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.

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?]

From Mike Webster to Junior Seau

Yesterday my wife and I walked into a local restaurant for lunch, and one of the TVs over the bar was showing an NFL team practicing.

Just practicing.

Of course it was the NFL Network. But still, practicing.

Not playing a "practice game." That happens often enough in baseball, as spring training games do get broadcast fairly often. But not even MLB Network broadcasts practice.

Of course, this is the weekend that teams actually play a game of sorts, as the Pittsburgh Steelers and Minnesota Vikings play the Hall of Fame Game tonight, a day after a new class of players was inducted into the NFL's Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio.

Between the Steelers' inclusion in the game and the induction of Jerome Bettis, the city is covered in gold and black, especially with Pittsburgh not all that far away. Another inductee, though, also garnered a good deal of attention this weekend, in his case by his unavoidable absence.

Junior Seau was inducted into the Hall of Fame posthumously. One of the greatest linebackers to play the game and one of its most liked and popular players, Seau retired in 2010 after a stellar career with the San Diego Chargers and New England Patriots. About two years later, Seau was dead of a self-inflicted gunshot would in the chest. His death followed by about a year the similar suicide of former Chicago Bears safety Dave Duerson, who also shot himself in the chest; in Duerson's case he left specific instructions that his brain be taken for examination, to determine if it showed the telltale traces of what had already become well-known in the sporting world as CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy. While Seau left no specific instructions, the gunshot wound to the chest had after Duerson's case already taken on the status of a signature; a means of suicide that left the brain intact for examination.

Like Duerson's, Seau's brain showed the telltale protein markers signifying CTE, which would confirm anecdotal evidence of Seau's struggle with the onset of CTE -- marked personality changes, violent mood swings, inability to focus or perform basic mental tasks -- that were already showing up before his career had ended. Sean became easily the most famous and widely popular player to have been found with CTE after his death, supplanting another Hall of Famer whose induction ceremony marked, for many sports fans, their first exposure to the debilitating effects of this particular brain trauma.


*The following is indebted to League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions, and the Battle For Truth, Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru (New York: Crown Archetype, 2013). I've said before you need to read this book if you give a damn at all about this issue. That still holds true, even if at times it is a difficult and even gruesome read.

Mike Webster was selected for induction into the NFL Hall of Fame in 1997, after a seventeen-year career with the Steelers and Kansas City Chiefs. Signs of deterioration, though mostly overlooked, were also showing before the end of Webster's career, but his post-football decline was both tragically quick and tragically extended. Financial collapse, constantly increasing pain, drug reliance (eventually popping Ritalin like candy, some would say), memory failure and more were the routine of Webster's life. By the time of his Hall of Fame induction, seven years after his retirement, those closest to him feared for his ability to get through his acceptance speech.

As the ceremony approached, media outlets began to seek out the inductees and do the seemingly requisite profiles of the greats, their careers and their post-career lives. The sordid details of Webster's decline created a sensation in the weeks leading up to the ceremony, after a profile by ESPN laid out the details of Webster's decline. The following weeks were peppered with headlines such as "Webster's Induction Comes Amid Chaos" (Houston Chronicle), "A Life Off-Center" (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette), "A Man of Steel Crumbles" (St. Petersburg Times), and "Humbled Hero: Webster Fights to Overcome Despair" (Atlanta Journal-Constitution). Even as Webster tried to portray the ESPN profile and the following stories as overblown and exaggerated, his own behavior undermined his claims.

The induction ceremony went about as badly as his friends and family expected. Webster's speech, extending thirteen minutes beyond his allotted eight-minute slot, was frequently incoherent, disconnected, and rambling, while also being occasionally funny and even inspiring. Still, no one who had read or heard the troubling stories about Webster were convinced by Webster's speech that his situation was not every bit as dire as those stories suggested.

Webster to Bradshaw, one last snap at Webster's Hall of Fame induction

One of the more lucid quotes from Webster's speech:

You know, it's painful to play football, obviously. It's not fun out there being in two-a-day drills in the heat of summer and banging heads. It's not a natural thing.

A little more than five years later Webster was dead. He did not commit suicide; simply put, his body failed. One wonders if the suicides that have followed in intervening years were even a little bit motivated by a desire to avoid ending up like Mike Webster.


To some degree, the current concern for the long-term effects of playing football, at least as a public concern, stem from the publicity generated by Webster's Hall of Fame induction and the reports generated by it.

