The NFL Finally Disputed A Claim In A Timely Manner, And You'll Never Guess What It Was...

JUST IN: NFL issues statement on Thursday Night Football saying it is "fully committed...and any reports to the contrary are unfounded." pic.twitter.com/llTFzeIbCy

— CNBC Now (@CNBCnow) November 28, 2016

Think about this for a second. The NFL has always treated organizational epidemics that should be  detrimental to their brand the same way you or I treat phone calls from numbers that aren't in our contact list. Ignore, ignore, ignore.

Domestic abuse by professional athletes has been prevalent for decades and the NFL basically gave it the 'fuck you' button until a star running back went full "WorldStar" and knocked his wife into next Tuesday on camera in the least private place in all the land. It took watching a grown man drag an unconscious woman around a casino floor for them to finally acknowledge that the repeated beatings of wives and girlfriends was something that needed to be addressed.

There has been more than a handful of former players that attended their own funeral before they even experienced a mid-life crisis. I mean, the lives of so many former NFLers have been prematurely taken by CTE that a factual feature film featuring Will Smith and Alec Baldwin was released to draw attention to how much of a problem concussions are, and some NFL executives are still hesitant to admit that long term brain injuries are a thing that exists.

They face backlash for outlawing celebrations? The blindly outlaw more celebrations. They face criticism for fining players that slightly alter their uniforms to raise awareness for commendable causes? They increase the amount of the forfeiture. People aren't forever shaking their head at Roger Goodell because a league that promotes excessive violence has it's issues, their forever shaking their head at Roger Goodell because they refuse to answer to those issues.

Meanwhile, one source merely suggests that the NFL may potentially think about discussing the idea of getting rid of their bullshit mid-week game that has proven to provide such shitty football that it's only worthy of a solid hate-watch if nothing else is on, and they have a denial ready within hours. I imagine that someone in NFL HQ read the ProFootballTalk article and immediately pulled the alarm summoning everyone to the panic room. I picture the entirety of the NFL office carefully crafting every word of an official statement in order to assure fans that the one game a week that they genuinely don't care about isn't going anywhere. Nothing speaks to the league's overall disconnect with the vast majority of society like holding an emergency meeting to do "damage control" on a rumor that most casual viewers would welcome with open arms.