Weekly Reader: Headlines and reflections

Last week's post on this blog was a public regrouping in order to put forward a small part of the Christian ethical foundation underlying this ongoing project. Today's post will be similar, except framed in a reading of some of the recent headlines directly or indirectly pertaining to the subject and seeking to tease out where these ethical concerns may intersect. It is an excercise in developing a methodology, or trying to do so anyway. So, on with it.

ITEM: The NFL is considering dropping or severly curtailing its schedule of Thursday night games in future seasons.
REFLECTION: I see two particular concerns that are revealed by this piece of news.
The NFL is considering this move for one reason, and one reason only: poor ratings. Others connected to the game have certainly raised other concerns about the package -- bad games, over-saturation, and even player safety on occasion. However, these have been the case for a while -- really, is it not clear that playing a game on Sunday and turning around and playing another game four days later could make it difficult to get every body, or everybody, healed even to a minimal degree? Nonetheless, only the middling ratings for the games seems to have gotten the NFL's attention. So...
1. Why are we so confident that a league that has ignored safety concerns so far in inflating the NFL's Thursday presence, from Thanksgiving Day to a few late season weeks to half a season and, this year, to a full season, can truly be trusted to give enough of a damn about player safety in any other context, absent the pressure of losing not making enough money? To presume that a non-ethical actor is suddenly going to act ethically is, well, not very ethical, is it?
2. The flip side of this realization is that FANS DO HAVE POWER to cause the NFL to change its ways. Withhold your money, or even your attention, and look what can happen! This realization makes it a lot more difficult to cling to the notion that an individual's turning away from the game, for example, "won't make a difference." It apparently can effect the league when people don't watch. So fan responsiblity really does matter.
Sidebar: Some of the same concern will need to be directed at college football as well, in which some teams and leagues play some truly bizarre schedules -- Tuesday and Wednesday nights, even -- and Thursday games have been in place for some schools for as much as twenty years.

ITEM: A study from Harvard University recommends, among other things, substantial changes to the structure by which medical personnel are deployed in the league; the league responded with predictable staged outrage (predictable if you've been paying attention to the league for a while).
REFLECTION: Aside from yet another case of academia being out of touch with the real world, this story points to the mania for control that also contributes to the NFL's untrustworthy nature where player health is concerned.
The study proposes that doctors monitoring health not be employed by the league. The logic is simple; doctors who answer to the league or to an individual team are inherently in a position in which the interests of the team or league (i.e. get the star back on the field as quickly as possible) and the interests of the player (don't die, or don't hasten your own death unnecessarily) do not align, despite the NFL's vapid denials of conflict of interest. (The incredibly fatuous statements attributed to NFL spokespeople in the article suggest that the NFL is either unbelievably ignorant of what "conflict of interest" means, or desperately trying to muddy the waters on the subject.)
And as to claims that the proposed system is unworkable? Then are you serious about the health and safety of your players? It really is that simple.

ITEM: Zander Diamont, a backup quarterback for the University of Indiana Hoosiers, has decided to forego his final season of eligibility after "a lot" of concussions in his career (dating back to high school), summing up his decision with the pithy and on-point comment "I need my brain."
REFLECTION: As has been noted in previous blogs, not everybody would necessarily agree with that last comment.
Of course, as Diamont openly admits, he didn't have an NFL career ahead of him, and he is set to graduate from IU this spring. The lure of a pro career does often interfere with good judgment, it seems. (He's also the son of a soap-opera star, and perhaps that lessens the financial pressures that may cause some to press on in the game and hope against hope for that pro career.)
Also noteworthy is Diamont's acknowledgment that his particular playing style was such that he was more prone to head shots, and that his relatively small size made it hard to have any success without putting himself at greater risk. What is rare here is Diamont's apparent ability to see through it all and come to a decision to step away from the risk before it becomes harm. Hopefully.
What becomes a concern is the degree to which young men, who have been playing football since elementary school in many cases, are terribly good candidates to come to such conclusions more often than not. And this comes back to the root concern of this blog: just because young men are free to put themselves at such risk and to choose the harm, are we Christians ethically or morally free to participate in it with our dollars or our presence or our adulation? And if you've read much of this blog, you'll know where this blog stands.

ITEM: A lawsuit filed on behalf of 142 former NFL players calls on the league to acknowledge CTE as an occupational hazard that should be covered by worker's compensation.
REFLECTION: As much as I would typically be sympathetic to the plaintiffs, some shifty stuff is going on here.
The article states that the lead plaintiff was "diagnosed with CTE in 2015." Um, what? Since the article also seems to indicate that said plaintiff is also still alive, something is wrong here. If some doctor is "diagnosing" former players with CTE (and naturally, this is in South Florida, or Flori-duh), then either some amazing breakthrough has been made in complete and utter isolation and with absolutely zero publicity, or somebody's scamming somebody. Considering that, despite some progress, CTE cannot be definitively identified except posthumously...yeah, ethical dubiousness isn't acceptable on either side of this struggle.

ITEM: Liberty University has hired Ian McCaw as its athletic director.
REFLECTION: While there are about a million things that can be said about this subject, for this case (sticking with the football/CTE issue) we are again forced to consider the issue of trustworthiness, but this time from an explicitly Christian (or nominally so) perspective.
McCaw, of course, was previously the athletic director at Baylor University, at a time when the institution failed spectacularly at dealing with revelations of sexual assault among its athletes. Apparently Liberty's desire to become the Notre Dame of evangelicalism is not about to be sidetracked by mere concerns about the safety of women on campus.
The Washington Post's headline on the article places the stakes pretty high, but not inaccurately so, I'd say. If the term "evangelicalism" hasn't taken enough abuse as a result of the presidential campaign, items like this should help push that over the top.
Of course, one of the principal evangelical leaders involved in that campaign was none other than Jerry Falwell, Jr., the president of Liberty University. The juxtaposition of those two tidbits is juicy enough to warrant a larger concern about just what evangelicalism means anymore. Can an evangelicalism that wants to portray itself primarily through athletic success -- at any cost, apparently -- be trusted with the health of the players who are supposed to bring that athletic success? And a school that is so little concerned with what happened on McCaw's watch at Baylor is not that likely to care for the long-term health of its athletes, either.
The win-at-all-costs mentality of college football is sad enough among the largely secular universities who enjoy most of the success in it these days. Seeing schools who shout loudly about their "Christian character" be so cavalier about such costs, and prioritizing athletic success to the degree that it calls that character into question, is profoundly hard to swallow. It's hard not to wonder if grappling with football and the harm it does to some percentage of its players is going to have to go forward without much participation from the evangelical wing of Christianity, or whether that wing is capable of forming a Christian ethical response to the harms (as opposed to risks) of football.

