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.

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.

Book Commentary: Unintended Impact

Prebstle, Jim. Unintended Impact: One Athlete's Journey from Concussions in Amateur Football to CTE Dementia. Edina: Beaver's Pond Press, 2015. 265pp. ISBN 978-1-59298-883-9.

I have previously in this blog raised the unsettling spectre that, aside from those former NFL players, known and yet to be known, suffering the lingering effects of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), there might well be numerous players (thousands? tens of thousands?) whose career arc never approached the NFL but yet suffer from the same debilitating effects of their shorter football careers.

This book tells one such story.

Dick Prebstle grew up in the football-crazed precincts of Canton and Massilon, Ohio. Born in 1942, he progressed through what was already a familiar path for a young athlete; beginning to play tackle football at age ten, getting onto the high school team (in his case skipping the "freshman team" that was more common in the 1950s), and as a successful high-school star (and also an excellent student), being recruited to a successful collegiate program, in his case at Michigan State. Prebstle was mostly a backup quarterback at MSU, and a succession of severe injuries, including a now-shocking number of concussions, ultimately ended his career prematurely. (His younger brother, the author of this book, would last longer in football, and was a member of MSU's 1965 national championship team, but neither brother would play in the NFL.)

Dick Prebstle's post-football life seemed destined for success, despite an unsuccessful attempt at law school. He ultimately made his way into business; getting a foothold in the insurance business before  maneuvering his way to the acquisition of a construction equipment company.

Jim Prebstle's story of his big brother's rise and decline has been dropping hints along the way -- frequent migraines, unexpected illnesses suggested as stress-related at the time -- that all was not to be well, but the decline is marked sharply at this point. Without giving away too many details (you are supposed to read the book after all), Jim Prebstle reads Dick's decline in retrospect, armed (as he and Dick's other family members were not at the time) with the understanding of CTE's effect on the afflicted brain. While a CTE diagnosis, which can only be confirmed posthumously, cannot change the suffering its victim and family go through, it can be a means to understand how a seemingly healthy and successful man like Dick Prebstle could be laid low so suddenly. The most marked changes in behavior and cognitive function began to manifest themselves in Dick Prebstle in the early 1980s, according to Jim Prebstle's account.

Dick Prebstle lived until 2012, aged 69.

Think of thirty years in fearsome mental decline, kicking in before age 40.

Jim Prebstle's account is straightforwardly retrospective, reading Dick's life in light of his posthumous diagnosis. Having learned how CTE works, through their experience with the Boston University study that has announced so many such diagnoses, Jim and other relatives of Dick, including wife and children, are calling up painful and baffling memories, and beginning to re-interpret those memories through new information and understanding that was simply not out there in the 1980s. (The book's Forward is by Dr. Robert A. Stern, a member of the BU study group, and is particularly useful to read and digest.)

As Jim Prebstle's account unfolds, a plethora of related issues float, sometimes unintentionally, to the surface -- the relationship between brothers, particularly the overachieving older brother and the younger brother constantly judged by his elder's accomplishments; the "warrior codes" and implicit assumptions about manhood attached to football; the sheer lack of understanding of brain injury and the harrowingly outdated and ultimately deadly way young football players were taught to hit head-first; the sheer idolatry (my word, not Prebstle's) of football in certain parts of American culture; the "steel mill mentality" of the upper Midwest; the bitterness and rancor that result from disputes over care of dementia patients; the staggering physical deterioration of a CTE-afflicted brain; and many more.

The one significant disappointment of the book is the Epilogue, in which football idolatry still demands an Affirmation of Faith in the sport despite its destruction of some percentage of those who play it. The insistence that there has to be a way to make the sport safer still rings out, despite the lack of any evidence that this is so. Preserving football still comes first.

Nonetheless, read the book as a kind of personal counterbalance to a more broad-based account such as that in League of Denial. I suspect more such stories are going to begin to appear, as more former players or their family members try to understand what they or their loved ones have suffered, and how it could all be a result of the game they loved.

Maybe it *is* a religion...

This one was too much to pass up...

You may have noticed in different news outlets (or on my social media feeds if you follow those) an amusing-looking story about a course offering at Presbyterian College, a small (yes, Presbyterian) school in a small South Carolina town, on a timely subject: The Religion of SEC Football.

