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?

Conflicts of interest

Indiana University has a history of powerhouse basketball teams. Football, not so much.

For their basketball team, anything less than contention for the Final Four is disappointment. For the football team, a 6-6 record and a bowl of any kind is a noteworthy accomplishment.

On the other hand, a Final Four run at the University of Alabama would be impressive, if not particularly noticed or appreciated there. A 6-6 record for the football team, on the other hand, would likely provoke an armed uprising in the state. Different standards at different schools.

Nonetheless, even at a school like Indiana, the pressure for football success can cause things to go off the rails.

A week ago in this blog, two seemingly unrelated stories -- one of a Harvard University study recommending changes to the hiring and oversight of team doctors, another of Indiana's backup quarterback deciding to leave football -- sat nestled next to each other as items two and three. It turns out that the two items, while not necessarily being related, were in fact going to intersect obliquely over the course of the week.

On Thursday, IU announced that football coach Kevin Wilson was no longer going to be football coach. Initial reports spoke of IU firing Wilson (and that's still how my browser bookmarks read), but eventually the departure was reported instead as a resignation. The team's defensive coordinator was immediately promoted to the position of head coach.

This was sudden. There had been no rumors or hints about Wilson's job security; indeed IU is on its way to a bowl game for the second year in a row, which is roughly tantamount to a national championship for the basketball team. If anything it seemed that all was well.

The press conference announcing the firing resignation did nothing to dispel the strangeness. The departed coach was not present, which is not completely surprising. The newly appointed coach talked, as he was supposed to do, of being honored to take the job and of continuing the team's relative success. As for the athletic director who either fired Wilson or accepted his resignation, Fred Glass gave a master class in not answering the questions asked of him. Even the ESPN writer who penned the above story found his answers revealingly unrevealing, in true lawyerly style, as below:

Glass mentioned the term "philosophical differences" so many times I began to envision him and Wilson in robes, arguing over the soul's immortality.

Glass repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, which seemed very strange. For his part, Wilson had accepted a fairly meager buyout despite being owed an average of $2.5 million over the next five seasons. That's not normal coach behavior. Something strange seemed afoot.

A couple of days later, more information started to come out. Despite Glass's protestations, there were some, shall we say, darker episodes sprinkled across Wilson's tenure at IU, episodes which (due to Wilson's departure and the evident confidentiality agreement bridling the tongues of both coach and AD) will probably never be fully interrogated and understood. (A more local view of the whole affair is here.)

At least two investigations into Wilson's treatment of players, particularly injured players, were initiated by Glass, one in April 2015 and another in the past four to six weeks. A number of former players also spoke out in the past week about Wilson's treatment of injured players during his time at IU.

Here's where we must begin to ask questions about coaching responsibility.

There isn't any likelihood of these allegations ever being settled one way or the other. With Wilson gone (and likely not to talk) and Glass having already demonstrate he won't say anything, IU will be unlikely to pursue the issue any further. Still, if even a few of the allegations reported in the last-linked article are true, there was a disturbing tendency towards belittling injured players or dismissing the severity of those injuries in the IU program.

Here's where the idea of conflicts of interest comes in.

Wilson (or any head coach) had the responsibility not to put players at unacceptable risk. That's standard for any coach in any sport.

Wilson also, as any coach in any sport, was responsible to win games.

Those are obvious and universal responsibilities. In addition, in college football, a coach has other concerns beyond those -- seeing that the players are not wiping out in the classroom. Whether or not the coach personally gives a whit about the academic progress of the players, such progress gets measured, and the team actually can suffer consequences if, for example, a certain percentage of the team's players fail to graduate in a timely manner over the course of years. (You might recall that the University of Connecticut basketball team got banned from the NCAA tournament in 2013, at a time when that team was carrying a graduation rate of 8% among its basketball players.) Even if a head coach doesn't directly oversee the academic progress of the team's players, a poor rate comes back on the head coach.

