Rant: What is a problem, and what is not

One of the greater but understated challenges in tackling attitudes about the ongoing trouble with football and its brain-trauma tendencies is in tackling attitudes about sports more broadly, attitudes that are even less consciously vocalized but nonetheless powerful and almost impossible to overcome. One of those is the attitude that, somehow, sports is a necessity.

If you pressed a sports fan on the subject they would likely either: (1) deny that such a statement is true, but continue to live their lives as if sports is in fact a necessity, or: (2) say that, yes, sports is a necessity, but be unable to answer "why" with anything beyond vacuous platitudes or myths.

Case in point: this article, a seemingly innocuous piece by one Julianna W. Miner on why kids tend to drop out of youth sports by around age 13.

Now it would be possible to report such a study, commissioned by the National Alliance for Youth Sports, in a pretty blase manner, putting the statistics out there and not much else. But that's not what his afoot here; it's not a straight-up news report, but closer to an opinion piece, written by a mother of youth, one of whom is about to hit that age, fretting about All The Things The Child Will Miss By Not Playing Sports.

Now if you've read this blog much you know something is up when I go all Hunter S. Thompson on you with the capitalization. Let's pull out the sticky lines and expose them to the light:

“It’s not fun anymore” isn’t the problem; it’s a consequence of a number of cultural, economic and systemic issues that result in our kids turning away from organized sports at a time when they could benefit from them the most. Playing sports offers everything from physical activity, experiencing success and bouncing back from failure to taking calculated risks and dealing with the consequences to working as a team and getting away from the ubiquitous presence of screens. Our middle-schoolers need sports now more than ever.

The "it's not fun anymore" quote, first of all, shouldn't be dismissed quite so easily; she doesn't seem to think her children are particularly intelligent, because the natural thing to do would be to ask "well, why isn't it fun anymore?" and get some more specifics out of it. But apparently the author is just bursting with the systemic problems she's just gushing to get out and can't be bothered with details.

The real slippery logic comes thereafter, with the recited list of positive attributes of playing sports. There are two particular kinds of slippery logic at play here; one I'll call the "lone savior" fallacy, and the other the "illusion of flawlessness."

Note the sleight of hand at play above: first, the claim is that kids are turning away from organized sports "at a time when they could benefit from them the most." Then the next sentence begins "Playing sports..." and goes on to recite the usual list of mandatory benefits of sports, as if somehow one absolutely cannot learn how to bounce back from failure if one never plays football or something (oh, and there is the ubiquitous complaint about excessive time in front of computers or phones for good measure).

But where did the word "organized" go?

Have we actually made it impossible for kids to engage in physical activity outside of organized sports? The only way to do so is to sign up for a league?

(Of all the bizarre things, I'm reminded of an episode of The Flintstones. Fred and the other parents are starting to put too much pressure on the kids in the kiddie baseball league. Barney, the only adult with sense in this case, eventually spirits the kids away to an undisclosed location where they can play for fun. I wanna be Barney Rubble.)

The conflation of "play" or "playing games" with "organized sports" is a deeply problematic mindset that is so deeply entrenched in culture as to be inseparable from any discussion about kids and physical activity. There are a boatload of problems with such a conflation, but to pick on just one for now: the moment that "organized" sports becomes the dominant or even exclusive paradigm you end up with an industry of sorts initially intended (I'll be generous here) to support kids and their physical activity, but eventually ending up demanding kids to be fed into the system in order for it to survive..and you get opinion pieces in the Washington Post trying to shame kids into continuing to play (or their parents into forcing them to play). Go look at that NAYS website linked above. It's just desperate to convince you that organized sports is the only way your child will ever be saved (from what I have no idea, but as a pastor/public theologian my BS antennae are naturally sensitive to such things).

Now let's check out the flip side of this assumption; organized sports, it is very much assumed here, is the only hope for producing children who learn such things as persistence in the face of failure, resilience, dealing with consequences, working in concert with others, and even cutting down screen time.

[WARNING: I am about to swear, loudly.]

BULLSHIT.

You want your child to learn resilience, persistence, bouncing back from failure, and all that stuff? Start them in music when young. Start them on one of those ubiquitous recorders when they hit fourth or fifth grade.

Or get them in drama club. Or dance (now there's some major physical activity for ya).

You can't stop and stew over your failure, because there's no break. You got to get your next line spoken. The music or the dance don't stop for you to have a pity party.

And even better, you can do those things literally the rest of your life. You can't play football forever, but there are church choirs out there dying for singers, and community theatre is everywhere.

So yes, I absolutely question the necessity of organized sports for learning all those virtues.