Zander Diamont says "a lot" of concussions is enough.

Weekly Reader: Dale Jr.'s troubles

Even if he were a mediocre racer, Dale Earnhardt Jr. would be a big deal because of his name.

As it is, he's a pretty good racer, and is definitely a big name.

So having Dale Jr. sidelined by concussion-like symptoms is a big deal in NASCAR.

He missed last weekend's race in New Hampshire, and won't be racing again for a while. He hadn't felt well in the circuit's previous race in Kentucky, but thought he was suffering from allergies. When medication didn't help, Dale Jr., recalling previous concussion history, got himself checked and got the bad news. Having had two wrecks over a three-week span, such symptoms and diagnosis were not necessarily surprising.

Auto racing is one of those sports, unlike football or baseball (for the most part) or other team sports, where its competitors are at risk of being killed during competition, as Dale Earnhardt Jr. knows all to well. Mind you, if a racer dies on the track it is definitely not normal, and it is entirely correct to say that something went horribly and tragically wrong. But it can and does happen.

Not surprisingly, given that known and pronounced risk, Earnhardt Jr.'s condition raises questions for some observers about how many other drivers might be zipping around the track at crazy fast speeds with "concussion-like symptoms" (as he was in the Kentucky race, apparently). It's dangerous enough when everybody out there is mentally sharp; who wants to risk having the guy in the car next to you being a step slow and a second behind?

Dale Jr. is not the first NASCAR driver to face these symptoms. One of the more sensitive pieces to come forth in this interval was from Ricky Craven, a former NASCAR driver who went through a three-month interruption late in his career due to such symptoms. Craven admits that one of Earnhardt Jr.'s great temptations will be the urge to return as soon as possible, even though he might not be ready -- Craven admits that succuming to that urge set his return back, ultimately.

For NASCAR, it's entirely possible that Earnhardt Jr.'s struggles amplify the sport's difficulty with potential brain trauma more than might be the case with any NFL player. For one thing, while some active players have struggled with concussions, those players most associated with the NFL's head-trauma crisis are former players, for the most part, and deceased (since only after death can CTE be diagnosed). The "fan-player" relationship in NASCAR is felt particularly strongly and personally, as well; at its peak a few years back NASCAR did a particularly good job of marketing its racers and their personalities, so that even though they're quite strapped down and concealed in those cars their fans claim a particularly personal connection to Dale Jr. or JJ or any of the others. As a result, the death of a racer like Dale Jr.'s dad is keenly experienced by people who never met the man.

It also seems that NASCAR tends to court a particularly religous demographic in some cases. Naturally I'm curious as to whehter race fans will be affected by any particular faith concerns as they watch Earnhardt Jr.'s ongoing battle and (hopefully) recovery.

Perhaps as a result of NASCAR racers "having a face" (so to speak), the system will be a little less reluctant to respond in Dale Jr.'s case. On the other hand, NASCAR racers do race for teams, and the owner of Dale Jr.'s car is already expressing opinions about his viability for future races.

We shall see.

UPDATE: Jeff Gordon has been announced to sub for Earnhardt Jr. for the next two NASCAR races, presumably including the Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

In other things relating to games and head trauma:

*Perhaps in response to Dale Jr.'s situation, the family of a former NASCAR great now suffering dementia announced that his brain would be donated for study after his death. This piece also offers a little background for Earnhardt Jr.'s decision to donate his own brain.

*Maybe this one doesn't belong on a blog about sports *coughNotRealcough*, but a number of former WWE participants are suing the organization over brain damage, and it's going about like you'd expect a WWE event to go.

*Speaking of personal reactions, Tommy Joseph hit a home run tonight for the Philadelphia Phillies agains the Miami Marlins. He now has thirteen homers this season, in only about fifty games since being called up from the minors. Joseph was a catcher for the Richmond Flying Squirrels while I was living there, and was traded from the San Francisco Giants organization to the Phillies for Hunter Pence, while the Squirrels were hosting the Phillies' AA team in a double-header. However, his prospect status had been derailed for the better part of two years due to concussions. Two years. Now playing first base, he does offer both hope and warning: it is possible to recover from concussions, but boy, does it take time.

In football:

*The column itself is actually from about a month and a half ago, but it is offered as an interesting perspective on informed risk and the NFL. Also, it seems to suggest that media voices may no longer be as easily swayed by the NFL's rhetoric as they used to be. That would be useful.

*From the Waiting on Science Our Savior Dept.: remember the MVPs, Dartmouth's robotic tackling dummies, developed to cut down on hits in practice? They're going pro.

Vaguely related:

*These two stories are not brain trauma-related, except in the sense that they may illustrate part of the challenge in dealing with the problem. In one story, a team of retired major leaguers is gearing up for a competition mostly against college players. In another, Ichiro Suzuki keeps churning away at age 42; he grounded out in a pinch-hitting turn in tonight's game reference above, leaving him six hits away from 3,000 for his MLB career (leaving aside all the hits he had in Japan). Sometimes the competitive urge is not easily conquered. Sometimes, as with Ichiro, that can be a good thing or at least a good story. (I'm not sure what it is with Clemens et al, although I can't stop myself wondering about the National Baseball Congress's drug-testing policies). Sometimes, though, that competitive urge keeps players going long after their bodies have told them it's time to walk away, which only increases the risk of injuries of all kinds.

Exactly what do we root for in that situation?

Dale Jr. and his ride, which he's not riding in right now...

Weekly Reader: Exclusive/Elite/Premiere

And the Weekly Reader returns...

Do did you hear what Giancarlo Stanton did last night?

In Major League Baseball's pre-All Star Game slugfest, the Home Run Derby, Stanton muscled out sixty-one (yes, 61) home runs across the event's three rounds, crushing the event's previous record by forty or so. Yes, he won, and caused his team some marketing headaches along the way.