Again, if the stories told about Wilson are true (and the "if" is not insubstantial here), even such a concern as that last one about academics can become an impediment to proper regard for a player's health. The more prevalent concern here in this blog is a kind of emotional manipulation; ridiculing or demeaning injured players as a means to induce them to come back from their injuries too soon.

It's pretty insidious, if you think about it; you get deniability ("hey, he said he could play...") and the player back in action. Eighteen- to twenty-two-year-olds, wildly competitive athletes at that, are not noted for sober judgment or careful balancing of risk. They're frankly easy to manipulate. And it looks possible that Wilson did exactly that.

Let's try to be understanding here; it's hard to keep so many things in balance. While Wilson might have had a nasty streak in his personality (according to some accounts), even a well-intentioned coach of good character can find it challenging to keep up success on the field and in the classroom and still keeping a proper eye on the health of the team's players.

If I'm ever going to start getting hate mail over this blog, it might finally happen because of this topic. Coaches are gods (at least as long as they succeed). It's not just in football; think of how long Bob Knight took to wear out his welcome at IU (in basketball, of course). But there's a media apparatus dedicated to their ongoing deification of coaches across many sports, but particularly so in football (college even more than pro). Nick Saban at the University of Alabama could probably kill and eat a cheerleader at the fifty-yard line at halftime during a game and keep his job. College football coaches always get the benefit of the doubt. Always. Unless they lose, or people get arrested, or overwhelming national attention of a bad kind comes to your program. Ask Art Briles, even as plenty of Baylor folk insist he should have been retained.

Players, on the other hand, are tools (particularly football players). Useful, and even beloved to a degree, as long as they "do their job." Academic failure only matters so far as it causes the player to be unable to play -- not remotely in terms of their education or development as human beings. Personal problems? Get that out of your system before game time, boy (racial coding very deliberate). And don't you dare have an opinion that your coach doesn't give you.

It's hard to challenge a coach who is having even a little bit of success. So if a coach who has the team succeeding even a little gets accused of pressuring injured players to play too soon, who in the administration or -- God help us -- the fanbase is going to hold that coach accountable? Aside from the affected player's parents, perhaps?

It's an unpleasant question to ask, but it had better be asked: are football coaches the best ones to be trusted with making decisions about the health of players (or having authority over those who do), particularly in an age where we have a lot more clue just how much damage football can do to bodies and/or brains?

Fred Glass (right, with new coach Tom Allen) at his lawyerly best.

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.

The gamut of player reaction

The subject of sports "curses" and belief systems is a fertile one, and one I hope to follow up on in the future (even if the most notorious of those curses went out the window last week). But there is a primary topic to this blog, and the past week-plus offered some interesting takes on the subject of football and its concussive effects on its players, against the backdrop of a startling, but not surprising, revelation about a deceased former player.

1) It turns out Cam Newton might actually care about his head after all.

It's amazing what having a concussion can do to your opinion on concussions. After a blindside hit that knocked him out of one game and kept him from starting the next, Newton was inclined to be a bit more cautious about exposing himself to unnecessary hits in the future.

Not that Newton is likely to change his style of play. To be blunt, without his mobility and running ability, Newton's just another big-armed quarterback, and being in the pocket isn't always that much safer than being on the run. No, by "unnecessary" hits he refers to, in the case of the hit that knocked him loopy, not doing foolish things like slowing down on the way to the end zone for no good reason.

I suppose such counts as a tiny measure of progress. Newton isn't stupid, and he might actually have the potential to be the kind of athlete who can have an impact after his career is over if he doesn't end up too scrambled to remember his name. But that's just not guaranteed, no matter how big Newton is. And given the (apparently statistically verifiable) tendency of NFL refs not to call illegal hits on him, he really is going to have to take care of himself.

2) You know that sentence above, "It's amazing what having a concussion can do to your opinion on concussions."? Well, maybe not.

At least one NFL player, Nat Berhe of the New York FOOTball GIants, missed four weeks with a concussion, and yet announced to the world that he will do exactly the same things he did that got him that concussion in the first place.

