Source: Bigstock

With 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.

Nobody much cares that other races than black and white haven’t been much represented recently. The part-American Indian and part-Mexican Jim Plunkett won two Super Bowls in 1980 and 1983, and the part-Mexican Joe Kapp lost one in 1969, but nobody not white or black has been involved since.

But liberals define representation in this case not by the black share of the country, but relative to NFL players, a majority of whom are black for reasons that progressives don’t want to talk about.

The recent rise in black quarterbacks probably goes back to the events of 2007–2008. All-time great quarterback Tom Brady of the New England Patriots typically had receivers assembled on the cheap by coach Bill Belichick, often overlooked pretty good white athletes such as Wes Welker, Chris Hogan, and Julian Edelman. But when Brady got an all-timer as a target, such as specimen tight end Rob Gronkowski, watch out. In 2007, the Patriots acquired the historic black deep threat Randy Moss, who caught a record 23 touchdown passes as Brady threw for a then-record fifty.

But then in the first game of 2008, Brady was injured for the entire season. The NFL brass started to wonder whether it would be sissy of them to start changing rules to keep their biggest stars from being sidelined so often.

The initial result of the various rule changes to reduce the NFL’s old ultraviolence was to extend the careers of the veteran white pocket passing quarterbacks like Brady, Drew Brees, the Manning brothers, Aaron Rodgers, Ben Roethlisberger, and Philip Rivers. Thus, Brady won his seventh Super Bowl in 2021 at age 43.

Over time, however, the new rules protecting quarterbacks made more feasible the ancient dream of black quarterbacks who could both pass and run without quickly getting ground into a pulp like running backs usually are.

Running backs like Jim Brown and O.J. Simpson used to be huge stars, but over time rushers had become disposable cogs. This year, however, two veterans, Derrick Henry and Saquon Barkley, had massive seasons. Hopefully, that’s a sign that the new rules mean running backs aren’t getting chewed up in just a few years.

Black quarterbacks often used to start off brilliantly, like Vince Young or Robert Griffin III. But their ability to run out of trouble during their youths usually kept them from developing as pocket passers after injuries sapped their quick-cutting running talent.

This doesn’t mean there wasn’t discrimination based on racial stereotypes against black quarterbacks with pocket passer skills. The clearest example is Warren Moon. After winning the Jan. 1, 1978, Rose Bowl for Washington, Moon went undrafted by the NFL because he refused to switch to another position such as tight end, saying he wasn’t a good enough athlete to play any position other than QB. So he went to the Canadian Football League and in six years with the Edmonton Eskimos won five Grey Cups, before coming to the NFL and playing seventeen seasons.

Similarly, after white Doug Flutie washed out of the NFL for being too short, he went to the CFL and won six Most Outstanding Player awards before returning to the NFL and making it to the Pro Bowl.

In contrast, Colin Kaepernick didn’t bother to go to the CFL to show he still belonged in the NFL.

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.

A rookie out of the U. of Iowa, DeJean took over the starting job midway into the season, started nine regular-season games and all the playoff games, and made the Pro Football Writers Association All-Rookie team as a cornerback.

No nonblack player had been a regular starter at cornerback since 2003 (the white Sehorn and the half-white and half-Thai Kevin Kaesviharn started at cornerback that year, but both shifted to safety in 2004).

But this year, DeJean’s former teammate at Iowa, Riley Moss, started fourteen games at corner for the Denver Broncos. (A third, Ethan Bonner of the Miami Dolphins, played a few snaps at corner over the past two seasons.)

Why were there no white cornerbacks over the past two decades, until the U. of Iowa apparently discovered a niche it could exploit?

There used to be a saying in the corporate world that nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. Similarly, few coaches got fired for playing white quarterbacks or black cornerbacks. Granted, you could eventually get fired for consistently losing while playing stereotypical players at their stereotypical positions, but a coach’s nightmare was getting fired on Monday morning because his white cornerback got burned for two touchdowns in a single loss.

Similarly, coaches didn’t get fired for punting on fourth down. These days, advanced analytics have shown that teams punted too much, so the four teams in the conference finals on Sunday punted only seven times but went for it on fourth down fourteen times, succeeding ten times.

Some of this is due to advanced statistical analytics finally coming to football. In 1947, the greatest baseball executive, Branch Rickey, hired the first sophisticated baseball statistician, Allan Roth, the same year Rickey broke the color line with Jackie Robinson. In contrast, football coaches didn’t need analytics as much because they watched countless hours of game film. As catcher Yogi Berra pointed out, you can observe a lot just by watching.

On the other hand, football coaches worked out a handful of customs at which they all agreed in order to make their careers less stressful, such as automatically punting on practically every fourth down, not going for the two-point conversion after a touchdown, and so forth.

For example, when I was a kid, all NFL teams always ran out of the T formation in which quarterbacks took a direct snap from inches behind the center. Sure, it looked kind of gay compared with how in the 1940s the quarterback had stood five yards behind the center, but football science had proved that it was the modern way to play. Or something.

Then on Jan. 4, 1976, Tom Landry’s Dallas Cowboys went to the Super Bowl by crushing my Los Angeles Rams 37–7 by baffling the Rams with the shotgun formation. Today, it’s the dominant setup.

Around 1968, the quarterback option, in which the QB could hand off to the fullback, pitch out to trailing halfback, or keep it himself emerged as a massive weapon in college football. One advantage was that you didn’t need a 6’4″ quarterback with a rifle arm. For example, UCLA went 17–5 in 1972–1973 with future TV star Mark Harmon (St. Elsewhere and NCIS) running their wishbone offense. He couldn’t throw much, but he was a gutty kid. The military academies tend to run these offenses even today since they get few NFL-quality quarterbacks but lots of brave little guys who love football.

Analytics have tended to make other sports worse, such as the NBA’s current emphasis on three-point shooting and the MLB’s on hitting homers and getting fresh pitchers into the game. But it seems likely that statistics have made the NFL better: fewer punts on fourth down, more mobile quarterbacks, more emphasis on giving the ball to your best player on the crucial downs (such as Los Angeles Rams wide receiver Cooper Kupp’s fourth-down end around in the 2022 Super Bowl), and the return of the option play on which the Bills scored by having Josh Allen pitch out at the last moment to James Cook for a touchdown.

The coming problems with football appear to be twofold: First, they’ve only slightly mitigated the concussion problem. So, it’s unlikely that NFL quarterbacks will continue to emerge from the best of the best. For example, the QBs in the 2019 Super Bowl were Tom Brady of San Mateo, Calif., and Jared Goff of Marin County, Calif. The future of the NFL looks less bourgeois, more gladiatorial.

Second, the NFL getting into bed with professional gambling is going to backfire. For example, I’ve noticed a big increase in conspiracy theorizing lately about how Patrick Mahomes’ 17–3 record in the playoffs going back to 2018 is due to his tight end Travis Kelce becoming pop star Taylor Swift’s boyfriend in 2023 and thus the NFL is obviously rigging games in Kansas City’s favor.

Granted, that’s pretty stupid. But then you didn’t lose big money betting against the Chiefs, so you aren’t as irrationally sore about it.

Furthermore, eventually so much money will be on the line that somebody will likely rig a big game.

Why take the risk?