Retiring types

So Jerod Mayo of the New England Patriots is retiring. He's 29 years old and has played eight seasons with the team.

It might be more accurate to say "parts of eight seasons," as injuries were a pretty frequent part of his career. He played only six games each in 2013 and 2014 before playing in sixteen games this past season, before being injured in the Patriots' first playoff game and missing the rest of their run.

Mayo was 29, but an old 29. The injuries had taken their toll on his physical abilities in his final three seasons with the Patriots, not just on his playing time. Rumors had been floating in the late weeks of the NFL season that Mayo would step away from the game, so the actual announcement wasn't necessarily a surprise to many players.

Apparently Calvin Johnson's announced plans to retire caught more people by surprise. Perhaps the biggest surprise is that this determination was apparently one Johnson. a.k.a. Megatron, made before this most recent season, and was actually kept secret by Johnson and the few (including two Detroit Lions teammates) he told before the season began. Johnson then told the Lions' coach on the final day of the season.

The Lions are caught in a bit of panic, it seems, and are striking the pose that there is still opportunity for Johnson to change his mind. That is certainly true. Their statements seem a little on the desperate side to me, though.

Like Mayo, Johnson has taken his share or perhaps more of lumps and beatings. He still performed at an awfully high level, though.

For the most part, as with Mayo, most commentators have been relative respectful of Johnson's apparent decision, although in one of the videos linked above, ESPN troll Stephen A. Smith is at his most trollish in taking the occasion to trash the Lions organization (this is known as "shooting fish in a barrel") rather than actually talking about Johnson.

Meanwhile, it seems Marshawn Lynch of the Seattle Seahawks has a lean towards retirement as well, at least if those ubiquitous "sources" and Twitter are to be believed. He's 30, as is Johnson.

Jared Allen also announced his retirement after his Carolina Panthers team lost in the Super Bowl. His twelve-year career across several teams left him as the active NFL leader in quarterback sacks at the time of his retirement. Likewise, tight end Heath Miller of the Pittsburgh Steelers made the decision to hang 'em up after this season just ended. Rashean Mathis of the Lions is also retiring after thirteen seasons, although his choice is even less of a surprise than some of these others.

And of course the potential big retirement announcement is still yet to be made.

Of course it won't be a shock if Peyton Manning retires. He has a lot of years on him.

Similarly, one could argue that Allen and Miller had enjoyed decently full careers (twelve and eleven years, respectively) at positions (defensive line and tight end) that involve pretty good potential for impact and bodily damage. Mathis (thirteen-year career) also had a decently long career and had been making his feelings known for a while. Lynch is one of those unpredictable characters who is fully capable of not retiring amidst all the speculation.

I don't know that there's anything meaningful in all this. No one (aside from Mathis, who did experience concussion issues this season) mentioned concussions or CTE at all in their retirement announcements. Of course, we've established in this blog that concussions or CTE aren't required in order for football to be a painful sport long after players give it up.

I'd say none of the announced or hinted retirements so far this season will have the shock value of Chris Borland's surprise retirement last season. And unlike last season, when the San Francisco 49ers took the brunt of the surprise retirements, the choices have been spread among multiple seasons this year (with the Lions possibly facing two).

So what of it?

I think mostly football followers need to start adjusting to the idea that there might be fewer players sticking around for those fifteen- to twenty-year careers that the likes of Mike Webster stuck around for. Running faster into bigger and faster players, increasingly crashing into artificial turf instead of natural grass on the field, and playing longer seasons are plenty of reason to decide to cut it short after eight or nine or ten years instead.

So, mostly, this is to suggest that this is possibly a foreshadowing of the new normal in the NFL.

Maybe it's just good sense.

The NFL and its franchises, after all, benefit from this in a way. Even players with eight or nine years in the league cost money, and a player like Mayo or especially Johnson represents a pretty hefty salary-cap number that can be written off if that player retires, and can be replaced with someone younger and cheaper. A team will make plenty of noise about their respect for the retiring player, but won't get too bent out of shape over the cap savings.

Meanwhile the player hopes he got out in time, while there might still be some chance to heal.

And if we're lucky, fans don't decide to be jerks about it.

Jerod Mayo decides it's time to "say when"

Super aftermath, before the game (continued)

It's a little disconcerting to find myself in agreement with, or at least on the same side as, George Will.

Our politics don't intersect at all, as far as I can see. Beyond that and separately, he's a little on the smug side (of course, some of you probably think I'm a bit on the smug side, at least on this subject), slightly oleangeous. It's not merely a matter of disagreeing, but of not finding much to enjoy even in the basics of writing style. It doesn't have the seductive readability of William F. Buckley or his like.

But there's always been one point of contact between us: baseball. Will is enough of a baseball fan to have devoted a book to the subject. My sports fandom isn't quite so narrowly focused, but baseball is still my first love. So, there's always been that.

