Marshawn Lynch on his way to winning the Super Bowl last time.
  • lev radin / Shutterstock.com
  • I promise this post will be about Marshawn Lynch, but it’s going to take a moment to get there, so bear with me.

For a period of time in the mid to late '00s I worked as a marketing coordinator at a mid-sized corporate law firm here in Seattle. My job on a day-to-day basis involved maintaining contact databases for attorneys, updating the website, sending out party invitations, and ensuring that our people were at the right events and aware of the people they needed to meet. My job as a whole was to ensure the work of the firm continued to flow (and given the timing, really to make sure it did not ebb disastrously) but nothing I did actually contributed to the legal work that the firm was doing. I didn’t look at cases, I didn’t read briefs, I didn’t cross-examine anyone. Obviously. I was a marketing coordinator at a mid-sized corporate law firm. It was about as thrilling as you might expect.

And I wasn’t very good at my job. It wasn’t that I couldn’t be good at it (though given my age, drinking habits, and commitment to projects outside the firm, I was never going to be great at it). I did the bare minimum, but I never mustered more. Again, perhaps it was just the late nights, but I think my issues ran deeper. Because my labor was so minimal and had nothing to do with the product, which itself was so nebulous (legal work as product, Christ), I was constantly filled with dread. My own insignificance, so obvious, manifested in my actions. (Which is to say this is not a dig on marketing generally, just the idea of totally disassociated work… if you do marketing and work at an ad agency? Or a sales firm? Good on you, I guess.)

This all has to do with Marshawn Lynch, but not in the way you might think.

Yes, Lynch is the exact opposite of what I was; his work is central to the creation of the product of football, and the labor he exerts is so obvious and physically rigorous, that if he doesn’t want to go in for extra-curricular activities like talking to the media on Super Bowl media day, good on him. If he wants to turn his silence into a form of anti-corporate performance art, all the better.

Also Marshawn Lynch is a fascinating human, and Andrew Sharp’s profile of him on Grantland today is a must read.

But more than Lynch, I think my crap marketing-coordination explains why Lynch is making a lot of people in notional positions of power around the NFL flip their shit. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, [insert name of awful talk radio host here], advertisers, whomever. And I think the answer is that everyone outside of Lynch is a marketing coordinator for football. Roger Goodell: marketing coordinator. Philadelphia journalist Marcus Hayes, who very cleverly called Marshawn Lynch, “Least Mode”: marketing coordinator. Ed Sherman of sportsjournalism.org who called upon all journalists to boycott Skittles: marketing coordinator. And, to be fair, me, Seahawks Slogger-in-chief: marketing coordinator.

The very nature of sportswriting and sports administration is increasingly unnecessary. It used to be sportswriting was the closest most people got to most games, and the state of the sport itself was so fragile that the commissioner’s job was of existential importance to the league. With the proliferation of distribution models for how to see sports, what matters are the players and broadcasts. Everything else is window dressing. And that window dressing, that had been so crucial to growing the sport of football in the pre-Red Zone Channel era, is lashing out. What we’re witnessing is a bunch of children punishing Lynch for their own insignificance, and doing so poorly. Being—as Richard Sherman might put it—as mediocre at their jobs as I was at legal marketing.

I know very few people outside of sports media who dislike Lynch or his antics. Those who do (excepting the worst hot-takers) primarily do so because he draws focus away from similar complaints about the NFL from more articulate teammates (like Richard Sherman and Michael Bennett). I think that critique is off-base. What comes through most clearly in Sharp’s piece on Lynch is the awe, respect, love, and admiration Lynch receives from people who play or coach the game, whose labor is the product of football. It makes me feel, as someone functionally publicizing a product I only kind of believe in, like my duty is to make Lynch’s job easier, more respected, more well-known. It's not my job to harass or harangue Lynch, it's my job to make who he really is visible. It's a great job, and it's only slightly harder than regurgitating athlete-speak bullshit. And I've come to hate those doing the opposite, because they too have great jobs, and they’re shirking.