As the Miami Super Bowl crowns its 100th season, here’s why NFL has never been healthier | Opinion
This is the first Super Bowl since the 2012 season that has not included a quarterback named Peyton Manning or Tom Brady — the most iconic, face-of-the-league football stars of a generation. Now one is retired and the other is 42 and fading, the New England Patriots dynasty wheezing and crumbling around him. A tectonic plate is shifting within America’s most popular game.
And the NFL plows on, undeterred, thundering unstoppable across the sports landscape.
There is a replenishing quality in play, and so, on the nation’s biggest sports stage Sunday night in Miami, up steps quarterback Patrick Mahomes, who will have his moment. He was league MVP at age 23. One year later, now, he aims to deliver the Kansas City Chiefs their first Super Bowl victory in a half century, since the 1969 season, when man had just walked on the moon.
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell was asked his week if it was good for the league that Mahomes was playing in the Midwest instead of , say, New York.
“Patrick Mahomes in any NFL city is good for me,” he said.
There is a freshness to this Super Bowl matchup that is invigorating for the league. K.C.’s wait to be back here has been an eternity to fans. The pedigreed San Francisco 49ers are after their record-tying sixth SB title but first since ever-distant 1994 (also won in Miami). The Niners also remind that anything in the NFL is possible, after going 4-12 just last season. No team in 20 years has reached a Super Bowl after as few wins the year before.
In this matchup, though, it is Mahomes who is poised to be the Next Big Thing, a Super Bowl triumph the springboard that catapults you like nothing else can. There is talk he will soon sign a new contract making him the NFL’s first $200 million man. But if it isn’t him, it will be someone, some team, that captures imaginations. If Mahomes isn’t the quarterback who is the next “face of,” maybe it’s Lamar Jackson or Russell Wilson or Deshaun Watson. Or Jimmy Garoppolo? Or could it be Joe Burrow or Tua Tagovailoa joining the league this spring?
There is always someone, something, to remind us why we love the NFL, despite it all, sometimes in spite of itself, even when it feels hard to.
So much is not perfect, and the blemishes are there even under the heavy makeup of a Super Bowl celebration — our de facto national holiday — crowning the league’s 100th season.
The debilitating effect of concussions and of brain trauma causing more and more players to retire young. Domestic violence. Officiating blunders. An unpopular commissioner. Lack of minority hires and head-coach diversity (the only category in which the Dolphins get an A). Heck, just two years ago, under the thumb of the Colin Kaepernick national-anthem kneeling protests, the NFL seemed at a low point. Embattled. And all is not well now. Antonio Brown. Patriots videotaping. There is always something.
But haven’t we learned by now that, even as football may be dangerous for your health, nothing kills this sport? The league has survived Ray Rice and its safety issues, it has survived Kaepernick and the Saints getting screwed by a bad call, and it will survive when Brady retires. Because it’s football.
It is what we grew up watching and is what owns American Sundays now in a way religion once did. Football is a religion to millions. A drug.
Two years after the U.S. president all but called kneeling NFL players anti-American traitors, NFL TV ratings were up this season for the second straight year to halt a steady downturn. Forty-one of the 50 most-watched shows on TV in 2019 were NFL games. Super Bowl ads sold out in November, the earliest in five years. Participation in fantasy football set records. The growth of legalized gambling has only served to further stoke interest.
The NFL is year-round now. TV viewership for the three-day 2019 NFL draft was double the average of all NBA playoff games. The league’s scouting combine is now televised and avidly followed as fans (for some reason) watch fat lineman run 40 yards.
Goodell is now negotiating new TV deals with CBS, Fox, NBC, ESPN and DirecTV, and digital giants Google and Apple reportedly want in. The NFL’s current $6.5 billion windfall from TV could approach $10 billion with the new deals. And corporate sponsor dollars are at a record high.
It’s an irony of sorts. Player safety remains an overriding moral issue for the league. But in terms of its popularity and revenue, the NFL has never been healthier.
You’ll feel that full power and muscle of King Sport inside Hard Rock Stadium on Sunday night as the Chiefs and 49ers play in the 54th Super Bowl and 11th in Miami.
You’ll feel it in the sheer bombast and spectacle of what Colombian-born halftime performer Shakira aptly called “a very American event — as American as it gets.”
And you’ll feel it, perhaps, as you watch Patrick Mahomes in the biggest game of his life and wonder if you are seeing the bloom and full arrival of sports’ next transcendent star.
This story was originally published January 31, 2020 at 7:00 AM.