Stanton is an interesting case. He's mostly noted as a power hitter, although he's become a pretty decent fielder and outfield arm along the way. He plays for a franchise, the Miami (formerly Florida) Marlins, that has only existed since 1993 (I remember watching on TV as Charlie Hough, the ancient knuckleballer, pitch their first game), yet has two World Series titles and the honor of benefitting from the Chicago Cubs' epic collapse in the 2003 NLCS (seriously, if you're still blaming Steve Bartman at this point you are epically stupid. Bartman didn't give up eight runs and drop everything on the field. Just stop). They are mostly remembered for almost immediately dismantling both of their championship teams in economically-driven "fire sales," having a tightwad owner and his massively jerky son-in-law as a leading team official, having fired Joe Girardi as manager after one season (a season for which he won Manager of the Year, mind you) and thus freeing him to be scooped up by the New York Yankees, seriously bilking Miami-Dade County into building a wildly expensive but admittedly beautiful new stadium, and generally being ill-supported by the nominally "home" fans who turn out to cheer the other team at least as often as the Marlins.

Stanton is also an example of what threatens to become a vanishing breed in Major League Baseball; the scouting find. He wasn't a product of the paid-coaching, travel-team, tournament system that is increasingly becoming the prime conduit for baseball talent, teams with words like "elite" and "premiere" bandied about playing in tournaments that are "exclusive" and "elite" themselves. He, uh, played for his high-school team. How passé.

Andrew McCutcheon of the Pittsburgh Pirates has, at least somewhat by choice, become the current poster boy for the potential loss of access to major league-worthy talent that arises from such a system. If an area AAU coach hadn't wandered over to a field where a skinny 12-year-old kid from a nowhere town in Florida was playing in a youth league game, it's not at all clear whether McCutcheon would ever have been in a position for his evident skills to be seen by people that matter. And let's just say that Major League Baseball would be a lot poorer without the likes of McCutcheon and Stanton, who was found in a rather fluky scouting story himself.

Only so many versions of The Blind Side can play themselves out to find talent. There is a real risk, as the travel-team system becomes more and more entrenched, that access to pro ball becomes a matter of who can pay up and who can't. And that would be deeply troubling, ethically and (dare I say?) theologically.

Other things worth reading this week:

*More on Brianna Scurry, former star goalkeeper for the USWNT, and her chosen role as brain-health advocate for women athletes.

*Syracuse University hires an ESPN executive as its new athletic director, more or less admitting that its athletic program is a content provider for TV. And this relates to the purposes of a university ... uh, well ... I'll get back to you on that one.

*Tim Duncan retired. I feel old. My time at Wake Forest was before his, but not by too much. His team took care of him, which helped him to play as long as he did. Radical concept, that. And if you thought Duncan was all stoic and humorless, think again.

*Speaking of sports that rely on travel and "elite" teams, US Soccer has a spanking new training ground for its elites under construction, in KCK.

*At least one writer is ready for "God Bless America" to be gone from the seventh-inning stretch.

*Jordan Spieth won't play golf in Rio. I hate to be alarmist and all, but really, I can't blame him.

Back in football:

*Roger Goodell shows his tobacco-industry learnin'.

*More college football players are joining in head-trauma lawsuits against the NCAA. At some point somebody's going to have to figure out that they really will need to sue the "university" for whom they played.

*The Joe Paterno/Jerry Sandusky story is just getting uglier.

*Since retiring, Calvin Johnson, aka Megatron, has been talkative. Concussions and painkillers and not coming back. Oh, my.

*And at least one NFL player has an idea of what players might be able to use instead of those painkillers.

Have at it, folks.

He hits baseballs far. Very far. It would be sad if he were getting broken down in football instead.

A tale of two coaches, speaking unwisely

I have, in discussing the ongoing challenge of brain trauma in football, I have largely, if hopelessly, tried to speak a challenge to fan participation, from a Christian ethical point of view, based on the increasingly evident harm suffered by a non-majority but significant percentage of players who play football over a significant number of years. The Christian ethical question, naturally, is whether or not football is an activity that is worthy of "participation" (not as an athlete, but as a supporter, financial or otherwise -- what charitable organizations or non-profits might call a "sustainer") on the part of those who identify themselves as followers of the Prince of Peace.

Beside the basic question of the harm (as opposed to simple injury or risk, "harm" here indicating some form of damage that will not be repairable in the player's lifetime; permanent, life-affecting damage) to those who play and the possible resultant moral harm that "sustainers" thus inflict on theirselves, there are also other questions around the issue such as how much can one trust those who might be regarded as the "guardians" or "stewards" of the game. In previous weeks, particularly among NFL owners, the occasional bout of loose lips has called into question just how much or how little those owners can be trusted when the overall health of their players, including brain health, is at stake. For every John Mara who expresses concern (or at least manages to sound as if he's expressing concern), there appears a Jerry Jones or a Jim Irsay for whom the kindest possible term is "tone-deaf," and for whom "brutalist exploiter" is probably more accurate.

Coaches, though, haven't come into the spotlight quite in the same way. Perhaps more than owners, coaches are generally proficient in the double-talk necessary to get through weekly press conferences and interviews without saying too much (one even hears the term "coach speak" for such), surviving and advancing from week to week by concealing more than they reveal.

Then came Bruce Arians.

Arians, for whom football seems to be his religion based on his behavior, apparently decided that somebody needed to stand up to all those namby-pamby wussy mothers who are hesitating about letting their boys play football. And he decided it might as well be him, so he loudly and angrily branded those moms as "fools." His word. Also, he seemed to be trying to set dads against moms. I'm neither, and I know that was the actual foolish thing to do. Arians had no cause to get dads in that kind of trouble.

Calling any mom a "fool" is not all that wise, particularly when there are millions of them potentially involved. The backlash was as fierce as it was predictable, so Arians had to try to talk himself down from the branch he had already sawed off.

(Rather than actually give Arians the credit of linking directly to stories covering his brutalistic drivel, I'm going to link to this rant on espnW, which administers to Arians the proper and needed bitch-slapping and also challenges him and his fellow Cro-Magnon types some basic instruction on how to deal with the supposed "war" on football such moms were waging. ["War on Christmas," "War on Christianity," "War on Football." So disagreeing is now declaring war?] I do find it interesting that such could only be found on espnW, where nobody on the "regular" ESPN.com had the, er, intestinal fortitude to do so. The Sporting News, on the other hand, did find someone to dissect the particular nature of Arians's foolishness pretty effectively. In short, he's scared.)

Arians's attempt to backtrack partly included the claim that coaches have to get the word out that football is "safe." Never mind the number of players for whom the game apparently was not "safe" over the last who-knows-how-many decades so far; even leaving out large numbers of players who seem to have suffered brain trauma of various kinds, calling football a "safe" sport is bizarre by a long stretch.