Among the money quotes in the article: "Nobody wants to live forever" (his own quote directly; has he not watched sci-fi movies?), and a description of his opinion stating that Berhe "said it's not his prerogative to think about the consequences." Um, Mr. Berhe, if it's not your prerogative, then whose is it? Player non-responsibility, thy name is Nat Berhe.

I really, really can't help but wonder what his family thinks, and if he's married and has any children.

3) And then there are those who are struggling with two thoughts, both true. Meet Alex Smith.

He's the quarterback of the Kansas City Chiefs. Once upon a time he used to be the quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers.

He lost that job because of a concussion.

By the time he recovered from that concussion, his job had been taken by a guy named Colin Kaepernick, who is now famous for different reasons. Smith ended up being shipped off to KC, where things have actually worked out pretty well for him.

But now he's about to miss a start with what might have been a concussion, and the backup who will be getting the start is a guy who Kansas City acquired because their coach liked him so much back in Philadelphia. On a competitive level, yeah, that would be enough to provoke concern. Oh, no, here we go again...

But Smith has a wife and three kids. He has a reason to want to live forever, to use Berhe's crude formulation. And he's not stupid about head trauma and its effects; at minimum he can read headlines.

So he's torn.

If all that wasn't enough to weigh on him...

4) Kevin Turner's post-mortem brain examination came back revealing as bad a case of CTE as there is.

You might remember this story from the New York Times featuring Turner, then a lead plaintiff in the ongoing legal action against the NFL. Turner died back in March, having already been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. The postmortem in this case did not replace that diagnosis with CTE, but verified the presence of both in Turner's brain, and suggests that in this case the CTE may have been the cause of the Alzheimer's. Such a link had been speculated in the past, but Turner's exam was the most concrete evidence yet for such a link.

Turner really didn't know what he was getting into at the time of his playing career, which was over by the time of Mike Webster's death and the subsequent publicity and understanding of CTE.

Newton, Berhe, and Smith can't say that.

Neither can we, which I can only hope affects how we participate in football, or don't.

Kevin Turner in 2014 (from NY Times)

The giving and receiving of hits

Two highly prominent athletes in their respective sports are currently sidelined due to suffering concussions in competition. (That would actually be three if you count Dale Earnhardt, Jr., who is trying to rehabilitate while missing the end of the NASCAR season due to concussion effects from much earlier this year.) One of last year's Super Bowl quarterbacks, Cam Newton of the Carolina Panthers, missed the team's most recent game due to a concussion. For Newton, the season started on a rugged note when he received multiple hits to the head in the season opener against their Super Bowl opponents, the Denver Broncos, and the pattern has continued through the season so far. While the initial reaction after game one was mostly about the dubious hits he has received, of late the conversation has turned to suggestions that Newton will have to change his style of play, relying more on pocket play and getting rid of the ball quickly instead of keeping plays alive with his feet. While this smacks a bit of "blaming the victim," it also seems pretty lame; the notion that any of this will guarantee that further harm does not find Newton is pretty untenable given that concussions don't happen just to running quarterbacks (ask Case Keenum).

Meantime, in the National Hockey League, possibly its best player is sidelined again. Sidney Crosby, center for the Pittsburgh Penguins, is day-to-day (such a thoroughly existential phrase) after a collision in practice on Friday. Any such concern for Crosby is magnified by his previous experience. Crosby missed nearly two seasons after suffering a concussion in 2011 (though he was hardly the first NHL player to have significant time lost due to concussion), leaving his sport missing one of its brightest lights and amplifying the concern about concussions in hockey during a time when a number of its former players were being revealed to have suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). The end of that period also marked the start of legal action against the NHL over head trauma. It may be coincidental that the NHL just announced new policies adding "spotters" at matches -- certified athletic trainers with hockey experience -- who can call for players to be removed from the game when a concussion is suspected.

