shoulders above every other sport in America in popularity. It’s popular no question. But it’s always about the “purity of the game”, the “mano-a-mano competition”, the “true spirit of the gridiron” that drives this interest. Of course, it’s never about the elephant in the room that the NFL states it wants no part of, but makes sure that proper information is available to them, to the point of fining people who file false injury reports: gambling. It is never acknowledged that a very large percentage of the “fans” of the NFL would have no interest at all if there was no money riding on picking the winner or the point total.
Not only that, but the NFL controls and packages what gets sent out with its NFL films arm. Games are not rebroadcast in their entirety, they are packaged into a nice show with a proper reverence in the narrator’s tone. Plus, anything that does not further the image can be conveniently edited out.
These are just some of the examples of how the media views the NFL. Given that backdrop, it does not take much to figure out that if you decide to hype something, and have a willing “distribution network” as described above, you can get a lot of traction when it comes to glorifying the Super Bowl as something more than a football game.
If you can get the media to ignore drug problems, and glorify the mystique of IMH to the same degree, you can see similar results. It takes years and year and years though.
