Why We Watch Football
Sometimes I genuinely wonder why I like football.
It’s an extreme glorification of violence. These players are damaging their minds and bodies for our amusement. Most of them have no idea what the long term ramifications will be, no matter what they say about “knowing what they are getting into”. This sport literally erodes brain matter and causes shortened life spans, suicides and painkiller addictions that sometimes lead to accidental overdose. The players frequently suffer for very little gain. Three years for the average player is terrible, and they don’t make enough money in that time frame to possibly deal with the possible lifetime of injury recovery.
Many of the players are exploited by a system built to profit off of the sport at the expense of the players. This is more for College and High School than the pros, but it goes for the pros too. Players are given a “free education” to hurt themselves to make people money. Most of them don’t get an education, because football in division 1 college schools is basically a job and they get passed on through the school because they can ball. Most don’t get degrees anyway, because they declare for a chance. Then most end up spending 3-ish years making several hundred thousand dollars until one day it’s all gone and they have nothing.
Then you get to how the NFL, college and the like enjoy sweeping things under the rug if the player can ball or if something might damage the team’s PR and henceforth some profits. People like Greg Hardy get passes by teams, but wearing the wrong color socks can get you thousands in fines. They have to wear tons of pink in October’s breat cancer support promotion, but when a player wants to actually honor a breast cancer victim and wear pink the whole year (DeAngelo Williams) they are told no. Some things that would just be fun, like group celebrations and such, are deemed penalties because the NFL hates fun and doesn’t want to actually embrace the fact that it’s not a blue collar sport anymore for REAL MEN, where celebrating isn’t THE RIGHT WAY TO PLAY. The right way of course, is to give your opponent head trauma.
And on top of it all, the whole thing is controlled by mostly uncaring greedy businessmen who care more about the profits than the product. If you are lucky to have an owner who appreciates both then good for you, but most don’t seem to. That’s why teams are uprooted or cities held hostage to pay for these billionaire’s money printing machines. That’s why head trauma was swept under the rug until the rug wasn’t big enough to hide it anymore. That’s why Cheerleaders are incredibly underpaid. That’s why the NFL actively pretended it never saw the Ray Rice tape until it was too late to deny it. That’s why the NFL will go to incredible lengths to protect its squeaky image (7 months of bullshit over saggy balls) and promote good players who might be rapists.
I could go on, but you get my point. Football is messed up. There is so much wrong in the sport. But in those moments where I doubt myself, I’ll see a game, or a season, or even just a play, where it reminds me of why I love it. Cardinals/Packers was that sort of game. For everything that is wrong with football, that game represented all that was right.
It’s the human drama of it all. Stat nerds get uppity about “narratives” and such, but that sort of thing is what feeds this fandom. Stats will show a touchdown pass, but the human drama shows an old QB in his second wind, trying desperately to win his first ever playoff game, playing poorly, throwing a pass to another older player just trying to reclaim a chance at a championship. The pass is deflected by an equally determined defender, but the ball flies right into the hands of another receiver, who celebrates as the home crowd goes wild because it was the go-ahead touchdown with the time winding down. The stats will show an incomplete pass, but the human drama shows a coach being so aggressive that it may have cost his team a chance to put the game away by not running down the clock. The stats will show a deep strike, but the human drama will show a QB backed into his own endzone escaping the pocket throwing a desperation heave on 4th down. The stats will say touchdown, but it won’t show that touchdown coming at the last second, thrown by a QB across his body, off his backfoot, 30 yards away into double coverage. And the Stats won’t show how Carson Palmer somehow scrambled like Russell Wilson, found a wide open Larry Fitzgerald, who proceeded to make some of the best cuts I’ve seen a WR make to take the ball to the 3 yard line, and then catch a shovel pass and win it all 2 plays later.
It was incredible, and that’s why I still love football, no matter what, why I can never turn my back on it. No TV show or movie has ever had me as constantly riveted as football does. As long as I get to see the drama of it all each week, I’ll forgive it. It’s worth keeping in mind the bad stuff so we can try to fix it, because what the sport does right is worth saving.
God that game was good.
Thursday: back to silly jokes
I like to think that anyone who’s really a fan or supporter of anything is critical of it. If you support a political cause, then you’re more critical and more wounded by the missteps of those who wave its banner than the rest of the populace. If you love a band, then you’re more aghast than non-fans when the drummer is arrested for trying to stab his wife. And if you’re a fan of a sport, you’re more appalled and thoughtful about the long-term consequences of that sport.
Sure you’ll always have apologists who sweep everything under the rug, the people who support a cause and shrug off any wrongdoing in its name as “Well they’re not real liberals/conservatives/democrats/republicans/etc.” or who love a band and justify the drummer’s attempted stabbing as “Well he didn’t actually hurt anyone and it was a misunderstanding” or turn a blind eye to football’s problems with “Concussions are no big deal it’s just the media trying to drum up a story”, respectively. But while you’ll find people like that amongst the fans, I really think you’ll also find the most intelligent, informed, and reflective thoughts on the subject from fans, too, because we have to decide to accept it.
