Whiteface/Blackface/Yellowface

Doctor Strange makes its cinematic debut this week, and almost forgotten is the brief flurry of complaint that arose when it was revealed that the role of The Ancient, who was an Asiatic man in the comic (excuse me, graphic novel) was being played by Tilda Swinton, a Caucasian woman (albeit a rather ethereal looking one).  This followed on the heels of the outrage over the casting of Emma Stone as an Asian character in Cameron Crowe’s film Aloha, a controversy that surely would have been bigger if anyone had actually paid to see that movie.

There is something to be said about Hollywood’s habit of casting White actors in minority roles.  Maybe you could somewhat justify it decades ago, when minority actors were rare, but in this day and age it shouldn’t be too hard for Cameron Crowe to find an Asian actress to play an Asian character (if I understand Cameron Crowe’s defense, he said the character was based on a friend of his who was half-Asian and did, in fact, look like Emma Stone).

So, can we all agree that when it comes to films and TV show, Hollywood should cast ethnically appropriate actors?  Not so fast.  Look at the casting of Tilda Swinton as The Ancient.  The role was conceived for an Asian man, but it was reimagined as a raceless/sexless entity.  Swinton’s appearance is such that she once starred in a film, Orlando, where she played one character as both a man AND a woman.  Here the filmmakers took liberties with the source material to get something a little less Earth-bound.

I find it hard to completely dismiss all attempts at cross-racial casting.  It is the nature of actors, especially great ones, to stretch their craft, which includes playing characters of other ethnicities.  If Marlon Brando wants to play an Asian in Teahouse of the August Moon, who is to say he shouldn’t?  Robert Downey Jr. got an Oscar nomination for Tropic Thunder, where he played an Australian actor playing an African-American character.  So, which is worse, an American actor playing an Australian actor, or the character of an Australian actor playing an African-American character?

Of course, some line must be drawn.  It is one thing for Brando to ineffectively play an Asian character, but quite another for Mickey Rooney to play a grotesque racial stereotype in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.  The problem with Rooney’s performance isn’t that he is a White man playing an Asian, it is that a mediocre actor is playing a one dimensional stereotype. 

Mickey Rooney playing an Asian is one thing, but German actor Peter Lorre playing Japanese sleuth Mr. Moto is quite another.  In the six Mr. Moto films Lorre’s presentation is subtle, multi-dimensional, and wholly respectful towards the race he is portraying.  While not in Lorre’s class as an actor, Swedish actor Werner Oland also treated the character of Charlie Chan with respect; Lorre and Oland were giving sympathetic performance of Asian characters at a time when virtually all portrayals were uniformly negative (I would recommend the book Charlie Chan by Yunte Huang for an examination of cultural attitudes towards Asian characters in the 1920-30s).

It is also unfair to impose modern ideas of casting on previous eras.  Anthony Quinn, who was from Mexico, made a career out of playing a variety of ethnicities, including Greeks (Zorba the Greek, The Greek Tycoon), Mexicans (Viva Zapata), Arabs (Lawrence of Arabia), and Italians (La Strada, The Secret of Santo Vittoria) to name a few.  Maybe these films should have been made with authentic ethnic performers, but for many years the standard procedure was to hire someone with dark hair to play any swarthy ethnic character.  Maybe this casting policy only made the number of roles available for ethnic actors more scarce, but the reality is there were fewer options when casting ethnic roles.

And what of mixed-race characters?  When Miss Saigon came across the Pond, Actor’s Equity wouldn’t approve the casting of Jonathan Pryce as The Engineer, who was described as half Vietnamese and half-French, insisting that the role go to an Asian actor.  The producers argued that the role was described as half-Caucasian, so why couldn’t the role be played by Pryce, who won awards in London and subsequently won the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical.