To testify to this, I call Bret Bielema to the stand.

Bielema is coach of the Arkansas Razorbacks, a more-or-less professional franchise in the more-or-less professional Southeastern Conference of the NCAA. Kody Walker, one of the team's more proficient running backs, suffered a broken foot in spring football (now there's a topic for further discussion in some future blog) a few days ago.

In discussing the injury in a statement to the press, Bielema said the following (I'm just gonna quote it all as well as link to it):

“Unfortunately Kody suffered a broken foot during yesterday’s practice. It required surgery that went well today and doctors expect a full recovery. It’s a pretty standard foot injury that we’ve dealt with in the past and we expect him to be full-go by June. If anyone knows how to battle adversity it’s Kody Walker.”

Wow. A broken foot is a 'standard' injury. Am I the only person who finds that a ... fascinating statement?

Kids break bones (although I never did, and still never have, despite playing about as much as a normal kid). Even so, I still have to insist that a sport that accepts a broken foot as "standard" is not really a sport that has a lot of leeway to call itself "safe." The two don't go together.

And again, we're not even getting into what happens to at least some of the brains of those guys on the field.

Please spare me your self-righteous chastising about your brother-in-law or some other person you or someone you know knows who is the ultimate saint of a coach and molder of men and all that pseudo-religious crap. A game that frankly acknowledges, and sometimes even brags about, breaking the Temple (remember 1 Corinthians 6:19, kids?) or wreaking irreparable harm on the bearer of the Imago Dei doesn't really qualify as "safe" by any sane definition. Are we so far gone as to be unable to see this? And any coach, no matter how much a Builder of Men or whatever, who is participating in this system is at least as much a Breaker of Men as a Builder of Men. At the absolute minimum, suddenly trying to apply the word "safe" to a game that has for decades gloated in not being a "safe" game is pretty hypocritical, yes?

At minimum, players clearly aren't buying it from coaches any more than from NFL owners. Another round of early or early-ish retirements kicked in over the last couple of weeks (more on that next time), including one player who was all of 23 years old.

Panic isn't pretty, especially when it expresses itself in what can only be called lashing out. We're seeing an awful lot of such lashing out from football types of late. It looks an awful lot like the kind of lashing out we saw in previous decades from people involved in the tobacco industry, and more recently from those dependent upon the fossil-fuel industry. It's the kind of thing you see when the disinformation campaigns show signs of not working.

Like NFL owners, if NFL or NCAA coaches can't do better than this, and if they can't at least pretend to give a damn about those players in their charge, they really should shut up. They're doing no one any good, and doing many people (not least themselves) lots of harm. And harm is the reason we're even having this conversation in the first place.

Kody Walker suffered a standard injury in Arkansas spring football...it involved something breaking.

Unwise words

In the NFL it is the players on the field who take, in the course of sixteen or more games per season plus practices, a huge number of physical blows, some of them (quite a lot in some cases) inflicting roughly the same force as a car wreck on their bodies.

So why, at the risk of a "too soon" joke, are the owners increasingly the ones acting as if they've been hit in the head too many times?

First it was Jerry Jones, noted loudmouth, who had to walk back some ill-advised comments calling "absurd" the very idea that getting repeatedly hit in the head over so many years could possibly have anything to do with brain trauma. While John Mara of the New York Giants tried to strike a sane tone in comments suggesting that the NFL really needed to deal with the issue, the balance shifted back this week with leaden words from Jim Irsay of the Baltimore Indianapolis Colts. Irsay, attempting the subtle and difficult craft of analogy, ended up suggesting to a radio audience that playing football somehow carried about the same kind of health risk as ... taking aspirin.

Clank.

Fortunately, there are people capable of calling foolishness foolishness, even at jock-factory ESPN. Actually, this may be a case where the pervasive ex-jock culture of that network is an advantage; people who remember what it was like had no trouble coming up with an appropriate measure of outrage at the cloddish hatefulness of such remarks -- not to mention family members of people who ended up with long-term damage from all that aspirin head-to-head contact. (It really is worth working your way through several of the videos in that sequence.) Louis Riddick and Jerome Bettis have some choice words for NFL ownership, in which Bettis acknowledges some modification of his playing style might have happened if he'd known then what he knows now. Mike Golic of the ESPN "Mike and Mike" radio show practically blows a gasket at Irsay's dumb remarks. Former Colts center Jeff Saturday was more measured in his comments, evidently trying not to throw his former owner under the bus, but also admitting that he had recently undergone an examination to find ... well, whatever can be found at this point and enlisting his wife to monitor his behavior and condition for, presumably, the rest of his life.

Given such sentiments, it's no surprise that current Lions player DeAndre Levy also jumped on Irsay's comments, questioning where Irsay might have gotten such expertise. Others have also noted Irsay's own checkered past, including being caught driving drunk in the past.

For this blog, what such sentiments expressed so carelessly demonstrate is a point I've made often, and one perhaps that needs to be made more. I have expressed the concern that for a sports fan, one's "participation" in chosen sports is not without a kind of ethical liability. It isn't really possible to flip on the game on Sunday, or buy that jersey or spring for tickets, without in effect being party to whatever harms are visited on the physical participants in the game. In that light being ignorant about such harms is an irresponsible and untenable ethical position.

I went to two spring training games in Bradenton, Florida earlier this week. The Pittsburgh Pirates hosted first the Baltimore Orioles and then the Minnesota Twins Sunday and Monday. Thankfully, I didn't see any notable injuries in either game. It could have happened; even in spring training guys can get hurt and hurt badly. Generally, though, players recover from such injuries. Severe arm injuries can put a pitcher out for a year or more, after surgery; nonetheless, it usually doesn't end a career the way it used to do.

Even so, that bum arm generally doesn't irreparably destroy that player's future quality of life.

It's getting harder and harder to say that about football-related brain trauma, where studies keep suggesting that about a third of people who play football (pro or not) are going to come away with some form of debilitating neurotrauma.

But that point has been made, by me and others.

What is becoming clear is that, at least in the case of the NFL (and do you really think the NCAA is doing any better?), the people who profit from this level of physical damage have very little interest in mitigating that damage at all. Irsay's comments, also including the assertion that players know what they're getting into if they play football, have more or less the effect of Pilate washing his hands of what happens to that two-bit Galilean rabbi -- nice dramatic gesture, but the crucifixion still happened on Pilate's watch and with his name on it.