In the current climate around both sports, such losses draw heightened attention from fans of these sports, or even sports fans generally. This is, of course, a far cry from past years in which the word "concussion" might not have entered the discussion at all, and neither Newton nor Crosbly would have missed any action until neither one of them was able to walk. That only began to change after a number of deaths, mostly of football players at first, who were found to have suffered from CTE. This is of course well-established now, but I find it worthwhile and even needful to reach back in memory and try to remember how it was when we didn't know or understand what was going on, and to try to figure out how I came to the position I currentled y occupy, one in which watching football at all just isn't something I can stomach anymore.

In doing so, I find that the turn started many years ago, with the death of Andre Waters.


Andre Waters played twelve seasons in the NFL, mostly with the Philadelphia Eagles. His reputation, and it was a pervasive one, was as one of the hardest hitters in the league among its defensive backs, or frankly from any position. On occasion Waters would draw fines for the severity of his hits, and that in an age when the league was cranking out videos like "NFL's Greatest Hits" and other such similarly themed titles.

After his playing career ended Waters began to get into collegiate coaching, working at Morgan State University, the University of South Florida, and Alabama State University before ending up at Fort Valley State College, an HBCU in central Georgia not far from my hometown. Between that and the fact that Waters was a native of Belle Glade, Florida (not far from West Palm Beach, where I was living in 2006), the story caught my attention. It's not as though Waters was a favorite player, by any means -- he was usually causing harm to whatever team I was following. But his was a familiar name, and the report of suicide was naturally shocking.

And he wasn't a Pittsburgh Steeler.

Mike Webster had died in 2002. He had been diagnosed with brain damage during his life, but his diagnosis of CTE was not of course known until after his death. Another former Steeler, Justin Strzelczyk, died in an automotive accident in 2004, and the following year onetime teammate Terry Long committed suicide by drinking antifreeze. Both were also found to have CTE in postmortem examination.

As bizarre as it sounds, one could at that point rationalize such stories by wondering damn, what are the Steelers doing to their players? After all, the three had all played for them. Maybe they were just too abusive in practice or something. Also, all three of these players had been offensive linemen. They were in position to get hit a lot, and on every play. If you don't want to think there's a real problem, you look for anything that can be used to limit the scope of that problem. So no, it wasn't crazy-sounding to posit that the Steelers somehow abused their offensive linemen in some way.

Andre Waters's death and diagnosis messed with that.

For one thing, obviously Waters didn't play for the Steelers. He spent the last couple of years of his career with the Arizona Cardinals after his time with the Eagles.

Also, Waters wasn't an offensive lineman. He was a defensive back.

He wasn't the one being hit. He was the hitter.

He was famous for delivering punishing hits. One might even say he was notorious, though such terms are usually reserved for the likes of Jack Tatum (the one who paralyzed Daryl Stingley) or Lester Hayes. To learn that Waters had suffered from this condition messed with a lot of the mythology about football, perhaps the most pervasive of such being a gratuitous perversion of a well-known scripture: when it comes to hits in football, it is better to get than to receive.

If a ferocious hitter like Andre Waters could end up dead at age 44, with a brain likened to that of an 85-year-old Alzheimer's sufferer, clearly hitting was not a lot better than being hit.

I would actually go so far as to say that the death of Andre Waters was the first one to cause me to pay attention to football and CTE and the deaths of players -- not in any systematic way, and not nearly to the point of even thinking about giving up watching football (though I had lost a lot of interest in the NFL by this time), but enough to wonder about what effect the game might have on some number of its players.

At that point it was hard to imagine the numbers of former players who would be found to have suffered from CTE, or that such big names as Junior Seau or Ken Stabler would be among their number. It was certainly not imaginable that a movie would be made on the subject or that a book like League of Denial would come along.

In short, it was not imaginable that we'd end up where we are now, where football -- not just the NFL but football at every age -- would have to think about change, would have to face the possibility that people might decide it wasn't worth the risk for their kids. It was hard to imagine that players who never played beyond college would be diagnosed with this condition.

And yet here we are.

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...

Weekly Reader: Dale Jr.'s troubles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We shall see.

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

In other things relating to games and head trauma:

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

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

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

In football:

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

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

Vaguely related:

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

Exactly what do we root for in that situation?