There is another question—if you want to say that all roles should be cast in a racially appropriate manner, then where do you draw the line?  There was a minor kerfuffle over the casting of John Cho, who is of Korean ancestry, in the role of Hikaru Sulu, a Japanese character in Star Trek.  I seem to recall there was a proposal to make a movie based on a Tony Hillerman novel with actor Graham Greene as Joe Leaphorn, a truly inspired casting choice, but the project went nowhere after protests due to the fact that Greene, while Native American (well, native-Canadian), wasn’t Navaho like Leaphorn.

Are we going to restrict actors to only playing characters that match up with their genetic heritage?  If your grandparents emigrated from Scotland, you can’t play someone who’s Irish?  I don’t think there should be a hard and fast rule, but it should be treated as a factor in the casting decision.  If Mickey Rooney wants to play a buck-toothed caricature of a Japanese person, don’t cast him.  If Peter Lorre wants to play a Japanese character with dignity and humanity, put him in the movie.

It reminds me on The Simpson’s episode when Bart ran for class President and his opponent said “There are no easy answers,” to which Bart replied, “We want easy answers!  We want easy answers!”  We want straight-forward rules regarding race and identity, but there just aren’t any.

To cheat or not to cheat

             

One thing everyone is taught as a child is not to cheat.  Winners never cheat, and cheaters never win.  There is also an old saying: “If you ain’t cheatin’, then you ain’t tryin’.”  I wonder if that statement is engraved on Bill Belichick’s office wall.

Someone should tell the Oakland Raiders that cheaters never win, because they cheated 23 times last Sunday and won. This is nothing new; in the 1992 Simpson’s episode Lisa the Greek, she explains that she’s picking the Raiders to win because they cheat, and sure enough the Raiders win on what the announcer describes as a “very suspicious play.” Cheating is in the Raiders DNA.

Of the three major American sports (sorry soccer, you aren’t there yet), only baseball has a strict “no cheating” policy.  If you are caught cheating in the smallest detail, what you gained is taken away.  Anyone who has seen George Brett's reaction to having a home run disqualified because his bat was too dirty knows that enforcing the rules does not always make sense (the ruling was sensibly overturned and they replayed the rest of the game with the home run allowed).

This sense of morality gets warped a lot when talking about baseball.  Just as there is no rule against stealing bases, there is also no rule against stealing signs.  You don’t want the runner on second tipping off the batter?  Develop a more sophisticated signaling system.  Yet announcers will describe suspected peekers with barely disguised distain in their voices.  It’s not exactly cheating, but this also colors the demand for instant replay and the micro-examination of every close call; we can’t allow the runner a base if he was out by the tiniest fraction of an inch, because that’s the rule.

Basketball and football are different.  There are violations, there are penalties, and sometimes the gain from committing the violation is worth the penalty.  It is illegal to foul an opponent in basketball, but if the opposing player has a free throw shooting percentage under 50%, go ahead and hack him.  In the NFL holding is illegal, but if holding is the only way to prevent your quarterback from being blindsided, hold away.  Baseball attempts to eradicate the violation; football and basketball impose a penalty that may, or may not, discourage such behavior.

I wrote not long ago about how football penalties should be completely re-examined.  Yardage penalties established in the days of “three yards and a cloud of dust” offenses may not be appropriate to today’s high-octane pass-oriented offenses.  Offenses pass so much that maybe pass interference should be 15 yards instead of putting the ball at the spot of the foul, assuming the pass would have been caught but for the interference.  Maybe holding is so ubiquitous it should be a five yard penalty instead of ten; or maybe it is so ubiquitous the penalty should be twenty yards.

Where this has become critical is the protection of a quarterback in the NFL.  The health of a team’s quarterback is the number one determinant of whether that team’s season is a success, or if they will have a high draft pick. With new concussion protocols now in place, any blow to the head might take a QB out of the game.  Alex Smith of the Chiefs was knocked out of the game because of a concussion that was sustained when the defender pushed his head into the turf.  Cam Newton complained about a shot taken at his knees that looked like it should have been flagged; the NFL’s response created some new questions.

