On Friday, Broncos quarterback Russell Wilson posted a denial to Twitter saying he never asked Seahawks ownership to fire Pete Carroll and John Schneider, as a story in The Athletic alleged the same day.
I read that and thought it wasn’t surprising Wilson denied the allegations, but we shouldn’t be focusing on the question of whether he actually did it. Why? Because it’s not surprising Wilson would ask for his head coach or general manager to be fired. It happens in almost every facility, every single year. It’s symptomatic of the disease that is the NFL. We just get to pick and choose the situations that amount to Big News.
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See whether you can follow me here for a minute. Tom Brady semiretired, and, all of a sudden, Bruce Arians decides to step down a year earlier than planned, and Brady is back in a Buccaneers uniform. (Brady and Arians have denied the decisions being linked, for what it’s worth.) Each year, coordinators who underperform whilst working with elite quarterbacks disappear like FBI witnesses. When it comes to a head coach trying to save his own job, defensive coordinators are the NFL’s equivalent of Spinal Tap drummers. Friends become expendable, knocked back down the employment ladder.
Basically: This is one of the most cutthroat businesses in the world, and almost everyone is willing to get someone else fired to save their job, their legacy, their creature comforts or some combination of the three.
Here we have a microcosm of the major issue that underlines most franchises. There is no trust. There is so little real accountability. Some call this a beautiful, purposeful malfunction. In the NBA, a season can turn like a BMW once a coach figures out how to get a very small number of people on the same page. Even a Major League Baseball team, with active rosters half the size of an NFL team, can hit some July hot streak when the team starts coming together (or stops eating fried chicken and drinking beer in the clubhouse during games).
In the NFL, rosters are far too massive. The stage—the biggest in American sports—is far too visible. If a quarterback is staring down the barrel of the end of his career, what is the likelihood he’ll say, “You’re right; I’m cooked,” instead of prolonging the IV drip containing the greatest drug there is and blaming the scheme or the people he’s throwing to? If a head coach, already better versed in combative politics than a crooked senator, is asked by owners why his team underperformed, he is almost certainly going to blame the general manager, putting him on the chopping block.
We often wonder why everyone is so tense throughout the course of an NFL season, why coaches will walk off the podium when they are asked a question they fully expected to be asked, or why players will treat the most innocuous of slights from a Pro Football Focus tweet like it’s directly insulting a parent or guardian.
It’s because everyone is threatened by firing. Every single day. Every single season. Everyone in the NFL wants someone fired constantly. I’ve talked to players about the real-life implications of this. It’s maddening.
This is not meant to defend Wilson or to knock down the reporting done around his relationship with the Seahawks. That stands on its own. But when we digest news like that, we should take time to remind ourselves of what the NFL really is: a reality-show corporation that sucks in its biggest stars and turns them against one another like island plane crash survivors. Everyone wants to be the greatest. Everyone wants to stay in the show. Football is Family, if your family is the Corleones.
At the end of the day, this is the reality we’re dealing with, be it Wilson or anyone else. See whether you can watch this year through that lens and not have the deepest sympathy for this collection of powder kegs bouncing off one another constantly, throughout the course of a season. See, also, how a good team, a well-run franchise, a successful head coach, owner or GM can somehow instill even that tiniest sense of security, accountability and trust. There is a lot of money to be made by people willing to put the betterment of others above mere survival (and ironically, longer and more successful careers).
It’s rare, but it’s not extinct. Days like this one are good reminders to seek it out when possible.