These guys don't give a s--t. And they, even more than the players, are the ones enriched by your ticket purchases and souvenir buys and cable or extra packages. To participate in the enrichment of the NFL power structure is to keep company with some of the sleasiest people in the USA.

As the saying goes, bad company ruins good morals. Or, as it used to be put back where I grew up, if you lay down with the dogs you're gonna get up with fleas.

Getting itchy yet?

He'll spend the rest of his life watching for telltale signs and being monitored.

I'm guessing he won't be the only one.

Everybody knows now

Apparently this has a chance to be a thoroughly contentious off-season for the NFL in ways that go beyond the quarterback carousel.

In the wake of last week's seemingly inadvertent admission of a football-CTE link by an NFL official, and with research suggesting brain trauma was far more widespread among non-NFL veterans than previously believed, folks connected to the NFL are not keeping their thoughts to themselves.

Exhibit 1: John Mara, owner of the New York Giants, not only acknowledged the admission of the previously denied football-CTE link (although somehow claiming that the admission wasn't new), but declared that link to be teh most important issue the NFL faces, adding "and I don't think anything else comes close." Mara acknowledged the research indicating CTE in 32% of a sample of non-NFL football players in making his statement.

Exhibit 2: Kevin Turner, a former University of Alabama and NFL player who had been particularly active in supporting the settlement reached between the NFL and a large body of former players suffering from brain trauma-related maladies, died today after his six-year struggle with ALS.

Exhibit 3: Bruce Arians, coach of the Arizona Cardinals, has apparently had enough and decided it is time to end this whole foolishness once and for all. You're one of those parents who doesn't want your child playing football? You're a fool. Mr. Arians (and that is more respect than you deserve), there are worse things than being a fool. There is, for example, being a damned fool. And you, sir, are a damned fool. And yes, I am using that word theologically. This after Dallas Cowboys owner and noted intellect Jerry Jones declared "absurd" any notion that football could possibly have anything to do with concussions or CTE or any harm to his lil' ol' players, later attempting to walk his remarks back to the now-discredited position that "more research is needed."

Exhibit 4: Of course, Arians's employers had their credibility taken down several more notches today by the New York Times. You might remember the careers of, say, Steve Young and Troy Aikman, two of the top quarterbacks of the 1990s. You might also remember that both of them suffered a series of rather frightening concussions, career-ending in Young's case. Somehow those rather famous and highly-documented concussions never made it into the much ballyhooed report the NFL issued in 2003, declaring that (much like Jones above) football and brain trauma were unrelated. As a side note, the Times also documented that during that period of the NFL's history, quite a few of their owners and executives decided that it was a good idea to get advice from the same people who made Big Tobacco the moral exemplar of American goodness and decency that they are today. More than a few people have compared the NFL's moral compass in the brain-trauma era to to that of Big Tobacco or, more recently, the fossil fuel industry. Well, that might have been more true than anyone realized. Wonder if we'll find out that they've also consulted with attorneys for Exxon-Mobil as well.

Exhibit 5: Meanwhile, it is becoming increasingly apparent to NFL players that nobody else -- not the NFL, not the NCAA at an earlier stage, and certainly not football fans -- is going to look out for their interests, so they'd damned well better start looking out for themselves. The latest to start speaking out is DeAndre Levy, a linebacker for the Detroit Lions. Whie in injury rehab last season, Levy started to look around and do that dangerous thing called "thinking."  Then he started asking questions. Really good questions. Questions about why the NFL continues to emply some of the most discredited and frankly reprehensible representatives of the hardcore denialist era of the NFL. This isn't Levy's first time speaking up on the issue of brain trauma, nor is he necessarily the first to question the continuing presence of those hardcore denialists in the NFL (and as a side note, it turns out that some current NFL players actually did go see the movie Concussion.) This is the only thing that is going to get any movement at this point. Owners, despite Mara's protestations, are still going to put their interests first, and fans clearly aren't going to do a damned thing. Players are going to have to look out for themselves. Some, like Chris Borland, will decide it's not worth the risk; some, like Levy, will choose to stick around, at least for a few years. But nobody else is going to give a damn for the current guys on the gridiron, so it is absolutely right and good for the players to start demanding a seat at the table, along with the suffering former players, survivors of deceased former NFL players, and the parents of those kids who die playing football.

Exhibit 6: The Onion is still on the case.

This could be an active off-season indeed.

Steve Young in 1999 (one among many); and...

Troy Aikman...several times. 

But not if you read that 2003 NFL report on how football doesn't cause concussions.

Quickie: Culture change doesn't come easily

My schedule keeps conspiring against my ability to blog lately, but I certainly didn't want this one to get overlooked: an NFL player actually self-reported concussion symptoms in the course of a game. And the player was a fairly big name to boot.

The culture of football has demanded, pretty much as long as football has existed, that players play hurt, and more specifically they play hurt without saying anything about it. Back in Teddy Roosevelt's day it was literally better to die than to fess up to being hurt. While I doubt that most modern players truly feel that way, In the course of a game a football player really doesn't care about his future. I'm not trying to be cruel; ask one. The only thing that matters is staying on the field for the next play, and the next, and so on. If something is broken or your bell is rung, hide it. That's the code.

So, when a pretty big-name quarterback came to the sideline and reported feeling concussion-like symptoms on Nov. 29, it was a bit of a jolt. Ben Roethlisberger did exactly that, though, in the Pittsburgh Steelers' game against the Seattle Seahawks. Accordingly, he was put into the NFL's concussion protocol, and ended up missing the rest of the game. The Steelers lost.

Roethlisberger continued in the concussion protocol for part of that following week. (This article has a quick-and-dirty summary of the requirements a player in that protocol must meet in order to return to the field.) He was found not to have a concussion, and returned to action the following game.

There will be troglodytes who will see nothing but Roethlisberger missing the end of that game and blame him for being soft. He's been accused of exaggerating injuries before, so that is a fairly easy leap for such a trog to make. So far, most of the public reaction has been restrained and even somewhat supportive, as in the initial link above. But the troglodytes tend to lurk in comment sections.

Seeing a big-name athlete watch out for his own health is not a thing to be dismissed or taken lightly. Even so, though, it's hard to assume that some high-school kid who gets his head slammed into the ground and suddenly can't remember his name is going to think, "I need to get to the sideline, that's what Ben Roethlisberger did." The culture change has to be built in from the bottom as well, which is presumably the purpose of this site.