It's an elective course, team-taught by professors in history and English who both identify as intense fans of schools in the Southeastern Conference. The course description is fairly descriptive:

Woo Pig Sooie!? Roll Tide!? Go Cocks!? What is it about college football that turns otherwise sane people into raving lunatics? Why is it that each fall millions of people schedule their lives around SEC football, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for RV’s and tailgating for days prior to a game? Why do fans often hate another school — such as the ‘Bama fan who poisoned 130-year old trees at Auburn? This class will attempt to answer these sorts of questions by exploring the ‘religion’ of Southeastern Conference football and how each of us fit into that faith.

Sounds like fun, I guess.

In truth, the course is not new. It was first offered back in 2003, and has been offered "periodically" ever since. For whatever reason, this was the year that nationwide publicity came upon the class. It's a fairly interesting coincidence of timing, as Presbyterian's football team is making its biannual pilgrimage to serve as a sacrificial lamb for an SEC school, in this case the University of Florida, later this season. (Tickets are available.)

Of course, PC (as it's sometimes called) has a bit of experience as a sacrificial lamb. The school's athletic programs moved into NCAA Division I in 2007. The football team plays in the Football Championship Subdivision (what used to be called I-AA), in the Big South conference, but like many schools on that level it sells itself out to big-time programs as, in essence, cannon fodder. The gain in such a sacrifice, of course, is a paycheck, one that provides a substantial chunk of the athletic budget for a school of PC's size. (Please divest yourself of any fantasy you might hold about athletic revenue having any beneficial impact on the school's academic programs. Boosters essentially have to be bribed into supporting anything academic.)

I can only wonder what the benefit is beyond the paycheck. Partly as a result of their paycheck pursuits (they also travel to play Central Michigan of the Mid-American Conference), PC only has four home football games this year. If the point of such a move in the athletic department has anything to do with the enhancement of campus life, four home games seems a pretty meager return. For what it's worth, the Blue Hose (yep, that's the nickname) basketball program has known some bumps along the way in its Division I journey (with no subdivision to cover itself in that sport) but at least they got to play half their regular-season games at home last season.

In short, it might be worth some professor's time to develop a course on PC's own athletic journey and what, if any, benefit it has brought to the university as a whole. But for now, back to the class subject at hand, the "religion" of SEC football.

You might be expecting this blog to jump in feet-first. And yes, this blog would normally not pass up a chance to do so. But honestly, I can't quite get that excited by it.

Yes, there's a ton of excess in SEC fanship. The anecdotes related in the larger article above are all sufficient evidence of that -- the parents who blew off their daughter's wedding because it conflicted with a 'Bama game, the 'Bama guy who poisoned the Auburn trees, the PC professor who floated to his wife the idea of naming their child Zorback (as in Ra-Zorback) (I'm guessing he was at least joking somewhat, but it really did happen to someone...). It's comical, or it would be if it weren't so sad.

But such idolatry (and that's what is, well beyond mere "zealotry" as called in one of the articles) is hardly restricted to the SEC, is it?

The conference has its own network, sure, but in this they followed the lead of the Big Ten Eleven Fourteen Whatever.

Despite the antics of certain church-attendance-enforcing head coaches/violators of the Constitution, the SEC doesn't actually engage in the direct mixing of their athletic programs with religious missions (looking at you, Notre Dame, BYU; please sit down, Baylor).

Is the SEC egregiously bad about worshiping its teams, or even its own conference reputation? Yes. But you don't have to be in the SEC to have a cultish following.

Are they that much worse than, say, the Big Whatever, the Other Big Twelve Ten Whatever, the ACC, or the Pac-10 Whatever? I don't know that they are. And does it even compare to the idolatry of the NFL, the league which (as one of the better lines from Concussion puts it) now owns the day of the week that used to belong to the church?

And that probably isn't the worst part. The worst part, beyond the idolatry of any individual team or conference, is the inherent, but much less questioned, idolatry of the sport itself -- an idolatry that, as regular readers of this blog will guess I believe, claims its own physical sacrifices regularly.

When somebody develops an academic course that tackles that particular worship, then I'll pay more attention.

Circle Nov. 19 on your calendar...

Baylor

It's as if God decided to deliver me some headlines tailor-made for a blog about sports and faith.

On Thursday, heads started rolling at Baylor University. Proceedings were announced to fire the school's president, athletic director, and head football coach. (The athletic director has since saved the school the trouble by resigning.)

As you've quite possibly heard by now, the terminations were carried out in response to a report from a law firm investigating allegations of sexual abuse against female students at Baylor, many (but not all) by members of the football program. The university's Board of Regents issued a Findings of Fact report which speaks to nothing less than institutional failure, particularly regarding Title IX and the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) reauthorization of 2013, both for the university as a whole and the athletic department and football in program in particular.

