The NFL as good guy?

You know things are strange when this blog, retired nine months ago for the sake of my mental health, is resurrected, for one night only, to ... I can barely type it ... praise the NFL?

How in the world did Roger Goodell turn into a good guy?

How did a protest initially scattered among a few NFL players (the primary figure among whom is not in the league at this point) become a movement that has induced even a player in staid, ultra-conservative Major League Baseball to take a knee?

How did bitter on-court NBA rivals end up allies?

How did it come to pass that an NFL owner end up joining his players on the field?

How did players in a game mostly noted for picking off about a third of them with extreme brain damage finally get woke about their status in a league that relies upon them but usually would prefer they shut up, and in a country in which that feeling goes double?

How did one of the less salutary traditions of sport/politics intersection finally get broken?

How did another of sport's less salutary traditions get interrupted for possibly the first time since World War II?

How did a league in which nine of its owners gave money to that guy end up calling him divisive?

How did the great divisions of a country end up playing out on playing fields?

How does this ever work out?

Weekly Reader: Headlines and reflections

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Weekly Reader: Another page from the tobacco playbook

Q: Which sports organization spent $1.2M on lobbyists and congressional lobbying in 2014, and has a political action committee that raised $900,000 in the last election cycle?

A: (Say it in Chris Berman's voice) The NAtional. FOOTball. League.

This one slipped by me. The NFL is becoming a fairly serious player in DC.

One might suspect the ongoing storm over brain trauma and chronic traumatic encephalopathy as the principal motivator for this increasing flexing of political mu$scle, and you'd be right to a large degree. Roger Goodell's halting and embarrassing turn on Capitol Hill in 2009 (seven years ago, if you can believe that) prompted the league to pour increased effort into, er, persuading members of Congress (the House Judiciary Committee in particular) to look more kindly on the NFL where concussions and trauma were concerned. You'll notice said committee has said bupkis on the subject since. (The bombshell admission of a link between football and such head trauma earlier this year happened before the House's Energy and Commerce Committee.)

But the final straw, so to speak, was actually Ray Rice's assault on his wife. As members of Congress got agitated and began to poke around the league's exposed nerves, the league finally concluded it needed a full-time point person on The Hill, and appointed a former Joe Biden aide to the task (some critics, you'll read in the link above, likened her move to that of a former lobbyist for MADD taking up a new job lobbying for the spirits industry, and they're probably not wrong). The most recent issue to come under NFL influence-spreading is the lucrative gambling rings-in-all-but-name known as daily fantasy sports, which has required a particularly blatant form of double-talk.

So what's the complaint? Corporations (which are people, my friend) have the legal right to lobby politicians. And if you want to assert that such lobbying takes place in every and all circumstances in a completely ethically pure and above-board manner, you have the right to do so.

I'll laugh in your face, but you do have the right to do so.

For comparison, the NFL's political spending noted above is about double that of MLB, NHL, and NBA combined, and the NHL and NBA don't even have PACs (the NFL's PAC about doubles MLB's in funds raised as well, even collecting almost exclusively from NFL owners and their family members).

Of course, those with a nose for history will remember that lobbying is reminiscent of how other ethically challenged businesses have preserved themselves over the years. One such industry that might come to mind? Oh, I don't know, maybe...the tobacco industry, already known to be tied to the NFL in spirit?

Is it legal? Yup. Does it smell? Oh, Hell, yes. (And I do use that word theologically.)


More stuff worth reading about that game:

*Ken Stabler was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Of course, he wasn't around to enjoy it, sadly.

*Speaking of the HoF induction, the game that typically goes with it had to be canceled, apparently because the paint used for the on-field logos turned hard and impenetrable. Wait, since when have rock-hard surfaces been a problem for football?

*The Tampa Bay Buccaneers franchise is trying a different kind of deep-freeze to rehabilitate its players.

*Sort-of football story: Um...o.k. 


From the Lords of the (Olympic) Rings:

*Is it bad sportsmanship to be vocal about cheating (which would seemingly be a pretty serious offense against sportsmanship)?

*When you've committed so many failures in preparing for the events of the Olympics, a pool that is suddenly and unexpectedly green is going to raise questions.


Other sporting realms:

*The NBA's Adam Silver has sounded almost progressive at times, and MLB's Rob Manfred has brought a degree of transparency to his office. MLS's Don Garber can be a little opaque at times but that league isn't quite there yet enough to cause great concern. So, if any commissioner was going to make the NFL's Goodell look like a morally upright and forward-thinking person, it had to be the NHL's Gary Bettman. And on cue... .

