NFL at Christmas is the gift that does not need to keep giving

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Many Christmases ago, I was given a Joe Montana Notre Dame practice jersey. Midnight blue with gold piping and Montana’s college No. 3 stencilled front and back in tall, cotton lettering.

No name across the back. If you knew you knew, and no one knew.

Unlike most jerseys sold these days, I played sports in it. Since it was too precious to wash, it became stiff after repeated soakings in sweat. It got so rank that I had to store it in a plastic shopping bag.

I left the jersey in a drawer one day and left for university. When I rediscovered it a couple of years later, it had begun to crack like porcelain along the folded edges. But it had stopped smelling.

Back then, that holy relic was unusual enough that strangers would comment on it. They wanted to know what it stood for.

When I told them ‘Joe Montana’, many didn’t know who I was talking about. That was a time when people were not only ignorant of sports symbols, but did not assume that that ignorance put them out of touch with the mainstream.

That’s how I measure how far football has spread through North American culture. A few decades ago, I was gifted an obscure relic from a niche pastime. Now the NFL owns Christmas. How many hundreds of thousands, millions even, will unwrap football jerseys this Monday?

The holiday season is a target-rich area for sports. Large affinity groups gathered together for long periods of time after months apart with nothing to do but talk about that thing they read in the paper the other day. Wars start this way.

Sports is an effective buffer to whatever Uncle Cornelius is going on about. Can’t hear you, Cornelius. I’m watching the game.

The NBA had this market cornered for ages. This year it has five games on Christmas Day, stretching from noon ET until the early hours of the next morning. It’s useful as white noise, but these matchups are never much good. It’s too early in a long season and the players are too resentful at being there. They come off like exhibition matches.

The NHL takes a Christmas break. Twenty years ago, that must have seemed like the family oriented thing to do. Now it’s unforgivable laziness.

But you try convincing the players they have to start working the three-day stretch they used to use for a quickie vacation in South Beach. The NHLPA has been turned over and shaken so many times by ownership that this might be the thing it is finally willing to go to the wall for.

Instead, Canada’s hockey needs are outsourced to a bunch of teenagers.

That the world junior championship can attract four-plus-million viewers in this country tells you two things – they can’t air 9-1-1: Lone Star reruns on every night of the week; and Canadians will use any excuse to zone out the in-laws.

The NFL used to call a Christmas truce with other leagues. It already owned Thanksgiving. Why not let others get fat for a change? But when needs must, priorities change.

With Christmas falling across a long weekend this year, the NFL is going in hard. There will be three games on Christmas Day.

Unlike the NBA, they all matter. Also unlike the NBA, NFL players can be cut at will. There are no half-speed days in that league. Some stars may try, but they are then vulnerable to being decapitated by some guy who’s getting edged out of his roster spot.

The past year wasn’t particularly remarkable from a sporting perspective. No teams for the ages peaked. No all-time greats left. No Olympics.

This was a process year. One part of that process was the increasing hegemonization of the NFL. More than 80 per cent of the 100 most-watched TV shows in the United States are NFL football games. The biggest show in America is Sunday Night Football. No one else can keep up.

Remember when football was going extinct? When every muppet you knew was all over social media ranting about how they were giving it up because it is pure savagery? When everyone was going to stop letting their kids play it because it was too dangerous and the highest levels would eventually be starved of talent and audience? Yeah, so can I.

League of Denial was published nine years ago. Concussion with Will Smith came out a year later. That starvation process should be well under way by now. Except it isn’t. Football is bigger at every level.

U.S. college football is socking away so much cash that they’re going to start paying players at (under) market rates. They don’t even have to pretend about an education any more. America has accepted that college is a business, and that some people have a better head for it than others.

You get rich over a lifetime because your mom got you into Princeton. I get a lot less rich for a couple of years because I play cornerback at Auburn. It’s still not fair, but it’s a little closer to being so. At least, by U.S. standards.

The NFL stands at the top of this pyramid, picking off the best talent, underpaying them by global sports standards and churning through players so quickly that few have the chance to fully capitalize on their celebrity. It is the realization of the gladiator economy. Now it’s here for Christmas, too.

I wouldn’t dare try to put on that Montana jersey any more. I tell myself it’s because it’s too fragile, but it’s really because I don’t want to know how poorly it fits. It is the only piece of sports paraphernalia I own or ever will.

I think of it now as archeological. It comes from a time when football was a sport, not the sport. As childhood gifts go, probably a little deeper than my mom intended.