Re-quitting the NFL
UPDATE: I re-unquit the NFL a few months later. This one didn’t stick, but I still like the piece, so I’m leaving it up!
Damn. It looks like ChatGPT won’t make this decision for me. I’m on my own. But I can make this call.
I’m out again. I just can’t watch this anymore. I’m re-quitting the NFL, effective immediately.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because I’ve been here before. On October 21, 2013, I posted on my old website that I’d be quitting the sport I’d loved for decades, cold turkey. Well, cold turkey-ish, because I just so happened to have a ticket to the Giants-Vikings Monday Night Football game that evening. But I was quitting. And I did quit.
Given my history with the sport, this was a big deal.
I still remember exactly when I got into football. It was fall of 1989, I was 7 years old, and I lived in Boulder, Colorado. Almost no better time and place to become a fan. The local college team was the University of Colorado, and they would go 11-0 and qualify for the Orange Bowl as the #1 team in the country before losing 21-6 to Notre Dame. Meanwhile, the local pro team was the Denver Broncos, and they would go 11-5 and win their way into the Super Bowl before losing 55-10 to the San Francisco 49ers.
I watched all of these games at my friend Donnie’s house, often before or after Nerf battles among mattress forts. And while I haven’t seen or spoken to Donnie since then, he’s responsible for what would become a true obsession.
It was perfectly tantalizing. Both of the teams I watched were good, but neither team had yet climbed the mountain. I was emotionally invested, but there was still more to see. Even though I’d be leaving Boulder to move to Cincinnati, Ohio in a short few months, I decided I’d stick with the teams I fell in love with in the fall of 1989.
I did eventually move on from hardcore fandom of both the Colorado Buffaloes and the Denver Broncos after seeing both of them win championships in the 1990s, but I’d stick with the sport overall.
The primary draw for me of football was never the violence. I’d always been short and in my early days I was impossibly small, so the concept of being tackled was legitimately terrifying for me.
Despite the violence, what drew me in was the sheer beauty of the sport. It was a stunning combination of strategy, tactics, and kinetic execution. The impossible throwing angle and the absurd toe-tapping of a sideline catch. The incredible read to find a gap to run through as the gap itself is moving. The breathtaking whiplash of an interception. The variety of offensive and defensive formations. The sheer wonder and whimsy of playcalling.
Football was engaging to watch and think about, and it consumed my life.
I watched every game. I built statistical models to rank teams and players. I played every video game. I ran and won fantasy football leagues among both friends and industry experts. I even became obsessed with NFL Films productions and their music, inspired by the evocative tracks that played behind impossibly-shot, slow-motion highlight videos:
And then, in October 2013, I watched the Frontline documentary League of Denial. It highlighted to me definitively that football was not a safe sport, that it would cause brain damage in every player I ever cared about, and that the league knew this and covered it up. I had to do something. I had to quit the NFL.
I explained my reasoning at uselessanalysis.com:
“Football’s entire raison d’être is violence. You see it every single play. It’s not accidental or incidental.”
From there, maybe I got a little carried away. I started another website, QuittheNFL.com, and used that as a place to post news updates about brain injuries, challenges that retired players had, and more.
This eventually got exhausting. I wasn’t disengaging from the sport - I was keeping it top of mind. I didn’t watch the games, but I’d follow every news story to keep on top of every negative development. It became a constant cycle of negative energy that I needed to break. I was probably definitely also annoying all of my friends who still loved the league. Eventually, I shut down QuittheNFL.com and started ignoring the sport entirely. That worked much better.
I had fall Sundays back in my life. Over 20 weekend days to do anything I wanted! Football was fading from my memory. By 2018, I was completely disengaged and I was thrilled about it. Plus I missed a bunch of Tom Brady Super Bowl wins, apparently, and that’s always fantastic. Screw Tom Brady #notmyGOAT
“I’ve moved on. #quittheNFL has worked well for me.”
Obviously, this isn’t where the story ends. There was a backslide.
While I may have found a way to completely disengage with football, there were two things I really missed about it: running analytics on the sport, and competing against my friends in fantasy football.