*Sometimes it's good to tip the hat to achievements without getting ethically worried, and so here's to Ichiro... .

*But then, some folks make that impossible.

Ichiro!

Trust

The NFL would like you to believe you can trust it on the subject of concussions and head trauma among its players. To that end (among other things), the league, in concert with the NFL Players Association, announced today that stricter guidelines and harsher punishments would be applied to teams that failed to follow the league's and NFLPA's agreed concussion protocols on game day. The case of Case Keenum, referenced here, was apparently the impetus for this toughening. Additionally commissioner Roger Goodell announced the NFL would be appointing a new chief medical officer.

The latter announcement, ironically enough, points to one of the most significant reasons why the NFL hasn't been and can't be trusted on the subject. The new officer will be in effect replacing Elliott Pellman, a rheumatologist who became for all practical purposes the face of the NFL's denial on brain trauma and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and as much of a villain in the process as anybody connected to the NFL. Indeed Pellman's stony-faced "no" in the face of questions that threatened to cause the NFL trouble is as much a representation of how the NFL became something of a modern moral equivalent to the tobacco industry.

Pellman, however, is not the only doctor associated with the NFL to come under scrutiny for his professional conduct in that role. Dr. Richard Ellenboegen, a member of the NFL's health committee, is under investigation by his own school (the University of Washington). Ellenboegen, co-chair of the league's Head, Neck, and Spine Committee, is also chair of U-Dub's Department of Neurological Surgery. UW is investigating Ellenboegen over his alleged attempts to influence the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to pull CTE research funding away from Boston University's program (one which has carried out some of the foremost research in the field so far) towards doctors who were more sympathetic to the NFL's position, including possibly some funded by the NFL.
In the meantime, the more new information comes out, the less the NFL looks like anything you want holding your life in its hands, and those who have been associated with the NFL are starting to feel the effects of that taint. Green Bay Packers great Paul Hornung has sued the league's primary helmet manufacturer, Riddell, over the ineffectualness of their helmets (Hornung now suffers from dementia). Also, another former NFL player, Haruki Nakamura, is now suing Lloyd's of London for failing to honor a policy he purchased from them. The policy was independent of the NFL in this case, but the NFL has declared Nakamura physically unfit to play in the league, which Lloyd's is contesting. Nakamura's wife describes how her husband changed after the injury, in a litany becoming all too familiar.

In the meantime, Calvin Johnson has talked about the many concussins of his career, none of which ever made it to an NFL injury report (not to mention the proliferation of painkillers dispensed to deal with them and other injuries); the player who has emerged as the primary advocate of marijuana use to deal with such injuries (and cut back on the painkillers) has decided to retire; a new NFL coach has apparently decided to have players hit in practice like it's 1999 (i.e. the age before brain trauma awareness);  and, in probably the most SMH development of all, a former NCAA and NFL running back avoided prison time for a drug offense by claiming he was being treated for CTE. You can't be "treated for CTE," since CTE can't be diagnosed until after death, and cadavers (as far as I know) don't receive medical treatment. Oh, and it's really looking like 30 is the new 40 where NFL retirement is concerned.

Perhaps the saddest or strangest part of the story is that the degree to which the NFL has managed to lose the public's trust, the NFL itself is not the entity most likely to suffer from that lack of trust. Instead, that "honor" probably falls to youth sports organizations (Pop Warner football and the like, but not just in football), ill-prepared for the scrutiny, which are now seeing folks conclude that tackle football (or, for example, heading the ball in soccer) just isn't appropriate anymore for children or even younger teenagers. Now in theory, this could eventually have an effect on the "pipeline" of talent into the NFL, but probably not soon and not as much as you might expect; the NFL (and the NCAA for that matter) will simply find different sources of talent, and there will always be plenty of young men who are convinced they are invulnerable. It's a macho thing, you know, even if they don't call it that anymore.

As NFL training camps and NCAA practices gear up in the coming weeks, I'm guessing more such stories will start to flow freely through the media. Summer vacation is over for Big Football, and scrutiny is only going to re-intensify. How much that matters? I'm not optimistic. There are actual fan groups that do seek to shine a spotlight on these abuses, but I fear they're a drop in the bucket compared to the literally obscene amounts of money the league rakes in. Popularity has never equalled ethical legitimacy, though, so the question of how we can justify an entertainment that sure as Hell looks like it irreparably damages about a third of its participants must and will continue to be asked, at least in this blog anyway.

At least Case Keenum's inglorious moment wasn't totally blown off, I guess...

Playing games after Orlando

One "game memory" that is still pretty strong me is a memory of the absence of games.

This was, as some of you might remember, the week following September 11, 2001, and the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon (and the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania). Major League Baseball was most affected, with a week's worth of games having to be postponed and rescheduled, resulting in baseball's first World Series to stretch into November. College football and the NFL ended up missing a week of games themselves, but that only amounted to one game in those sports. This was of course necessitated by the grounding of air travel in the US; indeed many of those MLB teams had a challenge getting home from the road trips on which they were engaged at the time.

I have the distinct memory, by about Friday of that week, deeply regretting that there was no game to which to go. Mind you, I was living in Tallahassee at the time, and the closest team, the Tampa Bay (Devil, at the time) Rays, were more than five hours away (and they were closer than the Atlanta Braves; I had actually measured this in the only way that made sense to me, by going to games in both places and comparing the distances). Nonetheless, that Friday night, even as I knew it was a practical impossibility, I ached for it. I ached for it, even as I was somewhat ashamed for doing so.

There was, as best as I could comprehend it, a desperate need to be among other people in a way that had even the tiniest tinge of normal to it. The week of course was filled with many different types of gatherings at churches and city halls and capitals and courthouses and all manner of other public places. But the very point of such gatherings was their not-normal-ness. The very point was the abnormality and the mind-numbing and mind-blowing horror of what had happened.

Games did resume, eventually, and while there were memorials and ceremonies at the "first game back" at minimum (and particularly pronounced ones at the first games back for the New York teams, the Mets first and then the Yankees), there was still baseball. The rules of the game were still the same. The interruption of baseball ritual by the displacement of the seventh-inning stretch with "God Bless America" (a disruption that seems to be receding somewhat but has long overstayed its appropriateness) marred the longed-for normality of a ballgame, but it was still baseball, gosh darn it.

There aren't many kinds of disruptions that can get games called off. (Whether or not this is a good thing is a discussion that is needed at some point, but this isn't the night.) A riot in a city can get that city's teams to postpone or move games, and natural disasters can sometimes cause cancellations or relocations (the Florida teams can get put off by hurricanes, as can teams in Houston, and earthquakes have been known to cause cancellations and postponements in California).

Our current situation is one in which a crime or tragedy with nationwide repercussions has no effect on the scheduling of games, but has a major effect on how said event is carried out, locally for certain and nationally in some cases. The latest instance of this is the set of responses to the murders at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, an event with definite national repercussions and reverberations but one most intensely felt in central Florida.

Though I don't know for certain (I really cannot watch every game, after all), the standard response that I would guess happened pretty much everywhere was the traditional moment of silence. That could be done, and I'd guess was done at baseball games on that Sunday, probably at the next game of the NBA Finals (that I did not get to see), and probably at a number of minor-league baseball games as well. The Orlando Magic, the city's NBA franchise, was no longer playing; that left local commemorations to Orlando City SC, the city's MLS club; Orlando Pride, their new team in the Women's Professional Soccer League; and to a secondary degree the Tampa Bay Rays; obviously they're not in Orlando, but they are the closest MLB team and it's not a crazy drive. (The Pride were away last weekend; their next home game is Thursday night.)

The Rays, to a degree, had the first chance, and coincidentally Friday night's game had already been planned as a "Pride Night"; thus the team had a ready-made vehicle for recognizing and honoring the families of the victims, and stepped up their efforts pretty effectively, it would seem; Friday night's game was a sellout. Do not underestimate the significance of this; the Rays do not get sellouts, outside of Opening Day, and sometimes not even then. Orlando City followed the next night with their own effective commemorations (another thing that just doesn't happen: a game stoppage at the 49th minute as a moment of silence was observed). The city's franchises in the Arena Football League and the East Coast Hockey League also held commemorations at their immediate next games.

On the national level perhaps the most effective commemoration, subtle but unmistakable, occurred last Thursday night, during the US Men's national team's match against Ecuador; team captain Michael Bradley took the field with his more typical captain's armband replaced with a rainbow-colored armband with the logo #OneNation emblazoned on it. The USMNT and MLS (which had been on a break for the Copa America Centenario tournament in which the USMNT was playing) had hit the airwaves with video messages of support for Orlando and the victims' families (at least one prominently featuring among its voices Sporting Kansas City's and USMNT's Graham Zusi, an Orlando native).