Now Will has positioned himself among those who question the future of football. It's actually one of his less-pontificating columns, in fact. Will reviews the newly-broken stories of CTE diagnoses of Ken Stabler and Earl Morrall, and also mentions Jim McMahon and his publicly acknowledged struggles with headaches and other dementia-related difficulties (McMahon has been diagnosed with early-onset dementia, but those symptoms mirror those of persons posthumously diagnosed with CTE. The latter, of course, can only be diagnosed posthumously).  From there Will pivots to wondering how long football's fans will be able to ignore these concerns and continue to consume the product on the field. In this case Will is probably more optimistic than I, although he does more or less expect to see Super Bowl C come to pass.

Will's column in the Washington Post was just one of the editorial comments across a few of the national media in the week before that game. The New York Times took the most shots, with one of their "Room For Debate" assemblages; a profile of a former NFL Films filmmaker who "went rogue," directing a PBS documentary (it won an Emmy in 1981) critical of the game and its harms to those who play (well before the advent of public awareness of CTE or the work of Dr. Bennet Omalu), with the author expressing his own qualms as well; and an op-ed from a pathologist and (once upon a time) football fan expressing the opinion that football will end up a more marginal sport if it doesn't change its ways, based on the trajectory followed by boxing in the past four decades.  The latter isn't necessarily a unique position, though I have trouble believing it. Then again, I wouldn't have believed that significant American media outlets would spend the week of the game bringing these stories to the forefront in something approaching a relative balance with the usual pregame hype.

NPR, largely a laggard on this subject, offered a different take during the week, with one of its "Youth Radio" stories from a high schooler who chose to walk away from the game. Don't get too excited; by his own admission Garrison Pennington wasn't going to play football beyond high school. This isn't a story of a high-school Chris Borland.

Still, in a way this is the NFL's nightmare. Football, and the NFL in particular, aren't going anyway soon. Will's expectation of Super Bowl C is probably correct. Still, there's a decent chance that it will look quite different. Those who are determined to play in the NFL will. But high school teams can't sustain themselves on NFL prospects alone. Even Florida and California and other talent hotbeds need players who don't expect to play behond high school to keep those rosters full. NCAA schools similarly rely on some number of players whose future plans don't include pro football, whether they realize it or not.

Garrison Pennington isn't a trend, necessarily. His choice won't necessarily influence others to do the same, NPR or no NPR. It does, though, suggest another angle from which the game is going to be challenged in years to come, and the degree to which many voices are going to be influencing that challenge.

If you've read this blog at all before you know where I stand. But let me toss out this question for consideration:

Can the Christian church, already looking more marginalized than at any time in its US history, and already slow to respond to so many moral questions across American history past and present, really claim any moral credibility if it remains on the sidelines (or in the stands, mindlessly rooting) at this particularly challenging moment?

(Note: to be continued, although it may take a week or so as I'll be on the road next week. We'll see.)

P.S. the screen shot below is offered as evidence/acknowledgment that everybody wasn't/isn't necessarily on board with the concern. Worth noting that Crabtree had a Super Bowl to his credit with the Packers, while Kanell was mostly a professional clipboard-holder and now ESPN foof. Make of it what you will.

Super aftermath, before the game

So was there some big football game last week or something? I took my wife to a movie for our engagement anniversary.

In the aftermath of the game, which seems to have mostly revolved around the sinfulness of one quarterback or the saintliness of the other, it might be easy to forget what kind of week it was before that game happened. (Yes, it is entirely possible the NFL worked very hard to make it that way.) So let me remind you.

Remember Ken Stabler? I didn't like Ken Stabler when I was growing up watching football, not because of anything about him personally, but his team always seemed to be beating a team I liked.

Stabler, who died in July due to colon cancer, made the news twice this past week. On Saturday Stabler, deservedly so, was announced as one of this year's inductees to the NFL Hall of Fame. This measure guarantees some awkward silence at the ceremony, silence in which people will have the opportunity to remember the other news about Stabler that came out this past week; that at his death Stabler was suffering from "advanced stage 3" chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).

The linked story and others describe the severely slipping brain function of Stabler's late years. Unlike some, Stabler found a way to cope with ("manage" is probably too strong a word) his symptoms, possibly with his (and his partner's) understanding of the disease as it struck and claimed other victims. Stabler had other health issues left from his career -- his knees were so bad he seldom went out in his later years. As well, he had suffered prostate cancer as well as the colon cancer that eventually took him. Despite all the other health issues, Stabler was resolute about having his brain donated for CTE research, a decision he made after the suicide of Junior Seau and posthumous CTE diagnosis.

Stabler lived long enough to wonder about his grandsons' pursuit of football in high school.

