Bernstein: Games, Gambling Ready To Clean NFL's Slate
By Dan Bernstein--
CBSChicago.com senior columnist
(CBS) Scandals are elaborate sand castles, impressive yet fleeting.
Again they have been built on the shores while the NFL has been away from the action since the Super Bowl concluded, in fact immediately and unceasingly thereafter. One beside another in a long line, each with additions tacked on in the weeks without football, drying slowly in the summer sun.
And they aren't long for this earth. There are waves building.
Thursday night's NFL opener brings the crest of it, and the rest crashes home Sunday to wash us in our national distraction. We have felt it all approaching, and it's here.
For those attached to the home team, the weeks of practices and depth charts finally culminate in familiar collisions, more meaningful and explosive than those presented by the increasingly silly exhibitions. Rosters have been pared, selected for size and speed, as the physics now go from theoretical to tangible. Temptation from the possibility of success always trumps confronting the alternative in the minds of hopeful fans – heart over head for now, at least – and a league designed for competitive equality reaps the rewards of generational faith as the gates swing open and turnstiles spin. More objective observers may have appetites whetted for other opportunities, noting a half-point imbalance one way or the other, or a curiosity amid the posted win totals.
Civic loyalty has nothing on the more mercenary instincts, however. We have heard it for weeks in casual conversations at work, at the gym and at the bar, and we've absorbed the advertisements luring our eyes and ears with the promises of millions of dollars. Indeed, fantasy football deserves a more apt name at this point, having become at least as real as the game both for fans and the NFL itself.
It should come as no surprise that such an ownership-dominant business model has made owners of its consumers, empowering them by commodifying interchangeable players and making all games more important to everyone invested. Stadiums themselves are glittering, crackling monuments to postmodern irony, providing bandwidth so attendees can track results everywhere else, as massive screens replicate the living rooms the thousands paid handsomely to relinquish for the day. Tickets have never been more expensive, and the fans ostensibly there to be in the moment have never been less present.
Soon football will be everywhere, and always in the Red Zone. If it's not your team, it's someone on one of your other teams, as they are all your teams.
Anything that has occurred in a federal courtroom or at an office conference table soon becomes an afterthought, subsumed and overwhelmed by young men destroying each other for our amusement in staccato bursts of violent athleticism. For some of us, watching the game played at the highest level itself is satisfying enough. Others crave action on the action to make it more personally visceral.
It's all spectacular entertainment regardless, commanding our time and attention. At once mortally human and gloriously inhumane, football returns to arenas and airwaves to divert us from previous pursuits. It's a sea of money and power.
The tide is coming in.
Dan Bernstein is a co-host of 670 The Score's "Boers and Bernstein Show" in afternoon drive. Follow him on Twitter @dan_bernstein and read more of his columns here.
