LA Times: Dozens of Reasons NFL Should Be 'Banished Forever'

The former sports editor of the Los Angeles Times wrote that there are dozens of reasons why the NFL needs to “go away” and “be banished” forever.

“There are dozens of reasons why the NFL deserves to go away, to be banished from our sight forever. There are at least two reasons why that won’t happen,” Bill Dwyer writes in Times. “Tradition and Peyton Manning.”

Calling PBS’s “A League of Denial” “a journalistic masterpiece,” Dwyre writes that the NFL is now being compared to Big Tobacco.

“What a despicable label to have pinned on you,” he writes. “But now, a masterpiece of documentation and reasoned journalism has joined them at the hip with … Big Tobacco. Bye-bye goodwill.”

He calls the recent “$765-million payout to old, injured players, and doing so with no admission of responsibility” “blood money with no Band-Aid.” 

He laments that “people are still smoking and NFL players will still be taking shots to the head” because “our country’s freedom allows us the right to be stupid.”

And he then writes that because the “NFL is as woven into our fabric as the singing of the national anthem before games” and the “NFL’s biggest game, the Super Bowl, has become the equivalent of a national holiday,” “there is no turning back.”

Dwyre says “the pedestals are crowded with hypocrites. Often well-meaning, but still hypocrites.”

Nevertheless, he says NFL is here to stay:

It is like our freeway system. Flawed, full of accidents, full of frustration, but impossible to do without. Similar to the government that keeps trying to fix the freeways, the NFL needs to start paving over its years of potholes.