The NFL and NBA must ask some tough questions, like are penalties supposed to eliminate cheating or merely discourage it? Should the penalty for fouling an opponent be increased, or should poor free throw shooters simply practice more until they are better?  How can you discourage cheating when the gain from injuring an opposing player is clearly greater than the loss of a few yards, or the ejection of a player from one game?

Baseball essentially has a zero-tolerance policy on cheating.  How close do football and basketball want to come to emulate it?

Cubs win! Cubs win! Now what?

We now live in a world where the Cubs are champions

What will replace the Cubs as the epitome of futility? What other Sisyphean entity exists, now that the baseball fans of Chicago are no longer living under a 108-year-old curse?  Pointing to the Indians’ World Series drought seems cruel, and 68 (excuse me, 69) years of futility isn’t nearly as bad as 108; besides, the Indians made it to the World Series twice in the 1990’s, so they remember some good times. 

Game Seven of the 2016 World Series will go down in history.  It didn’t have the walk-off charisma of Mazerowski’s blast in 1960, or the sustained tension of the 1991 Game Seven where Jack Morris pitched 10 innings of shutout ball for the Twins until his team finally scored in the bottom of the 10^th.  But a back-and-forth game that went extra innings, had a rain delay, and ended with a one-run deficit for the losing team, is the stuff of legends. 

One thing winning did was possibly let Cub’s manager Joe Maddon off the hook for his most controversial decision, to use closer Aroldis Chapman for 20 pitches in game six despite having a five-run lead.  Critics said it would make Chapman less effective in game seven, and he gave up hits to the first three batters he faced including a game-tying two run homer.  If the Cubs hadn’t come back to win the game Maddon would have been vilified in the sports media.  Maddon’s continued reliance on Chapman was a sure sign that he had no faith what so ever in his other relievers, so the Cubs have some work to do in the off-season.  You can’t prove that Chapman’s ineffectiveness was the result of his stint in Game Six, but the dots must be connected.  Maddon also had second baseman Javy Baez try to bunt with two strikes and a runner on third; you only do that with a batter who knows how to bunt.

I thought Indians’ manager Terry Francona made a mistake by walking Anthony Rizzo to pitch to Ben Zobrist in the tenth inning.  The logic was irrefutable—with the go-ahead runner on second and first base open, walking Rizzo creates a force out at every base, and the important run was the go-ahead run, not any other.  That is baseball managing 101; plus, I believe that pitcher Bryan Shaw is a groundball pitcher.  The upside is obvious, but the downside is subtle.  Putting another runner on base gives the pitcher less room to maneuver, making him have to be that much more careful.  If (as it happened) the batter gets an extra base hit, you are looking at a multiple run deficit in the bottom of the tenth instead of a one run deficit.  Plus, Zobrist was hitting the bejeezus out of the ball.  Playing the odds to reduce the chances of a single-run scoring but increasing the chances of a multi-run inning works in the bottom of an inning in a tied game, but not the top.

I picked the Cubs to win game seven, mainly because I felt that Francona was going to the well once too often with Cory Kluber on short rest.  Yes, he did well in game four, but generally speaking World Series pitchers on short rest have a significantly higher ERA. We love the narrative of the superhuman pitcher willing his body to perform despite inadequate rest, but for every time that play works there are other times when it blows up in the manager’s face (Matt Harvey of the Mets last year trying to throw a complete game).  Game Seven was like that for Francona.

Let’s face it; by Game Seven it was clear that neither manager had much faith in anyone in their bullpens except their closers.  The Series became a war of attrition where both managers refused to use their mediocre relievers as cannon fodder.  Maddon stuck with Chapman when he was clearly ineffective from overuse (because Maddon didn’t trust the rest of his staff to preserve a five-run lead), and Francona expected Andrew Miller to be lights out even after the Cubs had seen him enough to start figuring out what he was throwing. 