Tied into the forthcoming movie Concussion (and quite unafraid to pitch the Will Smith film, as you can see at the bottom), this site, also tied to this educationally oriented site, appears to be aimed at making the avoidance of head trauma part of the early levels of football. How much effect it can have I don't know (young boys aren't always noted for having a lick of good sense, and are often allergic to looking or seeming uncool), but at least somebody's trying, I guess. When paired with news like this out of Florida some weeks back, one might be excused for feeling vaguely hopeful.

For a better view go visit that website.

Is there even a "last straw"?

First, before you read anything else, watch this video.

I'll wait.

It's not a pretty sight. I'm not trying to make you uncomfortable (well, maybe a little) (OK, maybe more than a little). But if you're into NFL football, all up on the TV every Sunday, you need to watch it.

It is a pretty sickening sight to see. As Case Keenum, playing at quarterback for the St. Louis Rams, tries to escape a tackle, he gets wrapped up and slung down by an onrushing Baltimore Ravens defender, his head being slammed against the turf in the process. The slightly-slo-mo replay ... it hurts just to watch.

Keep in mind that this game is being played in Baltimore. The Ravens play in something that is currently called M&T Bank Stadium. Some years ago the stadium had a natural-grass playing field. Even so, having your body slung against it was going to be painful and damaging. However, the Ravens (presumably) switched to an artificial surface in 2003, and changed to a different artificial surface in 2010. There may be some who will try to tell you that artificial surfaces aren't that hard any more. They probably have a vested interest in your believing that. Harry Frankfurt has a word for that kind of thing.

So Case Keenum's head makes very hard contact with a hard surface. Next, Keenum tries to get up, but it doesn't go very well. Somehow a teammate thinks the best thing to do for his fallen quarterback is to drag him up from the ground by his arm. A trainer comes on the field to check him out.

This was apparently a pivotal moment. Because this trainer took the field, apparently the ATC spotter for the game -- a certified trainer designated by the NFL with the authority to stop the game -- didn't do so, or at least that's what Rams coach Jeff Fisher thought. The trainer, in turn, was eventually waived off the field by an official (again, according to Fisher), leaving the quarterback in because, supposedly, he said he felt o.k. Keenum ended up staying in the game for two more ineffective plays, the second of which resulted in a fumble that gave the Ravens the ball and the chance to win the game, which they did.

OK. So if the ATC spotter and the trainer somehow got prevented from doing their work, what of the head man? Sorry, but Fisher was in "game management mode." The game was tied and late, and Fisher was apparently already on to the next play. Somehow none of the other coaches on the field managed to take note of Keenum's wobbliness. It didn't occur to any of his teammates on the field that maybe, if at the most base level, a wobbly and unsteady and possibly concussed quarterback (who was the backup QB at the start of the season, at that) might not ought to be on the field. The trainer apparently thought that a guy whose head was just slammed into the concrete was somehow capable of answering for himself coherently.

At least one person on the Rams sideline suspected something bad was up: backup quarterback Nick Foles. While probably not completely devoid of self-interest in getting up and starting to take warmup tosses, even an opportunistic Foles was aware that Keenum was not right in the head, in the most literal sense of the word.

I was in the midst of a long drive on Sunday, so my first exposure to this story was on Monday, with a few hits on ESPN and other sports media outlets and a brief "trending" moment on social media. Keenum was entered into the NFL's "concussion protocol," meaning he has to pass cognitive tests before he can return to football activities. A handful of stories and editorials popped up, expressing various levels of scorn or outrage, particularly in the St. Louis media, not surprisingly. Yesterday, you might have thought that this would be, maybe, the incident that would provoke enough outrage or scorn or some kind of emotion to force some kind of reckoning. You might have thought this would be the last straw, or something close to it.

Today? All you can hear about the NFL is about Johnny Manziel's party habits.

Seriously, go look at that page. Notice all the NFL stories queued up to the left: you have to scroll down an awfully long way to find anything about Keenum's injury and the fallout from the procedural failure.

In essence, the story has already blown over.

We may hear a little more when the NFL concludes its "investigation" (no, I don't really expect much from it, hence the scare quotes). Maybe the trainer or the ATC spotter will get some kind of  It's possible that Fisher might lose his job, although that was already a pretty strong possibility before the game. The mediocre Rams might face some sort of fine or other punishment. It's possible that local outcry in St. Louis might be more pronounced.

But really, I despair of anything changing signficantly.

Maybe if the affected quarterback was somebody more famous than Case Keenum. Would there be more reaction if it were Tom Brady's head being slammed into the concrete, or Peyton Manning's or even Ravens quarterback Joe Flacco's.

I'm beginning to wonder if even an NFL player dying right there on the field, in front of God and all the cameras, would even provoke the needed outrage any more.

So, a few points to review:

1. A player who has just taken that blow to the head is the last person who is credible to determine his own condition. Let this be clear: EVERY ATHLETE WILL LIE in that position. These people do not care about their own health and well-being at this point. I know that makes no sense. It's still true. There are sheep herders in remote Mongolia who would have been more qualified to determine Keenum's fitness for play than Keenum himself.

2. Coaches really are not going to be paying attention to the quarterback's or anybody else's immediate health when the game is on the line. To be blunt, we pay them not to pay attention to anything but getting the next play called. So they're not going to pay attention to anything but getting the next play called. Coaches simply have too much stuff in their faces in that situation. These calls cannot be left up to them.

3. If a designated spotter is going to be given authority in these situations, that authority cannot be conditional. The spotter has to be able to call the medical timeout even if a trainer is on the field. This business can't be preempted by turf wars over authority.

4. Officials need to be disciplined as well in these situations.

5. Anybody who's going to be intimidated by fans in such a situation cannot be trusted with the job. A similarly ugly situation occured in an MLS playoff match a couple of weeks ago, in which a concussed goalie was left out to dry for about five more minutes of play before finally being removed from the match when he more or less belly-flopped after a shot on goal. The goalie was on the visiting team, and the home fans did not allow for the league's protocol on head injuries to be carried out properly. That can't happen. If some means of disciplining fans becomes necessary, do it.

6. It bears repeating: EVERY ATHLETE WILL LIE in that situation. Keenum was no different than any other athlete in any other sport in that respect.

At this point, how do you, followers of Christ and fans of football, trust the NFL any more?

If you don't, what are you doing about it?

(If I sound angry...well, I am. Why aren't you?)

He's good to go.

The many challenges of soccer

So the Women's World Cup final is approaching halftime at this point, and the main story so far has been the US blitzing out to four goals in the first sixteen minutes, only to have Japan pull one back and slow the US down in the last chunk of the half.

