Here is How We Fix the NFL....

            Turn off your television sets. 

            Look away from the shamefulness of this damaged game. If you need sporting entertainment, there is quite an exciting pennant race going on in baseball.  It may seem impossible to do, yet it is the only way to get the real referees back.

Last night the integrity of football dissolved right before our eyes. The replacements made a call that cost somebody a game. Although the normal refs would have also faced a great deal of scrutiny for this call, they would have at least discussed the play first. Yet as much as you will yell, curse, and tweet, there is one harsh reality that for some reason many do not understand.

The NFL doesn’t give a crap about its fans. As long as you are still eating up whatever they serve, the league will continue to serve you the same previously digested pig meat.

Think about it. If you go to a restaurant and get poorly prepared food there are two courses of action. You could pitch a fit, throw your food at the waiter, demand a refund, and demand the restaurant makes certain staff changes. However, you will then be seen as a jerk and if you go back to that same restaurant, they will still serve you food that tastes like wet dog.

The other course of action is to not go. If enough people stop going to a restaurant, they have no choice but to make changes because they are bleeding revenue. The NFL has the exact same mindset.

It is tragically funny to see and hear talking heads act so shocked that multi-billion dollar cooperation doesn’t give a flying fudge about the fans they are supposed to be catering to. Steve Young of ESPN was the only one who seemed to get this very critical point. Everyone is yelling about the same thing, yet their cries of anguish will be ignored while the NFL bathes in its billions.

It is a basic fighting principal that hard must be met with soft to do more damage, and this is now a fight to get the real refs back. Everybody screaming at the league about the broken integrity of the game will be lost in the vacuum of NFL space. Instead, what must be done is the soft approach: turn off your television set.

That means that you the fans have to sacrifice in order to make the NFL listen.

This means no fantasy updates. No Tebow coverage. No are the Saints on the verge of implosion debates. Not even any complaining about how bad the replacement refs are. If you want your game to be fixed, you actually have to give something up in order to make that happen.

I know sacrificing something for the greater good sounds weird, but it must be done. Otherwise the NFL will continue to feed you the same crap for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Do not fear. In this instance not watching your team will not make you any less of a fan. If you want the NFL to be fixed, you have to refuse to accept the product the league has sent out.

Otherwise you look stupid for giving that same terrible restaurant more of your money. 

A Buried Lead

Devon Walker will never play a down on Sundays. He will never win the Jim Thorpe Award for best defensive back in the country. Walker’s team, the Green Wave of Tulane University, will likely never host College Gameday on ESPN.

These are just some factors as to why the kid who broke his neck in a game has become a one day story.

On the final play of the first half, Walker went in for a tackle and his helmet met the plastic headgear of a teammate. The resulting collision fractured Walker’s spine, collapsed his lung, and broke his neck.

The Memphis Commercial Appeal and ESPN.com both reported that Walker was in stable condition after being rushed to a Tulsa hospital. Both of these sites also reported that Walker’s mother watched her son break his neck on TV.

The big media outlets filed the Devon Walker story and ceased their coverage. It was time to ignore Walker’s condition and focus on whether to start Adrian Peterson or Maurice Jones-Drew for your fantasy team.

Expanding on Walker’s injury and questioning the safety of football would have put a damper on the NFL’s opening day. A multi-billion dollar industry would have had to share the media cycle with the demons of their game; but that didn’t happen.

The season debuts of the pro teams were too important to the big time networks. Peyton Manning playing on a new team, the expectations for the Pittsburgh Steelers, and of course everyone’s fantasy team was more important than the life threatening injury to Devon Walker.

A college senior fracturing his spine during a game did little to continue the national debate about the safety of football. The death of Junior Seau had a media cycle that lasted for days, and prompted several well reported stories relating to concussions in the NFL. Walker’s story had the impact of throwing a pebble into the ocean. When in reality, the horrid image of a player dying on a football field looks clearer than ever.

There is a good chance Walker will never walk for the rest of his life. Yet he isn’t a deceased hall of famer, a player on a noteworthy football school, or a kid on Mel Kiper’s draft board, so he clearly doesn’t’ matter.

Not all media outlets were guilty of dropping the story like Terrell Owens. Yahoo!Sports, USA Today, and SportingNews.com did their jobs by following up on Walker’s condition. Whether or not Walker would ever walk, let alone play football again, was not even on the home page of ESPN.com on Sunday morning.

Even still a young man almost died on a football field, and his story gets buried in less than a day. Meanwhile Tim Tebow, a quarterback who couldn’t hit water if he fell out of a boat, gets an entire summer’s worth of media coverage for taking his shirt off in the rain.

Somebody’s priorities are really messed up.

A family almost lost a son to a game where bone shattering collisions are encouraged. Instead of questioning the culture of America’s favorite collision sports, or filing stories about the devastating impacts of helmet to helmet hits, the media turned our attention to bigger behemoths hitting each other at faster speeds instead. Yet for the most part, the audience turned away from the ugliness of the game to see something else.

What nobody will be watching is if Devon Walker will ever walk again. And the decision to ignore the dangers of football, could lead to the death of somebody else’s son. Chances are, unless Tom Brady dies in a head to head collision next week, it will be downplayed as somebody else’s tragedy.

Sadly, we are all someone else to someone else.