NFL

Spring professional football returns in 2019 with the Alliance of American Football (AAF). 

Time for lawmakers to sack sports subsidies.

Sports team owners, and the elected officials who enable their graft, say using taxpayer money to pay for stadium construction is an investment in local economic growth.

The huge dust-up over the protests of the American flag during the presentation of the national anthem by National Football League players has served to dramatize a massive deficiency in civics education in this nation.

As National Football League teams start to go into their “bye” weeks when they don’t have a game to play, fantasy sports fans are scrambling to find replacements for their starting lineups on the waiver wires.

Elected officials often say using taxpayer money to pay for the construction or renovation of sports stadiums is an easy way to boost local economies and revitalize the flagging fortunes of downtown areas. But what really happens is that these teams pit cities against one another in competition for franchises, using their scarcity as a way of wresting ever-greater subsidies from taxpayers while team values rise to astronomical levels.

One of the few simple joys I have in life, shared with Camille Paglia, is listening to sports radio. She describes it as one of the few arenas still safe for an old-fashioned sort of masculinity – I think of it more as a respite from reading and thinking about politics and policy, second only to leaning back in an easy chair with a good simple future-noir detective story about hunting Chinese Martians or a word that could end the world. There is a simple rhythm and cadence to good sports talk radio which allows for an undercurrent of wit and humor juxtaposed with statistical argumentation, hitting the high and the low.

This is the real thing the NFL is concerned about: as a seventh round tweener DE/LB, the odds don’t favor a long career for Sam. Maybe he’ll beat those odds, and the league would love it if he does.