How it happened that I stopped watching football

Since the three or four of you who read this blog have put up with my repeated if sporadic outbursts of commentary on football and its potentially fatal perils, it seems only fair to give some explanation of how I came to stop watching the game.
It's actually a fairly recent development.  Until a little more than three years ago I still watched college football.  I had fallen away from the NFL game in a rather gradual fashion -- first taking a pass on the Super Bowl, then losing interest in watching any of it -- somewhere in the initial stream of trauma-related suicides of former players.  For whatever reason it was the suicide of Andre Waters that set me on the course away from the NFL.  I'm not sure why it was him; he wasn't a player to whom I had known any particular attachment.  It might partly have been the knowledge of his reputation as one of the harder-hitting defensive backs in the game; if he had been so dramatically affected by CTE, it was clear that it wasn't just those who received the punishment that were at risk, but those who dealt it out as well.
At any rate, the NFL gradually dropped from my sports-viewing habits, but I held on to college football.  I'm sure that in part I was convincing myself that the danger must have come from the extended years of playing beyond college, therefore watching college games was o.k., or some similar form of rationalization.  While living in Lawrence we actually attended a number of games of the University of Kansas football team.  This was partly because it was frequently cheap -- this is KU, remember, where as good as the basketball team is, the football team is that bad.  We could get tickets as low as $15 a day or two before the game because, well, they were desperate to sell.
After moving to Richmond, we chose not to pay for cable television, which meant that watching games on Saturday afternoon (or all throughout the Thanksgiving weekend, for example) was no longer so easy.  It happened that Florida State, the only alma mater in my background that played football, had a big matchup on the schedule against the University of Oklahoma that fall, and I decided to seek out a sports bar and allow myself to watch this game.
Oklahoma had beaten FSU badly the previous year and this was to be a test of whether FSU was going to be any better this year.  It was apparent pretty quickly, as I recall, that some things hadn't improved.  FSU's primary quarterback was running for his life from the Oklahoma defense.  Still, the game remained close, in contrast to the previous season's blowout.
At one point FSU was close, close enough to try a pass play into the end zone.  The receiver was, if I recall correctly, double-covered, but nonetheless made a game effort, but the hit he received knocked the ball loose.  The pass fell incomplete, and both players went to the ground.
Only the FSU receiver (his name might have been Kenny Shaw, or something similar?) didn't get up. The cliches started to sound about his having his bell rung, and the training staff was quickly onto the field, but it was quite a while before the receiver could finally be taken off safely.
Before all the reaction set in, in the instant after that play, before I had a chance to think or react or be on guard, the thought flashed into my mind:

I wonder how many years of brain function he just lost.

As quickly as possible I paid my bill and left.

Kenny Shaw's in there, somewhere.

For all I know the receiver was fine, and for all I know he got back into the game later.  It mattered little.  I was to horrified to continue.  Not that I had had such a thought, but that the thought was not out of order, in my mind.  And even without having had a course in Christian ethics yet, I was quickly persuaded that I couldn't do that.  If that was what the sport had become, for eighty former players or forty or twenty or two, I couldn't do that.  
About a year ago the satirical site The Onion, which is always at its best when there's an uncomfortable ring of truth in their fake headlines, came up with one that mined a similar vein.  I just beat them to it by two years, and without any intention to be funny.
So, that's how I got to be where I am.  There will be more to say on the subject, by smarter people than I to be sure.  Meantime, I will continue to struggle with the ethical and faithful implications of it all.

Note: here's a video of the play. By any definition I know it seems to be a legal hit, as the contact involved did not seem to be helmet-to-helmet as far as my eye can see (though it's close).  I'm not sure that there is any relevance to that fact where the larger question is concerned. 

Self-policing #FAIL

It's been a few weeks now, but I've been unable to shake the images and sounds of a fairly horrible incident in the Michigan vs. Minnesota football game of September 27.  If you follow the sport you probably heard about it.  (I don't watch football or make it a part of my sports pursuits any more, but obviously I follow stories that happen just in case they supply blog fodder.  Call me a muckraker if you must.)  If you'd like a video reminder, watch this.  I'll be here when you get back.

It created a brief kerfuffle of controversy around the country, and perhaps lasted longer at Michigan, and may have played a role in the impending departure of that university's athletic director.  From what I can tell from a distance, it seems that The Michigan Daily, the campus newspaper, took the lead on the story and helped stir up opinion in the university community, which may just suggest that journalism is more alive on certain campuses than in the mainstream media.  But I digress.

