Interesting writer. I see this, though

When the Eagles kicked off their season Sept. 10, I wrote an anguished essay on these pages that railed on about “the moral bankruptcy” of today’s NFL, only to conclude the cultural bonds that began for so many of us with father and son were simply too strong to make that clean break — at least not yet, not for me. The hope that the rising Eagles could pull our often-fractured city together still loomed, and I pleaded with football “to do a lot better.”

and I think he still has his blinders on. I read on, I see got the fever a few years too late to see the big picture

On the surface, my nostalgia for the Yale Bowl autumns of 1973 and 1974 might seem not only misplaced but bizarre. It wasn’t just the Giants that stunk. America was swirling around the giant drain hole of Watergate. I was a geeky, mumbling adolescent starting out in a new school, and only years later did I appreciate that my dad was having something of a time of it, too. But there could not have been a better bonding experience, those hours stuck in Connecticut traffic in an overheating car, Elton John’s latest hit crackling from an AM radio. Fathers and sons, and that sense of childlike awe at the ritual of pro football. All so pure, all good.

As I grew, the political-science major in me started to grasp the broader complexity of the NFL and its tangled place in modern American culture.

I saw it as a kid without even watching too hard, growing up in Packer land never learning much about football but knowing the passion of the fans.  It was the Superbowl-ization that done it. Since the first Superbowl in 1967, that's when it changed, turned into a huge corporate endeavor. And amoral not immoral!

Since that time, it became a very gross money-making thing, a spectacle. Not about your town, that town patriotism is so phony. Everyone falling for it seemed like suckers. Somehow baseball and basketball never seemed to turn as bad, never became as crass. I don't know why that is, but I see it. I know it deep down, that this Superbowl day is the day that ruined the kind of football he remembers as a kid. And somehow baseball and basketball avoided much of the fate, though it definitely has some of it, too, the taint of monster audience and monster money is not as much there for some reason. The hyper violence of pro football vs. the others is part of it, but not all.

It must be an existential crisis for guys like him to finally see the end result. Because: there'd be a lot less jobs like his if pro football wasn't the monster it became with the Superbowl. This is why I noted the Bob Costas thing with interest.