I am a diehard Chicago Bears fan, but when they are not in contention (a common occurrence these days) I need someone else to root for. When I’ve made a wager on the game the task is easy, but failing that I tend to pick the team that has a uniform that most closely resembles what they wore when I began watching the NFL in earnest in the late 1970s.
That means I root against the Bengals, Patriots, and Bills, who each inexplicably changed their helmets for no good reason. I’ve got no use for the Falcons and their attractive but by no means traditional uniforms, or any of the last six expansion teams. But I find myself rooting for the hapless Chargers and even my Bears’ archrivals, the Green Bay Packers, and their classic, changeless uniforms.
There are a lot of things I enjoy less than I did a decade ago: I no longer read the Wall Street Journal front to back every day, it’s been a good three months since I’ve seen live music, and I’d rather stare at a blank wall than watch the Indiana Hoosiers—my alma mater—play basketball these days.
But, echoing the writer Chuck Klosterman, the NFL is even more enjoyable than ever. HDTV seems tailor-made to enhance a football game, and the Red Zone channel is the single greatest innovation in entertainment history, in my narrow worldview. And, of course, the game is better than ever—the players are faster and stronger and more skilled than ever before.
A better product, bolstered by technological advances, to which most men have a sentimental attachment, is an unbeatable combination, as the league’s ratings bear out.
My ennui with the rest of my entertainment options leaves me desperate for more NFL football. So desperate, in fact, that I faithfully watch the Pro Bowl, scheduled for this Sunday, each and every year. The Pro Bowl, the league’s all-star game, is never an interesting competition: nothing is riding on the outcome, so players don’t try and, in the telling of one participant, often play the game while dead drunk. In last year’s game most runs ended with the defense merely holding the running back until he stopped running. No one bothers to even move on punts and kickoffs. No amount of money will induce these athletes to risk their career to an injury in this game.
To make the game palatable, the league should do everything possible to make it resemble an actual NFL game, or else to embrace the nostalgia factor in some way—perhaps with throwback uniforms from great NFL teams of the past.
However, for the past few years the powers that be have done the exact opposite: The game has typically been played in a hideous, unfamiliar venue (Aloha Stadium in Hawaii) during daylight hours while it is night everywhere else—an incongruity that is difficult to get used to. The sight of coaches wearing Hawaiian shirts and leis only exacerbates the problem.
A couple of years ago Nike stepped into the fold and replaced the players’ traditional, ugly uniforms with modern, even uglier “color rush” uniforms that don’t resemble anything familiar either, apparently just to be certain that no one mistook this game for actual NFL football.
And for a couple of games that I would like to forget, we dispensed with the NFC-AFC match-up altogether and had a couple of hall of famers “draft” teams.
This year, thankfully, they’ve fixed a few of these problems. The game will be played at night and at the Citrus Bowl in Orlando—not a real NFL stadium but a marked improvement. We will have a traditional NFC-AFC match-up. And there will be no Nike color rush uniforms—just different, new, (still) ugly uniforms.
This might be as much as we can do to improve the game. If people still don’t bother watching it then maybe it is time to do away with it. But that doesn’t mean we can’t come up with a way for more football through the year.
My idea would be to add more bye weeks to the NFL regular season. Another three weeks would give players more rest during the season and allow them to avoid playing Thursday night games on three days’ rest. If they want to be bold they could add seven more bye weeks, players could be off once every three weeks, and we could have football until the beginning of baseball season. I would never complain, and once the players and owners saw how much revenue an extension of the season would bring I suspect they might not complain, either.
Until then, we’ll have to make do with the reasonable facsimile of an NFL game that is the Pro Bowl.
Ike Brannon is president of capital policy analytics.
