Against Football

by Steve Almond

  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.

  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. Col
leges 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.

  9

  ALL GAMES ASPIRE TO A CONDITION OF WAR

  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 h
is 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.