The gig is up, the NFL is trash and they can blame the drop in ratings on whatever they’d like, but the reality is that the treatment of former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick and the realization that NFL owners have an unshakable plantation-owner ethos now has the league canceling the final Sunday-night game.
The reason, they claim, is that the final Sunday-night NFL game falls on New Year’s Eve. Since calendars have been around since some prehistoric cave dweller figured out that future days could be charted, I’m not buying this. You’re telling me this billion-dollar business didn’t have the foresight to realize before now that the final Sunday-night game was on New Year’s Eve?
According to CNN, the last time the NFL aired a game on New Year’s Eve was in 2006, when the Chicago Bears took on the Green Bay Packers. Here’s how the news station breaks down the NFL’s decision:
It was expected to be quarterback Brett Favre’s last game with the Packers (and widely expected to be his last game ever). Still, only 13.4 million people watched that game, about a quarter fewer than the average Sunday Night Football game that season.
Since the last Sunday night football game also happens to be the final game of the season, the NFL tries to schedule a game that will definitely have playoff implications for one or both of the teams playing. (A team that already made the playoffs might sit their starters, leading to an exceptionally boring game.)
The league claims that no games met this criterion, and since it hadn’t announced which teams were going to play, the NFL just decided to cut the game altogether.
Instead, the league that wants some 70 percent-African-American players to risk their lives chasing a damn ball but doesn’t want them to protest black death at the hands of police will run seven games at 1 p.m. and nine games at 4:25 p.m.
“We felt that both from a competitive standpoint and from a fan perspective, the most fair thing to do is to schedule all Week 17 games in either the 1 p.m. or 4:25 p.m. windows,” said Howard Katz, the NFL’s broadcasting chief, in a prepared statement, CNN reports.
The ratings for this NFL season are down 9 percent from last year, and whether it’s from the #NFLblackout or white fans who just couldn’t handle black protest, the ratings are tanking, and that’s a good thing.
Read more at CNN.
DISCUSSION
I’m neither an American nor an American football viewer but I’ve always been troubled by the fact that the stadiums are full of angry white people cheering on black men in their prime giving each other concussions. It evoked something akin to gladiators to me.