Another Super Bowl has come and gone. Kyle Shanahan is still a choking nepo baby. Usher is still in great shape. The NFL is still pleased as punch to be gifted 18-34 demographic clout by Taylor Swift. The culture is still stuck between roughly 2004 and 2012. I think it’s fair to say we knew the majority of this going in. It’s all surface level. Interrogating every goose on the pond in the hopes it’ll honk some profound truth at you may interest some. For my part I’m more interested in diving in to fumble around in the murky depths. Join me in my diving bell and let’s pay Nessie a visit (though personally I’m more partial to Ogopogo, real heads know).
In the least scientific way possible, with zero opinion polls, psychological studies, or check-able facts, I have confirmed the following; a growing number of people seem to earnestly believe that the National Football League is fixed, scripted, predetermined, or otherwise “rigged.” What was a momentary flare-up after last year’s Super Bowl was decided on a controversial pass interference call has since become a low hum in the background of all sports discussion. Like a concerning noise coming from your car’s engine. Or a carbon monoxide leak.
Rigged by who? For who? For what purpose? Ask twenty fringe weirdos in twenty comment sections and you’ll receive twenty distinct answers; each one a prism reflecting internal anxieties, prejudices, and other potholes in a beautiful mind. There’s the obvious stuff, the platitudes about corporate greed and advertising revenues that feel so late to the party in a world that gets more economically stratified every day, often with the enthusiastic consent of the self-styled mavericks who believe Roger Goodell is some sort of nefarious puppetmaster. There’s the more targeted culture war takes, mistaking consumption for politics as is so often the case nowadays. There’s the outright magical thinking where words like “gematria” get thrown around in such a way as to make it clear that this person is just reciting a viral video they watched at some point. Then of course there’s the people that just blame it all on Jewish people or Freemasons or the Democratic party or the Republican party or the Catholic church or the UN or the WEF or, I dunno, fuckin Oxfam? You know what kind of people I mean. Boring people.
I wanna drill down here. I wanna ruminate on this. Don’t expect conclusions.
Beautiful Games, Ugly Money
As is the case when analyzing any discursive phenomenon, it helps to untether our perspective from the boundaries of any nation state and view it at a truly macro level. Lest we forget that when we talk about discourse, we’re not talking about salons and cafes, or pubs and town halls. We’re talking about the internet. We have to think globally because the character of all modern discourse is global. It can’t be otherwise when every word typed or spoken has no theoretical upper limit to its circulation among users of the monolithic corporate sites that have defined the era of Web 2.0.
As the most annoying guy in your social circle likely informed you, a significantly larger audience tunes in to watch the World Cup than the Super Bowl. Better yet, it’s a truly international audience. Did you know people think that was rigged too? Accusations of biased refereeing followed eventual champions Argentina all throughout the tournament, both from fans and opposing players. The contours of the conspiracy are remarkably similar. It’s like playing Mad Libs. Fill in the blanks as you choose: ______(sporting organization) and ____(political entity) rigged ____(competition) for ______(star athlete). You can either get “FIFA and the Kingdom of Qatar rigged The World Cup for Messi” or “The NFL and (boogeyman of choice) rigged the Super Bowl for Mahomes/Kelce/Taylor Swift.
I’m not letting the NFL (or indeed any sporting organization) slip out the back door without making it clear that they ultimately do a lot to earn their reputations for dishonesty. The NFL lied about the effects of concussions for years and has done all it can to obfuscate the fact that they sold their product on repeated head trauma being cool for the better part of their existence. FIFA is basically a mafia and comically corrupt in the way that most similarly profitable non-profits seem to be. The specter of Tim Donaghy (not dead, but not really living either) looms large over the NBA. If you tune into a Major League Baseball game, you can still hear the faint banging of trash cans in the distance (bonus points for world class sack of shit Rob Manfred burying his own world championship after the fact). The petrostate-funded three-times-running English Premier League champions are currently being investigated for well over a hundred breaches of financial fair play rules. And let’s not forget the Sportsbooks. What was once the domain of the mafia is now out in the open, brought to you at the speed of fiber optics, encouraging you to slap a fiver on a pick of the day endorsed by some Barstool/ESPN douchebag.
The increasing monetary focus of sports alienates the average person who has turned to them as a means of entertainment and inspiration throughout history. Being a fan has never been more expensive. You need specialized cable packages and streaming services. You need more and more disposable income to attend games in person. You may need to pay extra taxes to build your team a shiny new stadium so they don’t pull up stakes and move. That alienation deepens as revenues grow. Before long it curdles into bitterness. The game you love has been profaned by bean counters that charge you through the nose to watch mediocrity. But what the hell else are you supposed to do? When the whole enterprise is just bastards on top of bastards, why would you assume any of them are being honest about anything, ever? Every sacred institution has failed in my lifetime and I am not an old man. The churches have seen sex scandals. The banks have become casinos. The politicians race each other to prison. Regardless of how unworkable it actually is; is it really that big a leap to suggest the realm of athletics is similarly dishonest?
