The Super Bowl is a celebration of the NFL and its hold on the national zeitgeist, but recent lawsuits could loosen its grip<\/p>\n
A month before the NFL\u2019s Las Vegas Super Bowl, a different sort of high-stakes football contest unfolded in the Supreme Court of Nevada. That\u2019s where the league was called to defend itself in a lawsuit from Jon Gruden \u2013 the disgraced NFL coach who stepped down from the Raiders<\/a> after being exposed for sending racist, sexist and homophobic emails for nearly a decade while in the employ of ESPN. The revelation cost Gruden more than half the balance of his $100m Raiders contract, the league\u2019s highest coaching salary at the time, and it\u2019s long been the coach\u2019s contention that NFL commissioner Roger Goodell conspired to make him a pariah in the sport.<\/p>\n The Super Bowl is as much a celebration of the NFL as it is a stamp of its hold on the national zeitgeist and expanding influence abroad. (On Friday the league announced it will play its first ever regular-season game in Madrid at the Santiago Bernab\u00e9u Stadium.) But a flurry of recent lawsuits threaten to pierce the league\u2019s aura of invincibility. Doubtless for some, the litigation is evidence of a successful enterprise (from Microsoft to Trump Inc), part and parcel of a larger money game. On top of that, the NFL product has proven effective in distracting fans from alleged transgressions. Before they realize what hit them, the league\u2019s nuclear-grade legal team has either swept the matter under the rug or worn down the opposition. It\u2019s a playbook that\u2019s carried the league for more than 50 years. And yet one can\u2019t help but wonder if this Goliath isn\u2019t a stone\u2019s throw away from buckling.<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Super Bowl is a celebration of the NFL and its hold on the national zeitgeist, but recent lawsuits could loosen its grip A month before the NFL\u2019s Las Vegas Super Bowl, a different sort of high-stakes football contest unfolded in the Supreme Court of Nevada. That\u2019s where the league was called to defend itself … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4114"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4114\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}