Little wonder, then, that the NFL, under Roger Goodell's imperative to "protect the shield," reacted with hyperactive determination to prevent the family of Junior Seau from causing even the tiniest scene this weekend in Canton. Even given a standing policy of having no family speeches for posthumous inductions (and I have no idea if it's true or not), and even given the Seau family's wrongful-death lawsuit against the NFL, the NFL's overly aggressive policing ended up being the black mark they sought to avoid. Even NPR, basically somnolent on the concussion/brain trauma story up to now, finally trotted out a piece for the weekend.

The ceremony seems to have come off without incident, in the end. It seems the Seaus wanted to have one occasion for simply celebrating their father's life and accomplishments, and everybody managed to get out of each other's way long enough for that to happen.

Of course, one weekend of relative peace changes nothing. The NFL won't change, because nobody is really challenging it to change. The questions about brain trauma will continue.

And this question will continue to be asked.

"Moneyball," Moneyball, and the Church?

So last week, my Twitter feed produced a link to a column by a pretty well-known blogger in progressive-evangelical circles, putting forward the notion that the church needed to embrace the principles laid out in Michael Lewis's best-selling book Moneyball. Being a guy who occasionally traffics in the intersection of sporting culture and faith issues, this naturally caught my eye, but a few "wild pitches" found in the blog column (in terms of its description of Moneyball in its baseball context strictly) put my suspicion antennae on high alert. I made the mistake of acknowledging this on Twitter, which led to my being questioned about the hackles-raising points, which obligated me to respond (albeit tardily), which is resulting in this blog post.

Image: baseballphd.net

For the uninformed, Moneyball is Lewis's account of the 2002 Oakland Athletics under the leadership of general manager Billy Beane (and also the title of the Brad Pitt movie based on the book). This leads to the first "wild pitch" in the column: Beane is general manger of the Athletics in the book, not manager, as the blog post states. This may seem trivial but is desperately important; it is the general manager in most organizations who bears principal responsibility for acquiring players for the team, whether via draft or trade or free agent signing. As a manager, Beane would have had little opportunity to put his ideas into action; even as general manager Beane faced stiff opposition from many parties in the A's organization -- principally the team's scouting staff, steeped in traditional, non-statistical player evaluation beliefs, and the team's actual manager at the time, Art Howe.

Another "wild pitch": I'm not quite sure to what the author is referring when he speaks of "a company called Saber Metrics." I've never heard of it, and I like to think I'm enough of a sports fan that I would have. What I do know of is sabermetrics, not so much a company as a practice of empirical analysis of baseball. (Sabermetrics, or advanced statistical analysis in general, has started to expand to other sports as well, with basketball perhaps being most notable.) The term "sabermetrics" is derived from SABR, the acronym of the Society for American Baseball Research, an organization founded in 1971 and espousing baseball research of all kinds (historical research has long been a strong suit of the group), not just statistical analysis. However, a number of SABR members (most famous of whom are probably Bill James, statistical analytics guru who published occasional editions of the Bill James Baseball Abstract for diehard stat geeks and is now with the Boston Red Sox, and Rob Neyer, sabermetrician and author long affiliated with ESPN.com and now with FOXSports.com) did engage in the use of advanced statistical methods to engage with baseball and its results, including developing new statistics intended to gauge baseball performance more accurately. Beane himself was/is not necessarily a sabermetrician himself, but made the decision to make use of these advanced analytical tools in his role with the Athletics. (More on this later.)

Another "wild pitch" (or at least curveball in the dirt): it's a stretch to say that Beane's teams were or are "playoff contenders ... year after year." While there have been a number of highly successful teams during Beane's tenure, there have been rough years as well (this year's team looks like one of the latter so far). A look a the franchise's history shows that, since Beane took over as GM in 1997 (after first working for the club as a scout), after a slow start, the team peaked around 2001-2002 (the period covered in Lewis's book), declined over time to a pretty rough stretch from 2007-2011, and rebounded with three straight playoff appearances 2012-2014. One could argue that the Tampa Bay Rays (full disclosure; the closest thing I have to a "local" team right now) have had a somewhat more consistent run of success since their playoff breakthrough in 2008, while being run under similar principles (and with maybe even less money).

Another factor to be considered is that for all the success across regular seasons, the team has yet to win a playoff series under Beane's tenure. Beane himself famously acknowledged this with the earthy declaration "my s*** doesn't work in the playoffs," attributing playoff success or failure in general to luck. (He's probably not completely wrong about this, but that's another column, the theological implications of which I'm not sure about.) This isn't a reason to dismiss the success of Beane's work, but should not be forgotten in seeking to apply the concepts elsewhere, including the church.