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

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.

What is "fun" in modern sports?

About four years ago I read and shared on social media this article, written in the face of a near-beanball brawl, about the "unwritten rules" of baseball. In the wake of the donnybrook between the Texas Rangers and Toronto Blue Jays earler this week, it was humorously ironic to see that old story burble up from the dark recesses of Facebook.

Baseball has been having a rather strange season in at least one respect; it seems, this season more than most, to be torn over what seems an odd question to be asked about grown men playing games: is baseball fun?

This is primarily the work of Bryce Harper, young Washington Nationals outfielder, reigning Most Valuable Player in the NL, and self-appointed provocateur of Making Baseball Fun Again. His early-season push on "fun" has garnered the kid a pretty striking amount of attention for a sport that hasn't quite known what to do with outspoken players whose production on the field has backed up and surpassed their mouths off of it, mostly because there have been so few such players.

The "fun" campaign has manifested itself in many ways, some of them regrettably like a certain presidential candidate who shall not be named here, others rather more conventional (appearing on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon). Other players have been joining the campaign, entire teams have had their opinion solicited, and so forth and so on.

In the meantime, the un-fun parts of the game have also manifested themselves, as in that knockdown drag-out brawl between the Rangers and Blue Jays. Here is where Serious Baseball rears its head with ugly-looking consequences. When Toronto's Jose Bautista unleashed a hard take-out slide at the Rangers' Roughned Odor (RO-ned O-door, before you get confused), threw a punch at Bautista. Not the usual baseball "punch," which is more of an ineffectual shove, but a real, prepared and premeditated roundhouse punch. Odor got eight games' worth of suspension for the punch, and Bautista for the attempt to deposit Odor in the left-field seats.

Baseball (unlike, say, the NFL) has come to the conclusion that it would rather not see its players (particularly its expensive ones) end up mangled on the field, as has happened to a few catchers (see Posey, Buster) in the past couple of decades and now seems to be an issue among shortstops and second basemen. Late last season it was Jung-Ho Kang of the Pittsburgh Pirates getting wiped out by the Los Angeles Dodgers' Chase Utley, suffering an injury from which he is still recovering. As a result the Pirates were missing one of their most important offensive weapons in their wild-card playoff game against the Chicago Cubs. One can argue that MLB manages to care for its players and their health at least to some degree, or one can argue that owners want to protect their investments, or one can argue that the league would like to have its stars on the field for important things like the playoffs. And all of those three probably contain some truth.

But the business of "unwritten rules" plays into the Rangers-Jays affair, if only because of what happened in last year's American League Division Series between those two teams. Bautista, one of the more dangerous hitters in the AL, connected for a home run that gave the Jays the winning margin in the decisive game of that series, and unleashed an epic bat flip upon doing so.

Bat flips are of course evil incarnate, an invention of Satan himself.

Or that's what you'd think based on the reaction at the time.

Admittedly, Bautista's bat flip was at least as much a bat fling as flip. Pretty severe. But then, in the situation, that's not as surprising as it would seem. In the previous half-inning, due to a bizarre confluence of events, it appeared the Jays were going to be eliminated because of a catcher's return throw to the pitcher that somehow struck the bat of the Rangers' hitter before it could get back to the pitcher. That would have been far and away the most bizarre and crushing way to lose a playoff game and series in the history of history itself.

It is my opinion (probably an unpopular one, but that's hardly new in this blog) that for Bautista to be unemotional in that situation would have been incredibly dishonest and false. That was a huge emotional moment, with tons at stake.

Somehow, though, Sam Dyson, the Rangers pitcher, decided that the bat flip was all about him.

Pro tip, pitchers: when a batter hits a climactic home run to win a ballgame and especially a playoff game and series, the last thing that hitter is thinking about is you. You simply are not important enough to "show up."

Now I don't think that anybody was exactly having "fun" in that moment back in October. And this goes to my concern with Harper's "fun" campaign. And also this goes to why I consider this story worth blogging about in the place of the usual subject matter of this blog.

