To this point, I’ve focused pretty narrowly on the NFL. I’ve done so because, as Lewis notes above, the pro game drives the whole machine. Its incandescent lure induces a lot of kids to endure a lot of hardship. But there are plenty who play football purely for kicks, who harbor no hope of competing in college or beyond. And it’s pretty hard to argue with a kid who simply loves the game. If my son wants to head out to a park for a five-on-five, I’m not about to stop him. I’d rather they play two-hand touch, but if they mix in a few tackles, well, I received my fair share of injuries doing the same.
What bums me out about football at the amateur level is that it’s gotten way too organized and cutthroat and just generally corrupted by parasitic adults. And that begins with the fact that the sport has become a part of the educational system of this country, which, I’m sorry, is pathological.
The primary mission of high school and college, I hope we can agree, is to educate students, to stimulate and expand their minds, to prepare them for jobs and lives that contribute to society. (Or at least hold the apocalypse at bay for a few more sunny decades.) But all across the country, particularly in the South, schools have become football factories.
The insane commercialization of the pro game has trickled down through college to high school and led to an athletic arms race. National networks such as ESPN now air high school games. Elite “programs” spend hundreds of thousands on facilities and coaches and recruit from across state lines. The players, in turn, work out year-round. They’re as big and strong and fast as the pros of twenty years ago. This has led to a booming industry of scouts, trainers, promoters, and (lest we forget) steroid dealers, whose job is to groom these teens for college stardom. Sixth-period PE, meet late-model capitalism.
Given all this, you might expect enhanced safety standards, if for no other reason than to protect those valuable two-legged commodities. But the nearly 1.1 million boys who play high school football—more than any other sport—are getting hurt more and more often.
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:
All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.
Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.
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.
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.