As You Were

Well, that's over.

It took turning his league into an international joke, but NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell seems to have realized that the American people will only put up with just so much, coming to terms with unionized game officials in time to get them back on the field for tonight's Browns-Ravens game.

We have no problem subsidizing oil companies at the same time they earn record profits. We have come to accept that most candidates for public office, regardless of party affiliation, are completely full of shit and settle for basing our votes on which set of lies more closely conforms with our under-informed personal worldview, or at least which liar we find less personally loathsome.

As Goodell learned this week, though, you do not, under any circumstances, mess with our football.

Sure, there were a few contrarians who tried to defend Goodell's attempt, on behalf of his owner overlords, to strip away the pension plan enjoyed by the real officials. After all, the argument went, most people in the real world no longer have pensions and the league had already forced most of its off-field employees to accept putting their retirement nest-egg into the shell game of a 401k.

Those people, however, do not have a direct impact on the NFL's product or reputation.

Others claimed that the difference between the locked-out zebras and the scabs was minimal, that blown calls are part of every sport and that the fiasco that was the first three weeks of the regular season was some sort of media creation. Then there was the spurious claim that all the official incompetence somehow made the games more exciting, because you never knew what would happen next.

Anyone taking up either of those points, though, clearly was not actually watching the games.

The ceaseless post-play huddles stretched already-long games to infuriating lengths. Worse than the lack of flow to any contest -- already a problem for the sport -- was the sense that the scabs were not trying to make sure they were getting things right, but that they were trying, without much success, to figure out what the hell was going on.

That feeling was compounded by the growing number of post-whistle scuffles and blatant cheap shots. Someone was going to get seriously hurt, not because of the inherent danger of large, muscular men running into each other at high speeds and unpredictable angles, but because those who do the hitting were feeling increasingly empowered to operate lawlessly.

Such unease probably did not have a lot to do with finally settling this mess, at least from the owners' perspective. They have long since proven that player safety is little more than a talking point and public-relations tool. Players have always been, and will always be, thoroughly replaceable. If one superstar quarterback retires due to repeated concussions, his successor is waiting on the sidelines, or in college.

What Goodell had to know could not be so easily restored, though, was the NFL's image as the slickest, best-run entity in sports and maybe all of entertainment. To paraphrase Jack Woltz, the pedophile movie mogul from The Godfather, a league in the NFL's position cannot afford to be made to look ridiculous.

In less than a month, the scabs had done just that. So, to borrow again from the greatest movie ever made, you won't see them no more.

(In case you are already feeling nostalgic for the days when the NFL abandoned the rule of law, Deadspin -- whose coverage of the whole mess was free of the sort of subservience displayed by the large outlets beholden to the NFL -- which is just about all of them -- offers up this video montage of some of the most absurd moments of the past three weeks).