Conservative radio powerhouse Rush Limbaugh told fans that he decided to skip NFL football last weekend “with great sadness,” knowing that the whole league was going to erupt in anti-American protests.
Limbaugh said that he is “smack-dab in the middle of the targeted marketing” for the NFL, but the league has lost him with its parade of protests. He also feels he is fairly typical of the league’s target audience (as crashing rating may prove).
President Donald Trump’s criticism of the league delivered during a September 22 rally in Huntsville, Alabama, for Republican Senate candidate Luther Strange sent the NFL off into its latest spate of protests. However, Trump’s criticism didn’t bother Limbaugh much. The radio talker did note, though, that he just knew the league, the players and the media would “get it wrong” with their response to Trump.
Because of how the media portrayed the president’s comments, Limbaugh said he has now checked out of the NFL:
I was personally saddened. I did not watch the National Football League yesterday, and it was the first time in 45 years that I made an active decision not to watch, including my team, the Pittsburgh Steelers. It was not a decision made in anger. It was genuine sadness. I realized that I can no longer look at this game and watch this game and study this game and pretend, you know, fantasize, everything a fan does. This whole thing has removed for me the ingredients that are in the recipe that make up a fan.
Until now, Limbaugh has been a great booster of the NFL during his radio career. Not only did he work for the Steelers before he launched his nationally syndicated radio show, but he was also once chosen to host an ESPN sports show.
In fact, he used to anger fans of his radio show when he went off into discussions of the NFL (and golf) and frequently noted that he would be the recipient of calls for him to “stick to the issues” and quit talking sports.
However, now it seems Limbaugh’s fandom is over:
“But all of this is just sad. Folks, the National Football League, I loved it. I mean, it was one of my top five passions, hobbies, enjoyments, as regular listeners of this program know,” he said. “I’m not making this about me. I’m trying to use myself here as what I think is a pretty right-down-the-middle example of the way people are going to react.”
Limbaugh told listeners that “the mystique” of the NFL is gone, that it is no longer about “the best and brightest.” Limbaugh slammed the NFL for “becoming politicized,” adding, “And the people politicizing it, since we’re talking about politics, the people that politicized it are people on the left. And when that happens, things change. It’s just over.”
Limbaugh continued saying:
That kind of corruption, sometimes it’s fast and overnight; sometimes it’s creeping. This has been creeping, but it took a big leap over the weekend. Why did I not watch the Steelers? Well, when I found out that the coach said a word I’m having trouble here relating. He said, “I need to protect my players.” What? Protect your players from what? I mean, the players are who’s doing all this.
The top radio talker then retorted, “The whole notion of protecting the players just mind-boggles me, folks. Are we talking about children here?”
After bemoaning the false impression that the U.S. suffers from out of control racism, as many players insist, Limbaugh went on to say that the protests are destructive for the league.
“Some people are gonna have anger about it,” Limbaugh said of the protests. “Some people will be ambivalent about it.”
But the one thing that this is not going to do… I don’t care what anybody says: The one thing this is not going to do is make the NFL more popular. It is not going to make the NFL more ingrained in our society. You just cannot have a business as large as the National Football League — which is as dependent on public dollars as it is. You simply cannot have a business that allows itself to be used to promote “social justice” when that promotion of social justice requires displays of anti-Americanism, however you want to define it.
Limbaugh then insisted that the fun has been removed from football and that it is no longer a thing Americans can turn to in order to escape politics for a while.
Yes, it’s now all about politics:
You can’t watch ESPN anymore and just learn about what happened during the day in football games. You can’t. You are going to be deluged with other things that are irrelevant to why you care and why you want to watch. You can’t open the Internet in the morning — newspaper, whatever. You can’t. You just can’t watch and absorb and learn about the NFL the way I used to be able to. You have to be willing to accept all the other things now that people are using it for — and it is being used.
But, in the end, Limbaugh thinks that it is football that will lose this battle, not Trump:
There’s no way Trump loses in this. You may think so, but there’s no way he does. There’s no way the NFL wins, if this continues as it is. The ratings are down last night. The early returns — we don’t have, of course, all the metered markets, the overnights. Some of them are in. But they were down, and it’s not insignificant, the numbers that are down.
The fans will simply continue turning away, Limbaugh concluded:
Because there is so much disgust, lack of trust, anger at the media, which provides the lens through which most people see things now. There was no way the ratings were gonna be up last night. There was no way the ratings overall were gonna be up yesterday. And people that don’t understand that and still today don’t understand it then are probably gonna have trouble understanding where America is right now, whether that’s good or bad.
So, as far as Rush Limbaugh is concerned, NFL football is on its deathbed.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston.
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