The NFL's predictable bad day

In a poignant passage from his recent New Yorker feature on the coaches and players of the New York Jets, Nicholas Dawidoff describes the hardscrabble and downright traumatic backgrounds many of the players come from. “Football is my father,” one of them says. It’s a sentiment that sums up the commitment beyond money and professionalism that many players have to this unusual sport. 

Professional football has terrible dangers and long-term costs, which I recently explored in the Century. If there is something meaningful to weigh against this, it is probably that player ethic that contains—in whatever ghostly form—a kind of family loyalty and esprit de corps that is largely vanished from modern capitalist American culture. Football may be exempt from the laws and customs that govern the rest of life, but it is widely understood to operate by its own code, which is more rigorous in its own narrow terms. 

So it happens that a sport plagued by health concerns and labor disputes has been rocked more sharply by a flagrantly blown call--a call made by an official replacing the locked-out union members who typically manage the game--than by any lawsuit or ex-player suicide. On Monday night, the Green Bay Packers lost a game on a touchdown that was seen only by a referee. Everyone else saw an interception, including the back judge in the officiating team, who was waving his hands above his head to signal a change of possession even as his colleague ran up to signal the game-winning touchdown: