Only Nixon could go to China

It is one of those stories where, well, you just have to wonder.

About a week ago, the University Interscholastic League, which is the governing body for high school sports in the state of Texas, announced a major effort to track brain injuries among athletes who compete in high school sports in that state. Twenty-four sports will be covered. While I assume some  boys' youth soccer does exist in Texas (girls' soccer is named in the article, you'll note), as a number of professional players have come from the state, the sport most likely to be up for closest scrutiny (by those observing and reporting on the study, if not in the study itself) is football, perhaps the most sacred of idols in that state (or perhaps only second to oil).

Note: while I am intensely curious about how the University Interscholastic League governs high school sports in Texas, I'll leave that discussion aside for now.

The study is inherently significant, as noted in the article, if for no other reason than the sheer number of youth who participate in sports in the Texas system. More than 800,000 athletes participate in sports in Texas public high schools (one assumes there are plenty of private schools with sports as well; whether they are covered in the study or not is not noted). That's the beginnings of a very large database tracking brain injury in young athletes.

The League is partnering with the O'Donnell Brain Institute at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center for the study. Its purported aim is to provide a more scientific means to judge whether rules changes, new equipment, or other measures are in fact having any impact in preventing or mitigating brain injury in young athletes, and whether new measures are warranted or needed.

This isn't the first case of a state organization trying to track youth sports on a large scale -- Michigan is noted as having been tracking such injury for some time now. In the 2015-16 academic year football produced the most reports of brain injury, with girls' basketball coming in second, trailing by a mere 1,453 reports.

One would like to be encouraged, wouldn't one?

It all seems very serious. The University Interscholastic League's spokesman acknowledges the lack of scientific usefulness in the current system, which only requires schools to report on a rotating basis. Whatever you may think of UT, its medical program is generally well-regarded. It all sounds like it should be a good thing.

But it's Texas.

It's freakin' Texas.

The book Friday Night Lights (or the movie or the TV series) wasn't set in Pennsylvania or Ohio or Michigan, or even California or Georgia or Florida. All of those states have strong, successful traditions in high school football, as do others. But this is Texas. "Worshipful" is not too strong a word for how that state views football, not by a long shot. The saying that gives this blog its name might as well have been invented there.

Can a state with such a reverence for, such an identity with a sport like football really pull off such a study, no matter where the results may lead?

Do they really want to?

Can the UIL really keep reporting numbers of they get large and out of hand, and nothing seems to help?

Can Texas high schools really be trusted to be scrupulous about reporting all such incidents of brain injury? Can coaches, assistant coaches, trainers, doctors really stick to the rules when the pressure is on and the star quarterback might have to be held out of the big game?

It all has the potential (as it might in any state to some degree) to become a big whitewash.

Or it has the potential to be, to use an overused sports cliché, a game changer.

A genuine and disciplined study can potentially point to what works, whether it be practice limitations, more scrupulous rule enforcement, rule changes or anything else. It could also, in the extreme, point to the conclusion that nothing really works, that football is just going to do this to some percentage of the people who play it when so much size and speed are in play.

On the other hand, a large study such as this could also become little more than a stall tactic, a cover for cries of "we don't have enough data" ad nauseam.

It may be that if a breakthrough of whatever kind is going to happen, it's only right that it comes out of Texas, the epitome of a state where the game really is "way more important than that." Rather like the historical event referenced in the title of this entry, maybe it has to be a state that so zealously embraces the game that has to the one that pushes forth the true nature of the game, or unveils whatever steps are necessary to keep it from enacting a macabre form of Russian roulette on the brains of those young athletes who play it.

It could be big, or it could be just a big sham.

Conflicts of interest

Indiana University has a history of powerhouse basketball teams. Football, not so much.

For their basketball team, anything less than contention for the Final Four is disappointment. For the football team, a 6-6 record and a bowl of any kind is a noteworthy accomplishment.

On the other hand, a Final Four run at the University of Alabama would be impressive, if not particularly noticed or appreciated there. A 6-6 record for the football team, on the other hand, would likely provoke an armed uprising in the state. Different standards at different schools.

Nonetheless, even at a school like Indiana, the pressure for football success can cause things to go off the rails.

A week ago in this blog, two seemingly unrelated stories -- one of a Harvard University study recommending changes to the hiring and oversight of team doctors, another of Indiana's backup quarterback deciding to leave football -- sat nestled next to each other as items two and three. It turns out that the two items, while not necessarily being related, were in fact going to intersect obliquely over the course of the week.

On Thursday, IU announced that football coach Kevin Wilson was no longer going to be football coach. Initial reports spoke of IU firing Wilson (and that's still how my browser bookmarks read), but eventually the departure was reported instead as a resignation. The team's defensive coordinator was immediately promoted to the position of head coach.

This was sudden. There had been no rumors or hints about Wilson's job security; indeed IU is on its way to a bowl game for the second year in a row, which is roughly tantamount to a national championship for the basketball team. If anything it seemed that all was well.

