It’s Playmakers day – ProFootballTalk

PublicAffairs

It’s been a long time coming, and it finally has arrived.

Playmakers, a book of essays that chronicle the past 20 years in the NFL, lands today. It can be ordered online, and it can be found in bookstores. In addition to the hardcover edition, electronic and audio options are available. (Dan Woren narrates the audio version. I tried to do it. After recording one paragraph and listening to it, I bailed.)

Divided into 10 sections, Playmakers has accurately been described as a mosaic that, in total, shows what the NFL does well, what it doesn’t do well, and where it needs to improve — especially as it heads toward a future that is filled with various challenges.

The simple reality for the NFL continues to be that, no matter how the league handles those challenges, it will keep making plenty of money and gathering millions to watch games live. In an on-demand world, the NFL is the only property that commands attention on its chosen terms, at its chosen time.

And if the title rings a bell, it should. It’s an homage to the ESPN series that lasted only one season. The NFL didn’t like it, and the NFL twisted ESPN’s arm to dump it, with a not-so-subtle threat to stop doing business with Bristol.

“Everyone feels that it’s a rather gross mischaracterization of our sport,” then-Commissioner Paul Tagliabue said of the original Playmakers. History, as chronicled by the new Playmakers, would agree with Tagliabue. But only because the fictional show didn’t go nearly far enough to depict what really goes on.

The new Playmakers does. The NFL may not like it. After my wife read an early draft last year, she said, “This is going to piss a lot of people off.”

Maybe it will. It shouldn’t. There’s no opinion in the book that I haven’t expressed elsewhere in the past two decades. But it’s all collected in one place, with one essay after another that becomes a handbook on how the NFL really works, and (as the cover of the book says) how it doesn’t. So, yeah, maybe some people will be pissed off. Maybe they need to be, since that’s the first step in eventually realizing that changes are needed.

The NFL is great. It can be better. I was brainwashed in the early ’70s by the sounds and images of NFL Films into thinking that pro football was a gleaming example of American excellence. As I’ve gotten closer and closer to the sport, I’ve realized that there are plenty of things about the NFL that aren’t excellent. The goal, both in Playmakers and every day that we post content here, is to nudge things toward the vision of the NFL that the Sabols and John Facenda conveyed to a generation of future fans, perhaps too effectively.

That’s my pitch. Here’s the call to action. Buy it now. But if you need to read a little bit of it first, here you go.