Stabler was the seventh former NFL quarterback to be diagnosed posthumously with CTE. I'm not sure if Earl Morrall is reckoned as the sixth or eighth. The same story above also reports the posthumous diagnosis of Morrall, himself a Super Bowl quarterback like Stabler -- although unlike Stabler, who won with the Raiders in 1976, Morrall's start in Super Bowl III didn't go so well, as his Colts got abused by Joe Namath's Jets. Morrall made a more successful Super Bowl appearance two years later, leading the Colts to a win in relief of Unitas against the Dallas Cowboys. Morrall was also instrumental in another Super Bowl season, filling in for an injured Bob Griese for much of the Miami Dolphins' undefeated 1972 season, but Griese returned for the conference championship and Super Bowl. Morrall retired at age 42.

Morrall had also spent much of that 1969 season with the Colts technically as a back-up, in that case to Hall of Famer Johnny Unitas, a man who suffered his own maladies in his later years (including being unable to use his right hand, due to an elbow injury from his playing days) leading to his death in 2002 and worked to call attention to the damage he and other former players suffered. Nonetheless the posthumous examination of Morrall's brain revealed advanced stage 4 CTE, the highest stage known of that disease. His death was attributed to complications from Parkinson's disease at the time, a disease which shows many of the symptoms as CTE, but manifests differently in the brain upon examination.

Not all football players, even long-timers, manifest CTE (why Stabler and not, for example, Fran Tarkenton, another scrambling quarterback roughly contemporary with Stabler?), but that doesn't mean their later lives are free of football-related damage. Joe Montana may look just fine in those Papa John's pizza commercials, but he related to USA Today that he experiences plenty of post-football physical ailments, including arthritis and a bad knee and neck (with three neck fusions "so far"), as well as nerve damage related to head trauma that causes occasional vision problems.. This is in some ways conventional; football players have long exhibited all manner of physical dysfunction once their careers end, and as a general rule most of them recognize this as the tradeoff for having an NFL career in particular. Montana isn't expressing any regrets, but -- like Unitas -- isn't keeping silent about the price he has paid for all those Super Bowl rings.

One wonders if Payton Manning has read Montana's interview.

One more Super Bowl hero: Willie Wood, who made one of the pivotal plays of the very first Super Bowl for the Green Bay Packers against the Kansas City Chiefs. Early in the game Wood picked off a wobbly pass from Lin Dawson and took it almost all the way, setting the Packers on their way to a romp. Dawson calls it the one play he wishes he could have back, although he had a much better experience in Super Bowl IV.

Wood can't remember the play. Nor can he remember being inducted into the Hall of Fame.

And possibly the worst part for him is that, despite all the talk and all the examples of contemporaries who have been posthumously diagnosed, Wood will never know (barring a breakthrough in diagnosing living persons very, very soon) whether football took away his memories of football.

(next time: the media onslaught)

Kenny "the Snake" Stabler, in full slither...

Book Commentary -- Tribal: College Football and the Secret Heart of America

Diane Roberts, Tribal: College Football and the Secret Heart of America. New York: Harper-Collins, 2015.

More book commentary, while I'm completely blocked on an Ash Wednesday message...for tomorrow.

Have you ever had the experience of hearing a speaker with whose argument you agree, and whose basic points you readily acknowledge as valid and factual, and yet all you can think as they continue to speak is "oh, good LORD, get ON with it already!!"? That's roughly the experience of reading Diane Roberts's Tribal: College Football and the Secret Heart of America.

Roberts is a darling of the NPR crowd and contributor to the likes of Oxford American (vouching for her Southernness cred with a particular crowd) and the Guardian (international credibility). She's a faculty member at FSU (where she also studied, along with a degree from Oxford), after some years at the University of Alabama. And she's a college football addict, the type who tosses around phrases like "these are my people" when talking about college football and its fans. This after conducting a thorough and thoroughly snarky dissection of everything those fans love and represent.

The book is, cleverly, divided into four quarters with a pregame, halftime, and postgame. Each quarter has five chapters organized around a general theme, with the exception of the third quarter, on gender and college football, which inexplicably has only two. The other three quarters touch on the tribal hatreds of college football, religion (read: Christianity) and college football, and race and "Southernness", respectively, although the last chapter of the fourth quarter diverges somewhat into the saga of Bobby Bowden's fall at FSU. (The "halftime" chapter mostly focuses on the hazing/murder of the drum major of Florida A & M University's Marching 100 in 2011, with a few mentions of other band misbehaviors.)

Clearly all of these subjects provide ample fodder for one who wants to take college football apart, and Roberts pulls out all the stops in doing so. She doesn't spare her beloved FSU by any means (the Jameis Winston debacle gets a major airing-out) but plenty of schools get skewered.

For those who know Roberts's NPR commentary or other writing projects, the voice will be familiar. It may come off a bit more strident than in some cases. Possibly this comes, one might suspect, with taking a hatchet to a phenomenon to which one has already declared one's loyalty and unwillingness to give up. The whole tone of going on and on and on gets more than a little annoying.

