Extending chaos

They carted rookie sensation Alvin Kamara off the field last night with a likely concussion, the latest casualty in the NFL's war on its players. The Shield's regular Thursday Night Massacres have come under increasing fire from those players -- most recently last night, when Kamara's teammate and one of the league's leading father figures, Drew Brees, blamed Thursday night's long list of injuries on the obvious fact that the NFL shouldn't be making teams play four days apart.

It does so because there's money in it, and the bottom line remains the bottom line for America's pre-eminent athletic corporate entity. This would seem to be at jarring odds with the league's alleged (and newfound) commitment to player safety, except that this, too, is about the bottom line. It's a wholly transparent public relations ploy designed to address growing concerns that the NFL product has simply become too damn dangerous for a civilized society.

The upshot is you have a league talking out of both sides of its mouth. On the one hand, it will defend a practice (Thursday night football) that clearly puts its players in peril. On the other, it talks a lot of noise  about player safety, fining or suspending miscreants for head-to-head shots that, let's face, at times are unavoidable when very large, very fast humans are flying around in a confined space at warp speed.

Fact is, you can't make football at the professional level less violent. Violence, in fact, is its main selling point, because our aforementioned civilized society isn't actually all that civilized. And so the more the NFL is buffeted by that reality, the worse the product becomes, and the fewer people watch it.

And that doesn't even factor in the recent player protests -- an eloquent and principled cry against obvious societal wrongs (racial injustice and police brutality) which was deliberately misrepresented as "anti-America" by Our Only Available President and various other self-serving jackals.

So now you're trying to sell a confused and unappealing product to people who are turned off by it because, yes, it's a confused and unappealing product. And, yes, because they think the players are either A)"disrespecting America" or B) being made out to be cartoon villains by faux-patriotic political hacks.

And how does the NFL react to all that?

By throwing another horse-choking contract extension at Roger Goodell, the man who presides over this whole mess.

Good thinkin' there, guys. Goood thinkin'.