What I want to do, as much for my own understanding as for any future rabble-rousing purposes, is to try to understand what happened on that play.  The number of weeks passed since that game is not an accident; my desire was to let time pass and let the story fade from public prominence (as was inevitable) in order to come to the event with perhaps a more critical eye than might be possible in the heat of the moment.  Fortunately, the video linked above was still available on YouTube (oddly, ESPN doesn't see fit to have it available on their site), and I could actually watch the sequence of events unfold as I had not been able to do before.

With that disclaimer, I would identify at least five moments of failure in this sequence.

1. (0:00) Quarterback Shane Morris is still in the game, despite a pronounced limp and utter lack of mobility.
Now, I know all about how football is supposed to instill toughness (and how I am presumably a namby-pamby wuss because I Never Played The Game and all that BS.  Save me your Neanderthal crap.  All you'll do is convince me even more that I'm right and that you're not a person I should ever trust or respect again) and character and all sorts of other things that are presented as life skills.  But there are two things wrong with this scenario: (1) Morris isn't that experienced, and being down to one functional leg leaves him that much less effective as a quarterback, and this rather smacks of punishing the rest of the team, particularly when Devin Gardner, until recently starter and about as healthy as any football player ever is, is available on the bench.  Yes, I'm actually criticizing the coach, Brady Hoke, for not putting the best team on the field in order to have any kind of chance to win or at least make the game respectable.   Furthermore, (2) Morris's limited mobility makes him a sitting duck, unable to escape from anyone, including your grandmother if she had been on the field.  When you're already hurt, you stand an even better chance of getting hurt more or worse -- plain common sense, folks.  Of course part of the fail goes to Morris, a True Believer in the cult of Play Through Pain, is waving off any attention from the sideline that might result in his being removed.  But mostly, coaching #FAIL.

It takes a couple of minutes on the video to get to...

2. (2:20) Morris, gimping around in the backfield, gets hit by a Minnesota defender, who lowers his head and drives his helmet directly into Morris's face mask.

Credit: larrybrownsports.com

This is an illegal hit, under the label "targeting"; the prescribed punishment is ejection from the current game and suspension from the next game for his team.  Instead the Minnesota defender is only called for a roughing the passer penalty that, ironically, serves to extend Michigan's sputtering drive.  This turns out to be important, because Morris, who now cannot walk a straight line and generally has the demeanor of a crack-addled prostitute in New Orleans at 3:30 a.m., is not removed from the game.  One of his linemen has to hold him up as the quarterback staggers and finally starts to fall.
I briefly considered charging the lineman with a #FAIL, but decided not to.  Had Morris gone to the ground, he would have had to be removed from the game, but in all honesty in his condition the fall might have hurt him worse.  I also considered a general team #FAIL, but I decided to give the benefit of the doubt and take some of the gestures I saw from Morris's teammates as attempts to signal the sideline to replace the quarterback.  So, first a referee #FAIL for not ejecting the perpetrator of the hit, then a coaching #FAIL for not getting the staggered quarterback out of the game.

3. (about next three minutes, not all on camera) The new quarterback, Devin Gardner, gets the team moving with a completed pass and some nifty runs, demonstrating that mobility is a good thing.  Meanwhile Morris is being observed on the sideline.  I'm going to give benefit of doubt and assume those people with him are medical personnel of some sort, although they look an awful lot like coaches (anyone who can identify one way or the other?).  However, whoever they are, the next #FAIL is theirs; Morris's helmet is still on.  If these are the medical personnel with the responsibility to examine Morris to determine his fitness to continue, they have to get his helmet off even if they have to cut off his head to do it.  Yet his helmet remains on.

Get the helmet off already.  Credit: maizenbrew.com

4. (around 5:15) Meanwhile Gardner is moving the team along, with another first-down run, but his helmet pops off.  This is an automatic removal from the game for one play, which is somehow supposed to be long enough to determine if the player who lost his head helmet is fit to continue.  Accordingly Gardner is sent to the sideline.  Of course, because Gardner had just picked up a first down, Michigan still needs a quarterback.
Now the third-string quarterback bestirs himself, ready to enter, but ... no, Morris, still gimpy and groggy, returns.  Thankfully someone had the brains to call only a handoff, but who knows what kind of disaster might have befallen the quarterback even if all he did was trip over a teammate.  At any rate Morris is safely removed and Gardner reinserted, presumably to finish the game.
Gotta go general system #FAIL here.  Nobody got this right -- not Morris, not the medical personnel/coaches attending to him, not the head coach Hoke, nobody.