One blog post isn't enough to unpack that question, but the other bit of slippery logic must be addressed. Not surprisingly, the author isn't all that interested in getting into the possible drawbacks or harms attached to organized sports for you.

I, as it happens, have no such reluctance.

Perhaps most obvious these days in injury risks we never imagined before. Even without getting into the usual subject of the blog, and the degree to which even people who don't play football beyond youth-sports level or a little high school can end up with some degree of CTE discernible in their brains upon death, you have to be a blithering idiot not to be very circumspect about starting your child on such a sport. (Fortunately there are other options; in fact, we recently had an Olympics full of games that don't involve brain-rattling.) But there are other horror stories -- teenage pitchers getting Tommy John surgery, ghastly injuries from basketball or hockey or gymnastics (???), all can be found if you look hard enough.

But I want to pick on something else. I question the notion that all the impacts of playing organized sports are positive.

Do you learn independent thought playing youth football? Or do you learn "do what coach says or you're benched"?

Do you learn creativity?

Do you learn social discernment?

Do you ever actually learn that discretion really is the better part of valor? In other words, when quitting really is the right thing to do?

Or do you learn mindless obedience?

Or do you learn that physical prowess trumps all?

Or do you learn that your success is dependent on someone else's failure?

Let us not buy the assumption that all of the lessons of organized sports are good ones. To borrow words from Frederick Buechner,

Maybe it's not competition but cooperation and comradeship that build the only character worth building. If it's by playing games together that we learn to win battles, maybe it's by playing, say, music together that we learn to avoid them.

The original column that precipitated this rant ends with the sentence: "And, perhaps more importantly, until we dismantle the parenting culture that emphasizes achievement and success over happy, healthy kids, we don't stand a chance of solving this problem." Ms. Miner, you haven't earned the status to critique parenting cultures, because you have failed to convince us that kids leaving organized sports is an actual problem. Come back when you're not blowing smoke and throwing shade.

You know, this might just teach your kids teamwork, resilience, etc. too.

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...

Is there even a "last straw"?

First, before you read anything else, watch this video.

I'll wait.

It's not a pretty sight. I'm not trying to make you uncomfortable (well, maybe a little) (OK, maybe more than a little). But if you're into NFL football, all up on the TV every Sunday, you need to watch it.

It is a pretty sickening sight to see. As Case Keenum, playing at quarterback for the St. Louis Rams, tries to escape a tackle, he gets wrapped up and slung down by an onrushing Baltimore Ravens defender, his head being slammed against the turf in the process. The slightly-slo-mo replay ... it hurts just to watch.

Keep in mind that this game is being played in Baltimore. The Ravens play in something that is currently called M&T Bank Stadium. Some years ago the stadium had a natural-grass playing field. Even so, having your body slung against it was going to be painful and damaging. However, the Ravens (presumably) switched to an artificial surface in 2003, and changed to a different artificial surface in 2010. There may be some who will try to tell you that artificial surfaces aren't that hard any more. They probably have a vested interest in your believing that. Harry Frankfurt has a word for that kind of thing.

So Case Keenum's head makes very hard contact with a hard surface. Next, Keenum tries to get up, but it doesn't go very well. Somehow a teammate thinks the best thing to do for his fallen quarterback is to drag him up from the ground by his arm. A trainer comes on the field to check him out.

This was apparently a pivotal moment. Because this trainer took the field, apparently the ATC spotter for the game -- a certified trainer designated by the NFL with the authority to stop the game -- didn't do so, or at least that's what Rams coach Jeff Fisher thought. The trainer, in turn, was eventually waived off the field by an official (again, according to Fisher), leaving the quarterback in because, supposedly, he said he felt o.k. Keenum ended up staying in the game for two more ineffective plays, the second of which resulted in a fumble that gave the Ravens the ball and the chance to win the game, which they did.

OK. So if the ATC spotter and the trainer somehow got prevented from doing their work, what of the head man? Sorry, but Fisher was in "game management mode." The game was tied and late, and Fisher was apparently already on to the next play. Somehow none of the other coaches on the field managed to take note of Keenum's wobbliness. It didn't occur to any of his teammates on the field that maybe, if at the most base level, a wobbly and unsteady and possibly concussed quarterback (who was the backup QB at the start of the season, at that) might not ought to be on the field. The trainer apparently thought that a guy whose head was just slammed into the concrete was somehow capable of answering for himself coherently.

At least one person on the Rams sideline suspected something bad was up: backup quarterback Nick Foles. While probably not completely devoid of self-interest in getting up and starting to take warmup tosses, even an opportunistic Foles was aware that Keenum was not right in the head, in the most literal sense of the word.

