Nathan Schiller

Thirty-five years ago, Eric Dickerson was an exquisite and record-setting NFL running back. Since then, he has crusaded against the NFL, threatening to boycott the Hall of Fame induction ceremony unless he and his fellow inductees receive lifetime healthcare and reminding everyone that most players hate the league. None of which is scandalous. Dickerson loves football and acknowledges that being an NFL star improved his life. He is routinely employed as an NFL analyst. 

This duality illuminates the liminal strangeness of America’s most popular sport. Everyone can know that football is innately violent and that the NFL exploits its players. Everyone can agree this is not good. And league revenue can still tick upward. Some years back, I thought the balance was beginning to tip—that more fans were caring less. Turns out I was projecting.

How the NFL grew to make $15 billion 

A century ago, if you were interested in this upstart sport, you could check out your hometown team of elite amateur athletes. Football grew, slow and steady, for forty years, until the NFL-AFL merger consolidated power, creating the Super Bowl and paving the path for cultural prestige and entertainment professionalism. 

TV changed everything about our species, but its effect on football is unparalleled. The sport’s linear and marching game play maps perfectly onto television hardware and the medium’s ad-based economy. In person, the action—seconds of abrupt movement among twenty-two players—is incoherent. You need a camera to tell you what to follow and a replay to show you what happened. 

In the ’80s, talk radio did for sports what cable news would soon do for politics. Football is too brutal for more than sixteen games a season; this slow drip of supply generated analytical demand. Among the best evidence that humans crave intellect is, to paraphrase Chomsky, the working-class American male calling in to The Dave and Larry Post Game Report to deduce the motivations of Coach Bill’s Bailout call on third-and-two from the twenty with two timeouts down six.

Mass communication provided the foundation for production innovation. The league found a gorgeous PR mill in NFL Films, created virtual cosplay with Madden, embedded binge-worthiness into gameday with Sunday Ticket and every other hour of the week with NFL Network. Fans and non-fans played fantasy football obsessively. Sports blogs evolved into a content farm cottage industry of pro-am commentors. Finally, in 2018, the Supreme Court legalized sports gambling nationwide. 

Growing up in Pittsburgh as a Steelers fan

The last Super Bowl I remember watching was, by coincidence, played in 2018. My football fandom atrophied, like most people’s, from maturity. Not high-browism (though that’s there, somewhere), but the fact that, the longer you live, the more life’s responsibilities become irreconcilable with addiction (unless that’s your immutable state). 

In Pittsburgh, the site of the first pro football game, it is tough to travel a mile without seeing the Steelers logo—simply the U.S. Steel logo plus “e-r-s”—on billboards, bumper stickers, decals, and license plates, on scarves, hats, and gloves, on T-shirts and collared shirts, sweatshirts and jerseys, winter jackets and sports coats, jeans and turtlenecks. I absorbed the importance of knowing who was on the team and what was happening to it early enough to now have no concept of how it happened.

Which amplifies instances to the contrary. When, in fifth grade, I cajoled my parents into presenting me a Sega, I learned that it was often more fun to play games as the Steelers than spend three hours pretending a midseason Steelers slog was a stimulant. The notion of total devotion could not stand my introduction to the piano, either. I wasn’t supposed to prefer Mozart to Madden, but I couldn’t help it. 

Fandom, in isolation, came with a cap. The social element was the deeper dimension. My friends were largely sports-comfy guys who could enjoy the athleticism, analyze the game play, indulge in the narratives, and laugh at the absurdity, all while talking about everything else in the world. Cultural centerpieces are always more background noise than focal point.

A brief, personal history of the Steelers

To stake their claims of royalty, Steelers fans stick to loyalty and longevity. It’s an area where they have a legitimate edge. In the times of fickle allegiances and bottom-line business deals, one Pittsburgh family, the Rooneys, has owned the team since 1933, and probably always will. 

Those teams were disasters for decades, but in the ’70s the Steelers won four Super Bowls and became football’s first dynasty. They reverted to the mean in the ’80s, but ownership kept the coach, letting him retire, on his terms, in the early ’90s. 

