This is Marisa Miller. I know you do not need any introduction. She was on the cover of Sports Illustrated’s 2008 swimsuit issue, and when that happened, the magazine’s website drew 226 million hits. That’s 226 million. She has worked some for Victoria’s Secret. She stops traffic. She drops jaws. And she is now a proud employee of the NFL.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, Miller will be featured in a series of sexy new ads to promote NFL events. The photos for the first one, a game between the Broncos and 49ers in London on Halloween, already are available online. The NFL describes what she is wearing as “vintage” NFL “gear,” but it’s fair to say it isn’t the kind of get-up that ever flattered Dick Butkus. Unless Butkus actually looked good in pumps, a sweatshirt tugged below the shoulders and a come-hither look on his weather-beaten mug.
Look, I feel compelled to say something here: I have nothing against pretty women. I married one. It is also a matter of record that I have nothing against SI swimsuit models. I sacrificed my basketball career for one. True story. Wrote a letter when I was 17 detailing the myriad merits of Kathy Ireland. SI ran it. The holy men who ran my high school informed me upon reading that treatise that my services would no longer be required on the varsity. Looking back, I’d say I made a hell of a trade.
The NFL can do whatever it wants to sell its product. But it can end, immediately, the pretense that it doesn’t serve two masters every day, that while it howls with moral indignation and shakes crooked fingers of outrage whenever one of its players forgets the league’s so-called rules of decorum, it also silently encourages that very behavior.
Almost every NFL team has cheerleaders, and every cheerleading squad has requisite calendars and posters, and the subjects of these pictures very rarely are seen in their Sunday-gone-to-meeting clothes. Every team makes a fortune from its relationship with beer companies. It does so without apology, and nobody is asking them to apologize. Read more.
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