Against Football (13 page)

The most definitive epidemiological studies suggest that upward of 65,000 concussions are reported per year, though thousands more go undiagnosed because schools lack the medical staff required to recognize the symptoms. Rates have doubled in the past fifteen years. According to a 2013 study funded by the NFL, high school players are nearly twice as likely to incur a concussion as their college counterparts.

Why? Because the NCAA has rules regarding maximum playing and practice times—twenty hours per week during
the season; eight hours in the off-season. Although these limits are routinely flouted, they provide some measure of moderation. By contrast, there's no national body to regulate the sport at the high school level.

What's more, the incentives are all wrong. Coaches are under intense pressure to win. They're working with kids who've been taught for years that enduring pain is what makes them worthy, an especially dangerous credo when you cannot conceive of your own mortality. These young men hunger to compete, and a lot of people depend on them to do so: parents, coaches, teammates. The result is that players devote much of their high school careers to preparing for a dozen games each fall. The driving ambition is not education. It's entertainment.

Here's the scariest part: not only do high school players receive more blows to the head than college players, they are more vulnerable to these blows because their brains are still developing.

Three years ago, researchers at Purdue University began monitoring every hit sustained by two local high school teams. The goal was to study the effect of concussions. But when researchers administered cognitive tests to players who had never been concussed, hoping to set up a control group, they discovered that these teens showed diminished brain function as well. As the season wore on, their cognitive abilities plummeted. In some cases, brain activity in the frontal lobes—the region responsible for reasoning—nearly disappeared by season's end. “You have the classic stereotype of
the dumb jock and I think the real issue is that's not how they start out,” explained Thomas Talavage, one of the professors running the study. “We actually create that individual.”

Let's take a deep breath and consider how psychotic that is.

What would happen if some invisible gas leak in the school cafeteria caused diminished brain activity in students? Can we safely assume district officials would evacuate the school until further notice? That parents would be up in arms? That media and lawyers would descend in droves to collect statements from the innocent victims? Can we assume that the community would not gather together en masse on Friday nights to eat hot dogs and watch the gas leak?

So why do Americans not only accept high school football, but, in certain regions, worship it? What is it in our national psychology that gets off on seeing boys engage in such a savage game? I think there's some kind of shame mixed up in it all, the shame of men whose dreams have collapsed.

Here's what James Wright had to say on the subject, in his poem “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio,” which I have been unable to get out of my head:

Too heavy? Fine. Let's consider the allure of a show such as
Friday Night Lights,
which revolves around the high school football team in itty bitty Dillon, Texas. I'm not a fan of
FNL,
but I've seen enough episodes to recognize why so many of my friends are. It's well written and acted and it portrays rural America in that seductive way Hollywood so often does: forlorn, earthy, mysteriously rife with gorgeous folks engaged in soap-operatic intrigue.

Also, the producers were canny enough to confront the dark side of high school football right from the start. The pilot features pushy boosters, unctuous recruiters, even a star quarterback who gets paralyzed in the season opener.

To someone who did not grow up in this country, this might not seem like a promising launch. But Americans recognized it as a familiar enticement: a drama whose presentation of “real issues” is actually a form of moral flattery. People who would never allow their own kids to play football watch
FNL
and feel ennobled. Sure, the franchise is built on a slavish devotion to a game that uses and even disables children—but at least they cop to it, man!

FNL
also came along in an era when the big concern was traumatic injuries, which could be dismissed as freak accidents. There's no consideration of cognitive impairment on
the show. In fact, you barely ever see a student in class. Dillon High exists as a substrate for its football team.

And football isn't just football. It's the local brand of redemption. The pilot includes a scene in which revered quarterback Jason Street gives a bunch of Pop Warner players an inspirational speech, then asks everyone to kneel in prayer. “Do you think God loves football?” one of the moppets asks.

“I think everybody loves football,” the QB says.

We are left to consider (or not consider) the theological implications of Street's subsequent spinal cord injury. God's favorite sport apparently mandates that a few of His children be sacrificed.

The star of the show is head coach Eric Taylor, who exudes a beleaguered dignity, which masks the fact that his techniques are actually kind of horrifying. When his hunky star fullback shows up to practice half drunk, Taylor knows just what to do: he has his players circle around the boy and take turns smashing him into the turf, as rock music blares in the background and the coach yells “Get up, son” in his best John Wayne twang. But don't worry. Punishing this kid by turning him into a human tackling dummy doesn't hemorrhage his brain or rupture his spine. It saves his soul. Tough love. Rehab in shoulder pads.

Of note: Buzz Bissinger, author of the book
Friday Night Lights,
upon which the series is loosely based, now believes football should be banned in high school and college. The
current system, he says, turns kids into “football animals … who have no other purpose in life.”

And then I think too about my old pal Pat Flood. We must have watched 10,000 mindless happy hours of sports in our twenties. Now we're suburban dads with all the standard complaints.

I've known Pat's first-born, Jack, since he was a baby. The last time I saw him, a year ago, he stood six feet four inches tall and weighed 275 pounds and I had that invasive thought so peculiar to aging men:
Hey, I used to be able to kick your ass.

Actually, I suspect Jack weighs more than 275 by now, because he recently received a scholarship to play offensive lineman at a Division I school and is probably under orders to bulk up.