Despite a few oddities (like, how in the world did Germany and France end up playing each other in a quarterfinal -- more on that later -- and was that stadium in Edmonton ever full?), I dare say this will turn out to be a successful WWC. One can hope, with maybe some justification, that the impact will be such that more women and girls get opportunities to play, and maybe play professionally if they've got the stuff to do it, and maybe not go broke doing it. One can hope that maybe the National Women's Soccer League (yes, it does exist) will get some more fans at games.

But it would be dishonest to pass off soccer as the ideal sport for the ethically sensitive fan. There are, as is the case with any sport, reasons for concern -- some of them well-known, some less so. Just to review a few:

1) FIFA. Actually this could be one, two, three, and maybe four, and the general corruption of this world governing body of soccer complicates one's reactions to some of the other issues to be considered below. I'm not even bothering to provide links here; if you haven't heard about the US and Swiss investigations of that body (I mean, really; if the Swiss are investigating you...) and can't find out more with a quick Google search it's very unlikely you could find your way to this highly obscure blog. Just look up Sepp Blatter and prepare to gag a lot.

2) CTE. After football and hockey, it's very possible that soccer is the most susceptible sport to chronic traumatic encephalopathy. At last report two or possibly three soccer players, including a Brazilian World Cup star of the 1950s, have been confirmed as having CTE by the post-mortem exams that are as of yet the only way to confirm that condition with certainty.

Think about it; not just all the headers, but all the collisions. If someone had tried to convince you that soccer was not a contact sport, hopefully the World Cup has disabused you of that naive belief. Recall the particularly frightening collision between Germany's Alexandra Popp and the US's Morgan Brian in last Tuesday's semifinal. It illustrates both just how such violent collisions can happen in the game, and soccer's particular difficulty in dealing with the problem.

One of soccer's particular charms is the utter relentlessness of the clock; it stops for nothing. It is the un-baseball in that respect. But a perpetually running clock doesn't allow for a clear diagnosis of whether a player has suffered a concussion or not. Even in (American) football, the clock can at least be stopped and the injury at least has a chance to be assessed properly (even if it frequently is not). Also complicating matters are the substitution rules in top-level soccer; unlike American football, but like baseball, a player cannot return to the game once removed. Furthermore, in such games, only three substitutions are allowed at all. So you can see the potential trouble; you run the risk of removing a player only for her or him to be o.k. after all, or you play on "a man down," or playing 10-on-11, while the player's condition is evaluated (or for good if you've already used your subs).

So how to address this? Do you stop the clock? (Major League Soccer and some other leagues are already starting to try "hydration breaks" to deal with intense heat; Orlando City may never play a home game without hydration breaks. But the idea isn't as out of bounds as it might have been a few years ago.) Come up with a "concussion substitution" who can then be pulled if the stricken player turns out o.k.? Declare the player automatically out of the game? Any or all of the above may be considered, but before long soccer partisans will be sounding like American football fans complaining about "being soft" or changing the nature of the game.

And of course, looming over all of this is the hopelessly corrupt FIFA. Is an organization that thinks Qatar in August is ideal for the game's showcase event even remotely capable of thinking rationally about the health of its players? And how much do you, the person of faith who enjoys the game, want to invest yourself and potentially your money in that particular hope?

3) Fan -isms. Until the last few decades, if Americans knew much about soccer at all (aside from the heyday of the old NASL and the New York Cosmos with Pelé), it might well have been less about the game and more about the hooliganism of some of its European (mostly English) fans. Fan racism is also a potent poison in the European game; players such as Kevin-Prince Boateng, from Ghana, and Mario Balotelli, an Italian of African ancestry, have at times encountered a horrifying racism, frequently in Italy but potentially anywhere, that might make even the most hardened Southern Neo-Confederate blanch with horror. (Seriously, read that link above only if/when you have a strong stomach.)

So far, the US game seems remarkably free of such plague. I seriously doubt it is totally free, and it's possible the game here benefits from the relative lack of coverage it gets in US media. But by comparison to the Euro game, fan racism in the US seems a lot less, possibly because soccer in the US seems to draw far more diverse crowds than the other major sports. By "diverse" I mean not only drawing fans from different races, but having what might be called un-segregated crowds; whites not always only with whites, Asian not only with Asian, and so forth. Whites hanging out with blacks hanging out with Hispanics hanging out with Asians. Easily the most such diverse sporting event I've ever attended live was my one match at Sporting Park in Kansas City, the first MLS match played there. I don't know if that's the case all over the US -- I seriously doubt it -- but it stood out dramatically to me even in the midst of a rather exciting game in an extremely modern stadium.

Meanwhile, while homophobia also rears its ugly head on occasion in Europe, MLS not only welcomed Robbie Rogers back into the league, but practically begged him to return from his premature retirement in which he dealt with the ramifications of his coming out. While the NBA went into convulsions over Jason Collins's status, and the NFL nearly fell apart over Michael Sam (not to mention baseball's ongoing straight-only facade), Rogers has spent the last couple of years settling in with the LA Galaxy with amazingly little stir after his debut. Again, I would be shocked if he hadn't received a bit of hate mail, and the US media's continuing ignoring of a sport that now regularly puts more butts in seats than the NHL and NBA might again be benefitting the league in this case, but the sport seems to be going about its business with little fuss over the subject. Not to mention that the newly-crowned World Cup champions from the US have relied on Abby Wambach and Megan Rapinoe for several years now with marginal fuss, and even a certain amount of activism from Rapinoe.

Will an expanding fan base possibly bring more struggle with the -isms of human culture? Will geographical expansion do so? It's something to watch in the future.

This is just a scraping of the surface. I didn't even get around to the potential pitfalls of a sport so reliant on nationalism for much of its appeal and structure; player responsibility and the appearance of making allowances for poor behavior, with troubled goalie Hope Solo as Exhibit A; and the impact of any and all of these things on youth soccer and its continuing popularity.

While the US soccer governing body seems to have its head screwed on more or less cleanly, the overarching structure and its mind-boggling corruption will be incredibly challenging for the sport in its future. It will be virtually impossible for the mindful fan to continue forward without being ever more mindful of how the sport conducts itself in the face of those challenges, and how it adapts in its continuing growth in the United States.

"Non-contact sport"...yeah, right.