There are parts of the book that are actually indispensible. It is particularly touching and harrowing when Roberts returns to her experiences tutoring athletes at FSU lo, those many years ago, young boy-men given to arrogance on the field, not always able to live up to that bravado when confronted with things like classes that are beyond their capacity. When the humans who are both at the center of and decidedly at the bottom of the pecking order in college football come into focus, the book is actually compelling.

Of course, there is one issue that Roberts somehow manages to dance around for most of the book's longer-than-it-looks length, one which this blog doesn't allow you to overlook, of course -- the issue which is largely unavoidable in football these days. And yet largely, it is avoided here, or made mostly an object of snark.

It seems that Roberts mostly regards the "concussion crisis" as (a) the ultimate bogeyman that will finally undo the NCAA (possibly, I guess), or (b) the ultimate bogeyman that will take away her beloved college football. Of course Roberts would never be so gauche as to say that directly, but that's about the only thing one can draw from her few comments on the subject. You would think that an academic thinker like Roberts might do more with the brain-trauma issue -- connect it to the racial issue, as more affluent (and frequently more white) players might have the luxury to pull a Chris Borland, while poorer (and frequently blacker) athletes will see themselves with fewer options. But really, Roberts just doesn't seem up to the task of confronting that issue squarely.

But I suppose when one of the key phrases of her "pregame" is "I accept and embrace my Inner Barbarian," and she waxes poetic about being unable to quit the game the way one can't quit a bad boyfriend, that was probably too much to hope for.

[An aside: stepping back from Roberts's tome, this seems like a place to point out a basic ethical principle at play here. For her being a college football addict is an identity, one bred into her over pretty much her whole life. For any Christian, though, this is an excuse, not a reason. From the point of view of this blog (seeking to understand and act on football and its damage to children of God from a Christian-ethical viewpoint), we have to do better than retreating to talk of identity. After all, people who are actually following Christ, or even trying to do so, have a higher identity, do we not? And when that identity (for which the word "Christian" used to be useful before becoming overly politicized) comes into conflict with any of our other human identities, or when those human identities demand of us compromises that cannot be squared with our allegiance to Christ, then which allegiance is supposed to win?]

Book Commentary -- NFL Confidential: True Confessions From the Gutter of Football

Note: the ethical discussion will continue, but I got hit by a school bus today and don't frankly have the energy to give to that argument as is needed. (I'm OK, my car probably isn't.) That discussion will continue, and will probably feature the long-awaited comparison of football to the gladiatorial games of ancient Rome.

"Johnny Anonymous," NFL Confidential: True Confessions From the Gutter of Football. New York: Dey St. (Harper-Collins), 2016.

Short review: don't bother. Really.

This falls in a long line of books that promise heaps of scandal and deliver nothing you didn't already know. This seems less a tell-all than a spec script for one of those cheap and cheesy football-based series that turn up on HBO or some similar network on occasion.

The author is (or is claimed to be) an NFL player, active during the 2014-15 season. (I wouldn't be shocked if this turns out to be one big punking, but if so it wasn't a terribly successful one.) Mr. Anonymous purports to hate the NFL. It says so right there on the book jacket: "I'm an NFL player, and I ----ing hate the NFL." (I am leaving a bit more mystery about that expletive than the book jacket does, but I'm guessing you can fill it in.) His stated aim at the outset of the book is to be the Best NFL Backup Ever (c), in essence to make an NFL paycheck without actually doing anything besides riding the bench. So one of his first moves is to demonstrate that he's not nearly as smart as he claims to be, if he seriously thinks all the players ahead of him on the depth chart are going to stay healthy through a whole season in the NFL (he's an offensive lineman, in more ways than one).

It gets worse. Under the guise of being honest, he unveils his own raging homophobia (you might remember Michael Sam was trying to make it in the NFL at the time). His revelations about locker-room attitudes towards everything from women to their own coaches are probably meant to be dramatic and shocking, but you're pretty unlikely to be surprised if you've ever seen a few episodes of Hard Knocks, and probably won't be surprised even if you haven't.

Without too much elaboration: Mr. Anonymous's plans go awry when the team's starting center is injured, and Johnny has to step in. All the supposed pent-up rage dissolves, as Johnny's perhaps long-buried yearning to hit people kicks in and he remembers that he actually likes playing football, and if that means loving the NFL, so be it. His original plan to play the one season and then get out is, presumably, out the window, as he is (as of the book's printing) back with the same team for this about-to-end season.

It's not the scandalous book it claims to be, and its central character isn't nearly as interesting as he thinks he is. Save your money for something better.

Added: somebody thinks he knows who Johnny Anonymous is. Sounds reasonably plausible, but honestly, after reading the book I really don't care.