Predictably, the story has spawned a great deal of pontificating, high-minded speculation about culture change in college sports, and predictably self-interested tweets from Baylor players and ship-jumping by recruits. In the meantime, the university has named an interim president (who I think was once a New Testament professor of mine, not at my most recent seminary stop) and an acting head coach, Jim Grobe, once of Wake Forest. This is an interesting hire; Grobe, who retired from Wake just a couple of years ago, looks like a true interim hire -- someone who will not, and quite possibly does not want to be, considered for the permanent position, but will get the team through the coming season.

Grobe also has a track record, albeit not as impressive as that of fired coach Art Briles, of success at a  school not accustomed to it. His overall record wasn't great, but Jim Grobe coached Wake Forest to an ACC championship and an Orange Bowl bid. That remains one of the most impressive "wait, what?" accomplishments in athletic history.

Briles's success at Baylor looks similar, with the exception of apparently being more lasting. The school's football team now plays at a shiny new stadium that would never have happened without the success of recent seasons there, with players like Heisman Trophy winner Robert Griffin III and a lot of attention to the program and, by some remote extension, the school.

The allegations, which were being investigated for almost a year by the Philadelphia law firm Pepper Hamilton, have rained all over that success like a particularly nasty Plains thunderstorm.

Where this case stands apart from so many others is this:

Baylor University is a Christian institution of higher education. Its website will tell you so.

As a former student at a Christian college and a former professor at a Christian university, that does make my ears prick up in this case. Unchallenged sexual assault doesn't really go very well with such a self-description.

A university Board of Regents (or trustees or governors, as they are variously named at different schools) can be a vexing thing, making prescriptions about educational matters in which they have no ability or expertise or, in the case of a Christian institution of higher education, expecting the school to serve as little more than an extended Sunday school.

In this case, I am trying to read events at Baylor optimistically. The Board of Regents at Baylor, I am hoping, really valued Baylor being a Christian institution (whatever that means), even at the expense of all that football glory.

Much of the commentary around the Baylor case has not commented on this aspect of the school's identity. A few have, but many have not. This may be why what has happened at Baylor won't really be a sign of general culture change after all. Most of your big-time football franchises in the NCAA don't have that particular pressure to live up to Christian principles, even if their coach is barely concealed preacher-wannabe. If pressure comes to clean up a situation like this one, it comes mostly through threat of legal action. (Sadly, the desire to do right by the university's female students doesn't really seem to register at most universities.)

So no, I'm not looking for any kind of culture change from this situation, outside of Baylor at minimum. As for Baylor itself only time will tell.

*Some commentary after the fact has suggested that Briles saw himself as a guarantor of second chances, for players who had gotten into trouble at other schools. Well, if you're going to give out second chances, you are obligated to put in place a system of oversight to make sure those second chances don't end up bringing harm or assault to others. If you don't, your gracious second chance starts to look awfully opportunistic. There is zero evidence that any such oversight was ever put in place in these cases. 

**I'm going to forego the wide-open opportunity for schadenfreude that the university's president, a man who made his reputation zealously pursuing what he saw as a sexual misdeed, is now losing his job over failing to pursue charges of sexual assault at all. At least I'm mostly going to forego it.

Where this becomes challenging for us is in the conflict between Baylor's much-proclaimed Christian identity and its increasing desire for success in the cutthroat world of college football. What had looked like a great story rapidly denegerated into a story of soul-selling, looking the other way in the face of one of the most vile and unchristian, not to mention criminal, things that one human being can do to another. Whether Baylor's football team will ever regain its lofty heights is pretty doubtful. What Baylor would be willing to do in order to get there, we shall see.

I don't, despite the title of this blog, hold to the notion that football (or any other sport) is a religion. I am beginning to wonder, however, if sport is a belief system. And I am beginning to wonder if that belief system is at all compatible with the following of Christ that is the call of any self-proclaimed Christian. (And yes, this does bear implications for the usual subject of this blog. We'll get there.) On this, I am less optimistic. And while football may be the place where the belief system of sport and the Christian walk are most in conflict, I fear what it may mean for the relation of the Christ-follower and the big-time sport that so fills up the culture in which we live.

An image from Baylor's website.

The two- (or three-) way street

Loyalty is an awfully strange word in sports.

There's the whole business of which loyalty we're talking about.

There's the question of coach or manager loyalty to players. Players' loyalty to coaches or managers. On the pro level, ownership adds another level to the loyalty question. And then there are the fans, the ones who, in Jerry Seinfeld's words, root for laundry.

Loyalty got an unfortunate social media workout last night, apparently, in the recruiting life of the Texas A & M University football franchise. Notice the word "recruiting" in that sentence. In other words, the question of the loyalty of football players who are, technically, not yet part of the program or franchise became an open question, and as a result, some football players who were planning to join that program are now no longer planning to do so.

A little background is in order; a more detailed sketch of the events leading to this impasse is here. To be brief, the program has had some difficulties holding on to the highly touted quarterbacks who have variously played for or committed to the franchise, to the point of losing players who had made "oral commitments" to play at Texas A & M. Up to last night, the main shocking news was that the two quarterbacks who got most of the playing time last season had decided to transfer to other schools.

Seeing the instability, Tate Martell, a highly ranked high school quarterback who had made an oral commitment to A & M before his junior year of high school (yes, junior year), made the strange announcement that while he was still committed to A & M, he was going to take advantage of all five of the official visits a high schooler is allowed to make to different football franchises. While this might sound a little like telling your girlfriend that while you're still dating her exclusively that you're going to go on dates with four other women, one could argue that the franchise is "dating" a whole bunch of other quarterbacks while theoretically remaining "committed" to you.

Whatever the reason, Martell made the decision to "decommit" from Texas A & M, re-opening his recruiting process more fully and spilling some beans on who else had expressed interest. This was last night, a little more than two weeks after the decision to make all his visits.

For whatever strange reason, one of A & M's coaches, Aaron Moorehead (the wide receivers coach), then fired off a series of tweets on the subject of loyalty. It was hard to escape the notion that Moorehead (the college coach, the presumed adult in the room) was going off on Martell, the 17-year-old high school quarterback). Moorehead, because of NCAA rules, couldn't mention the name of a recruit who had not yet signed a letter of intent (which Martell is not eligible to do until this coming February), maintained that he wasn't tweeting about who people thought he was tweeting about, but went right on tweeting in a way that more or less said that these tweets about loyalty were "relevant" to the situation that everybody thought he was tweeting about.

Meanwhile other recruits took notice. A highly-ranked receiver, taking notice of the words of his "future coach", used Twitter to announce his own decommitment. (This receiver, Mannie Netherly, has already received an offer from the Mississippi franchise. Things do change quickly.) This didn't stop Moorehead from tweeting, adding that kids these days were too sensitive and "soft." This in turn persuaded another recruit, not committed to Texas A & M but still considering the franchiie, to decide he was no longer considering the program. Another player, not even an A & M recruit, offered the opinion that the tweetstorm (apparently that's a thing now) had probably cost A & M about twenty-five recruits, while others weighed in on one side or the other.

Today brought the mandatory apology from Moorehead and vague insinuations by head coach Kevin Sumlin that Moorehead might lose his social media privileges.

Please tell me I'm not the only one who finds the whole business bizarre on its face. I can't possibly begin to enumerate the dumbfounded and I-can't-believe-I-have-to-ask questions this provokes in me, but just to name a few:

1) Making "oral commitments" before junior year of high school? Since when is that ever a good idea? And yes, I've heard the stories of offers to kids in junior high, I just don't want to acknolwedge them. I suppose on some level that making such an early commitment theoretically allows a kid to play his last two years of high-school ball without all the distraction of a full-blown recruiting process, but I have my doubts that this theory really works out that well in practice. And who's to say that any of the coaches who recruit you as a sophomore are going to even be around by the time you're a senior, much less ready to join the franchise?

An "oral commitment" is a strange thing. It is utterly without backing. It has, really, about as much credibility as your promise to your doctor to exercise more and cut back on the sweet stuff.

2) Coaches are not really the best people to go tweeting or otherwise browbeating about "loyalty" to a program. To pick on the currently humiliated Moorehead: is he really saying that he plans to spend his entire career as A & M's wide receivers coach?

Even in my short stay in academia I climbed the career ladder. I moved, after three years of teaching at a small evangelical school in south Florida, to a much larger state university out in the plains, one with one of the better music programs in the country and with much more interest in basketball than baseball. For me, the appeal was threefold: a slight pay bump (but also a move to a much less expensive place to live, which heightened the effect), a chance to work with graduate students and not undergrads only, and, well, the prestige of the music program there. Such a move was no declaration of disaffection for my previous school, but I will never doubt that it was the right thing to do at that time in that career and will never regret it.

It's hard for me to believe that Moorehead isn't going to want to climb the career ladder in football coaching at some point. And hey, this is the good ol' USA; nobody's really going to begrudge him that privilege. He might move to another school for an opportunity to be an offensive coordinator, or maybe even a head coach, or he might make a move to the NFL. (Of course, how much the publicity from this incident will affect such opportunities for him in the future remains to be seen.) But a system that allows him to demand such loyalty out of players who might not even be at A & M before he climbs the next step on the coaching ladder is a broken system, isn't it?

3) Twitter, boy, I don't know... .

4) I won't even get into the degree to which this whole process is utterly divorced from the basic concept of a college or university education... .

5) And because you know this blog is going to go there whenever the chance arises, this coach (the one tweeting how kids these days are too sensitive or soft) is somehow being trusted with, among other things, the health of the players who play under his direction, including yes, the health of their brains. Sound like a good idea to you?

6) I haven't waded into the cesspool of comment sections or Twitter replies to get any reactions from fans of A & M or other franchises, the ones rooting for laundry. I'm not going to, but I'm going to guess that it's ugly and vile and petty towards the de-committers, and obnoxiously defensive of Moorehead. That apparently is what fanhood requires (auto-correct wanted to change that word to "manhood." In that case I have to concede that auto-correct might have a point). Defend the franchise against any and all assaults, including any physical ones committed by players or coaches, but turn on the franchise and demand blood if it doesn't win enough games. I guess that's fan loyalty.

In this case, this particular situation is unique to college, and to college football somewhat. College basketball has its own profound corruptions and irregularities, but early recruiting just doesn't have quite the same hold on that game. Coach-hopping is maybe even worse, though. On the pro level, loyalty is deeply intertwined with money. (Not that it isn't on the college level, but for those actually playing it is mostly future money at stake.)

In all seriousness, I am not sure it requires a faith-based ethical viewpoint to make a person wonder if it would be best just to shake one's head and walk away from the whole business. A basic rational mind and sense of human decency might well be enough.

How nice that he bounced back so quickly...

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.

Loose lips

"Loose lips sink ships."

It is unlikely that the unexpected admission, by an NFL official, of a link between football and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) will actually "sink" the NFL. It might, however, sink the career of the person who uttered two seemingly simple words.

"Certainly, yes."

These words from Jeff Miller, the NFL's senior vice president for health and safety, are pretty thunderous for a league that has not only steadfastly refused to acknowledge even the possibility of such a link but has worked very hard to control research on the subject and the funding for it.

We actually have to give credit to a member of Congress, Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), for shaking loose the admission from Miller, though I doubt even Rep. Schakowsky expected such an admission. Now that it's out, the potential repercussions are already starting to unfold.

It took very little time at all for a representative for the NFL Players' Association to hustle into court to file a contention in the ongoing court settlement between the NFL and NFLPA over brain trauma. While the NFL had agreed to settle on such illnesses as Parkinson's or Alzheimer's, it had steadfastly refused to include CTE in any settlement. With the NFL having now gone on public record acknowledging such a connection (and they have already gone on record not rebuffing the statement), it's going to be pretty hard (though not necessarily impossible) to sustain such a position in that lawsuit.

I'm also interested in some of the other, more obscure implications of this bit of revelation. It's been six years since the process of lawsuits over brain trauma began. This of course followed the revelation of CTE in a number of deceased former football players over many years, starting with the 2002 death of Mike Webster (with more such revelations even after the suits were well underway, as recently as Super Bowl week). The Players' Association has long been convinced that the NFL did not have the best interests of the players -- past, present, or future -- at heart, and this bit of admisstion will most likely confirm that suspicion.

The implications won't be limited to the NFL, either. Already college football representatives were at the event where Miller's comments came out, and the NCAA won't be able to deflect the connection very well in the wake of this acknowledgment.

Even further down, the lifting of the NFL's denial could have notable impact on youth football. Already participation rates for youth flag football are increasing at a rate well ahead of that for traditional tackle football (with the South being the one regional exception, which is probably a whole other story). Might the acknowledgment of the CTE connection persuade other parents to steer their kids towards flag football, at least until high school, as some advocates have already urged (Dr. Robert Cantu and Chris Nowinski among them)?

One thing the statement won't affect is future research. That will largely go on as it would before. And frankly, it's unlikely that the NFL will change its approach to what research (or which researchers) it will or won't support with its dollars.

The great unknown, of course, is one more critical but largely silent party of interest: fans.

One thing that can be deduced from the Players' Association and its pursuit of legal action against the NFL is largely unspoken but hard to avoid. The NFLPA has figured out, quite rightly it seems, that they are the only party that is going to look out for the interests of the players.

Certainly not the NFL, even if they acknowledge the link between the game and the trauma.

And certainly not football fans.

You don't have the players' backs, and they know it, and are proceeding accordingly.

Any chance that will change?

Don't ask me. That's up to you.

Jeff Miller. What he said, apparently.

A little life

No ethical discussions today. Just some sports-fan joy.

This was me Friday:

Orioles vs. Blue Jays, 3/4/16, Dunedin, Florida

That's Florida Auto Exchange Stadium in Dunedin, Florida, where the Toronto Blue Jays hold spring training. On Friday the Baltimore Orioles made their way up from Sarasota to play a little ball. With Friday being my day off, the timing seemed opportune.

It was a pretty typical spring training game, won by Toronto 4-3. The highlight was a three-homer inning in which Toronto built the lead that Baltimore would never overcome. 

My seat was actually much closer to home plate; this just seemed to be a good spot to get a picture of a baseball crowd on a sunny (but not too hot) March afternoon.

As this was Toronto's spring training site, you might wonder about the national makeup of the crowd. I'm sure there were plenty of Floridians around, but I was surrounded by Canadians. As a result, in odd moments between action I learned more about Ontario than I had learned in any one occasion since the last time I was there (2011, I think, when I attended one of my last academic conferences that happened to be meeting in Ottawa). 

And thankfully, no political talk. Just as well, I can't say I know that much about Justin Trudeau.

Being in front of live professional baseball game was all sorts of good for my psyche and my soul and all those good things. On the other hand, getting into and out of Dunedin, and the Tampa/Clearwater/St. Petersburg area in general, mostly managed to evaporate all that psychological healing before I even got back to I-75. Still, some residual effects (good ones) do linger.

Not nearly on the same scale, but still a pleasure, the Major League Soccer season started today, and I got to see Sporting Kansas City get an ugly win against Seattle Sounders. It's still not on the same level as baseball, and it was televised instead of live, but hey, small pleasures count. 

And of course my #3 sport preference, college basketball, is approaching its peak season. (I dare not use that phrase -- you know, the M-alliterative one -- for fear of copyright infringement.) The Kansas Jayhawks head into their conference tournament as the top seed, with their twelfth consecutive Big XII title wrapped up. They won the national championship in 2008, during my first year teaching at that university, and have been breaking hearts ever since. Still, this is "hope springs eternal" time. 

On occasion it's good to remember the pleasures of "participating" in sports. So no heavy ethical contesting tonight, just some enjoyment of such pleasures as sports can bring, and enjoying the way they can bring a little life to the everyday.

Clint Dempsey, you shall not pass!

Waiting on science our savior, cont'd.; the Ivies take notice

Remember the Dartmouth MVP?

The MVP, or Mobile Virtual Player, became the means by which Dartmouth football coach Buddy Teevens moved to eliminate tackling from practices during football season -- tackling of other players at least. The MVP is a robot programmed to move like a football player -- not just with speed, but making cuts and other elusive maneuvers. While the move had immediate benefits for team health, Teevens was concerned about his team lest its skills get rusty. When Dartmouth engineering students (including a former Dartmouth football player) came up with the device, Teevens jumped at it.

It turns out Dartmouth won a piece of the Ivy League championship this past season (after third- and second-place finishes in previous seasons), and the rest of the league took notice that they did so while only tackling that Mobile Virtual Player device instead of each other during in-season practices. Possibly as a result, the league has voted -- unanimously, at that -- to eliminate tackling drills during the season throughout the league.

There are things to be excited about here, and things not quite worth jumping up and down about. The latter first, so one blog entry can end on an upbeat note:

1. This is the Ivy League. There are a few players from the Ivies in the NFL; New York Jets quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick of Harvard might be the most prominent right now. The Ivy League schools have some of the longest and most storied histories in college football, but one can't deny that the Ivies fall rather far outside the current power structure in the NCAA. In short, this move by itself is unlikely to be the start of a trend in the NCAA.

2. This is the Ivy League. Only a very limited number of high school players are going to be able to make the cut academically to play in that league, and many of those players will not be interested in doing so because of point #1 above -- they don't represent a likely springboard to the NFL. The number of players who will be affected by this move is pretty small.

3. This is the Ivy League. For a large part of the culture surrounding college football or football generally, the league's adoption of these standards will merely be proof that they don't play "real football" in that league.