Then the teams got good again, just as I was old enough to care. I have vivid memories of a 1996 Super Bowl party, at a friend’s home, the downstairs packed with bouncy kids and chattering adults, and the disappointment when the Steelers lost to the Dallas Cowboys, their old nemesis and ongoing antithesis, brash and flash versus Rust Belt lunch pails: spoiled football celebrities besting humbled football workhorses.

In that loss and every other season-ending heartbreaker over the years, I became increasingly disturbed that inferior organizations could deny us our rightful “one for the thumb,” the fifth championship that would restore our place atop the sport. That the Cowboys (and San Francisco 49ers) had reached five titles while we’d been stuck on four since before I born was cruel.

When the Steelers finally won one, in 2006, my senior year of college, I felt relief a smidgen more than joy. The narrative had concluded, but I wasn’t fully aware. I wanted an epilogue. When, three years later, they won another, an unprecedented sixth, I felt the pandemonium of privilege. When, two seasons later, they lost one, I wondered why I was taking it so hard.

CTE and the NFL concussion crisis

At the time—2011—the New England Patriots were muddling through a matchless modern dynasty. They’d won three Super Bowls in four years, lost another, would lose another the next year, and then win three more. Fandom may appear to position winning as the metric that makes the hierarchy, but real fan know it’s about the arguments. What fans don’t always understand is that the arguments are only reflections of the stories we tell ourselves to make the games matter.

In 2002, the year the Patriots kicked off that two-decade dynasty, Mike Webster, the Hall of Fame center from the Steelers ’70s dynasty, died at age 50. At the Allegheny County coroner’s office, a physician named Bennet Omalu performed an autopsy on Webster’s body and identified a new kind of brain injury, a neurodegenerative disease that he coined chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE. 

In 2017, researchers published a study that showed signs of CTE in the brains of 110 of 111 deceased NFL players. According to the WebMD article “CTE: Football’s Growing Medical Crisis,” the study may rely on skewed samples, since the brains were “likely donated by families of players who had exhibited neurologic and psychiatric symptoms.” A critical caveat, for the sake of the scientific method.

Any observer can instantly see that tackle football bounces the players’ brains on even the most mundane plays. The only way to eliminate this is to make football a relatively contactless sport. Flag football is fun and popular, but it’s what Americans like to play, not watch. Americans watch tackle NFL football for the same reason they watch NASCAR racing: crashes. 

For years, ESPN featured a segment during its football show called Jacked Up! On Jacked Up!, NFL analysts—former players and coaches—gawked at the week’s most violent hits while muttering witty one-liners and chanting, in unison, “Player Guy got . . . jacked up!” As the Jacked Up! Wikipedia page notes, “Jacked Up! was quietly cancelled by ESPN in the wake of concussion studies that showed a correlation with violent football collisions and CTE.” However, the page also warns that “This article does not cite any sources.”

In 2012, Junior Seau, the historically great NFL linebacker, shot himself in the chest and died. A year later, his family revealed that he had suffered from CTE. In 2016, an NFL doctor admitted to Congress that there is a link between football-related traumas and CTE. That year, a trend was already underway where prominent NFL players, from rookies to veterans, retired early, citing years of injuries, the prospect of injuries, and increased awareness of CTE. Many of them—many of us—though not me, I never saw it—first understood the impact of CTE in a true way from the 2015 movie Concussion, which was adapted from a 2009 GQ article and features Will Smith as Dr. Bennet Omalu.

Football reflects American life

I remain fascinated by football. It illustrates, to paraphrase George Will, America’s worst impulses and excesses, the pompy jingoism, rapacious capitalism, and colonizing bloodlust. It also contains beauty among brutality. Unlike in any other sport, execution on the football field is the evasion of violence, the success of which requires a sophisticated mix of planning, preparation, and kinesthetic wizardry. 

A guy like Eric Dickerson knows this as lucidly as anyone. It would be so easy for him to leave it at that.