I was in the midst of a long drive on Sunday, so my first exposure to this story was on Monday, with a few hits on ESPN and other sports media outlets and a brief "trending" moment on social media. Keenum was entered into the NFL's "concussion protocol," meaning he has to pass cognitive tests before he can return to football activities. A handful of stories and editorials popped up, expressing various levels of scorn or outrage, particularly in the St. Louis media, not surprisingly. Yesterday, you might have thought that this would be, maybe, the incident that would provoke enough outrage or scorn or some kind of emotion to force some kind of reckoning. You might have thought this would be the last straw, or something close to it.

Today? All you can hear about the NFL is about Johnny Manziel's party habits.

Seriously, go look at that page. Notice all the NFL stories queued up to the left: you have to scroll down an awfully long way to find anything about Keenum's injury and the fallout from the procedural failure.

In essence, the story has already blown over.

We may hear a little more when the NFL concludes its "investigation" (no, I don't really expect much from it, hence the scare quotes). Maybe the trainer or the ATC spotter will get some kind of  It's possible that Fisher might lose his job, although that was already a pretty strong possibility before the game. The mediocre Rams might face some sort of fine or other punishment. It's possible that local outcry in St. Louis might be more pronounced.

But really, I despair of anything changing signficantly.

Maybe if the affected quarterback was somebody more famous than Case Keenum. Would there be more reaction if it were Tom Brady's head being slammed into the concrete, or Peyton Manning's or even Ravens quarterback Joe Flacco's.

I'm beginning to wonder if even an NFL player dying right there on the field, in front of God and all the cameras, would even provoke the needed outrage any more.

So, a few points to review:

1. A player who has just taken that blow to the head is the last person who is credible to determine his own condition. Let this be clear: EVERY ATHLETE WILL LIE in that position. These people do not care about their own health and well-being at this point. I know that makes no sense. It's still true. There are sheep herders in remote Mongolia who would have been more qualified to determine Keenum's fitness for play than Keenum himself.

2. Coaches really are not going to be paying attention to the quarterback's or anybody else's immediate health when the game is on the line. To be blunt, we pay them not to pay attention to anything but getting the next play called. So they're not going to pay attention to anything but getting the next play called. Coaches simply have too much stuff in their faces in that situation. These calls cannot be left up to them.

3. If a designated spotter is going to be given authority in these situations, that authority cannot be conditional. The spotter has to be able to call the medical timeout even if a trainer is on the field. This business can't be preempted by turf wars over authority.

4. Officials need to be disciplined as well in these situations.

5. Anybody who's going to be intimidated by fans in such a situation cannot be trusted with the job. A similarly ugly situation occured in an MLS playoff match a couple of weeks ago, in which a concussed goalie was left out to dry for about five more minutes of play before finally being removed from the match when he more or less belly-flopped after a shot on goal. The goalie was on the visiting team, and the home fans did not allow for the league's protocol on head injuries to be carried out properly. That can't happen. If some means of disciplining fans becomes necessary, do it.

6. It bears repeating: EVERY ATHLETE WILL LIE in that situation. Keenum was no different than any other athlete in any other sport in that respect.

At this point, how do you, followers of Christ and fans of football, trust the NFL any more?

If you don't, what are you doing about it?

(If I sound angry...well, I am. Why aren't you?)

He's good to go.

Rant: once more, with feeling, it's not just concussions!

I promise this one isn't from The Onion, although I couldn't blame you if you doubted me.

One Michael Turner, medical director of the International Concussion and Head Injury Research Foundation, is going to get a nice piece of change to fund his research on concussions across four sports prone to them: American football, ice hockey, Australian rules football, and horse racing (the latter being Turner's own principal field).

This is actually a pretty sound idea. Comparison across different sports makes plenty of sense, if you do it right.

So why am invoking a notorious satire site as a lead-in to this blog entry?

Turner, you see, has some pretty ... ah, interesting ideas about What's Really Going On.

Based on his experience with those jockeys, he's pretty sure all the "media hype" on the subject is out of line, because:

I don't think my jockeys end up all dribbling and demented, and we have good reason to suspect that.

Nice.

Turner is also quite willing to offer up another theory on how the post-football-career issues with mental health happen:

Also when athletes retire they are at a very critical period in their lives. Prior to that they were well-known they might have been famous and earning quite a lot of money and suddenly, they have very little status, nobody knows who they are, they don't have somewhere to go to work and I think that transition can be badly handled by lots of sports.

