The NFL starts tonight, and the season can’t get here soon enough.
The league is the biggest venture in American sports and the biggest monolith in American pop culture, considering better than 80 percent of the top-20 watched shows last fall were NFL-related.
Still, the game needs to get back to the game so that the questions that have followed through a troubled offseason can fade into the background and the league’s uneven and duplicitous dealings will be booted when toe meets leather.
Consider the recent potential controversies:
Michael Sam, the first openly gay player to enter the NFL draft, was released by the Rams and signed with the Dallas Cowboys on Wednesday. Sure, Sam had a better-than-expected preseason, but know that the Cowboys are the only team in the NFL that controls and collects their merchandise sales — a deal brilliantly negotiated by Jerry Jones 25 years ago.