Chris Borland's research

Note: It's been a while.  In the interim I've accepted a call to a pastorate and moved to Florida (a town with a pretty well-known college football program at that), which has admittedly kept me occupied.  But as you might have heard, there was some news today in the ongoing football-brain trauma connection, and that got me to carve out some time to address it.

Followers of football, and maybe of sports more generally, were rudely reacquainted with a subject that seemed to have died down for a while with the news of the retirement of Chris Borland, a linebacker for the San Francisco 49ers.  The jolting part of the story was that Borland was no grizzled veteran; actually he had just finished his rookie season, which was a highly promising one by all accounts.  Also jolting was Borland's stated rationale for his early retirement.  Borland frankly acknowledged that he was getting out after a lot of consideration of the risks of playing football in light of the last several years of revelations about former and often deceased NFL players suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and other brain trauma-related diseases.

The combination of Borland's youth and his frankness about his motivation was enough to awaken the beasts of sports television (ESPN in particular, but others too) and sports-talk radio, not to mention the ever-virulent spheres of social media.  The subhuman trolls of Twitter were out in force, though perhaps not carrying as much of the day as might have been the case in the past.  For the most part, public figures refrained from bashing Borland (though there were certainly exceptions, but even those were relatively restrained in some cases).  The NFL, of course, had to release a statement that, while striking a respectful pose towards Borland, more or less called him a wuss by insisting the sport has never been safer.  (Increasingly the NFL is joining the ranks of the tobacco industry and Big Oil/climate denialism in its ability to forfeit credibility with every statement it issues. But I digress.)

Borland also acknowledged that last year during training camp he experienced what he thought might have been a concussion, but did not report the injury and continued to participate in drills in his concern for making the team.  He acknowledged questioning himself and his actions afterwards, leading to the research (including consulting with scientists researching CTE) that helped inform his decision (maybe including this bit of information).

Herewith, a few thoughts:

1. Borland was not the first person to retire from the NFL at a young age over health concerns.  In fact he wasn't the first member of his team to retire this month over health issues, but Patrick Willis's retirement was over very specific injuries he had already suffered, not over potential long-term harm. Two other NFL players, Jason Worilds of the Pittsburgh Steelers and Jake Locker of the Tennessee Titans, also left the game last week, and Locker's frequent injuries played a part in his decision.  But in none of those cases was brain trauma listed as a factor.  Despite the oddity of four young (30 or younger) players retiring in the space of about a week, Borland's case is still different and potentially the most challenging.
For that matter, Borland has a predecessor from almost three years ago.  Jacob Bell walked away in 2012, and the risks of brain trauma were among the factors he acknowledged in his decision.  Bell, though, was 31, and had had a respectable career already.  Rashard Mendenhall also made mention of injury risks in his discussion of his retirement at age 26, but it was not a primary factor in his choice. What Borland has done is unique and challenging enough that it will reverberate within the football industry for some time, even if the sports-media beast gets bored and lets the story drop.

2. Borland's opinion is not unchallenged among NFL players.  Even within the link above to the main Borland story, someone named Bobby Wagner is quoted via tweet as saying he'll play until he can't anymore because he loves the game too much.  Because this is a faith-oriented blog and because I'm a pastor now, I'm going to refrain from commenting on that, or on Chris Conte's stated belief that brain trauma and early death is totally worth getting to run around and hit people.  (Yes, he claims that his remarks were not specifically related to concussion issues, but considering he had just come off a second concussion and his lack of other clarification, I'm not buying it.)  OK, one bit of snark; I don't know if Conte is married or not, but I have trouble imagining why any woman would want to be married to him with this expressed lack of concern for his future health -- given what happens to women like Kasandra Perkins, Jovan Belcher's girlfriend.

3. Borland's concern did not necessarily need to be limited to long-term health concerns.  The aforementioned Jovan Belcher was only 25 when he murdered his girlfriend and committed suicide, and his brain showed signs of CTE in the posthumous analysis.  And Chris Henry, the Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver who died in a strange automotive accident in 2009 while still an active player, already showed significant brain damage despite being only 26.  Paul Oliver was only 29 when he committed suicide, and his brain also showed advanced CTE.  Other former players who lived into their 40s or 50s report that the kinds of symptoms frequently associated with CTE -- memory loss, violent mood swings -- began to manifest themselves as early as their thirties.  If Borland was concerned about the health risks associated with football and brain trauma, it wouldn't have been impossible for such symptoms or impacts to have started manifesting themselves much sooner than even he might have thought.

4. Don't let's kid ourselves; this isn't going to bring down the NFL, not even close.  For every Chris Borland that chooses to walk away, there are a hundred or more ready to take his place.  Maurice Clarett, the former Ohio State running back, took to Twitter to offer a different take on Borland's decision, noting that Borland "probably had a backup plan" and that an awful lot of football players come through their college careers with no practical "backup plan" nor the ability or credentials to form one.  Football won't go away any time soon, but it does run the risk of going the route of boxing; a once-dominant sport that becomes a spectacle of the rich keeping their kids playing but happily watching the less fortunate (desperate for any out or up) bash their brains out on the field for their entertainment.

5. And therein lies the rub for the would-be Christ-follower who enjoys football.  Do you keep on watching?  Buying the merchandise?  Paying for the cable or dish packages?  Where does a sport that cannot shake this deadly connection no matter how much its main purveyor claims otherwise fit into a Christ-oriented ethic of living?  Just how close are we to recreating the days of the gladiatorial combats?  (Do you really think that the fact that death comes slowly, maybe years later, rather than immediately in the arena makes that much difference?)
And no, don't even try to make any claims about it being up to the players to guard their own health or take the risks (which Borland decided not to do, after all).  What is at stake here is how we, as sports fans who are trying to be Christ-followers, express that following even in this realm of our lives.  It is, I will insist, totally irrelevant that Chris Conte has decided that the risk is worth it.  Your own response to the risks associated with the game are not contingent on the players' own choices, for which they and only they can be accountable in the end.  The question ultimately can only be: can I, seeking to follow Christ, partake of such an injurious and potentially destructive spectacle in good conscience?  Even sports like auto racing, in which death is far more frequent, does not kill its participants so routinely -- a fatal crash very explicitly means that something went wrong.  The players, from Mike Webster to Junior Sean to Paul Oliver, were playing football exactly the way they were taught to play.
We cannot escape the ethical challenge here.  To the degree that we try to evade it we discredit ourselves and our professed faith.  The question must not and cannot be swept under the rug.  Time to start facing up to the challenge.

Credit: 49ers.com

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.