The 2016 Cubs are a super team, or as ESPN personality Tony Kornheiser has been calling them all year “The ’27 Yankees.”  Maybe not quite, but close. They won 103 games, which generally happens only about four times in a decade on average, but given their run differential and lack of “clusterluck” they were the equivalent of a 110 win team.  The only other super teams I can recall since I started following baseball are the 1975-76 Reds and the 1998 Yankees. 

I am not including the 2001 Mariners who won 116 games but lost in the playoffs; as we learned from the Warriors last season, no matter how many games you win, if you lose in the playoffs you’re nothing.  I should also mention the 1970-71 Orioles, which slightly pre-date my having the capacity to follow baseball.  The 1970 squad had three 20-game winners, the 1971 squad had four; plus, great hitters like Frank Robinson and Boog Powell and great fielders like Brooks Robinson and Paul Blair (and my pick for best manager of all time, Earl Weaver).

Will the Cubs and Indians give us a sequel in next year’s World Series?  Unlikely.  But for the first time in over a century, Chicago Cub fans can hopefully say, “Wait ‘til next year!”

Home field and the World Series

I have blogged before about the problem of having one Major Baseball League have the DH and one not.  Now that inter-league play is year-round it messes up the contests, putting the American League teams at a disadvantage when playing in a National League park.  It also plays havoc with the World Series, making home field advantage crucial.  Well, most of the time; this year the Cubs actually have an advantage playing games in Cleveland where they can use injured Kyle Schwarber as a DH.

I watch a lot of talking heads on ESPN, and many of them have railed at the inequity of determining home field for the World Series by using the winner of the All-Star game. I’ll grant some of the injustice of basing home field on the play of players most of whom play for teams with no chance at making the post-season.  But the managers are from last season’s championship teams, so they usually have a chance of going back and can manage the game accordingly.  Of course, this might mean not playing some of the marginal all-stars, but we are long past the days when Lefty Grove pitched 6 innings in an all-star game.  So, most players will still get to play.

I find using the All-Star game to determine home field in the World Series defensible, but lots of people have a problem with it.  So what’s the solution?  One bad idea often floated around is to return to the format that used to be in play before Bud Selig decided the All-Star Game needed to “mean something.”  Namely, the NL hosts one year and the AL hosts in the next.  This seems equitable, but I don’t find it satisfactory.  If the claim is that the All-Star Game outcome is random, how is it better to base the decision on numerology?  Let’s see, the number of the year is evenly divisible by 2, therefore the NL should host the Fall Classic.  That’s nuts.

A solution that attempts to base the decision on merit, but ultimately fails, is the notion that the team with the better record should be the home team.  This sounds reasonable, but the team with the better record isn’t necessarily the better team, but the team that played against weaker opponents.  There is one other criticism—the team with the better record wouldn’t be known until the end of the season, but reserving the potential stadiums might need to be done before the last minute.  I’m sure they could work around this, but knowing that the AL will host the World Series in mid-July helps planners more than finding out in early October.

There is one potentially reasonable solution, and that is use the outcome of interleague play for all teams.  This also has the problem of not being known until the end of the season, so maybe say the result of inter-league play as of September 1^st.  It’s not perfect, and given how the schedule works maybe weaker teams in one league are playing stronger teams in the other, but these things even out over time (which is no solace to the team playing four games in the other team’s park come October). 

But I still think this is a solution in search of a problem.  To a great team, home field advantage in a seven-game series shouldn’t be that big of a deal.  And, as I said above, playing by the AL rules actually helps the Cubs this year.  Hey, there are a bunch of new stats coming out every day; maybe home field should go to the team with the highest average exit velocity on batted balls!

So, let’s stop worrying about home field advantage in the playoffs and start worrying about important things, like how mankind will go on without Vin Scully calling Dodger baseball games.