The press conference announcing the firing resignation did nothing to dispel the strangeness. The departed coach was not present, which is not completely surprising. The newly appointed coach talked, as he was supposed to do, of being honored to take the job and of continuing the team's relative success. As for the athletic director who either fired Wilson or accepted his resignation, Fred Glass gave a master class in not answering the questions asked of him. Even the ESPN writer who penned the above story found his answers revealingly unrevealing, in true lawyerly style, as below:

Glass mentioned the term "philosophical differences" so many times I began to envision him and Wilson in robes, arguing over the soul's immortality.

Glass repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, which seemed very strange. For his part, Wilson had accepted a fairly meager buyout despite being owed an average of $2.5 million over the next five seasons. That's not normal coach behavior. Something strange seemed afoot.

A couple of days later, more information started to come out. Despite Glass's protestations, there were some, shall we say, darker episodes sprinkled across Wilson's tenure at IU, episodes which (due to Wilson's departure and the evident confidentiality agreement bridling the tongues of both coach and AD) will probably never be fully interrogated and understood. (A more local view of the whole affair is here.)

At least two investigations into Wilson's treatment of players, particularly injured players, were initiated by Glass, one in April 2015 and another in the past four to six weeks. A number of former players also spoke out in the past week about Wilson's treatment of injured players during his time at IU.

Here's where we must begin to ask questions about coaching responsibility.

There isn't any likelihood of these allegations ever being settled one way or the other. With Wilson gone (and likely not to talk) and Glass having already demonstrate he won't say anything, IU will be unlikely to pursue the issue any further. Still, if even a few of the allegations reported in the last-linked article are true, there was a disturbing tendency towards belittling injured players or dismissing the severity of those injuries in the IU program.

Here's where the idea of conflicts of interest comes in.

Wilson (or any head coach) had the responsibility not to put players at unacceptable risk. That's standard for any coach in any sport.

Wilson also, as any coach in any sport, was responsible to win games.

Those are obvious and universal responsibilities. In addition, in college football, a coach has other concerns beyond those -- seeing that the players are not wiping out in the classroom. Whether or not the coach personally gives a whit about the academic progress of the players, such progress gets measured, and the team actually can suffer consequences if, for example, a certain percentage of the team's players fail to graduate in a timely manner over the course of years. (You might recall that the University of Connecticut basketball team got banned from the NCAA tournament in 2013, at a time when that team was carrying a graduation rate of 8% among its basketball players.) Even if a head coach doesn't directly oversee the academic progress of the team's players, a poor rate comes back on the head coach.

Again, if the stories told about Wilson are true (and the "if" is not insubstantial here), even such a concern as that last one about academics can become an impediment to proper regard for a player's health. The more prevalent concern here in this blog is a kind of emotional manipulation; ridiculing or demeaning injured players as a means to induce them to come back from their injuries too soon.

It's pretty insidious, if you think about it; you get deniability ("hey, he said he could play...") and the player back in action. Eighteen- to twenty-two-year-olds, wildly competitive athletes at that, are not noted for sober judgment or careful balancing of risk. They're frankly easy to manipulate. And it looks possible that Wilson did exactly that.

Let's try to be understanding here; it's hard to keep so many things in balance. While Wilson might have had a nasty streak in his personality (according to some accounts), even a well-intentioned coach of good character can find it challenging to keep up success on the field and in the classroom and still keeping a proper eye on the health of the team's players.

If I'm ever going to start getting hate mail over this blog, it might finally happen because of this topic. Coaches are gods (at least as long as they succeed). It's not just in football; think of how long Bob Knight took to wear out his welcome at IU (in basketball, of course). But there's a media apparatus dedicated to their ongoing deification of coaches across many sports, but particularly so in football (college even more than pro). Nick Saban at the University of Alabama could probably kill and eat a cheerleader at the fifty-yard line at halftime during a game and keep his job. College football coaches always get the benefit of the doubt. Always. Unless they lose, or people get arrested, or overwhelming national attention of a bad kind comes to your program. Ask Art Briles, even as plenty of Baylor folk insist he should have been retained.

Players, on the other hand, are tools (particularly football players). Useful, and even beloved to a degree, as long as they "do their job." Academic failure only matters so far as it causes the player to be unable to play -- not remotely in terms of their education or development as human beings. Personal problems? Get that out of your system before game time, boy (racial coding very deliberate). And don't you dare have an opinion that your coach doesn't give you.

It's hard to challenge a coach who is having even a little bit of success. So if a coach who has the team succeeding even a little gets accused of pressuring injured players to play too soon, who in the administration or -- God help us -- the fanbase is going to hold that coach accountable? Aside from the affected player's parents, perhaps?

It's an unpleasant question to ask, but it had better be asked: are football coaches the best ones to be trusted with making decisions about the health of players (or having authority over those who do), particularly in an age where we have a lot more clue just how much damage football can do to bodies and/or brains?

Fred Glass (right, with new coach Tom Allen) at his lawyerly best.