Published in the August 2015 issue.

The National Football League, which begins its ninety-sixth season of play in September, has proven itself to be one of the doughtiest enterprises in the long history of hullabaloo and ballyhoo. (Its history extends back to when people actually used words like hullabaloo and ballyhoo.) That character never has been tested the way it has under the NFL's current commissioner, Roger Goodell, a man who never has seen a problem he couldn't turn into a crisis and never has heard dissent he couldn't turn into a pitchfork-waving mob. Under his occasionally distinguishable leadership, the NFL has found itself, in only the past few years, on the wrong side of domestic violence, child abuse, pharmacology, neuroscience, and, most notably, its own silly rules regarding the Ideal Gas Law. Under Goodell, the league's response to all of these has been reflexively wrong, reflexively dilatory, and reflexively tin-eared. Only when public outrage became audible on Jupiter did the league and Goodell take even half measures to address any of these problems, and by God Goodell's solutions were inadequate when it mattered most and crushingly excessive when it didn't really matter at all—as in the case of Tom Brady's deflated footballs.



And yet the NFL survives and prospers. It is what Chuck Yeager once called the space program. The NFL is a pooch that cannot be screwed.

Of course Brady will be allowed to play in the exhibition games, including a high-profile one against the Green Bay Packers on August 13. This is because, in a spectacular bit of ongoing consumer fraud, the NFL insists you buy tickets to these burlesques as part of your season-ticket package. And speaking of burlesques, more than a few cynical souls have pointed out that whenever Brady is finally allowed to suit up in a regular-season game this fall, it will be a ratings bonanza, proving at last that God does not play in these affairs at all.

Through all these years, as the nation's attention span has shrunk with the acceleration of new technologies—shifting from televisions that dominated the country's living rooms to those you can hold in your hand, from gambling with the local bookie to gambling online with someone in the Bahamas—the NFL has managed to protect the Shield, as the league's logo is called, and the Shield has protected it. This is where the ultimate liberation of Tom Brady is to be found. There is nothing he can do to the league and nothing the league can do to him that will prevent either one of them from continuing to succeed.

Fundamentally, Brady's place within the league is set in stone, and he earned it the hard way. He worked his way up, going from splitting time at Michigan and being a sixth-round draft pick to becoming arguably the greatest player ever at the most high-profile position in American sports. He is accused of, at worst, an unsophisticated act of gamesmanship that had no bearing on the outcome of the game in question, an offense so minor it barely qualifies as venial. His career is one of the league's finest ornaments, one of its greatest products ever. He knows it and the league knows it. Ultimately, all of the outside bloviating will vanish on the autumn breeze. And the Lilliputians who tied him down will again cheer their little cheers.

The only possible crisis the NFL would not be able to weather is the rising notion in the country that American football is simply too destructive to the human organism to be worth playing. The Shield is largely illusory to the Pop Warner leagues and to high school football and even to the huge college franchises. The Shield will not protect your son's spine, or the ligaments of his knee, or the obscure corners of his hippocampus, where the essence of his individuality is stored. If that realization ever came to critical mass, the NFL would be in authentic trouble.

But the NFL's luck remains astounding: Right in the middle of the second stage of the whole Patriots frenzy, authorities on two continents raided the offices of FIFA, the extraordinary collection of freebooters who run international soccer. Given an actual scandal to illuminate, the national spotlight shifted from the NFL to what the rest of the world calls football and the criminals who run it.

Without the place that the NFL has carved out in our national life, without the hold that the NFL has on the national culture, the passion play that is Brady's balls is a brief kerfuffle, dismissed with a fine and an admiring chuckle from the fans.

But this is the NFL, as self-serious an operation as ever has existed. It has succeeded in attaching itself to other major cultural and political institutions so well that any controversy—be it Ray Rice's inclination to violence or Tom Brady's alleged preference for underinflated footballs—becomes a threat not just to the league but also to all of its corporate partners. These, we discovered in May, include the United States military, which paid various NFL franchises hundreds of thousands of dollars to stage the patriotic pageants that are now as much a part of NFL game presentations as classic rock and overpriced domestic light beer. But that doesn't seem to matter. The Shield remains intact, and Tom Brady's glorious career goes on. The pooch remains unscrewed.





Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io