A Belated Socialist NFL Preview
OK, this isn’t really a “preview,” since Week 1 is already (mostly) in the books, and I’m not really going to do an in-depth analysis of the entire league. But I think it is worth flagging a few things that your typical socialist NFL fans should keep in mind as they decide who to root for on Sundays this season.
1. Do Not Fall for the Broncos’ Trap
Last year, the Broncos were awful. They made a big splash in the previous off-season, hiring a new coach, Nathaniel Hackett, and making a huge trade for Russell Wilson. But instead of getting better, they won two fewer games than the year before, going 5-12 and finishing last in the AFC West. But even that understates how bad their offense in particular often looked. Going into Week 14, they were averaging under 13 points per game. They boosted that a little over the last four games, but were still last in football by that metric.
So they fired Hackett and brought in Sean Payton. Payton has a fairly earned reputation as an offensive mastermind: In 15 seasons as the head coach for the New Orleans Saints, the team had a Top 5 offense ten times, including the 2009 season, when they were #1 in points and won the Super Bowl. As a result, a not-insignificant number of people expect him to turn around the Broncos’ offense and lead them back to the playoffs.
But this is a classic example of a coach appropriating the success of his players. The obvious reason that Payton’s New Orleans teams had such a good offense was Drew Brees. This is not to discount the head coach’s role in their success — obviously he knew how to get the best out of Brees, and to set him up for success. Sometimes a coach and a player just click…
The problem is assuming that relationship can be replicated with any old undersized quarterback, that players are just interchangeable parts that can be molded by brilliant coaches to do what they want. But this is very much not the case, as we’ve seen with Bill Belichick, who has been unable to sustain any kind of success without Tom Brady as his quarterback.
Socialists should know better than to fall for the hype around “genius” NFL coaches. The history of Super Bowl winning coaches trying to turn around a new franchise is mostly a history of failure: Jon Gruden in Las Vegas, Mike Shanahan in Washington, George Seifert in Carolina, Jimmy Johnson in Miami, etc. No disrespect to Sean Payton, but the game is about the players, and I’m dubious that the Broncos will be much better with Payton in charge.
2. Root for Running Backs, In General
I covered this a little over the summer, but it does seem like the situation around running backs is getting somewhat dire. Teams simply do not want to invest in that position.
And yet, there are some reasons for optimism. The holdouts this summer, though mostly unsuccessful, at least signaled that players are aware that this problem is getting more urgent. Meanwhile, two running backs were drafted in the Top 12 this year, the first time that’s happened since 2017.
I’ve been watching the Dorktown History of the Minnesota Vikings on YouTube, and watching the section on Adrian Peterson reminded me just how exciting and fun it is when the league has a superstar running back. It would be nice if that happened again, and if some of these guys could start getting paid again…
3. Don’t Be Scared of Big Contracts
Last week, Joe Burrow signed a record-setting contract extension that will make him the highest paid quarterback in the NFL this year, with a salary of $55 million. That broke the record set by Justin Herbert all the way back in the olden days of July 2023, when he signed his own extension for $52.5 million a year. He took the record from Lamar Jackson, who signed for $52 million per in April, breaking the record set by Jalen Hurts a few weeks before that.
It’s easy to grow numb to these numbers, but as long as the NFL’s salary cap keeps going up, and as long as the quarterback is such an important position, the salaries will keep increasing. These salaries tend to bring a new set of demands, and a new sense of urgency. If a player makes over $50 million per year, it’s not that crazy to expect them to win a game single-handedly.
But, of course, that’s not how it works. Even the best quarterback in the world needs help (as Patrick Mahomes learned on Thursday), and only one team can win it all, so most of these quarterbacks will end the year unsatisfied. That doesn’t mean they haven’t earned their money, though…
4. Resist Any Hype Around “Josh Harris’ Commanders”
It is good for the NFL that Daniel Snyder is finally gone. So if the Commanders are even a little bit good this year, there will be much temptation to credit that to the “new leadership” of Josh Harris. Do not fall for this! Remember: All owners are bad, and if a team succeeds, it does so in spite of whoever happens to own the team.
5. Root Against (Or Possibly For?) The Cardinals
The Arizona Cardinals have quietly emerged as perhaps the most dysfunctional team in the NFL. Back in 2018, they fired Steve Wilks after only one season — one of the suspiciously early firings of Black coaches that led to the Brian Flores lawsuit — even though it seemed like the team had been tanking that year anyway. They replaced Wilks with a (white) college coach who had a losing record, and then drafted Kyler Murray (despite having already taken a quarterback in the first round the previous year). Murray turned out to be a sensational talent, so they signed him to a big extension, only to embarrass their franchise QB with a clause in the contract requiring him to do playbook homework for four hours per week. To top it all off, the NFLPA ranked the Cardinals second to last when they did their franchise grades earlier this year, saying, “The consistent sentiment in players’ responses was that ownership does not provide high quality workplace facilities, and Club policies reflected the lowest rate of confidence that current ownership is willing to invest to make upgrades.”
Now they’ve fired Kliff Kingsbury, who only managed one winning season in four years, and it seems like they are going to use an injury to Murray to get out of paying him, so they can start over with a new quarterback AGAIN. Clearly this franchise is a disaster, and they are squandering a generational talent at QB. My instinct is to root against them, but since they seem to be tanking, that’s what they WANT. So I don’t know… Obviously this team should be seized from its private owner and reorganized as a worker-owned cooperative. But short of that…