Part of the problem with football and its traumatic effects on too many brains is that football, along with other sports, has assumed a position in society way beyond what it can or should ethically sustain. It's too big and too expensive and too much of an idol.

And idols aren't fun. Not even American Idols.

Also: fun is a nice part of sports, even on the more individual non-professional level, but that's not quite everything that there is to sports.

There are far stronger forces at play in games -- like catharsis, probably what was happening with Bautista back in October.

But there are things missing, almost as if by design, in big-time sports that can't quite be solved with a call to "make baseball fun again."

When the title of my blog applies so broadly across sports ("it ain't a religion, son, it's ... ), "fun" just isn't strong enough to be the answer to the question.

First of all, you have to figure out what the question is.

(To be continued...)

The Flip.

The two- (or three-) way street

Loyalty is an awfully strange word in sports.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How nice that he bounced back so quickly...

Spectacle, the NFL draft, and Johnny Manziel

With the NFL Draft bearing down like an out-of-control freight train upon the American consciousness, it seems like a good time to talk about spectacle.

Oh, and Johnny Manziel too.

The NFL has, to its credit if you believe it's a good thing, done a pretty amazing job of turning its off-season into a spectacle almost equal to that of the season itself. (Reminder: the subject of spectacle and its relationship to the ongoing concern of this blog was introduced in the previous post.) This itself is not necessarily unique to the NFL, but what is particularly of interest is how much of this off-season spectacle revolves around young men who have played absolutely zero snaps in the league as of yet.

Major League Baseball has long enjoyed an offseason spectacle of sorts, so old and traditional that it earned itself a nickname -- the "hot stove league" -- that has long outlived the source of the name. That bit of spectacle revolves around the trading or potential trading of players and, in more recent years, the signing or potential signing of free agent players. As with much of baseball, the hot stove season unfolds in a relatively leisurely fashion, with occasional spasms of activity around certain off-season markers such as the Winter Meetings or general managers meetings in which trades were often culminated in the past. But again, the emphasis is on players who have established themselves and in some cases are about to get obscenely rich. What the NFL has done is make an all-consuming spectacle of a sequence of events, from NFL scouting combine to the draft itself, out of players entering the league, rather than familiar faces in the league.

Of course, it helps that the players are not exactly unknown. Thanks to the popularity of college football, the league doesn't have to introduce these wannabe-NFL players from nowhere -- in many cases these guys are pretty familiar already. On the other hand, many of the players who become "stars" in the draft -- early draft choices, the number one pick, and so forth -- are not necessarily the ones who became most famous in the NCAA. Really, how much did you follow Carson Wentz's career (North Dakota people, put your hands down) before he became a potential #1 or #2 pick? And when a team settles on an offensive lineman for their draft pick, that player isn't going to be as famous as the Heisman Trophy winner.

No matter. First the combine -- a glorified workout session -- leading to the final frenzied push to the draft itself. People now make actual careers out of projecting the draft's results. (Looking at you, Mel Kiper.) What used to be a Saturday afternoon affair has now blown up into a three-day event, although how many people actually stick around for the sixth and seventh rounds isn't necessarily clear.

NOTE: yes, the NBA does a similar thing with its draft, although it's only two rounds and contained in one evening, and there's nothing like the NFL combine. Also, the number of international players that get drafted in that league require a bit of introduction that even the most obscure o-lineman doesn't on Draft Day. 

And yes, there was even a Kevin Costner movie about the NFL draft, at least nominally. (At least it didn't wipe out as badly as the FIFA movie.)

There's a reason I'm alluding to the NFL Draft here, in a blog that concerns itself most frequently with the traumatic effect of the game of football on some substantial chunk of its players. It is at the draft, and during the combine and process leading up to it, that the commodification of the athlete is most clearly on display.

The combine is, frankly, a meat market. The appeal of a bunch of post-college guys standing around in their tighty-whities getting measured and poked and prodded escapes me. At least the potential draftees get to put on clothes before they go out on the field in Indianapolis and run and jump and throw or catch footballs, while Important Men with stopwatches stand around and look important and measure things.

