USA TODAY's Sports' JarrettBell breaks down the NFL's *very* bad decade.
Sure, the NFL is seemingly more popular than ever, so established as a cultural phenomenon. Tens, if not hundreds of million people are passionate about their consuming connection to the league.
Throughout the past 10 years, the NFL – its teams, its leaders, its players – have provided so many dramatic episodes and issues that illuminate just how imperfect it is as a window to our society.Maybe there’s hope for better 2020s when considering that this final year of the decade has “only” given us this collection of drama: Patriots owner Robert Kraft implicated as part of a sting operation at a Florida massage parlor.
But the NFL, for years, has also become the ultimate reality TV show, given the next-mess-is-waiting-to-happen existence that has kept the brand in the news as much it attracts attention for the product on the field. Maybe the interest is not unlike motorists slowing to watch the scene of a car crash. Not pretty. But people watch, anyway.
That, like so many other issues connected to NFL figures during the decade, cast light on larger societal issues. Consider the cases.
Goodell has drawn considerable heat over the years for his handling of various situations, and surely his actions in some of the cases have warranted the criticism. An eerie link to the suicides, however, is that both Hernandez and Belcher were posthumously found to have suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy , the degenerative brain disease that some experts contend is cause by the type of repetitive head trauma that comes with football.
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