Can you believe what the NFL has done to itself as players continue to prove Colin Kaepernick was always right?

I won't layer in any sarcasm when describing this billions-on-billions athletic monster league. The NFL has always aimed for the lowest common denominator in its marketing message, and Its refusal to evolve will birth its cancer.

The NFL is half tradition, half family get-together, half masculinity, and half business, so without motorcycle-leaning too hard into metaphor, the NFL prefers kicking its casket down the road instead of abandoning its willful ignorance of the meaning of a growing American protest.

The NFL as we know it will backpedal into its slow death.

It believes its product is evergreen. The white toast and ice water League Commissioner Roger Goodell, a living marionette replica of Seymour Skinner brought to life by Pinocchio magic, would prefer to keep the job he has.

To do so requires holding the course, which is to say, don't rock the boat. But, hey, dude, check out the view from your porthole window.

See that? That's chop.

Those are whitecaps. And that over there on the horizon is a raging generation of Millennials that'd rather raise money to save the coral reef you've wrecked than develop the patience for your hyper-boring competition of brain damage and Ford trucks.

Hang on. From memory, let me recall the types of many-thousand dollar advertisements that air during the NFL games:

1. Cars
2. Trucks
3. iPhones
4. iPhone alternatives
5. Cell phone networks
6. The NFL store
7. Snacks
8. Insurance; including life, home, and car variety
9. Alcohol, but domestic beer only (never mind that Budweiser is owned by InBev, which is owned by a Brazillian and Dutch conglomerate)
10. Restaurants (greater than 50 locations, nationwide)
11. Gambling; including Draft Kings and FanDuel
12. Home care; including Lowes and Home Depot
13. General Electric
14. Heart medications and erection drugs for retirees that led self-destructive lives

What do they expect me to do with any of that stuff?

Allow me one more second, I need to do push-ups until I scream. The shrieking is gonna freak my dog out, but it needs to happen before I die with this image in my head.

Football is a dying planet.

This image. This is the imagined American planetoid the NFL would gladly continue slapping like a toddler finger-painting an antique globe in grandpa's study.

Let that sucker whip in circles on its axis until the continents smear.

Why perpetuate anything less lucrative than these continuations of status quo?

Indeed, why fuck up the escapist fantasy of righteous, fair competition?

Because the NFL has created an escape compatible only with their desired demographic. You know, the trucks, home repair, and corporate energy-demo. They want you to join up, or kindly leave their flotilla, and don't even mention the uncomfortable exclusion they've crafted.

Do not mention the hypocritical NFL coaches cursing players' non-violent protests while putting coke up their own noses.

Do not mention the sport's deadliness, its link to concussion-related CTE brain disease, or the league's denial of its existence until 2016.

Do not mention young football players' actions around old football players, like the legendary, one-time Super Bowl-winning coach, Mike Ditka (that's as many as Joe Flacco! (but not as many as Eli Manning!))—these old fellers become confused and upset at the passage of time, the specter of death's outline drawing sharper with each day.

It all comes down to respect in the NFL.

Ah, respect.

Well, kindly fuck your oh-so-sad respect and the self-created system that perpetuates its definition. Participating in a practiced, ceremonial game such as football is barely a job.

From one civilian to another, permit me the chance to tell Mike Ditka that I'd sooner praise a mother of three for raising her children right than compliment the work he's done at his job.

The NFL, an American institution, has erected a contained intrasystem of praise, demanding respect from its players, employers, and—let's face it—viewers, while never chancing a glance outward beyond its borders.

The NFL can do no wrong, and it will die believing so.

Fuck the NFL and its self-congratulation. Fuck the NFL as it enables systemic racism.

Fuck the NFL's pride, its toxic masculinity, and its reductive view of its own desperate fanbase.

Why are all the men shrinking violets wearing unbuttoned shirts in all ads during football games?

Why are all their wives nags?

Why is this considered normal?

Nobody that young goes to Tampa Bay Buccaneers games. Quit lying, NFL Shop.

Fuck the NFL for pretending it doesn't give people brain damage.

Fuck the NFL for letting old shitbirds complain about how the defenses aren't as tough as they used to be while legislating out the bigger hits across the secondary. The league literally used to make fucking movies about that kind of shit.

You cannot have your goddamn cake and eat it, too.

Fuck the NFL for mislabeling complacency as unity.

Everyone stands for the national anthem so we can have a dialogue? They didn't even play the national anthem before games until 2009.

It's a rule younger than the Obama administration.

Go get some racist cops fired instead of throwing your breast cancer fundraising into a slush fund. Only 8.01% of all that pink merch they shill goes to disease research; the rest goes to pay Roger Goodell.

Fuck you again for forgiving Ray Lewis for killing that guy, for forgiving Ray Rice for punching his fiance out cold in an elevator, for the continued existence of the Washington Redskins, and for the billionaire team owners gouging local American taxpayers to build fucking monstrous stadiums that stand empty.

Do you want a dialogue?

Do you want to discuss?

On a level playing field, under circumstances the NFL presents, where the onus of responsibility is on us, on the interlopers, on guests in your club, to prove something is rotten?

Very well. My opening statement also includes my close:

Fuck you. We're leaving.

The Millennials will leave you high and dry. None of our kids will grow up playing football. It's too deadly and psychotic. It isn't for us.

And those one in one thousand free rides into college football you extend to poor kids for a shot at four years of indentured servitude, while the head college ball coaches are the highest-paid government employees in 39 of 50 states?

Gone.

Viewership, gone.

Advertising dollars, gone.

Beer, gone.

Official merchandise, the sweetest of plums, gone!

Why sit through twelve hours of football each Sunday when there's creativity, content, and life?

What the fuck would a Millennial do with an automobile, anyway?

The NFL will die in our lifetime, and you and I, reader, will kill it without even glancing up from our phones.

We won't even do it on purpose or with malice; we'll simply do it because we kill unimportant, cruel, money-leeching institutions.

If you can't parse that thought, you're already dead.

I'll be by to pick up the body in the morning.