From there NFL scouts will also make visits to various college campuses for "pro days," in which players who for whatever reason don't get to the combine are measured and commodified. Meanwhile the Kipers of the world issue weekly updates about Who Will Be Drafted When, with the breathless urgency of the live updates from Baghdad during one Iraq war or another. It will get louder and more breathless until this weekend.

At the draft itself a select pool of likely high draftees is invited to demonstrate their fashion sense, or lack thereof, while sometimes getting phone calls and otherwise waiting for their names to be called, to find out which franchise controls their fate and how much money they will or won't make. They might get interviewed, or filmed hugging their weeping mother or who knows what. They'll walk to the podium, endure a handshake from Roger Goodell, hold up a replica jersey or ball cap, and be shuffled off to be discussed endlessly.

ESPN or the NFL Network will try to convince you that these players are Real People, with lives and families and interests outside of football. This is less untrue than it is irrelevant. What matters most, what matters at all from this point forward is their value or usefulness to the franchise that drafted them. If it doesn't work out for the team, well, remember that NFL contracts, aside from signing bonuses, are not guaranteed.

And even that human-interest angle is, in the end, part of the spectacle. One would think we were choosing our representatives to defend Earth in some kind of interplanetary battle royale.

Perhaps the most revealing spectacle, one that isn't necessarily going to happen at every draft but happens just often enough, is the Player Who Slides Down The Draft Board. This is usually a fairly famous collegian (the spectacle works best if it's a quarterback) expected to be drafted pretty high, who instead gets passed over by team after team until suddenly we're down around the 20s in picks and he's the only guy left in the green room. This becomes a spectacle rather like that of vultures circling a wounded animal. What went wrong? Why is everybody passing on him? What ugly secret do these teams know about him? It gets pretty grotesque, really, until some team finally pulls the trigger and drafts the kid.

This happened to Aaron Rodgers eleven years ago, and he turned out okay. He fell all the way to the 24th pick in the first round of that draft before the Green Bay Packers selected him. He had to wait a few years for Brett Favre to clear out, but things have turned out pretty well for Rodgers, and his draft slippage only comes up to demonstrate, as here, that it didn't hurt his career so much.

This also happened to Johnny Manziel.

You may remember two years ago that Manziel, carrying the monicker "Johnny Football" and a reputation towards recklessness both on and off the field, tumbled through the first round before being drafted 22nd by the Cleveland Browns.

Now Aaron Rodgers and Johnny Manziel are extremely different people. Rodgers has, for one thing, a life beyond football, or perhaps more accurately an awareness of how to leverage his football fame for things beyond football, and generally seems a level-headed sort. These are not words that fit well with Manziel. Further, Rodgers slid into possibly the best possible football situation for him, while Manziel slid into the dumpster fire that is the Cleveland Browns.

Manziel was pretty well-known as a party animal when drafted. It couldn't have been a surprise that he didn't immediately transform into a choir boy upon being drafted. Even so, his two-year descent from hope of the franchise to outcast is pretty striking.

The troubling possibility I can't escape is that Johnny Manziel, the spectacle, was more useful to football than Johnny Manziel, the football player, at least until he started hitting his girlfriend. Until he invited the ugly spectacle of Ray Rice back into fans' memories, the screwup, the struggle to do anything useful on the field while continuing to be a party boy off it, was a useful storyline. The Browns can't really be any more embarrassed than they usually are, and they get to cut Manziel loose, sign Robert Griffin III, and be in line to draft the aforementioned Carson Wentz, who doesn't initially look like that much of a party boy. The NFL gets to pat itself on the back for maneuvering an abuser out of the way.

The spectacle serves to keep all eyes on the league. A quiet offseason doesn't serve a league that thinks $25 billion (yes, billion) in annual profits is its natural right. Keeping enough eyes bedazzled to sustain a whole network and a daily ESPN show all year long is paramount, not to mention selling jerseys and all that stuff.

