Agency, Free Agency, And The NFL's Stockholm Syndrome Season

A thought experiment: imagine that you are employed in a difficult and demanding job by an employer that you know cares very little about your wellbeing. This employer dispenses backslaps on the regular and constantly burbles buzzspeak on corporate culture, but also has cut loose a great many of your co-workers—because they were too old or paid too well or for no reason at all other than that there was someone else who could do the same job reasonably well for significantly less money. Some of these people had been there long enough to become essential to the workplace, but most cycled through in rapid, hard-hunted succession; there was no percentage in learning these peoples' names, even, because they were only passing through. You know where you stand, though, and you believe that you are good at your job. There is a whole big world out there of employers that, to be fair, also do not care overmuch about your wellbeing, but they also have money and the willingness to pay you to do what you do. Also this is not a thought experiment.

This is it, basically. This is just the way that we work, we being people who work at the T-Mobile store or write long sentences and habitually overuse em-dashes—even for gratuitous interstitial in-jokes, like that degree of overuse—as well as those fortunate people that understand valuable things like science and the law and what an "app" is or does. We are more than the sum of our labor capacity, naturally, all of us. But we will be disappointed, and also eventually fired and embittered, if we expect those parties to which we really are the sum of our labor capacity—the names are on your paycheck, this is not a metaphor for anything—to treat us as more than that. People are beautiful and awful, dark-sided and bright, but mostly we are reducible and reduced, and act various types of ways as a result. You already know this. Wherever you are reading this, you are soaking in it. I am, too, as I write it. We should probably get back to work.

Anyway, the NFL's free agent signing period began late Tuesday afternoon, and everything went floridly and delightfully shithouse for an hour or so. A number of rumored (and non-rumored) deals became official, expected and unexpected trades were made official, and a number of players in something like the prime of their careers—potential Hall of Famer Patrick Willis and human "Operation" board Jake Locker and rising star Jason Worilds—all announced that they'd just as soon not play football for money in the NFL anymore. For people that enjoy transactions, or just prefer their sports news be delivered by six "crying loudly" emoji and a manual retweet, it was like a second, non-denominational Christmas, except with Santa Claus swapped for an extremely stressed-out Adam Schefter.

There is, as there was at the NBA's similarly hectic trade deadline, a queasy sense of overage to the whole thing. Much of this is due to the way in which the information arrives; the term "feed" is never as dismayingly apt as it is in these foie gras-goose moments, all that information and un-information and years and salary figures and preliminary assessments all arriving as a nutrient-deficient slurry. Some of it is the nagging (and not-incorrect!) sense that it is weird to thrill at people being bought, sold, and traded.

What was mostly disorienting about it, though, was the sudden reintroduction to NFL World, with its rushing rivers of goopy sentiment and grinning cynicism, its soaring edifices of buttheaded blowhard posturing. We will be led through this brand-blasted Monument Valley by Skip Bayless, who is screaming at us about Darrelle Revis' unseriousness, his outrageous greed. Bayless is an unrelaible trail guide, but this upside-down wilderness is his home, and damned if he doesn't know it well.

Revis, who signed a deal with the New York Jets that will guarantee him $39 million over the next three years, is the NFL's reigning master of free agency, which is to say that he has managed to play for the teams he wanted to play for and make a bunch of money—he'll have earned about $124 million by the end of the guaranteed portion of his new contract—by leveraging every opportunity available to him. This is not a controversial thing for an athlete or any other person to do, let alone one in a sport defined by the way it grinds through the supermen that play it. It is not even an obscene amount of money, by professional athlete standards; Aramis Ramirez, to pick a less-virtuosic player from another sport, has made more than that in the last decade alone.

There's no urgent need to celebrate Revis' latest triumph of market-actualized self-determination, exactly, but it is rare enough to be remarkable. In a league whose owners are dedicated to the most militant possible approach to labor relations, Darrelle Revis has consistently gotten what he wants. He has earned it by being good at football, but also he's won it by persistently outplaying owners at a game whose rules those owners have rigged hilariously in their favor. Naturally this is a very bad thing.

Not really, of course. It's a neutral thing, a business thing. It is the job of people like Skip Bayless (and, to a lesser and less direct extent, myself) to say that various trending sports things are BAD or GOOD, and as Revis is leaving the Super Bowl champions (who are successful, and so GOOD) for the New York Jets (who are the stupid, unsuccessful Jets, and so BAD) Bayless did what his dipshit reflexes compelled him to do. As always, where Bayless is concerned, it is good not to put too much on this, or to pay any more attention to it than you would to a man on the bus eating Chef Boyardee ravioli out of a can while yelling about chemtrails. But, as always, given that this is the NFL, it is not just Bayless getting Boyardee-juice all on his collar while shouting about greedy athletes.

All sports are captive, in one sense or another, to the stories that they tell about themselves, and governed by how they tell those stories. Baseball is fixated on the manufacture of mythos on one end of the discourse, and the ironical deflation of it on the other; basketball is fixated on its own free-form pursuit of cool, which at least makes sense given that it is the most enjoyable thing about basketball. But the NFL's involuted powerfucking is a stronger and stranger thing than these other rhetorical hangups, and produces stronger and stranger takes in turn. And so there is fuming and barking about disloyalty and greed and cowardice and priorities; there is Peter King-style fussy-uncle musing about how many millions of dollars would be worth leaving on the table in exchange for being in A Position To Win; there is a general sense that it is somehow wrong for Revis to make this much money, or for Jason Worilds to retire from football at the age of 26, one year after his team paid him $9 million (and deferred his free agency, by way of the "transition" tag), that this is all unfair.

Bruised fan-feelings and partisanship aside, there is a strange tang of Stockholm Syndrome saltiness to all this. The NFL's aspirational dynamics have long run in this way—fans are supposed to want to own players, not be them—and there is something unmistakably creepy about it. Something a little sad, too, because while all this goofy-pompous authority worship is laughable and easy to dismiss from the league's puffy pink power-dudes, there is something defeated and false in hearing it echoed from press boxes and tailgates. This is not to say that it's any less of a reach, or any less silly, to look at a few athletes effectively mirroring the bottom-line instrumentalism of their employers as some sort of triumph for working people or whatever. It is just less popular.

The more we know about what this great and terrible game does, the better we understand what a high-wire act it is to care about the NFL. For all the games' troubles and complications, it turns out that the NFL without actual football is CNBC—a string of transactions and business decisions and some sophistic justifications for them; means to ends but mostly ends; and a sort of passive, couchbound grouchiness. It is telling, maybe, that the default mode for this time of year is complaint and confusion and a vague ambient grievance. Without any games to take the edge off or remind us why we care, all we have left is the NFL, and the familiar inevitabilities of business done as usual.