It used to be reassuring that you could avoid political viewpoints and just focus on the purity of the sport… no longer:
It’s become more painful to watch TV sports analysts than the gladiatorial hits of the game itself: Aging veterans seek to recapture their cool by passing themselves off as political pundits who contextualize interceptions and fumbles in terms of abstract politics.. They’re oblivious that, in the court of identity politics, the NFL is itself found culpable: According to the logic of “disparate impact” and proportional representation, about 12 percent of the population is “over-represented” through its nearly 70 percent membership on NFL teams.
During the Cold War, Soviet-athlete propagandists who talked of the masses at least had a gun to their heads; today’s ESPN jocks who play-act as NPR talking heads mouth Democratic-party platitudes as a form of career enhancement. Life is short, so when Sundays are no relief from the daily frenzy, an increasing number have pulled the plug on sports.