Welcome to Bad Takes Week, where MMQB staffers have been asked to expand upon some of their worst football takes. Keep an eye out for more of these throughout the week, and every story is posted here.
Every year, when an NFL team wins the Super Bowl—regardless of the team, its makeup, its franchise location or the locations of all other franchises—it is crowned WORLD CHAMPION. Cue the laugh track. Expect the eye rolls. Then prepare for the debates. Start with what constitutes, well, the world?
Anyone who disdains the application of that particular phrase to the latest professional football champion has an easy argument to make. Each of the 32 NFL franchises is based, of course, in the United States. Duh. Debate over.
And yet, the league stages games in the United Kingdom, Mexico and Germany, while partnering with organizations overseas to spearhead development and growth. Does that count? If not, what would?
Bill Streicher/USA TODAY Sports
Most conclude the obvious: There’s not much that’s worldly in a pursuit that will never be mistaken for an Olympics, or a world championships that features competitors from, well, other countries. So, yeah, the phrasing, the hammering of said phrasing and the deployment of said phrasing, they’re all problematic.
But here’s the bad take: It shouldn’t be an issue, let alone a subject worthy of debate, let alone a yearly time suck of energy and focus, not to mention joy. That’s why we watch sports in the first place. Right?
Not always. Or not in full. This is the NFL, remember? It’s a sport and a pastime and tradition embodied. But it’s also a business that exists to bank billions, and the officials who run this $22 billion business, the league’s revenue from 2022, tend to rule from an iron throne. The NFL doesn’t simply take itself seriously. It takes its rule book seriously, along with its tweets, its uniform violations and its grand, majestic, voice-overed history of icy breath and odds surmounted. If there’s a way for America’s most popular sport to take itself even more seriously, the league office has likely already studied whatever that might be. Or will, inevitably, soon enough.
The problem with all this gravity and gravitas, which isn’t much of a problem but more an annoyance borne from intentional (and cliché) (and unoriginal) misdirection, is that the tone taken at 345 Park Avenue in midtown Manhattan and disseminated from the mountaintop to the masses down below bleeds into how everyone else, from fans to journalists to skeptics, view the NFL. It’s all unnecessary, overcooked, extra. But the real aims, all those $$$, are obscured in the narrative that’s cloaked in solemnity and sold as pastime and tradition and the upkeep of both. It’s the reason we must, must, consider pro football the same way we consider things like religion, ancient philosophy and the meaning of life, which is why football is often compared to things, like actual war, it should never be compared to.
Hence the whole world champions bit, which falls under the same umbrella. The logic sequencing matters in evaluating whether this matters and how much. It works like this: (1) The phrase teems with unwarranted self-importance; (2) it’s pretty much verifiably untrue; (3) it says more about the NFL than the U.S.; (4) but the reason it exists in the first place is grounded in the same notion as the criticism. Plus, (5) Who actually cares?
Many do, apparently! A quick Google search yields articles and news clips critical of world champions phrasing dating as far back as at least 2008. One piece, in The Guardian, is a letter penned to no less than all of America (!). It urged the largest U.S. sports leagues (NFL, NBA, MLB) to drop the “world” from descriptions of their champions. It doesn’t mention the NHL, because the NHL, of course, has teams and players from all over the world. There, the phrase apparently makes sense—never mind that the NBA and MLB are full of players born outside the U.S., too. Otherwise, as the author pointed out and not unreasonably, it can be viewed (again, not unreasonably) as arrogant or ignorant or, most often, both, one sentiment built on the other. All fair. All logical. But don’t do it! Don’t buy into the cycle. Don’t make the NFL more than it actually is, which, actually, is more than enough.
Amy Kontras/USA TODAY Sports
The NFL wants these types of debates. The NFL wants any debates. The league covets the widest possible audience to argue about pro football, because that means people are talking about, writing about, asking for Bad Takes about and watercooler-ing about the NFL. No publicity is bad publicity, more or less.
In debating the world in world champions, we’re falling into their revenue trap. We’re dismissing and deconstructing an argument that no one really makes, outside of the league office and the players/coaches/support staff of the team that wins. They’re not even making an argument, necessarily. They’re doing the same thing as the disdainers. By parroting a phrase that executives in all the sports called out by all the outlets also use, they’re adding to the seriousness the No Fun League—as its often mocked—deploys to widen its audience and grow its revenue, which is what really matters, not tradition or Americana.
Whether the Chiefs are the “world champions” of anything doesn’t matter. The NFL is best enjoyed when taken less seriously, with a bevy of celebrations and skewed uniforms and injections of self-awareness. Don’t buy the rest, let alone become part of it. And let world champions live, to make this pursuit of “world” titles more enjoyable to consume.
