I think there's a message being sent by the NFL -- and, fan or bettor, you better take heed of it...

I've been wanting to write this ever since Thursday night, but I think it is becoming clearer by the passing moment that the NFL now believes it has a problem and must solve it by any material means necessary.

The last two national games in primetime (the Steelers screwjob on Monday night and the Dolphins actually subverting and beating the Ravens on Thursday) were two of the most rigged games in recent NFL memory, with inconsistent values of pass interference and roughing the passer being forefront -- and up to and including a taunting call that, if correct, should've been followed with two other calls and an ejection on the same player, as well as a physical-instigation investigation on the referee of the contest.

And then, in this week's fines, a $55,000 fine for something that, even with repeat offending, isn't worth close to that.

That the person fined is a Las Vegas Raider cannot be lost on the equation.

But there is a very simple concept going on here, and people better get wise to it fast:

The NFL is basically circling wagons, and is telling the players and teams they best get with the program and get with it now.

The last three or four weeks have not been kind to the NFL, off the field:

• Jon Gruden exposed as a racist and misogynist within the e-mail trove of Dan Snyder and the Washington Football Team.
• The DUI murder of one driver by a Las Vegas Raider...
• ... and the threatened suicide (and perhaps more) of another, causing not only the cutting of that second player, but the very real question that the NFL may have to take serious actions in the best interests of the franchise to "stabilize" it, according to a clarion call from Sports Illustrated.
• One of the five or six players around whom this league revolves is exposed as an anti-vaxx lying pig, catches COVID and seems proud of it, costing the league a marquee mid-season matchup created by new seventeenth game in the NFL schedule (Packers-Chiefs was actually a game created with the 17th game, not the annual interconference matchups).
• And now, Gruden is suing Goodell and the league, and many people think that, though Gruden is a pig and deserved what he got, the lawsuit, alleging selective release of the e-mails to specifically target and eliminate him from the league (with no merit, also, as to how ESPN kept the guy employed while all this was going on with the e-mails!!) probably has merit and that, if "discovery" forces the e-mails public, the NFL may be in existential trouble...

The NFL has not been shy, if you've been paying attention (between the monologues of the announcers and the employment of "rules experts" in the booths and the studios), to tell you these games are rigged, without question or hesitation.

That these last two national primetime games have been such utter disgraces with the officiating (and other rigging situations) in manners which are exposing the business to more and more people not so blinded by Football Nation America that they can't figure out that what they have pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honors to (pigskin-wise) is nothing short of a professional-wrestling level sham.

And the NFL is doubling down, probably as a mechanism of the combination of two things:  It is trying to enforce order in the league (it's order), and the NFL may be going through a significant rewrite, especially in the AFC.

We may be getting all the way down to a question of whether we ARE, in fact, even with the rookie QB, going to get Brady vs. Belichick.  

• Henry's injury probably stifles any marketability of Tennessee, even though they are, at least kayfabe, the best team in the conference
• Buffalo is falling flat
• Las Vegas has off-the-fielded itself completely off the board (now I have to think they won't make the playoffs at all!)
• Kansas City is actually going to be pushed -- one week, they get the Lying COVID Pig out, the next, they get Las Vegas on Sunday night, and that should put them back on top in the AFC West.  But the impending Britt Reid trial probably stunts any real call for a rematch.
• I always thought Cleveland's best path to the Big Game was Odell Beckham Jr. on a marketability end, but now the question might be whether they are closer to the Big Game by jettisoning him...

So, right now, the NFL might be telling everybody:  Knuckle it down and knock it off!!!