5. (sometime after the game) Shane Morris tweets "I just want to play football."  Morris #FAIL.  This is not the time to be tweeting anything, aside from perhaps "I'm not dead yet" or some other statement about his condition.
Let us be clear on one thing: football players are STUPID.  No, wait, strike that: athletes are STUPID.  When caught up in the moment of competition a person who might (I'm not totally convinced, but might) be perfectly rational off the field will engage in the most bizarrely dangerous and potentially self-destructive behavior possible, just to Stay In The Game and Play Through Pain and Help The Team.  And they will LIE about their condition to stay in.  The very last person to be trusted to judge the player's viability to continue is the player himself.
Even though it's possible the team might be better off with someone healthy in that spot, this is The Code, and it is inviolable.  Basically the only way to get off the field without having one's toughness questioned is to be paralyzed on the play.  Even then, you better flash a "thumbs-up" sign if at all possible.  Morris is, as a very young man who has no other real purpose in life than to play football (it would seem), bound and determined to preserve his toughness credentials, no matter if he sees you holding up thirteen fingers on your right hand.

What the various failures in this one sequence of action point to is the near-impossibility of football to police itself.  The NFL, which has coaching staffs the size of small armies in the Low Countries, has a slightly better chance of policing things, but their players are even more bound by The Code, and coaches even more monomaniacal about field-marshalling, and doctors still dependent on team or league for their jobs.  Between games the NFL actually seems to be getting serious about policing potential head-trauma vicitms, but the in-game defenses are still shaky.

The NCAA, which just this summer settled its own concussion lawsuit, is on shakier ground.  Some schools have similarly extensive coaching and support staffs, but many do not.  The same problems of accountability and supervision exist, perhaps exacerbated by the intense focus on such programs when Chester from Goober Gap can raise hell on the radio and make the coach's seat even hotter.  The shakiest ground of all may be at the high-school level, where staffs are much smaller, medical personnel might be alone on the field against a coaching staff and stadium full of zealots are screaming for the star quarterback or linebacker to get back on the field.  (Yes, I'm aware that the nervous parents are also probably there, but the zealots in the stands don't care unless the player is lying motionless on the field.)

So, what questions arise from this?

A. Since this blog is mostly about trying to see things from the view of the fan who's trying to remain faithful and still be a sports fan, let's start there.  Can you, from any kind of faithful or ethical point of view, trust that everything possible is being done to safeguard the long-term health of those players you're screaming at on the field?

B. Suppose you want to go to the laissez-faire position that it's on the players themselves if they choose to play, and that Football Must Be Preserved At All Costs (which is apparently becoming increasingly a partisan political position). What does that say about your Christian ethics?  Do we have to go back to the early Christian debates about whether attending the gladiatorial contests was even a viable position for a Christ-follower?  Even if they choose to destroy themselves out there, can you as a follower of the Man of Sorrows, the Prince of Peace, justify watching such destruction of life for your own amusement?
(There is one possible derivative of this position that I will actually agree with, though: nobody who is currently playing in the NCAA or NFL has any business ever filing suit against either entity should they end up with some form of long-term brain trauma.  None whatsoever.  The knowledge is out there, and you are not compelled to play.  It is possible to walk away.  I'm not sure what the cutoff year should be, but by know you are responsible for knowing the risk and, if you insist on continuing to play, being prepared to absorb the consequences should you be one of the lucky 33% (or maybe less if you don't go to the NFL) to face long-term brain trauma as a result.
This frankly has no bearing on the question of the first paragraph of B, but it is worth considering as the sport plays out in the future.

C. Aside from the ethics of watching the game itself, can either an NFL franchise or an NCAA football team be trusted to be ethical in their treatment of athletes?  The NFL is spending tons of money to try to convince you that "they got this."  The NCAA has so many issues right now, it's almost impossible to trust.  But what of the 32 individual NFL franchises, or your beloved SEC football franchise operating in the guise of a university?  Do you in fact seriously believe that the health of all 53 or 85 or 100+ players is truly their greatest concern?  Had the Michigan-Minnesota game above not been televised on one of the ESPNs, do you think the issue would have been raised as forcefully as it was?  If you can, you're a more trusting soul than I.  Not necessarily because I particularly attribute malice to the Patriots or Crimson Tide or whoever, but because it's never been easy to be ethical with dollar signs in your eyes.

This is but one example, that happened to get famous for being nationally televised.  Are you confident there aren't others?  It's one thing to go on about players playing whole games with multiple concussions back in the '60s or '70s, the ignorant age.  We're not ignorant now.  We may choose to be stupid, but we can't be ignorant anymore.  We know what can happen.  Do you have your cutoff number of CTE cases that is too many all prepared?

The short version: can football police itself where the health of its players is concerned?  And can you watch even if it can't?

I have bucketloads of doubt.  And I can't.