You Have a Right to be a Lunatic
It does not strike me as unreasonable to suggest that this wave of suspicion, this lack of faith in the honesty of the contests which generate so much capital for their promoters and organizers, is a sign of the times. For some years now it seems as if we’ve lived under a general fog of suspicion, conspiracy, and mistrust. You can trace the roots of these feelings back decades. But for expediency’s sake it seems easiest to mark the COVID-19 pandemic as the breaking point. Again, the low hum had been around for a while. Kooks and crackpots have always been a part of the American body politic. Whether it’s Birchers and Klansmen, equal parts disgusting and pathetic, or more benign UFO freaks, bigfoot guys, and everything-is-the-CIA paranoids, they’ve always been around. They’ve always been amongst us. They’ve always been sure that they can conjure up the answers to what is really going on. Then the mild spring of 2020 rolled around and nobody had any answers. No one knew what was going on. In the years since, the low hum has become an unmistakable roaring. Everyone seems to know someone affected by the fringe beliefs of a family member or loved one. Most are not as benign as a belief that sporting results are the product of economic collusion and dishonest refereeing.
Belief is ultimately subjective. If you want to believe the NFL is rigged, you absolutely can. You can fortify that position, dig in, and make ready to die on that hill. You can spread it far and wide, provided you can endure the mockery that inevitably comes to the fringe. That mockery will generally just make you cling even more bitterly to whatever controversial belief you have adopted. We’re not really trafficking in the realm of facts here. I’m talking about belief, about faith. People believe ardently in things for all sorts of reasons. Some have messiah complexes, all ginned up to let us know that they emerged from Plato’s Cave and discovered the life-changing benefits of charging your butthole in the sunlight each morning. Some are just narcissists, mistaking contrarianism for undiscovered genius. A pitiable few are genuinely in need of mental health services; paralyzed by their belief in evil men from the government living in their walls, stealing their mail, sabotaging their job hunt, and making their sex organs malfunction at inopportune times. But all are alike in their willingness to in some way act on beliefs that sound like nonsense to a majority of the population. The American pragmatist thinker William James wrote that belief requires no justification for action. If you’re willing to torpedo your relationships, finances, criminal record, and the various other component parts of an adult life over a belief that the Earth is flat, or the 2020 election was illegitimate, or the COVID vaccine does something nefarious to your health, or that Hillary Clinton ate a baby and taped it, then a belief that the NFL is rigged is pretty fucking quaint by comparison. People who believe this sort of thing never want to admit that it’s functionally all faith-based. They’ll gesture to “research” (posting and reading other people’s posts). They’ll try to push this stuff on you. But let’s not play games here. If you’re willing to sit at your computer for eight hours and watch videos describing in graphic deatil how your political opponents are harvesting life-extending chemicals from tortured children; you already wanted that to be true. You’re just looking for someone to confirm what you already want to believe. That’s it. That’s all it is, all any of it is. Belief does not require justification.
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Oops! All Culture War!
I hate that I eventually had to make this about electoral politics. I didn't want to. I just wound up here. Like a birthday party for a weird, smelly friend-of-a-friend serving pizza you don’t recognize and store-brand soda, I don’t plan to stay any longer than I have to.
When you begin to really study the modern American culture war (for that’s ultimately what this phenomenon falls under) one of its most depressing features becomes apparent; it’s not confined to America. Everyone, everywhere, is on the firing line; they're all exposed to the endless talking, talking, talking. Twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, they’re all obligated to have a ready-made opinion about everything. The bandwidth primacy of the American media industrial complex has led to a profound flattening of global culture, global discourse, and global experience. The liberal/conservative divide which defines politics within the American sphere has never been more all-encompassing and rarely been more nonsensical. Liberals are told to love federal law enforcement. Conservatives are told to hate mass market light beer. The Super Bowl itself became a front in the culture war, as heartland Kansas City somehow became the liberal avatar against right wingers rooting for San Francisco of all places. It doesn’t make sense because it doesn’t have to. None of this has any point beyond a momentary emotional response. We lack the political imagination for anything more substantial than rooting for the “right” people to suffer, to be enraged, depressed, throwing their TV remote and screaming at their spouse. Then we wake up and do it all again.
The adoption of a nonsensical, contradictory personal creed is ultimately a kind of armor against the endless barrage of the Culture War. You believe these things because the other side believes the opposite. Reaction draws reaction draws reaction. Bad outcomes are never legitimate. You side is never really defeated, they’re cheated. They have to be, because they’re your side. If they’re losers, then so are you. When consumption-as-politics is the norm, magical thinking in the face of adversity becomes the norm as well.