The NFC Least (1970-2020)
The cynicism and ineptitude of the signature division in the signature American sport
This is Throwbacks, a weekly-ish newsletter by Michael Weinreb about sports history, culture and politics. Welcome to all new readers/subscribers, and if you like what you’re reading, please subscribe and share. (It’s still free: Just click on the free option on the “subscribe now” page. If you do wish to contribute, see below.)
(Note: I wrote the vast majority of this piece before the coup attempt in Washington on Wednesday afternoon. I realize it feels horribly inconsequential in retrospect, but I suppose it’s my attempt to make some kind of oblique point about the moment we’re living through. I’m honestly not sure what else to say.)
I.
Five decades ago, a woman named Thelma Elkjer thrust an arm into a cut glass vase, extracted an envelope, unfurled the slip of the paper inside, and shaped the future of the National Football League. Elkjer was the executive assistant to NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle; in 1970, as the American Football League and the National Football League merged from separate entities into conferences, the NFL teams could not agree on how best to split into 13-team divisions. To resolve it, the league decided to hold a drawing. Rozelle put five re-alignment possibilities into separate envelopes, called Elkjer into the room, and asked her to pick one.
Elkjer chose “Plan 3,” the only alignment that shuttled the Dallas Cowboys into the NFC East along with Philadelphia and Washington and the New York Giants (and the St. Louis Cardinals, long before they moved to Arizona). It was a geographically challenged grouping, but Rozelle didn’t care, because it comported with what the NFL owners wanted. Professional football’s signature division would include three of the largest media markets on the East Coast—including the nation’s capital, the nation’s former capital, and the nation’s largest city—plus the team that would soon become one of the two most popular professional sports franchises in the country.
For the next fifty years, the NFC East would dominate our television screens; the NFC East would become the most potent media entity in any major sport, the subject of a million conspiracy theories about East Coast bias and political favoritism and the Tao of Jerry Jones. And fifty years later, in the midst of one of the oddest years in American history, the NFC East would inadvertently come to symbolize the literal and metaphorical nature of our nation’s own flailing ignominy.
II.
So much of the wildly vast popularity of professional football is based on the way we perceive professional football. It is a sport that we’d like to believe has only one speed, and that speed is breakneck and terrifying. Unlike basketball, there is no room to slow down for a few possessions in order to catch your breath; unlike baseball, there are no somnolent lulls in the action. Football’s rhythm is violence-deep breath-violence, and if the players aren’t going all out, we can feel it on our television screens, which is why the Pro Bowl feels like an affront to our sensibilities. And it’s why what happened in Philadelphia last Sunday night felt like such a mind-boggling anomaly.
III.
The preface to this Sunday night football game between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Washington Football Teamsters (Imagine: a helmet logo of Jimmy Hoffa wearing concrete shoes!), of course, was that the NFC East proved to be an abomination amid this incredibly strange NFL season. There were no good teams; there were only varied shades of bad. No one ended the season with a winning record. One team’s franchise quarterback proved startlingly inept; another team’s franchise quarterback suffered a horrifying injury, a third team’s franchise running back missed virtually the entire season because of the ineptitude that surrounded him, and a fourth franchise finally dispatched its racist nickname, embraced its charming genericism, and rode a 36-year-old journeyman quarterback to a division title.
In other words, the NFL’s primary font of power appeared entirely inept, and if you don’t view that as metaphor for America in 2020, have I got an 8 Chan conspiracy theory message board for you. And it felt even more appropriate that the conclusion of the NFC East season was a zenith of ineptitude, gift-wrapped in the kind of breathtaking cynicism that we’ve come to accept as the status quo over the course of the past four years.
Here is the Cliff’s Notes version: In the second half of that game against Washington, Philadelphia coach Doug Pederson inserted his third-string quarterback, a human sacrifice named Nate Sudfeld. No one was injured—not the Eagles current starter, Jalen Hurts, and not their former starter, Carson Wentz. The game was still competitive. The Eagles, not surprisingly, wound up losing, thereby handing the division title and a playoff berth to Washington and denying one to the New York Giants. It was enduringly odd; it was not merely a team ceding to a larger strategy, or a team resting its starters but still trying to win. It was a coach essentially throwing a game in front of our eyes on a Sunday night, and rendering the NFL’s marquee division into even more of a mockery than it already was.
IV.