Sequels: bad money after good

The fine folks who lead movie studios and TV networks have an odd existence.  They are constantly trying to use their personal opinions and ascetic criteria to decide what would be a profitable movie, to develop some sort of formulae for success.  Once upon a time Fred Silverman was called “The Man With the Golden Gut” for his seemingly unerring intuition in picking hit TV shows at CBS and ABC.  He then took over NBC, green-lit projects like Supertrain and Pink Lady and Jeff, and suddenly his gut was less than golden.

One reliable arrow in any movie studio’s quiver is the sequel.  There is no guesswork, no speculation required.  If people loved actor X and actress Y is a comedy set in Paris about parrot smuggling, then they will flock to a sequel with the same two performers in a comedy set in Rome about sick cockatoos.  Studios now plan for built-in sequels, planning tent pole movies that will set up the next film in the sequence, then the next, and so on until your studio’s roster is filled through 2028.

Hold on, buckaroos.  As Hollywood Reporter pointed out, sequels have had a poor track record of late. Inferno is not recreating the financial success of The Da Vinci Code, or even the more modest success of Angles and Demons (which contains one of my all-time favorite movie lines, “Thank God, the symbologist is here.”).  Bridget Jones’ Baby also tanked, as did the “Why on Earth did they make a sequel of that?” movie Jack Reacher: Never Look Back.  There are exceptions—horror films seem to be able to put an infinite number of numbers after their titles, and Tyler Perry can churn out a money-making Madea film whenever he needs a few more million dollars.

Reboots are also on shaky ground.  The Magnificent Seven had an all-star cast but won’t be remembered as well as its 1960 predecessor, or 1954’s Seven Samurai.  For some bizarre reason someone thought re-making the beloved 1984 comedy Ghostbusters was a good idea, and then didn't understand why audiences stayed away.  Note—I didn’t stay away because of the women, I didn’t go because the original Ghostbusters is an impossible to duplicate classic, and no amount of stunt casting is going to improve on Bill Murray’s improv skills.  Again, there are exceptions—the Coen Brothers’ remake of True Grit was generally hailed as an improvement on the Oscar-winning original.

So the easy temptation is to draw broad conclusions—stop making sequels and reboots, start making more original films.  Geez, people have been telling Hollywood that for decades.  Remember when Gen Xers started taking over studios in the late 1980’s and 1990’s and producing movies based on beloved childhood series like Dragnet (1987), Car 54 Where Are You (1994) and Bilko (1996)?  That trend has lessened, although there have been recent big screen adaptations of Get Smart and 21 Jump Street (but both of those were parodies). 

The Hollywood Reporter article linked to above contained the important warning to not make sequels no one is asking for.  Was there a groundswell of sentiment for Tom Hanks to make another Robert Langdon film?  Why follow the mediocrity (and horrific bad casting) of Tom Cruise’s Jack Reacher with Jack Reacher: Even More Violence?  Who watched the original Ghostbusters on DVD and thought, “Yeah, we can make it funnier than Bill Murray, Dan Ackroyd and Harold Ramis”?

As I said, one trend is to assume that a sequel will be made before making a movie in the first place.  Marvel has announced a multi-year series of inter-related movie projects. That’s great, but what if one flops?  Or people start getting tired of these characters, or disapprove of the direction the series is going? It’s like a TV series planning plot twists in season five before getting a season one full season order.  The creators of Lost swore they had a six year plan, but the fact is that they initially cast Michael Emerson for only three episodes and his character ended up driving the final three seasons.  You have to stay flexible.

I always recall the story I read about Christopher Nolan’s movie Inception.  When it was announced, everyone said the studio was just doing it to keep the director of the Batman franchise happy, that otherwise no one would finance a film that wasn’t a sequel, remake, or reboot.  When early buzz was positive, the detractors said that it might be good, but an original film not based on a comic book was still a financial risk.  When it became the biggest grossing film of the year, the detractors said “Okay, let’s see him do it again.”