 Yeah, we never remember sports heroes of the past.

Oh, and:

You never hear that discussion among professional athletes or student athletes when they have finished competing and what we find out is that people who have pre-injury had mood disorders or depression do worse than those who don't...

So the likes of Junior Seau or Dave Duerson had mood disorders before they ever got their bells rung on the football field, most likely. Or something like that.

In short, the NFL is throwing a chunk of money (minuscule, in comparison to its profits, but still) at some classic denialism "research." The kind of stuff the tobacco industry threw out there for decades, and that the fossil fuel industry has been funding for decades even as they knew damn well what was going to happen if we kept burning their product.

In short, the NFL wants to keep you from thinking clearly on the subject. Even as they make public pronouncements about how much they care about the health of those who play in the league, they will do their damnedest to distract you from the very idea that playing the game might be even the least bit dangerous. And as you remain sufficiently distracted, they can keep on pursuing pet projects like expanding their schedule to eighteen games per season, playing games on Thursday nights, and ohter measures that are completely at odds with any kind of concern for player health (concussions or otherwise).

And, as long as you continue to watch and spend money on NFL products, they will be quite happy to pursue obfuscation rather than genuine research.

For example: they would rather you keep thinking about concussions, damaging as they are, without ever comprehending the degree to which repeated subconcussive hits are implicated in the long-term brain traumas that have galvanized public attention. Concussions, bad as they are, sound like a solvable problem. When you start considering the degree to which any hit you see at the line of scrimmage or downfield, the type from which the player hit hops up and shows no sign of undue injury, actually may well be contributing to a raging case of CTE down the road...then that becomes a problem with the fundamental nature of the game and the way it's played. The NFL would rather you not think about that. So they're quite happy to throw money at a jockey doctor who will say what they want you to hear, such as:

Whether you're knocked out or you have a concussion from falling off a horse or being a linebacker or whether you're playing Aussie rules football -- it's all the same.

Interesting. I was unaware that jockeys were getting hit that frequently between falls.

Meanwhile, don't think I'm giving the NCAA a pass. They're even happier to let the NFL take all the public scrutiny and pay for the research, as long as you still pony up for season tickets to see your Dear Old Alma Mater serve as the NFL's farm system, any ethical concerns that you might see in any other situation overwhelmed by your tribal loyalties.

 Have a nice weekend. Enjoy the games.

Poor Tom Crabtree (@itsCrab, formerly of the Packers)

Not what faith is for

So apparently ESPN.com is fascinated today with the notion that an NFL player does not believe in God.

I'm not sure if they're feeling a bit queasy about the College Football Issue of ESPN The Magazine or what, but this seems to have become the story they've chosen to highlight online. I suppose it could also be taking advantage of the headline coincidence that Arian Foster had surgery today that will keep him out this season.

Anyway, I'm a bit surprised that this is a story. Even I, who gave this blog a title that is the conclusion of a old southern saying that starts "Football isn't a religion, it's...", am a bit flummoxed by this.

I suppose I shouldn't be, though.

After all, as described in the article, Foster's Tennessee college team got taken to church as a team-building exercise. This was Tennessee, as in "University of," which isn't a church-related school as far as I know. Clemson's head coach, Mississippi's head coach, and more than a few others openly do the same thing, and these "exercises" aren't optional.

I'm going to keep this short. There are a whole lot of directions going all over the place from this piece that could provoke reactions from concern to outrage; the non-voluntary nature of the church trips (which tend to be to large evangelical churches instead of, say, the Catholic cathedral), the assumption that everybody is perfectly o.k. with participating in a faith tradition that is not theirs in order to get along with teammates and not get coaches angry at them, the association of Christianity (or would this be Andrew Sullivan's Christianism?) with a sport that seems rather lacking in Christlike graces, so to speak.

Where I get riled, though, is something that seems (to me) a far simpler problem: since when do we get to use Christianity for our own fun and profit?

When does it become acceptable to appropriate the life and death and resurrection, the teaching and healing and walking-on-water, the kingdom of God come near (Mark 1:15), the stuff of faith, as a team-building exercise? What kind of arrogance does it take to pray for a win? Does the church's own rather perverse bent towards militaristic imagery still color its fascination with our most militaristic game?

The Christian faith doesn't make a lick of sense and is extremely pointless if it's not about being Christ-like, as much as any human can be. It is about being transformed instead of conformed (Romans 12), about living into the kingdom of God come near (Mark 1). It's not about being a better quarterback or linebacker, or being molded into a football machine. And it's certainly not about using Christianity in service of football. There's nothing particularly faithful about that.