Now, as far as the actual application of "Moneyball" principles in the church realm, there are definitely possibilities there. But it matters what we understand those principles to be, and even those in baseball tend to get them wrong. For a number of years folks tended to leap to the conclusion that Beane's tactics were about acquiring a specific type of player (for example, one who was particularly skilled at getting on base) at the expense of another (e.g., one who hit a lot of home runs). Beane would have been plenty happy to load his lineup with power hitters, but because other teams with larger budgets could and did pay more for power hitters, Beane needed to find a way to acquire players who could contribute enough to the team without spending sums of money the team's ownership wouldn't approve. Thus, as teams such as the New York Yankees or Boston Red Sox loaded up on power hitters, Beane went in search of players skilled at getting on base.

Perhaps the most famous example of this in Moneyball was Scott Hatteberg, a lifetime backup catcher until being signed by Beane for the 2002 season to replace power-hitting Jason Giambi, who was siphoned off as a free agent by the big-bucks Yankees. If you know baseball, you know Giambi was a first baseman, not a catcher, but this didn't faze Beane, who signed Hatteberg anyway and put his coaches in charge of teaching him to play a new position. Hatteberg indeed went on to have a reasonably successful season for the A's in 2002.

At any rate the biggest takeaway from Moneyball in this respect is to "zig where others zag," using one's limited resources most efficiently by prioritizing players with skills less valued by other teams. Of course the problem is accentuated when other teams, particularly teams with bigger budgets than yours, start to appropriate your methods. The Red Sox in particular began to invest more in advanced analytics, to which they could then apply their much larger player-salary budgets. Their run of success from 2004 (their first World Series win in 86 years, as we heard about ad nauseam that year) through 2013 was largely fueled by this combination of analytics and budget, or "Moneyball with money" as some have called it.

Here, I think, is a potential pitfall for applying Moneyball principles in the church. In responding to other teams' appropriation of statistical analysis, Beane has quite notorious for ruthlessly trading "assets" before they reach their free-agent years, in order to guarantee getting some return on the investment the team has made in them. (At this point Beane's methods seem most about the collection of young -- and therefore affordable -- talent, while occasionally taking chances on risky players such as those recovering from injury.) As this year's team struggles, observers expect a "fire sale" of talent to kick in soon, as Beane seeks to retool and reload the young talent in the A's organization rather than pouring resources into a lost season.

If this sounds rather impersonal, well, it is. Players who think they've found a home in Oakland are suddenly shipped across the country without so much as a thank-you card. (Third baseman Josh Donaldson, now with the Toronto Blue Jays, would be a prime example from this past offseason.) Even if one is applying these Moneyball principles to the activities or programs of the church, one had better remember that there are people attached to those activities or programs, people who can't be traded or released. A church simply can't proceed as if personalities are not involved in its activities.  A church may seek efficiency, but it probably shouldn't be "ruthlessly efficient." There is at least some risk of getting caught in a different form of what many outsiders like to charge against megachurches or heavily evangelical churches; treating people as numbers.

Another general principle of Moneyball tactics, not necessarily restricted to Beane and the A's, can be loosely summarized as "don't tie up too much in one player." Even if the A's had chosen to pay the money required to keep Jason Giambi before the 2002 season, they would have blown too much of their budget in doing so, and been unable to sign enough players to field a workable team around Giambi. (The aforementioned Rays pursue this principle almost religiously, while a team like the Red Sox will still splurge on big-ticket players on occasion.) Here is a pretty workable principle for the church. Sinking too much of the church's assets into any one facet of its ministry (too much salary for the pastor, for example, or a budget gobbled up by the music ministry or the preschool or whatever) becomes quickly paralyzed and unable to respond to other ministry needs. Star pastors seeking $65M jets need not apply.

A final thought on Moneyball: the book actually carries a subtitle, "The Art of Winning an Unfair Game." (The "unfair game," of course, is competing against big-dollar teams such as the Yankees or Red Sox.) I don't think anyone seriously wants to suggest that the church is a "game" of any sort, but this might be helpful to consider in thinking of "moneyball" in application to the church. If our objective is not to "win an unfair game," then what is it we're hoping to accomplish in a "moneyball church"? If this becomes a prod to reconsider the mission of the church more generally perhaps it's a helpful thing; if it simply becomes yet another quick-fix for the ailing church then it is probably going to be more destructive than helpful.

Or perhaps the question becomes "with who (or what) are we in competition?" That opens up a whole minefield of questions beyond the scope of this blog, but those questions might actually be useful or needful for churches to consider.

This has gone well beyond the initial scope of the query that prompted this blog, to be sure. Hopefully, though, there are some useful points here for those who might wonder at the unlikely mating of Moneyball and church. Let the discussion continue.


*Note: I do have other reactions to the blog that initiated this whole discussion, ranging from curiosity to abject horror. As they lie (as far as I can see) outside the scope of the Moneyball Church idea I am not addressing them here, and as they lie outside the scope of the sports/faith focus of this blog, they are very unlikely to be addressed here. 