Hollywood will always give “proven” projects like sequels, remakes and reboots a priority.  If it succeeds, you’re a genius; if it fails, blame the marketing department because Tom Hanks movies should sell themselves. Hollywood should remember that before you have a sequel, you have to have a successful film.  That’s the hardest part about making money in the entertainment industry; you must have a good, original idea in the first place.

Cam Newton needs to learn how to lose.

Maybe you’ve sensed a slight difference between 2015 Cam Newton and 2016 Cam Newton.  2015 Cam was brash, cocky, and always doing that Superman thing he does.  2016 Cam is churlish, abrupt and uncommunicative, although he does display an excellent fashion sense in his headwear.

Perhaps the difference is that last year Cam’s team, the Carolina Panthers, went 15-1 and went to the Super Bowl, while this season the Panthers are 2-5.  Are the Panthers that much worse?  People always react to adversity in the same way—they call it bad luck.  The fact is that there isn’t much difference between the two teams; heck FiveThirtyEight called the 2015 Panthers the worse 11-0 team of all time. Last season’s schedule was really easy, the sixth easiest based on 2014 winning percentages, and they didn’t beat a single team with a winning record.  Cam Newton won an MVP award.  Everything was great until the Super Bowl.

That’s when the heavily favored Panthers were humiliated by the underdog Broncos.  Newton was petulant, churlish and brief, mostly giving one word answers. He later admitted his behavior was a mistake, but then he pretty much has done the exact same thing this season.

Cam Newton needs to learn how to lose.

Some people will disagree.  Some people will say what made Michael Jordan great was his drive not to lose.  Some people will say that Lebron James has that same drive, and that’s what makes him great.  Lebron once refused to shake hands with his opponent after a game, claiming he was just too competitive.

Hogwash.

Willie Mays, the greatest living baseball player, never refused to shake hands after a game; was he a loser?  The same goes for hundreds of baseball, hockey, basketball and football players.  It’s called sportsmanship.  It’s why we force little league teams to shake after a game; the battle is over, and now we respect our foes.  Showing respect does not diminish us in any way.

Rudyard Kipling’s classic poem If teaches us “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster/ And treat those two impostors just the same . . . you’ll be a man, my son.” Drive to win is important before the battle, but once the battle is over your enemy is no longer your enemy and should be respected, just as you should expect respect in return.

Is this an important topic?  I think it is.  Look at our political situation (yes, it’s distasteful, but try).  At the GOP convention (in Cleveland, the city of winners?) speakers like Rudy Guiliani said in no uncertain terms that losing wasn’t an option, that a win by Hilary Clinton would mean the start of a totalitarian regime that would enslave mankind (if you think I am overstating what he said, get a transcript). Doubtless the Democrats feels pretty much the same way about a Trump victory in November.

I can’t find exactly who first said “Failure is not an option” (I seem to recall it from the movie Apollo 13) but they were wrong—failure is always an option.  When you think it isn’t, then it justifies any subterfuge in the name of winning.  The important thing isn’t winning, but winning by playing within the rules.  If you elevate winning to an imperative, then it justifies cheating, as well as rudeness.  I don’t have to tell you what rudeness leads to (I probably do, but I prefer to leave it to your imagination).

I hope this season is teaching Cam Newton how to be a better loser.  So far it doesn’t seem to, but the season isn’t half over.  And I’m sure that when Cam Newton is sitting at home watching the Super Bowl in February, I hope he gets to see a better performance in the post-game press conference by the losing conference.

I do hope he keeps rocking the hats, though.

more on the NFL ratings drop

Let me return to the topic of my previous post, the search for an explanation for the 10% decline in NFL rating this year.  As with everything, the reasons for any event happening are many and varied.  Yes, the elections may be eating into some of the viewership for football; yes, some people may swear off watching professional football while a few players are kneeling during the national anthem (a recent survey said that 56% thought that anthem protests affected ratings; but note those are NOT people saying they watch less because of protests-- they are probably pro-police white people who disapprove of protests and thus claim they cause viewers to tune out even though they don’t); and  yes, the popularity of English Premiere League soccer in America may be part of the problem (although the Premiere League is having its own ratings crisis in England).

