Only Nixon could go to China

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But it's Texas.

It's freakin' Texas.

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

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

Do they really want to?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Irresponsible

Note: Once-a-week blogging for the time being. Need to do more organizational work now.

Another note: The rumination on fun has to go on hold, since the NFL has behaved badly again, or perhaps more accurately, gotten called out for it.



When Congress -- Congress!! -- calls you out, you've messed up.

A congressional study released this week found that the NFL attempted to throw its weight around, using its much-ballyhooed contributions to brain trauma research to control which scientists would be supported by the National Institutes of Health, the intended recipient of those funds. What had been touted as an "unrestricted gift" apparently had strings attached after all.

I don't think anyone is particularly surprised by this revelation. If anything, it merely confirms what has been increasingly clear for some time: the NFL is going to play by the tobacco playbook of the 1950s and 60s, doing everything in its power to muddy the science so it can go on making staggering sums of money. A researcher like Dr. Robert Stern, who previously had the temerity to follow the science in his work at Boston University, whose CTE Center has been at the forefront of such science as has been going on so far on the subject, was unacceptable to the NFL. So, they tried to keep the money from going to BU, and when they failed, they pulled their money.

This is the behavior of an organization with something, a lot of something, to hide.

Side note: I find it fascinating that BU continues to field a football team.

I suppose what is impressive about this congressional report is that part of the NFL strategy for making the concussion issue go away (not so much actual concussions, mind you, not to mention all the other hits that actually add up to CTE for too many players) involves political donations. Evidently they didn't manage to target the right members of Congress yet.

Ethical takeaway: this is the organization you are funding when you buy a ticket or a replica jersey or other bit of NFL merchandise, and probably even when you subscribe to that whole NFL Sunday Ticket deal.

You know this, right? Whatever your old childhood loyalties may have been, do they obligate you to continue to participate in this kind of blatant BSing and irresponsible stewardship of the players in the league's employ, past, present, and future? You might as well have been contributing to Philip Morris or Reynolds back in the day.

Other bits of news around the subject, possibly to be revisited:

1. Bubba Smith had stage 3 CTE when he died five years ago. Some remember him as a fearsome defensive star. Others remember him from the Police Academy movies or other film or TV roles, or maybe even the old Miller Lite "tastes great/less filling" ads. (Current research identifies four stages of CTE.) He would not even be the first NFL-star-turned-actor to be so identified; Alex Karras, of Blazing Saddles and Webster, also was found to have CTE at his death.

2. Thurman Thomas is still living. Last month he gave an account of the toll football took on his brain.

3. Meanwhile, the guys just coming into the NFL from last month's football meat market-palooza are still largely convinced they're invincible.

4. A (probably soon-to-be-former) NFL general manager, Doug Whaley of the Buffalo Bills, suggested that people probably really should not be playing football.

And from other sports:

5. Action sports has its first CTE diagnosis. I confess I had not even considered that sport, though it's certainly believable that its participants suffer plenty of blows to the head.

6. Another sport you don't necessarily think about: auto racing. A few weeks ago one of its bigger stars, Dale Earnhardt Jr., announced he would be donating his brain for CTE research after his death.

7. So will Brandi Chastain, former Women's World Cup champion (the one who scored the winning goal and gave the sportsbra its day in the sun, remember?). This is particularly noteworthy, as very little research on brain trauma and sports so far has involved female athletes.

8. Also from soccer: an MLS player has had to change his game after five documented concussions, cutting down on leading with his head.

9. The National Hockey League's brass was caught in newly released emails speculating about the possible connections between the deaths of three of its players and their primary on-ice occupation: fighting.

10. The NHL won't get off the hook; a class-action lawsuit by former players was allowed to go forward.

ESPN heard you say it, Mr. Whaley; too late to walk it back...

A settlement, but (maybe) not an escape

I'm still recovering, to some degree, from watching that first round of the NFL draft, and I will get back to some observations on that before too long. In the meantime, though, a couple of pieces of news that are of interest in understanding what the NFL knew and when it knew it have passed through in the past couple of weeks, and they're worth a quick comment.

It did not pass the notice of this blog that the long-disputed settlement between the NFL and a large number of retired players was approved by an appellate court about two weeks ago.

Nobody involved considers the settlement perfect (even the NFL, I suspect, but for different reasons), but the judge ruling on the case opined that it was not warranted to hold out for anything better. About 20,000 former players will potentially be covered by the settlement, al though a small handful of players did not participate in the settlement and are likely to continue action against the league. (Additionally, a number of families of players who were not diagnosed with CTE until after the settlement cutoff date -- Ken Stabler comes to mind -- are unlikely to accept being cut off from financial restitution.)

You can read the article for the gory legal details as you wish. For a great many people, the most damning result of that settlement was this: because of the acceptance of the settlement, there were two possible results caught up in these two quotes from the ESPN article above:

...thereby potentially ending a troubled chapter in league history.

and:

The settlement deal means the NFL might never have to disclose what and when it knew about the risks and treatment of concussions.

Now for many, this was the most damaging part of the settlement; the NFL was able to get off the hook without any admission of guilt, and there would be nothing in the settlement to hold the NFL accountable for what it knew, and when, and what it did to obscure it. In the eyes of too many, this was a poor result, even if a number of former players were able to receive funds within three to four months, possibly.

In the words of a TV foof associated with college football, not the NFL: not so fast, my friend.

Those initial reports were leaving out one party with quite an interest in the settlement, and in particular its distribution, as well as any other monies that might be disbursed for medical treatment for those former players: the insurance industry.

A New York state judge ruled that NFL officials and doctors had to be made available for questions, and in fact to answer questions, from insurers who want no part of paying up to a billion dollars* in potential settlement money if the NFL was not being honest about its knowledge of concussions and brain trauma and their effects. As well, documents pertinent to that knowledge and informaiton were also required to be made available.

*While the official amount of the settlement is $765 million, the actual compensation fund in the settlement (estimated at $675 million) is in fact uncapped; a separate $75 million medical monitoring fund was also uncapped as part of the settlement. Therefore, the actual amount of money spent could be much higher. The NFL estimates in court documents that they expect to disburse no more than $900 million, but the amount could be higher. 

When or how this will happen is yet to be determined, but (if anybody actually pays attention) this could be a significant development in getting at the truth of the NFL's involvement with (potentially) covering up what it knew of the damage the game was doing to its players. This could be damning in any future cases of litigation against the league (while 20,000 players may be expected to be covered, such information may well draw others out of the woodwork), and will potentially just look bad for the league. Bad enough to finally shake its stranglehold on its fan base? I'm not holding my breath. Bad enough to make the whole enterprise look less appealing to athletes with any other sports options? Sure. Bad enough to raise, at long last, enough ethical doubt about the game for something to give in this society? Who knows?

One point that has been wondered about in the past: what about current players? As much as I may not respect or trust the league, I don't think current players need to be included. Heartless? I don't think so. Whatever might yet be revealed about how long and how much the NFL knew, you don't need the NFL's acknowledgment to know what the risks are now. At some point, it's a player's responsibility to protect his own health now. You don't want to take that risk? Don't play. At least a few players are making that choice, as recent headlines have shown.

Anyway, this potential questioning, and its potential results ... something to watch.

You never know where important information will turn up.