At the beginning of the 2020 NFL season, CNN editors ran a headline that, without intending, spoke to the reason why NFL ratings plummeted this year: “Here’s how NFL Sunday games highlighted racial inequality in the U.S.”
On day 1, the NFL opened a Pandora’s box of grievances, more imagined than real. The airing of these grievances has succeeded only in driving viewers away.
As the NFL execs have learned, fans don’t watch football to be lectured to, especially by people who have no idea what they are lecturing about.
Case in point, the recent message on “inequality” from Atlanta Falcons owner and Chairman Arthur Blank, a member of the so-called “Player-Owner Social Justice Working Group.”
Said Blank in announcing various grants to an assortment of do-gooder enterprises, many of them left-wing grifters, “This past year opened the eyes of so many to the inequality suffered by many of our fellow brothers and sisters, neighbors and associates.”
Inequality, Arthur? Do you not know that you and your colleagues preside over the one enterprise in the United States most blessedly indifferent to “equality” in all of its many mutations?
If federal thoughtpolice learned that a police or fire department had employment numbers like the NFL’s, they would seize it tomorrow and frog march the chiefs to the nearest reeducation center.
The reason for the feds’ dismay should be obvious. Beyond silly lip service, NFL teams pay no attention at all to the equity messages coming out of the White House.
Unlike the woke ad execs who scruple almost comically over the race, gender, age, sexual orientation and handicap status of every actor in every ad shown during an NFL game, NFL coaches and GMs don’t give a damn about any of that stuff.
Setting the NFL apart from every other professional association, the league has no “metric” for race or sex or age let alone for sexual orientation or handicap status. The “metrics” that matter are height, weight, bench press, 40-yard dash and, yes, even intelligence.
Before being drafted, Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, like other prospects, had to take what is called the “Wonderlic” test, a timed test that measures cognitive ability and problem-solving aptitude.
Don’t try this at home, folks. Daring to test the intelligence of a job applicant could get you sued, shamed and canceled.
In addition to the various tests required at the NFL Scouting Combine, Mahomes submitted himself to 18 private team workouts and official team visits.
I am confident that no general manager of any of those teams thought, “Mahomes is good, and he is biracial, but we could really use a Hispanic player to get our numbers up. Is Mark Sanchez available?”
For political reasons, Biden’s diversity czar will turn his, her, or zher head the other way this Sunday. He, she or zhe is well advised not to look. Of the 106 players who will take the field for the Super Bowl there is not a single Hispanic among them.
Missing too are Asian-Americans, not a one, not even a Samoan-American, the most statistically over-represented ethnic group in the NFL.
Sexism is rampant in the league as well. Of the nearly 1,700 players in the NFL, there is not a women in the bunch, real or wannabe. There never has been and, unless the league adopts the diversity and inclusivity “guidelines” under which the rest of America labors, there never will be.
Ageism is very nearly as rampant as sexism. The median age of the players is less than 30, and there will be only one player on the field over 35. Being the GOAT does have its privileges.
Some 30% of the players on Sunday will be white males. In that non-Hispanic whites make up 60% of the American population, white males are represented almost perfectly proportionately – that is, if we exclude age from the calculation. Only one of these players is middle-aged. None is older.
At 70%, black males, of course, are hugely overrepresented. Unlike in many other professions, however, no one looks at a black co-worker and thinks, “Hmmm, I wonder how he got the job.”
If we are willing to suspend our nonsensical, unconstitutional, counterproductive identity metrics for football players, how can we insist on the same for pilots, doctors, cops, firemen and soldiers?
After all, no one has ever died from a dropped pass or a missed field goal.
Jack Cashill’s new book, “Unmasking Obama: The Fight to Tell the True Story of a Failed Presidency,” is now widely available. See www.cashill.com for more information.
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