Against Football (14 page)

Andrew Zimbalist, a leading sports economist at Smith College, notes that spending per student at schools with major programs stands at roughly $14,000 per year. The figure is over $90,000 for student athletes. In the country's most famous conference, the SEC, schools spend nearly twelve times as much on athletes as they do on students who came to study, say, engineering or epidemiology. Colleges with big football programs also spend hundreds of millions on big stadiums—subsidized by (wait for it) taxpayers and even other students in the form of student fees.

This is a point the writer Malcolm Gladwell makes, that virtually nobody else seems to care about: every college in America is supported by taxpayer dollars, and granted tax-exempt status. We do this because we value the collegiate mission, which is not to have a number one football team, but to graduate students who will go about the dull business of contributing to our society.

So who really benefits economically from college football?

The NFL.

Not only is it an ideal developmental league, it's a humungous free publicity machine. The college game turns players such as Andrew Luck and Robert Griffin, Jr. and Johnny Manziel into brand names before they ever set foot on a pro field. Much of the reason the NFL dominates the sporting landscape is because its minor league system is, itself, the third most popular sport in America, and will probably overtake baseball before long.

Of course, when we think about the big money and glamour of the college game, we're really thinking about the elite teams. What fans rarely see, and almost never think about, is how the game operates in the hundreds of smaller programs where players run even greater risks with no chance of going pro.

In August of 2011, the football coaches at Frostburg State, in western Maryland, held a series of two-a-day practices intended to whip the team into fighting trim. You may be forgiven for not having heard of the Frostburg Bobcats. They are one of the nation's 239 Division III teams.

The most infamous of the drills was reserved for fullbacks. One fullback pretended to be a linebacker. This meant he had to stand defenseless while another fullback leveled him. According to a lawsuit filed by the family of a fullback named Derek Sheely, here's what happened:

On the first day, running backs coach Jamie Schumacher ordered players to hit “hat first,” meaning they should lead
with their helmets. The drill was not over until each player had engaged in thirty to forty collisions. On the second day, one such collision opened a gash on Sheely's forehead, which bled profusely. Sheely had suffered a concussion the previous season, but the trainer bandaged him up and sent him back onto the practice field—without administering a concussion test. The same thing happened twice more on day three, and again on day four. At one point, Sheely told his coach he had a headache and didn't feel right. “Stop your bitching and moaning and quit acting like a pussy and get back out there Sheely,” Shumacher said.

Sheely did. A few minutes later, he collapsed and never regained consciousness. Like the young female rugby player whose brain Ann McKee autopsied, Sheely appeared to have died from second-impact syndrome, a sudden swelling of the brain caused by receiving a concussion before recovering from a previous one.

Sheely's family filed a wrongful death suit against the NCAA, which submitted a thirty-page brief in response. According to this document, which might be described, charitably, as consistency-challenged, the NCAA “denies that it has a legal duty to protect student-athletes” and yet goes on to concede, on the very same page, that it was “founded to protect young people from the dangerous and exploitative athletic practices of the time.” The brief is a clumsy attempt to shift liability from the organization to individual schools.

In fact, the NCAA's response to the issue of brain trauma manages to make the NFL look virtuous. In 2010, the
governing body did mandate that its member schools adopt concussion-management plans, and set out certain rules. For instance, concussed athletes were barred from returning to action for, well, the rest of the day anyway.

But it turns out that the NCAA doesn't actually enforce these plans, or even oversee them. Its director of health and safety, David Klossner, admitted as much in a deposition last year. Asked point-blank whether the NCAA had ever disciplined any of its member schools regarding these concussion plans, or even considered doing so, Klossner answered, “Not to my knowledge.”

It might be worth mentioning at this point that the NCAA faces a score of federal lawsuits stemming from concerns about concussion care. The reason we know about Klossner's testimony is because hundreds of pages of internal NCAA documents were made public last year, as part of an effort to convert a concussion lawsuit into a class action. E-mails reveal that other senior NCAA staffers actually mocked Klossner's safety efforts.

I am (of course) a total effing hypocrite when it comes to college football, because over the past five years I've become increasingly sucked in by the Stanford team, which is not my alma mater but where, as you'll recall, I sold hot dogs and watched John Elway gallivant so many years ago. The reason I got interested in the team was pathetically predictable: they got very good.

Last year, I decided to stop watching them. I kept seeing players get concussed during games, which I find more disturbing at the college level because I've actually taught undergraduates. It also dawned on me that the Stanford administration had made the disheartening decision to build an elite football program apparently because being an academically revered university wasn't cutting it with the folks in corporate branding.

Then again, I've never felt an insane devotion to the college game, like my friend Sean, whose overweening love of the Virginia Tech Hokies caused that broken hand I mentioned earlier.

An even more curious case is Evan, a respected endocrinologist who runs a medical research lab at Harvard. I think of Evan as the kind of guy who does not suffer fools, or foolishness. And yet he has, over the years, been so infatuated with Michigan football as to haunt the message boards that serve as grievance depots for the truly afflicted. He told me he first got hooked his second year of medical school at Michigan. “Everything else basically sucked but at least there was this event, once a week, that everyone cared about. It was like you were instantly part of this huge tribe. I got wrapped up in it very quickly.”

Sure, I said, but you were studying to become a
doctor.