In a league where commodification and spectacle and distraction are as paramount as all this, would you really trust the higher-ups to give a damn about the health of your brain, not to mention the rest of your body?

Not if that brain is working, you wouldn't.

Would you also expect the fans who buy all the stuff, who shout obscenities at you before you're even drafted, who spew bile anonymously on sports radio and internet comment sections, to have your back?

Yeah, right.

So if the DeAndre Levys of the world are taking their own health into their own hands, it is only because it has become clear to them that they are the only ones who will.

The number of ways the NFL Draft is a disturbing spectacle would require an entire blog even to begin to express its breadth and depth.

A burden sports can't always bear

Stepping away from football and its damage for one evening (even though there's plenty to talk about there) is solely an opportunity for reflection on Jackie Robinson, the Ken Burns mini-series that has aired on PBS the past two nights. It's a sobering reflection, of necessity, on how little we get history right, and how difficult it is for sports to bear the burdens society sometimes places upon it.

We don't always remember the history as well as we claim to. Burns has always done better in my opinion with shorter series like this one; having to focus seems to be beneficial for his narrative style, while the longer series can get pretty windy and repetitive at times. Here Burns has done, if nothing else, the great service of disabusing us of the myth that once Jackie Robinson made it to the majors and made it through a year without fighting back, all was well.

That kind of myth was pretty well established for a long time. The movie 42 exemplifies how the myth works, mostly by dint of the story ending after Robinson's rookie season in 1947. The virulent hate Robinson faced in 1947 might have been very slightly lessened in 1948 or 1949 or other later years, but it never went away. One could argue that, while it has probably softened somewhat (freely tossing around the "n-word" isn't acceptable in MLB any more), that racism never has gone away. Hank Aaron certainly felt it in the barrage of hate mail and death threats he received in his progress towards the all-time home run record in 1973 and 1974. Is it still out there, lurking in more coded language? Quite likely.

One can argue that such a burden as Robinson faced, prepared somewhat by Branch Rickey, was in some ways more than an athlete can bear. It's entirely possible, even likely, that the experience broke Robinson in ways even he probably didn't understand or realize. Not in spirit, mind you; if anything, Robinson only became more steadfast in his refusal to accept second-class citizenship merely over his skin color both during and especially after his playing career. But physically? Robinson had a pretty short career and health problems not always characteristic of baseball. I hate to speculate but it's hard not to wonder. The man was only 53 when he died.

At the same time, it's virtually impossible to imagine such a breakthrough happening in any other sport, then or now. Basketball might have established itself as the most racially progressive of current professional leagues, and the coming-out of Jason Collins was absorbed reasonably well, but it's still an uncertain league on some issues. The NFL, naturally, shows no signs of being capable of making progress on social issues as long as it's irreparably damaging some substantial number of its players.

The problem, though, is more accurately located in our fanciful hope that somehow any sport can be a vehicle for solving the hatreds and conflicts of society. Sports isn't cut out for that. It's a game. Whether it's the expectation of baseball fixing racism or sporting events being a megaphone for hyper-patriotism, it's not up to the task. There aren't that many Jackie Robinsons out there in any sport, or in most of life for that matter, who can handle the burdens that come with being an object or a cultural icon more than a human being. The degree to which we wish for sports to "fix" society is the degree to which we admit our failure to be a civilized society, to do, in the most basic sense, the right thing.

No sport can fix us. Don't ask it to try. Maybe it can be a piece of the puzzle (see: Tampa Bay Rays 4, Cuba 1), but it's never going to be a solution.

Meanwhile, baseball continues to cling to Robinson even as the sport seems to lose more and more traction among black athletes and fans, in a way the following picture seems to capture oddly well:

Robinson's jersey number 42 is retired in all of Major League Baseball, and on one day of the season every player in the league wears the number, in tribute or desperation I'm not sure. Among those who made the recent trip to Cuba with President Obama (and the Tampa Bay Rays) was Robinson's widow Rachel. 

Baseball is still placing a large burden on Jackie Robinson.