Art & Creativity Quote by Gregg Easterbrook

The line lands like a casual aside, but it’s really a neat little indictment of corporate media dressed up as workplace logistics. Easterbrook isn’t warning about bad manners; he’s naming the structural trap of writing inside the house. The phrase “really damning or embarrassing” is doing heavy lifting: it conjures the kind of journalism that matters most, the kind that punctures reputations and threatens money. Then he undercuts it with the calm understatement of “that would really be a problem,” a deliberately mild clause that makes the censorship feel even more normal, even bureaucratic.

The intent is less to confess personal frustration than to flag a fundamental conflict of interest: when the platform is owned by the people you might need to scrutinize, the limits of acceptable commentary aren’t editorial standards so much as property rights. “On the NFL’s site” is the key tell. It frames speech as a function of venue, not truth. The implication is that the league doesn’t just control teams and television contracts; it can also shape the narrative ecology around itself, turning criticism into a matter of permission.

There’s also a professional self-awareness here. Easterbrook, an author with a long history of sports commentary, is signaling credibility through constraint: trust me, I know where the bodies could be, and I know why you won’t read about them here. It’s a wry reminder that the most revealing sports writing is often about power, and the most powerful people prefer to keep the scoreboard.