These commemorations are, sadly, in line with a pattern that has had the tragic opportunity to become well-established.

I really don't make any claim that any of this is wrong in any way. Sadly, with such tragedies allowed to be routine, it's only going to become an even more well-established pattern. And particularly on the local level, I really don't think a team can do any less, nor should they do so.

There is one thing I still have to caution against, though. It is a caution similar to the one expressed here, against thinking that sports can fix us. Sports might be a tool to do so, but can't do the job.

As sports can't fix us, neither can sports heal us.

Earlier today Richard Lapchick contributed this column to ESPN.com. Lapchick is no ordinary ESPN foof; he has a rather formidable title and role as the chair of the DeVos Sport Business Management Program in the College of Business Administration at the University of Central Florida, and the director of UCF's Institute For Diversity and Ethics in Sport. (For the Florida geography-impaired, UCF is in Orlando.) You might have heard of that Institute for its reports on such things as graduation rates and Academic Progress Rates for teams in the NCAA basketball tournament, or its "report cards" on racial and gender hiring in Major League Baseball and other big-time sports programs. Being able to be critical of big-time sports and its ethical shortfalls is part of his job.

Side note: I can't think of many things that would entice me to leave my current vocation, but if a Christian-affiliated college, university, seminary, or divinity school were ever to create that kind of institute ... I'd at least have to think about it.

Being based in Orlando, Lapchick has had a front-row seat to the city's response to the Pulse attack and to the reactions of its sports franchises in particular (he acknowledges being at both the Rays game and the Orlando City match in the article, and even speaking to Orlando City's squad last Friday). Most of what Lapchick has to say in the article I have no problem with, but there is one sentence that just can't go unchallenged:

Sports can heal and unite and can change society forever.

Forever? Really?

If you followed that link earlier you know I already have a problem with the notion that Jackie Robinson's breaking of the color barrier didn't heal anything. It changed the US forever, yes. It opened eyes, sure. It changed many Americans, no doubt. But let us be blunt: does the United States look like a healed country to you in terms of racial relations?

Similarly, while Billie Jean King made an undeniable difference for women in sports, it would be a major stretch to suggest that women in sports have anything like equality with their male counterparts (for one example, the US Women's National Team in soccer is now embroiled in multiple legal proceedings against the US Soccer Federation over unequal pay, even though the women are vastly more successful than their male counterparts). For that matter, the United States doesn't look all that much like a healed country in terms of gender relations either.

Sporting events can be moments of respite or relief, which can be a part of a healing process. You can't grieve 24/7, and if a communal experience of catharsis in a sporting event can provide that brief period of relief or respite, all to the good.

But healing, people of faith or no faith should know, doesn't happen like that. It doesn't happen instantaneously. It is a process that takes time, and deep engagement with the source of the grief. It isn't about "getting back to normal," because that "normal" is never coming back. Some new place becomes "normal," but it's a "normal" that will never forget the attack in this case.

The survivors of the Pulse attack, or the family members and loved ones of the victims, did not wake up "healed" on Sunday because the Rays and Orlando City played games on Friday and Saturday, and they were invited. They may have awakened to the realization that many more people cared for them and empathized with them and maybe even grieved for them, felt their pain or shared their sorrow to some small degree. They may have even been able to sleep for the first time in days, who knows? But the process of healing is still only just beginning for them. And if those games and the outpouring of care and affection they showed provided even just a little bit of that relief and respite, all to the good.

But let's not put the words "heal" and "forever" together here. There are just as many homophobic people around as there were before the Pulse murders. That particular hatred is not going to end because of a couple of sporting events, any more than racism was eradicated by sporting events in the wake of the Charleston church shooting last year, or by Jackie Robinson or Hank Aaron. Sport simply isn't that powerful.

What it can do is still pretty amazing in the face of such shock and grief. Sporting events are still places where people who wouldn't even give each other the time of day elsewhere are united in common purpose. That's almost church in some ways (or a more successful example of what church would hope to do, maybe?).

Christian faith acknowledges one healer, called a Gentle Healer by some, a Wounded Healer by others, both accurate enough. Again, though, I don't think that in this case any particular religious affiliation is required to get that healing is too deep and too long a process to be accomplished by any sport, or certainly by any one game. It can be a step or a part, but it can't do it on its own, and evidently not forever.

Note the armband.

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...

Unwise words

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

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

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

Clank.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Getting itchy yet?

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

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