TG Fantasy Baseball

Having lapped its rivals in the US landscape, the most powerful American sports league is pushing for supersonic expansion of its calendar and its geography

“Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. And they’re getting hoggy.” When Mark Cuban, then owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, fired that line at the NFL in 2014, he was partly goading and partly gloating.

It felt directionally true. The NFL looked bloated, arrogant and vulnerable. Decades-long skeletons were tumbling out of the closet. Crisis followed crisis: concussions, Colin Kaepernick, sinister owners, cheating scandals and an almost Nixonian attempt to institute law and order. Youth participation declined. Football felt, if not dying, then at least dated, creaking under the weight of its own mythology.

As his team returns to the Super Bowl, the New England owner who once stood up on social issues proves he is just another transactional billionaire

During the worst of it, when Philando Castile and Alton Sterling were killed by police a decade ago and Colin Kaepernick took a knee in protest, when a widespread reaction was to tell the highly accomplished, overwhelmingly Black professional athletes they were un-American, or well-paid farmhands who needed to get back to work, or both, and some of his peers in the ownership class were releasing players as punishment for joining the protest, it was New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft who positioned himself as the voice of reason.

Kraft attempted to broker peace between the ownership hawks who saw the high-paid kneelers as ungrateful mutineers and, after decades of docility, the radicalized players unwilling to collect their checks in exchange for political silence. Kraft encouraged two of his players – the twins Devin and Jason McCourty – into deeper citizenship, to engage with the legal and political systems and promote reforms. As a sign of compassion and a willingness to listen, Kraft visited the incarcerated rapper Meek Mill, and later the two partnered with another artist, Jay-Z, on various criminal justice initiatives.