Unbelievably timely book commentary: Against Football

Almond, Steve.  Against Football: One Fan's Reluctant Manifesto.  Brooklyn: Melville House, 2014.

Honestly, I couldn't have planned this so well if I'd tried, believe me.
A few days ago I picked up Steve Almond's new book Against Football.  I had to order it.  Strangely enough, neither the big-box bookstore nor the "local" bookstore were carrying it as football season opened.  I can't imagine why.
It had to wait until after a couple of writing obligations (including yesterday morning's sermon), but last night I finally settled down with it.  The first thing I can report is that it's quite brief, only 178 pages.  It is not a lifetime commitment to read the book.
Second, it is not a dense, evidentiary argument in the manner of League of Denial.  It is probably best described by its full title: Against Football: One Fan's Reluctant Manifesto.

By his own description, Almond is a rather pathetic sort about his football.  A former journalist turned author, Almond did a little sports commentary in his day.  That's not the substance of his book, although it does inform his pointed deconstruction of the role football talking heads play in the rationalization and justification of the game's routine brutality.  No, his viewpoint is strictly as a fan, particularly of the Oakland Raiders (adding a different level to the term "pathetic" applied earlier).  The opening chapters of the book establish Almond's bona fides as a fan, from his highly subjective review of the history of the sport's place in American culture.  While quite hyperbole-ridden in its estimation of football's hold on the culture before the 1960s (which does seem to mark the rise of the NFL in particular), he is quite perceptive on its courting of television, corporate culture in general, and even the military.
He touches on the Michael Sam issue, although at the time he was writing Sam had only barely been drafted.  He also goes as far as to suggest that the pervasiveness of football subconsciously encourages a tolerance of greater violence in society, and this is without any reference to Ray Rice at all.  The New Orleans Saints bounty scandal shows up, too, mostly to point out that in the culture of the game, the only "scandal" about it was the fact that it laid bare the stuff the NFL doesn't want you thinking about.  (You don't really think the Saints were the only team guilty of such a thing, do you?) There is of course much to say about concussions and CTE and their continuing march through the ranks of retired players, not to mention former college and high school players as well.  The implicit racism of a whole bunch of white guys running a league with about 70% black players is not ignored (not to mention such unseemly spectacles as the scouting combine and its creepy evocation of the old-fashioned slave market).  The obscenity of stadium-building and subsidizing gazillionaires with public funding of such stadiums is also skewered with righteous indignation, as well as the subversion of academics to football on the college level.  In short, this is not a one-issue rant; Almond is accusing the total culture of football in America and laying the blame at the feet of those most responsible: fans, like himself.  He reserves his hardest criticism for those who see the corruption inseparably woven into the business of football, on all levels, and can identify it as such, but who are unwilling to back up their words with actions.  Bill Simmons, Chuck Klosterman, even President Obama fall into this category, along with Almond himself.
This is potentially where this blog entry gets offensive, and where I fully expect to lose some friends if anybody reads this.
Here's the deal: there is no more pretending that this doesn't apply to you, football fan who claims any kind of moral center.  Especially you preachers and preacher wannabes out there.
Did you get outraged at the Ray Rice news today?  Goody for you.  But if you're still devoting your entire Saturday/Sunday to consuming as much football as you can, you're still complicit.  Condemning an obvious monster is not enough to let you off the hook for supporting the less obvious monsters who run or participate in the game in some way.  The mind-blowing greed of league and ownership, the crippling effects of the game on the bodies and minds of its participants, the mockery of higher education (and even high school education in many cases), the homophobia, bullying (did I mention Richie Incognito shows up too?), and general thuggishness of the insidious Real Man Sport culture, the anesthetizing effect of the game on our own tolerance for violence ... that's on you.
The book is ultimately a gauntlet thrown down on American culture.  Not that American culture is going to go along with it, mind you.  As I noted before, bookstores are not going out of their way to promote the book or even acknowledge its existence.  Somehow I don't see ESPN (or any media with even a token financial interest in football) granting Almond an interview.
Merely acknowledging issues isn't enough, any more than it's sufficient to be outraged at the abuses in Ferguson without doing anything about the implicit racism in your own community, or to get all outraged about Ray Rice's assault on his fiancee without standing against domestic violence among your own congregation.  I've seen plenty of you on social media demanding an end to rape culture, or institutional racism, among other things.  Continuing to tolerate the monstrosity that football has become in American culture makes your words ring hollow.  There, I said it.  It's one of the biggest enablers of what you say you despise.  What are you going to do about it?