“Yeah,” Evan said, unconvincingly. “There was this part of me that realized that players were getting hurt, and ripped off, and that football wasn't the proper purview of a world-class university. But there was this other part of me that just
felt unmitigated glee when they won. And those two parts of me are often not talking to each other.”

Evan said his passion for Michigan had started to ebb—until his son became a fan. Three years ago, they took a trip out to Ann Arbor to see the Wolverines beat Ohio State, an experience both of them look upon as a kind of holy pilgrimage. Why begrudge them this? After all, I still bond with my dad over sports. It's a language to which we can always safely return. But it's also true that I now often wish we had found more personal ways to connect, ways that didn't do such harm to our principles.

As a rule, my brothers and I avoided playing sports against each other. There was just too much pent-up feeling between us. But for whatever reason, when I was about fourteen, we took part in a pickup football game with a bunch of our friends.

At some point, my team kicked off and my twin brother Mike wound up with the ball. He'd been a chubby, uncoordinated kid, indifferent to sports. But over the previous year he had grown into his body and assumed a strength and coordination that caught Dave and me off guard. On this play in particular, it was as if a slumbering giant had been roused. He didn't fake anybody out, just ploughed through two tacklers, Earl Campbell style, and shrugged off a third like a flimsy cape. Then he was in the open field with only one man left.

He ran straight at me along the grass with his top lip tucked. There was no effort at evasion. And I myself was frozen with panic, in a kind of shock I guess. I was the
designated jock of the family, but he outweighed me by thirty pounds and kept barreling toward me, and as I remember it—by which I mean, as I have constructed the memory—everyone else was just waiting for me to get pancaked.

Then Mike was on the ground, shaking his head a little, and I was standing over him as murmurs of wonder rose from the other kids.

Here's what had happened: just as Mike reached me, I took a half step to my right and my left arm found the crook of his neck so that, as his lower body raced ahead, he was violently upended. The maneuver is known as a clothesline tackle. It was not expressly forbidden in our game (because nothing is
expressly
forbidden in pickup games) but it was understood that even in a tackle game you didn't aim for heads or necks.

Mike and I had been so close as kids that we'd walked to kindergarten with our shoulders pressed together. We'd loved each other, and then that love had become too dangerous and was warped into a competitive rage so deeply ingrained as to seem a way of being.

For years, I had taken a romantic view of this play. It was a gesture toward intimacy, a kind of veiled embrace. But that's not what it was at all. My brother had charged at me and I had taken him down with a vengeance that stunned both of us. To this day, I have no memory of the tackle itself because my mind went perfectly blank, which is what happens to an athlete in the vital moment of contact: you abandon the distractions of thought, of moral calculation.

It is the moment when a human becomes a weapon, the moment when a civilian becomes a soldier.

NFL players themselves know this. They call themselves soldiers all the time. They talk about being in the trenches, going to war, all that martial jargon. They know that all the fancy strategy eventually gives way to the essential question: Which side hits hardest?

Ray Lewis puts it like this: “The long runs, the touchdowns and all that, that's the glamour. But the game is about taking a man down, physically and mentally.” Michael Strahan is even more candid. “It's the most perfect feeling in the world to know you've hit a guy just right, that you've maximized the physical pain he can feel … You feel the life just go out of him.” Aggression isn't just some unfortunate-but-necessary aspect of football. What Strahan is describing is the definition of
sadism,
the pleasure one takes in harming another. And he and Lewis aren't hysterical outliers. They are two of the most famous players of all time. Lewis works for ESPN. Strahan just joined the team at
Good Morning America.

The rise of football in this country isn't just about entertainment or money. It's a modern expression of what historian Richard Slotkin termed “regeneration through violence.” Slotkin's interest was in the way British colonists crafted a mythology that reflected their desire for autonomy and territorial expansion in a strange and untamed landscape. Americans have always defined themselves by means of
savage confrontation, from the heroics of the Revolutionary War through the ad hoc battles of the frontier and the mass carnage of the Civil War.

As military conflicts have migrated to foreign countries farther and farther away, and the visceral experience of war has grown more abstracted, football has stepped in to ritualize these forms of combat. It's become the national pastime not just because it suits this age (frantic, competitive, data-saturated) but because it reflects the bloodthirsty id that's always defined American identity.

Those holy moments before the Super Bowl—when a famous soprano sings about the rockets red glare and the Blue Angels perform a flyover and we see visions of our brave boys in blue (or red or white) weeping as they prepare to go to battle—represent a kind of national passion play.

Here's how Paul “Tank” Younger, one of the first African-Americans to compete in the NFL, put it: “My inspirational speech was when they played the national anthem. That really got me fired up. It always fired me up and I wanted to go and hit somebody. Shit, when they sang
o'er the land of the free and the home of the brave,
I'm ready to go knock the hell out of somebody.”

Ron Kramer, one of Vince Lombardi's, players, described the execution of the team's signature play, the power sweep, like this: “It's really all of life. We all have to do things together to make this thing we call America great. If we don't, we're fucked.”

As Americans, the thing we do together, more and more each year, is
watch
football. Fans tend to be less forthcoming than players about their hunger for violence. But the video feed tells the truth. The reason ferocious hits get broadcast over and over, often in slow motion, is because fans love to see them. Like all rubberneckers, we tell ourselves we're watching out of concern for the injured party. (Who knows, maybe we could recommend a good neurologist?) But the TV people know our appetites.