Assignment 1: The single greatest issue in sports

MaxDenver.com

I fear the most popular sport in America is turning into sports' biggest monster, and largest obstacle.

It's natural to believe this week is the National Football League's moment in the spotlight -- it's pregame trot out of the tunnel and into a stadium of thousands of cheering fans, if you will. The week leading up the Super Bowl is a cacophony of media attention, play diagrams and unabashed fandom.

So it's only fitting that in the two weeks leading up to the NFL's proudest jewel, the Super Bowl, it's stained with controversy.

That's what the NFL's become after all. What was  America's newest pastime -- OK, who am I kidding, it was never about truly about the game -- is now America's newest machine. The NFL is a constant, 24-hour news cycle within itself, a manufactured beast that only continues to grow. It's similar to the housing market prior to it's great collapse -- a bubble waiting to burst.

It begs the question, is the largest sports league in America too big to fail? It seems as if Roger Goodell wants to find out.

It's fascinating to me that the sport's most glaring issues could all come to light during it's finest hour. I wonder if the NFL even truly cares. Within the past week, ESPN again documented the risks of youth involvement in football, a GQ profile directly hit on Goodell's inability to handle crises and his narrow vision on revenue numbers and "DeflateGate" dominated news cycles to the point of nausea.

Throw in the league's continued assault on Marshawn Lynch -- he was fined for grabbing his crotch despite the NFL's official website selling photographs of it for $150 -- and you wonder whether this is some kind of reality TV show.

But that's the reality of the NFL -- it can go to the extreme, push the limit, ignore its issues and still pull in a bottom line.

Goodell's quest is reportedly grow the NFL's revenue to over $25 billion and league revenue is already up over 65 percent. CBS reportedly paid $250 million to air just 16 games -- all on Thursday night, no less -- and the league is aired on three major networks: NBC, CBS and ESPN.

The growing influx of cash helped the owners negotiate a favorable Collective Bargaining Agreement and makes the collective unit of 32 men some of the most powerful in the country. If you evaluate the NFL as a business, it's impossible to say it isn't firing on all cylinders.

Yet the drive for dollar revenue -- and the exhausting attention that comes with it -- is casting the NFL in a negative light.

Goodell operates with an iron-clad fist in the negotiating room, but his uneven disciplinary style earns criticism from players and doesn't cast a shadow of a man that's fully in charge. The discrepancy between the league's shady history on disciplining domestic violence and it's harsh drug policy is hypocrisy at its finest. This is the message most kids are privy too as they grow up.

And as those kids grow up and want to try what's popular, statistics show they're endangering the longevity of their lives. Former football players between the ages of 40-69 who started playing football before the age of 12 proved to be in "significantly worse" shape in terms of brain health in a study done by Boston University.

So to recap: the NFL cares about little more than its revenue, it disciplines (often unfairly) on a case by case basis, and the sport itself is a health risk.

And we're all eating it up by the spoonful.

Ratings are up. Way up. Football talk is a powerful staple of sports social media and it seems a myriad of scandals this season ( I didn't even mention Adrian Peterson's alleged child abuse) haven't deterred fans from the Super Bowl frenzy, as DeflateGate churned out an incredible amount of coverage and reaction.

This is my biggest fear, and the single greatest issue in sports. The NFL's skeleton's are out of its closet as it continues to gain a head of steam.

The NFL certainly seems like it's too big to fail.