I’d found an outlet for sports analytics by switching sports and creating an NBA power ranking algorithm, but I never replaced the camaraderie of fantasy football.
Fantasy football is ridiculous. In college I remember building a predictive model that could only explain 40% of the variation in the data, meaning that you could argue that the game is more than half luck. Still, that’s the appeal. Everyone can compete, it’s accessible, and it’s simply fun to trash talk your friends and then see how real world NFL performances translate to fantasy points for your team.
I first played fantasy football in 1998 and I would participate in and multiple leagues for years. I won two league championships before I started boycotting the NFL in October 2013, but what happened next was a doozy.
I was in a few leagues in 2013, so even though I started boycotting the sport mid-season, I still had fantasy teams to run. And my team in the big money league I was in happened to be really good. So here I was, “quitting the NFL”, but still running a winning fantasy team. And I made the championship round in the most fairytale of fashions.
I was dead in the water in the semifinal, down by 18 points against my friend Jonny with only my kicker left to go on Monday Night Football. I actually met Jonny for dinner that night and congratulated him on his win, wishing him luck in the final.
Unfortunately for Jonny, the kicker I had left was Justin Tucker, and he made six field goals that night, including a game-winning 61-yarder in the final minute that gave both the Baltimore Ravens and my fantasy team narrow two-point victories.
I’d gone to sleep at halftime, so I woke up to a series of chaotic, expletive-filled texts in our league chat thread. It was amazing. I won the league championship the next week. There would be no topping this. I retired right away.
Six years later, in the fall of 2019, I un-retired. My group at work was going through some organizational flux, and morale was on the low end. Fantasy football was something that could help. So we kicked off a huge, multi-league fantasy football initiative, and I eagerly participated. It felt nice to be part of it all again.
Still, it’s basically impossible to play fantasy football while being completely disengaged from what’s happening in the games. So fantasy football ended up being my gateway to creeping back into the league.
I drafted Patrick Mahomes in that league, and oh my was he fun. I’d first just read his box scores. Then I’d watch his highlight clips on YouTube. Soon, I was watching entire games just to see what wacky pass he’d come up with next. The next thing I knew, he’d led his team to nine straight victories to become a Super Bowl champion, and dammit, I was all-in on him and the league.
Yikes. Who even am I? Do I stand for anything? I don’t care about brain damage. I don’t care about the NFL’s hypocrisy. I don’t care about the players. I just want to be entertained. I’m the real hypocrite.
A few weeks later, we were in a global pandemic and I decided to stop beating myself up over it. I had other things on my mind. It’s okay to give myself football.
So I did. For the next few seasons, I was all the way back. Watching NFL RedZone cut from game to game every Sunday. Playing fantasy football. Adapting my NBA power ranking algorithm to work for the NFL.
Most incredibly, I went to my first game live since my original boycott, and I got to see the Cincinnati Bengals win their first playoff game in over 30 years. While I’d never lived and died with the team the way many of my childhood friends did, it was an all-time sports highlight to be in the stands for this moment.
So that’s where things stood until three days ago. Another Monday Night Football game, this one at the same stadium as the last game I’d just attended. One of the biggest matchups of the season, as the top-seeded Bills and 3rd-seeded Bengals were meeting with playoff seeding and pride on the line.
You know what happened next. Damar Hamlin suffered cardiac arrest after a hit, collapsed on the field, and is still in the hospital in critical condition as of today. The rest of the game was postponed and basically every NFL fan can’t get Hamlin’s story out of their head.
It’s the most horrifying scene I’ve ever seen in sports, period.
I fully acknowledge that this specific injury was one with an infinitesimal probability. It’s not likely to happen again and isn’t “part of the sport”. But Monday was a wake-up call for me.
I had legitimate reasons for quitting the NFL in 2013, and enough is enough. I’m quitting again.
I’m older and arguably more mellow for this go-round, so I’m going to be less obnoxious and less definitive about it all. I’m not going to call this a boycott. I’m not going to judge people who love or play football. And I need to acknowledge that I’ve backslid before and can backslide again.
But I’m out.
All the love to Damar Hamlin, his family, his teammates, and his community. And wishes of good luck and health to every football player, at all level, past and present.