4. This is the Ivy League. Probably every school in the league can afford a squadron of MVPs if they so desire. And while no doubt the Ohio States and Alabamas of the world could corner the market on the devices were they to try, that's less true of the Division II and III schools in the world or even the Tulsas and San Diego States and Marshalls out there. Should such technologically aided practices start to sweep through the college game, the division between the haves and have-nots will only become more stark. Then make the leap down to high schools and youth football programs and the divisions become even deeper, even as restrictions on tackling in practices have had dramatically positive results in reducing head injury (keep reading, you'll get to it). Technology as a leveler of the field isn't typically that accessible.

5. We are still acting under the assumption that technology can fix everything and save football as the country knows it (football as the world knows it is what we call soccer, to be clear). The evidence of this just isn't all that persuasive. There's a real desperation about it sometimes as well. From the next great helmet to the MVP to sensors designed to warn coaches or trainers that a player might be on the verge of brain injury, the technological hits keep on coming. Only the real hits also keep on coming.

OK, let's be positive:

1. There are coaches out there who actually care about the health and well-being of their athletes (one can't always be sure about this). It's good to be reminded of this amidst the jaw-droppingly bad headlines these days, not just on head trauma.

2. At least some coaches can cut through the macho jargon and see not only a way to improve player health, but apparently also performance on the field. Whether Dartmouth's improvement really correlates to reducing hitting in practice or is simply a function of Teevens being a good recruiter, or goes to randomness somehow, at least this success might persuade a few coaches elsewhere to ease up on the full-contact drills during the week.

3. While the NFL still seems to see most of its brain injuries take place during games, at lower levels practice seems to be the more perilous time for players. If this move helps persuade youth football or high school programs to think about cutting back on contact and those injuries drop as well, so much the better.

I've made it clear in this blog that I can't stomach watching football any more. That doesn't mean I'm particularly eager to see more and more players suffering concussions at whatever level of the sport they play; I've also made it clear that I don't consider it my place to tell people they can't play football, although I won't shy from speaking my mind on the subject here in this blog and elsewhere, and I continue to believe that there are serious theological and/or ethical problems with participating in the economic system of football. Anything that might offer a small amount of hope for cutting back on concussions or subconcussive hits is a positive by me.

It doesn't mean I'll be watching again any time soon, though.

Dartmouth's MVP might really be Dartmouth's MVP after all...

p.s. for those who don't recognize the title phrase, it comes from this little musical ditty...

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?]

Lawrence Phillips

It may have escaped notice in the broader culture this week, what with the deaths of David Bowie and Alan Rickman, among what seems to be too many others (even in the sports world the passing of one of the greats who straddled the Negro Leagues and MLB, Monte Irvin, made headlines), but Lawrence Phillips died this week. In prison. Apparently by suicide.

It would be hard to avoid wondering, almost by reflex, if his life had any chance of ending any other way.

Phillips came to fame as a powerful running back at the University of Nebraska, you might recall. He starred for the Cornhuskers in 1994 as they won a national championship (such as it was at the time), but only played two games in 1995 before being suspended from the team due to an assault against girlfriend Kate McEwen, a Nebraska basketball player at the time. Coach Tom Osborne went against his straight-arrow reputation by reinstating Phillips later that season on the premise that without football, Phillips would never be able to conquer his personal demons. More on that later.

After his junior year Phillips entered the NFL draft and was taken by the St. Louis Rams (as they were then), who gave up Jerome Bettis to make room to take him (think they might like that move back?). Phillips played only four years in the NFL, plus some time in Europe and Canada, punctuated by more run-ins with the law, before washing out of professional football.

At the time of his death Phillips was serving a thirty-one-year prison term for assault with a deadly weapon (a car) as well as domestic violence. He had recently been labeled a suspect in the murder of his cellmate and charged with murder in September. A number of other violent episodes were scattered across his lifetime.

It seems that Phillips -- Ray Rice without video -- should not pass from the scene unremarked, but it's almost impossible to know where to start.

1. As football coach (and also assistant athletic director), Osborne made the choice to reinstate Phillips only a short time after he had been suspended. As assistant athletic director, one wonders how Osborne considered his responsibility for the athlete who was dragged down a flight of stairs.

2. ESPN columnist Ivan Maisel reconsiders the Phillips incident at Nebraska and the fired-up reaction (his own included) to Osborne's reinstatement at the time. (Here's one example of that fired-up reaction.) I don't quite understand Maisel's current rationalization of now understanding why Osborne didn't "take the easy way out". Exactly what signs were there that football was of any aid in reining Phillips's demons? And how appropriate is it to sacrifice one athlete to redeem another? In retrospect it seems that Osborne did take the easy way out.