I was surprised to hear that Jack had become such an accomplished player, and curious whether Pat worried about his son's health. Which was stupid. And condescending. Because of course he did. He knows football is, as he put it in a recent e-mail, “brutal and unforgiving.” He knows it can cause brain damage. And when he thinks about that risk—really faces it—he knows it isn't worth it.

But this is where things get tricky, because how many of us really live that way? We don't want to believe our children could get hurt, so we don't face it. “Willful denial,” Pat calls it. And because Jack attended a private high school known for its football program, Pat became part of a larger community
of parents and coaches and boosters who also chose not to think about those risks—even as numerous kids suffered injuries.

When Pat looks at his son, he sees a kid striving for excellence, a kid whose passion has been awakened, who's become a leader, an indifferent student who got up all summer for 6 a.m. practices. A kid so dedicated to his team that he sobbed openly when they lost their final home game.

At Pat's urging, I watched Jack's highlight reel. He was the kind of player who seemed to relish pancaking smaller kids, which was disturbing. But he was also clearly very good. And there was something undeniably thrilling in watching him and his teammates execute complex plays.

I happen to think that Pat is out of his mind and that his son's devotion to football is not only a peril to his health, but may keep him from developing in other important ways. But if my son found that sort of greatness within himself I suspect I'd find a way to support him, too.

This is precisely why those concerned about high school football are pursuing a legal strategy. “You simply can't explain to a child that there is this weird thing called CTE, and in twenty years you might suffer substantial cognitive deficits,” says Ivan Hannel, an attorney who authored the paper “CTE: The Developing Legal Case Against High School Football.”

Last year, a Mississippi father filed a class action against the National Federation of State High School Associations and the NCAA, in the hopes of forcing both organizations to provide players updated information on health risks and to
establish concussion management plans that include insurance coverage for uninsured players.

Hannel says there are considerable challenges. “But you can't have government behind the injury of children in a way that may defeat the purpose of education itself, which is to become more intelligent, not less.” He speculates that football at the high school level will eventually migrate to private leagues. This is, in fact, the way sports operate in many European countries.

Now comes the part where I address college football, which means a whole new nation of fans can now despise me.

Yippee!

College football is the arranged marriage of two entities: an institution of higher learning and an athletic industry. It is corrupt and illogical and wildly entertaining and lucrative, which means a legion of lawyers and ad men and sports journalists are handsomely paid to defend and promote its corruption and illogic while the rest of us watch. The beauty of the scheme, from the standpoint of a business student or a sociopath, is that the players themselves get paid nothing.

Actually, that's not true. As we are endlessly reminded by the various Quislings in the employ of the NCAA, they receive
scholarships.
These “student-athletes” are given a chance to succeed in the game of life! Yes, in between the 40–60 hours a week they spend practicing and recovering from practice and working out and attending team meetings and
studying the playbook—never mind travel, media duties, and games—you can just imagine how much time and energy they have to devote to course work! After all, what matters most at Auburn is not that their star running back is primed and ready for a nationally televised Bowl game, but that he's primed and ready for that pop quiz in Anthropology. You can imagine how concerned all his coaches must be about his academic progress, given that their own career trajectories depend entirely on climbing the national football rankings.

Fun fact: 45 percent of Division I football players never graduate.

I don't mean to be flippant. I'm sure there are many college players who pursue their studies strenuously. My point is that the system doesn't require them to. The notion that they've enrolled in college to learn more about the world of ideas is a fraud we all consent to so we can watch them compete on Saturday.

And it's a fraud that degrades the essential educational mission. It suggests that what really matters, what makes a college worth attending and supporting, isn't scholarship or research or intellectual transmission, but athletics. Which is why, when you hear the name of a large state school such as the University of Texas or Florida or Michigan you don't think of a college at all. You think of a football team.

To return to the issue of free labor, let us consider the recent claim, made by football players at Northwestern, that they
be considered employees of the university, and thus allowed to unionize. This is not, as the media has reported it, a “controversy.” The players recruited by Northwestern work over forty hours per week, even in the off-season. In any other context, we would call that a job.

The NCAA is desperate to fight this case, because it would crush the fragile foundational myth of the “student-athlete.” It would make college football seem too much like what it actually is: one of the nation's fastest-growing industries. The top ten programs alone increased their revenues (self-reported, naturally) from $290 million to nearly $800 million in the ten years from 2001 to 2011. That's more than 150 percent growth.

In 2012, ESPN paid $7.3 billion to broadcast the newly implemented college football playoffs for the next twelve years. Major conferences such as the SEC and Big Ten have launched their own hugely profitable networks. I would estimate the eventual total revenues for the nation's 125 major programs (TV rights, ticket sales, merchandise, video game licensing) at a gazillion dollars.

Boosters point to all this moolah as a justification for the programs.
Look here,
they say.
Our football team is keeping this institution afloat.
The truth is that it's tremendously expensive to run a football program, what with multimillion dollar coaching contracts and recruiting visits and so on. The Stanford program, for instance, generated $25 million in 2011–2012, and spent $18 million. Ohio State spent $34 million. Alabama spent $37 million.
In one year.

To be sure, the biggest programs do turn a profit. But that profit doesn't provide financial aid for underprivileged philosophy students, or new labs for the chemistry department. It goes mainly to other athletics. More significantly, as economists Rodney Fort and Jason Winfree have noted, only a small share of the nation's college football programs turn a profit at all. And most of it goes right back into the business.