But the cause I single out is the dilution of the NFL product thanks to Thursday Night games and games being played overseas, mostly in London but this year also in Mexico City.  I do not claim authorship of this theory; others have pointed out that Mark Cuban forecast this development two years ago. Unlike most owners Cuban is very, very smart, so it should come as no surprise that he is right about something.

But there is still a causal connection to be deciphered.  It is easy to say that the NFL is losing viewers because they are putting out an inferior product, but that doesn’t end the discussion.  After all, people keep watching the Pro Bowl even though the quality of pay is execrable.   So it isn’t the bad play itself that is causing the problem.

My best guess is that putting out inferior games at new and different times breaks the conditioned response that the NFL has created in most American men.  Men organize their entire weekends around Sunday football, and families time their Thanksgiving dinners around the NFL schedule (which continues to include the Detroit Lions even though they have sucked for 40 years; come on NFL, even MLB stopped having the first game of the season in Cincinnati just because they were the first professional baseball team). 

But when you put a game on in London at 6:30 AM Pacific time, a lot of men will decide to sleep in or attend church rather than watch the game (most of which have not been good, for whatever reason).  When you put games on Thursday night and they aren’t good because the teams don’t have the usual amount of time to prepare, and it’s on TV opposite Grey’s Anatomy, some men will decide to hand the remote to their wives.  And voila! The Pavlovian call and response is broken.  Men un-learn to turn on an NFL game just because it’s there.  So the next time there is a match-up between two 3-4 teams on a Sunday afternoon, there is no longer any urgency to watch.

There is another possibility that would require research that I just don’t have the time to do.  It seems to me that as players have gotten bigger, faster, and more aggressive, injuries are on the rise, and naturally defenses target the best offensive players.  Now that the NFL has something called a “concussion protocol” it is possible that a quarterback will not play in a game the week after taking a hit to the head.  Even without concussions, the Vikings lost their quarterback and their leading rusher even before the first game of the season was over (but they seem to be doing okay so far).

Injuries make the games less interesting.  Who wants to watch Patriots vs. Steelers if Ben Rothlisberger isn’t playing?  What may look like a marquee matchup before the season starts may turn out to be a battle between two mediocre teams if key players on both sides aren’t suited up.  This may explain a lot of what passes for “parity” in the NFL.  Last year the Panthers had an easy schedule and no major injuries and went 15-1; this year they have a more difficult schedule and Cam Newton has been under “concussion protocol” and they are 1-5.  You can’t put your best games on Sunday or Monday night if you don’t know who’s going to be out with an injury.

I think that the poor refereeing that has been seen, and the more frequent flagging for celebrations, also makes outcomes more random and thus less satisfying.  An incorrect pass interference call can result in a gain (or non-gain) of 50 yards and may determine the outcome of a game and, oh yeah, aren’t reviewable.  A microchip in the nose of a football could conclusively prove when the ball crosses the plane of the end zone, but the NFL is too cheap to install them.  Some of the demand for perfection is overkill, but fans want games where the outcome is determined by the players, not by a bunch of guys in striped shirts penalizing teams because the receiver shouted “Yippee!” after scoring a touchdown. 

So, to conclude, the reason for the decline in NFL TV ratings are many and varied.  The NFL can’t control increased access to entertainment via streaming services.  Some of it may just be the passage of time.  Boxing and horse racing used to be major sports; now I couldn’t name a single boxer other than venerable old guy Manny Paciao, and no one cares about horse racing until a horse wins the first two legs of the Triple Crown.  But no one stays on top forever, not even the NFL.