The 2025 Super Bowl: Sailer's Perspective
The NFL is thriving, but there are storm clouds on the horizon.
From my new column in Taki’s Magazine:
Are You Ready for Some Changes in Football?
Steve Sailer
January 29, 2025With the 2025 Super Bowl eleven days away, much seems to be going well for the National Football League.
For example, the current decline of wokeness reduces the concern aroused during the Colin Kaepernick era that this inherently conservative game would self-destruct over race.
The NFL remains the most broadly popular sport, and perhaps institution, in diverse America. Whereas, say, the World Series, the Olympics, and the Academy Awards could once be compared in popular appeal with the Super Bowl, these days the Super Bowl stands alone at still unifying the attention of Americans, who are increasingly distracted by The Algorithm delivering on social media exactly what they’d personally find most diverting.
Meanwhile, the biggest black complaint about the NFL, the lack of star black quarterbacks relative to their abundance at most other positions, appears to be resolving itself the right way via numerous fine black quarterbacks emerging in this decade. This year’s Super Bowl matchup of the black Jalen Hurts of the Philadelphia Eagles versus the half-black Patrick Mahomes of the Kansas City Chiefs follows their confrontation in 2023 as only the second Super Bowl in which neither starting QB was all-white.
Counting the mixed-race Mahomes and Kaepernick as black, through 2025, blacks will have made up fourteen of the 118 starting quarterbacks in the Super Bowl (12 percent), about their share of the U.S. population.…
Less publicized is that Cooper DeJean, a white cornerback, will likely start for the Eagles in the Super Bowl. The last white cornerback to start a Super Bowl was Jason Sehorn two dozen years ago in 2001.
Read the whole column there.
Pretty much every sport has had some sort of point-shaving or spot-fixing scandal. Do I think the NFL's next big scandal will happen in a Super Bowl? Probably not. But in all likelihood there will be something like the NBA's recent Jontay Porter scandal, where a guy pulls himself out of a game after a drive or two, claiming injury, and the guys who bet the under on his props make a fortune. But with modern technology on the side of the gambling companies who want to make as much money as possible, all of these sorts of things will eventually get tracked down. It's going to be very hard to do something like that and get away with it, but there are a lot of NFL players and some of them are going to be dumb enough to try.
Obviously the NFL's popularity will wane at some point; nothing lasts forever. But I don't see it happening anytime soon. It's going to remain a popular high school/youth sport among black Americans everywhere and white people in the South and Midwest, even if the liberal coastal elites don't want their kids to play.
It's an interesting point you make that analytics have been good for football and bad for baseball and basketball. If I had to guess why, I think football is just more complicated. 22 players vs. 10 in basketball, and baseball is really just a pitcher vs. batter individual duel with a bunch of window dressing. For example, the percentage of plays that are passes had been trending up for a while, but then it leveled back off. There's pretty much always some sort of counter for whatever an offense or defense does. But in basketball, there's not enough reason to take shots that aren't either layups or threes. And in baseball, throwing hard and swinging hard are what's it all about (I miss the days of Ichiro, who could've been a damn good power hitter but was content to slap it all over the field).
What's up with the Aussie punters?
When is President Trump going to slam the door shut before these guys ruin our glorious game? They are also suspiciously white.