The Existence of "Playmakers" Will Forever Confuse Me

Nobody likes a tattletale, but in 2003, ESPN decided to tattle on itself. Or at least, tattle on it's biggest business partner in the NFL.

If you don't already know, Playmakers was ESPN's first ever original drama series which followed a fictional professional football team and a handful of it's star players. It was cancelled after one season (11 episodes) after pressure from the NFL. The fact that it existed in the first place given ESPN's relationship with the NFL is odd at best, profoundly confusing at worst.

People love to point out how the show predicted the future of the NFL, as many of the issues depicted within the Cougars organization would plague the league in subsequent years. That's fine, but Any Given Sunday came out 4 years prior, and plenty of other football movies have gritty aspects showcasing the darker side of the game. It's not like anyone was necessarily buying a squeaky-clean NFL anyway. I was 14 years old and even dumber than I am now, and yet I distinctly recall saying to myself "oh shit, the NFL ain't gonna like this." The bigger 'WTF' aspect is how the show was green-lit in the first place by ESPN. Imagine if Guy Fieri would have pitched a drama about the devastating affects of diabetes and cholesterol to the Food Network?

If nothing else, perhaps the biggest revisionist crystal ball moment of the entire thing was what happened in real life. Despite super high ratings, the NFL got it's way, showcasing it's existence as a force of nature that nothing and nobody could stop. The show was #3 on ESPN behind, you guessed it, Sunday Night Football and Saturday Night College Football, but was cancelled. Money talks, unless it gets in the way of the NFL. As we all know, the social media / 24 hour news cycle ushered in a much more difficult environment for the NFL to conceal it's flaws. And yet, as declining interest in the NBA and MLB continue to keep owners up at night, the NFL keeps chugging along despite a new controversy seemingly every week. Playmakers still has it's own website, but i'd be surprised to ever see it hit a major streaming platform like Netflix. Probably safe to say the NFL would prefer Playmakers fade into oblivion. When you own a day of the week, you can throw your weight around. God bless YouTube!

If you've never seen the show, it's pretty fuckin' entertaining. Us guys are more than happy to watch a soap opera, so long as the main characters are wearing pads instead of suits. A couple of the themes are listed below, see if any of them look familiar:

• Rampant infidelity

• Rampant drug use, including during games

• Rampant steroid use

• Murder, and subsequent cover-up

• Catastrophic injuries

• A gay player desperately trying to conceal his identity

• A player injecting clean urine into his own bladder through his penis to pass a drug test

• Players banging owner's daughters

• Domestic violence issues

• Destruction of evidence by a team to cover up for a player

• PTSD / Childhood Trauma

It would be interesting to see if Playmakers would fly in today's world. ESPN has since leaned into more gritty dramas / documentaries, and the NFL probably realizes they can't hide the bodies like they used to. Still, the show would almost certainly need produced by a third party like HBO or Netflix. HBO already has Ballers, but that show kind of sucks and feels way too much like an Entourage rip-off. I need something much grittier - what's David Fincher or that guy from True Detective up to? Here's the plot: DH is now in his late 40's and 6 years sober. He's asked to come in and be the running back's coach for a team with the #1 overall pick, The Bleveland Crowns. The Heisman winning RB they're planning to draft has substance abuse problems of his own and a super hot mom. You know the rest.