3. This points towards something that needs to be said about not just football, but any sport. Sports are not magic. Phillips's demons were not going to be controlled by playing football, or by any other sport. The impulse to "rescue" a troubled young athlete is understandable and even laudable, but the degree to which others are damaged by that rescue attempt is deeply problematic. Phillips didn't commit a victimless crime. Very few people seemed to remember that at the time, and it's not always clear that we're any better about that today when an athlete is implicated in a crime.

4. If you're interested in what it's like to be in one of the severely overcrowded prisons in the USA, or California in particular, Phillips wrote a series of letters to former coaches which provide some insight.

5. Phillips's brain will be donated for study at Boston University's Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy  Program. This is the program that has reported findings of CTE in 88 of 92 brains of former football players (most recently this unfortunate soul). You might be shocked to hear that this actually concerns me. If Phillips was suffering from CTE it does need to be established. And one of the acknowledged potential effects of CTE is the kind of violent mood swings that may have led to violence in some other former players who were later found to have CTE (Paul Oliver and Jovan Belcher come to mind, but they are hardly the only examples). It's going to be a challenge to make a definitive link between CTE and violent behavior, but it won't be for lack of potential case studies. Still, where is the dividing line between Lawrence Phillips, man who made a whole heap of horrible choices, and Lawrence Phillips, (potential) CTE victim (if that diagnosis should eventually be made)? Does this further complicate evaluating how Phillips's behavior was handled over the course of his career?

Regrettably, a sad and ugly story still has the potential to get sadder and uglier.

Follow-up: That was quick...

I did not expect that.

I barely got a blog entry off on the ongoing racial tensions at the University of Missouri, and the unexpected response of many members of the football team, when dominoes started falling in shockingly quick fashion.

Monday morning, the president of the university system in Missouri -- four universities, not just the one in Columbia -- resigned. Later that same day, the chancellor of the Columbia campus announced he would be stepping down later in the year.

Also on Monday, the Mizzou graduate student who had gone on a hunger strike in protest of the administration's laggard response announced he would end that hunger strike, and the football players and team announced their return to regular practice and game schedules, which means Saturday's game at Arrowhead against BYU is no longer under threat.

Some thoughts:

1. If there was any doubt about the untapped potential for student-athletes taking action (and frankly I had plenty of doubt), this incident should put a significant dent in it. Mizzou's governing body was set for one of those lovely executive-session meetings on Monday, only to have their principal reason for it be eliminated almost at the beginning.

Even now I'm still surprised that things happened so quickly. I can't quite figure out why they did. Was it the apparent unanimity of the team (even though to the very last ESPN was desperately flogging the interview with the one anonymous white guy on the team who insisted it wasn't so)? Was it coach Gary Pinkel's public support of those players and their stand, and the possibility that any move against the players would risk a backlash? Pinkel's team hasn't had the best season this year, but (as much as it pains me to say it) he's had a good measure of success at Mizzou and probably retains enough support in the university to hold a degree of leverage.

2. In the end, was it really all (or at least significantly) about the $$$? A cancellation of that game at Arrowhead would have required Mizzou to pay a cool $1M to BYU, a little more than twice the salary of the university president. Was it simply not worth the risk?

3. It's really, really disturbing that it took the action of football players to produce any movement on such a troublesome campus situation. For one thing, not every football team on every campus is going to react in such a way. Ordinary students evidently have no recourse in such a situation.

4. There is a legitimate ethical problem with ESPN's role in such situations. That network is, across its multiple networks, probably the most prolific broadcaster of college football games. And guess what network was scheduled to televise the BYU-Mizzou game this Saturday? The SEC Network, a subsidiary of ... ESPN. You'll never be able to draw a line between that fact and, say, ESPN.com's insistence on flogging that anonymous interview. You (or ESPN) will also will never be able to disprove the existence of such a connection, and the smell of such conflict of interest is going to linger.

5. This situation seems to have gone much more successfully for the Mizzou players than for those NFL players -- members of the St. Louis Rams, for example -- who used their moments on entering the field to show support for the community of Ferguson, Missouri, in the wake of the violence erupting in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown.

At any rate, I'm relieved of the need to watch a football game, at least, and especially a Mizzou game. But the ramifications of this event are going to be interesting to see in the future.

What next?