There are two ways for a team to deliberately lose games. The first, and by far the most common, is for the franchise to “tank” in order to gain more draft picks and rebuild the franchise. This happens all the time, particularly in the NBA, but it’s also arguably what the New York Jets and Jacksonville Jaguars engaged in this season while racing to the bottom to draft Clemson quarterback Trevor Lawrence. Tanking can be bothersome, particularly in Philadelphia, where the city’s perpetually aggravated fan base rendered the perpetually tanking Philadelphia 76ers into a punchline for many years, but it feels like an inevitable part of sports.
But that is not what Doug Pederson did on Sunday night with the Eagles, because in each of the above examples, the player on those teams were actively trying to win. This dichotomy—a franchise trying to lose, while the players try to win—feels acceptable to us. It’s the central plot of the movie Major League; it’s the central plot of Ted Lasso on Apple Plus, and it’s (kind of ) the central plot of The Bad News Bears. It’s arguably the central plot of Mel Brooks’ The Producers. There’s something endearing about watching a bad team if they’re still putting in a real effort. What’s disconcerting is when a team appears determined to actively throw a game.
There’s no other explanation for what Pederson did: He was not tanking as part of an overarching long-term strategy. He was not resting his starters. He was tanking in the moment, during a game. Even his players appeared to have no idea what the hell was going on. They’d come to see Les Miserables and wound up at Springtime for Hitler, and if there were fans in the stands in Philadelphia, I imagine they would have kicked off a second Revolutionary War. Maybe Pederson was doing it to improve the Eagles’ draft position, from the ninth pick to the sixth pick; maybe he was doing it because he wanted to see Alex Smith, a quarterback who logically shouldn’t even be playing football anymore after a horrific leg injury, get that playoff spot. Maybe he truly despises the New York Giants, and didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of winning the division with a 6-10 record.
But here is what we can say for certain: No matter what he claims, he was not doing it to win a football game.
V.
Whatever it was, it felt ridiculous, and it was the peak of a harrowing and often absurd NFL regular season, one that the league liked to point out concluded without a single cancellation, an odd little humblebrag amid a raging pandemic that affected many of the league’s top players, amid a crisis piled upon a crisis piled upon a crisis. It was like boasting that you drove straight through a hurricane, despite the fact your car no longer has a roof.
But even if you do find that ethos admirable, how can you also find it admirable when the season ends with a team deliberately betraying that ethos? My friend Michael Rosenberg at Sports Illustrated wrote an excellent column this week about how sports can help ground us in reality at a time when truth itself is in dispute, and maybe that’s why what Pederson did pissed me off so much: Because it was a betrayal of those basic principles.
Without the perception of competitiveness, what is professional football other than violence and committee meetings? Why shouldn’t we believe that the whole enterprise is a sham? And if the NFL—the most popular entertainment product in America—is a sham, why shouldn’t we just go along with the high-profile crackpots (and former sports-talk radio hosts) who believe that everything in America is rigged?
That’s been the most frightening aspect of the past four years: That nothing feels real anymore. That nearly everything in our society has been stripped to the point that it all feels like a perilous construction. That the whole system seems perched precariously on the verge of collapse, and that, this past week, it nearly did collapse. The cynicism, the lies, the ineptitude: Even the most powerful division in the most powerful institution in sports was an unadulterated mess, punctuated by a blatant lie. It is not Nate Sudfeld’s fault, but when I think back on this season, I will remember him as yet another avatar of our collective cynicism and our shocking ineptitude, a quarterback who an unwitting symbol of our literal and our moral failures, who played a small role in the Springtime for Hitler monstrosity that was America in 2020.
This newsletter is very much a work in progress. Thoughts? Ideas for future editions? Contact me via twitter or at michaeliweinreb at gmail, or leave a comment below. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please subscribe and/or share it with others.
I am keeping this newsletter free for now. The best way you can help out is by spreading the word as much as possible so I can expand my audience, because I am a terrible self-promoter. That said, I have set up payment tiers, if you wish to give something—I’ve made them as cheap as Substack will let me make them, which is $5 a month or $30 a year. If you do wish to pay, I’m happy to send you a signed copy of any one of my books as a thank you. Just shoot me a screenshot and a book title (preferably a book I wrote, but if you prefer me to send you a copy of The Corrections, I’ll do that, too), and we’ll work something out.