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Here’s the Trending team’s main character of the week: It’s the NFL. As we enjoy the final days of NFL Twitter.
We took them for granted. For more than a decade, NFL fans would follow along on Twitter during Sunday’s slate of games. Armchair doctors would diagnose injuries in real-time. Memes were robust.
But sports fandom on Twitter, which is now known as X under tech titan Elon Musk, is at risk.
Many NFL fans logged off the platform entirely over political disagreements with Musk. DIY creators who earned a living discussing fantasy football moved to TikTok. The X version of NFL fandom became overly political, tinged with Trumpism, and dominated by pundits with ties to the Trump administration like Clay Travis.
And now we sit with that feeling of malaise. It happens every January. It’s such a despondent feeling that the writer Hunter S. Thompson titled his suicide note after it: “football season is over.”
And these are the last days of NFL fandom on the internet as we’ve come to know it. There are three games left. Two on Sunday, and then the Super Bowl.
It’s unclear what sports fandom online will look like soon
It’s unclear what fandom on the Internet will look like under Trump 2.0 when football season returns in September. I don’t think it’s a stretch to imagine that arguing about the San Francisco 49ers’ running back depth chart, or whether the Chicago Bears will finally get their offense right under Ben Johnson, will be overshadowed by disjointed political ruminating.
When Trump was in power the first time, the Washington Post enjoyed 22 million daily visitors. Dissidents were plugged into daily Beltway headlines with soap opera enthusiasm. Under former President Joe Biden, that number dipped to 2 million daily visitors, according to Semafor.
The attention economy of the internet is poised to fixate on D.C. discourse again. And I don’t think sports will be as fun of a distraction—particularly when it comes to doomscrolling on X.
So let’s bask in the sunshine of these final games. Let’s flood those group texts with spicy takes. Remember that the passion you reserve for your team is perfectly valid 87% of the time. In this spirit, let me say this as a Hispanic person from the state of Texas.
The Dallas Cowboys are about to be terrible for 20 years.
Our owner has entered his Al Davis era wherein his showboat moves become predictable. The greatest football minds aren’t coming to Dallas because they understand that they will not be set up for success under Cowboys owner Jerry Jones. And when Jerry leaves this earth, like Davis, the eccentric owner of the Oakland Raiders, the penny-pinching son will be in charge.
And you thought the Zeke contract and the graceless competence of Mike McCarthy were downgrades.
It seems likely that the Cowboys, as I write this, are about to hire nepo baby Brian Schottenheimer as their head coach. The guy who ran the offense of the New York Jets to little acclaim from 2006-2011. I can assure you he is not Dallas’ first choice.
And of course, as a Cowboys fan, I have no rooting interest in the NFL’s remaining semifinalists.
So I’d love to hear from you: Who are you rooting for and why? The Bills, Chiefs, Eagles, or Commanders?
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