I don’t think there’s an intelligent football fan out there who hasn’t wrestled with the concussion issue, or with scumbags like Hardy. I think most people who read this comic have probably had a lot of personal conflict about things their own team has done. Ravens fans who’re upset about the way that they handled Ray Rice, Cowboys fans who despise Greg Hardy and Jerry Jones for tolerating him, Rams fans who were sickened by Fisher letting a blatantly concussed Case Keenum keep playing, et al., and that’s why I think that fans can often end up having the most informed and most intelligent opinions about whatever the subject in-question can be.
It’s easy to disavow something that has consequences when you don’t care about it. It’s easy to call the league a disgusting embarrassment when it doesn’t give you joy. It’s easy to decry a musician as a scumbag when their performances don’t give you life. It’s easy to bash something as vapid and wasteful when you think it’s vapid and wasteful. It’s much more difficult to come to terms with and accept those things when you do get joy from watching football, or when a musician’s songs do make your life richer, or when a dumb TV show makes you happy because it’s relatable. And that sense of cognitive dissonance, that idea that you’re against X, but you’re supporting a person or entity that creates X, forces you to look for answers. You feel a guilt by association, you feel responsible from supporting, so you dig deeper than everyone else. You read more thoroughly, you listen more intently, you try to find answers and come to understand what causes what, and how and why, because unless you can understand and make a logical conclusion out of it all, your only options are to pretend it’s all fine and lie to yourself, or to live with that awful cognitive dissonance.
When you’re a fan, if you can’t understand it, then you’re either lying to yourself constantly or living knowing you’re a hypocrite, so you’re forced to be more critical and think more analytically, because that’s the only way you understand.
Bear in mind it’s 5 AM and I’m only up because my sleep meds aren’t working, so I don’t know if that actually made any coherent sense.
Also, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that there are a ton of football players who do end up getting degrees through football. The overall graduation rate of student athletes is around 86%, and Division I football players are around 75%. Obviously that’s 25% lower than you’d like it to be, and I have no doubt that a lot of that 75% is composed with seniors who came back for another year of football and BS classes who don’t give a shit about the degree, but I’ve known a lot of former athletes who used their athletic ability to get out of poverty, get a degree, and make a better life, including a few coworkers. Obviously that’s not an overwhelming majority, and that’s also the perfect posterchild the NCAA loves to hide behind, but it does exist, and those players shouldn’t be lumped in with the meatheads who’re getting degrees in football.
That’s a lot of clarificating.
I get really wordy when I’m tired. Especially when my sleep meds don’t work so I’m trying to kill time until I’m tired enough to get to sleep.
I have a lot of problems with football, but most especially with the NCAA.
While I *DO* have problems with the NFL (particularly Baddell’s leadership– he’s the worst commissioner in American professional sports history), I find many of the portrayals of the NFL hypocritical or condescending.
NFL players have the same information we have– all of them. They aren’t children; they are men chasing a dream. Would I make the decision to play, knowing what we know now? Who knows. But some have walked away. Now. Does that mean the NFL is blameless? Hell no– they need to have a substantially greater degree of willingness to learn and more support of the science, and even better transparency with their players. But I’m not gonna say that any rookie coming in now is a victim, nor any from before the mid 90s. Now, mid-90s through early ’10s? Absofreakinglutely they should have some case– the NFL should have known more than it did then, and deliberately didn’t (particularly under Baddell’s early years).
When it comes to domestic violence, though, nah. The cases like Hardy get headlines, but the NFL has lower rates of domestic violence than America as a whole, and *DRAMATICALLY* lower rates of violence when compared to the economics-of-origin of the average NFL player. Like laughably lower rates. And don’t give me the “it’s not reported” thing– NFL players are scrutinized *WAY* more than average Joes are. It takes a phenomenal degree of willing blindness, arrogance, and hypocrisy to claim this as an NFL problem when it deals with it better than the rest of us do. And if you (generic, not Dave-specific), really DO have that big a problem? Vote the same way I protest the NCAA– by not watching. The NFL’s policies will only change with viewer drops. I think the NFL deserves praise, and that more things that focus on the incredible amount of good the NFL does– the success stories– need more play.
As noted above, I have vehement problems with the NCAA– it’s worse than the NFL in every metric from abuse, to players abusing others, to damage of players, everything. The NCAA is despicable. I don’t mind the 75% graduation rate, for example– that’s still better than the average freshman’s expected graduation rate. But I have a HUGE problem that the graduation rate of black athletes in the basketball and football programs of the major conferences are under 50% in far too many schools. That is abhorrent. I have huge problems that a player who is injured can lose their scholarship. I have huge problems that a player who realizes they need to focus on school more than sports can lose not only their scholarship, but their admission. I have huge problems that these athletes endure psychological– and often physical– abuse, that they are lied to and pandered to and then discarded, that this is ESPECIALLY true of black athletes. I have no concern with the quality of the education they get– my own experiences showed me that the university system is a grade-inflated joke, anyway; I have no concern with them being passed along– not because I have no problem with it generally (I do). I just have no problem with it *specifically as it relates to players*, because it’s not a problem specific to them; it’s a problem growing more endemic to the college population as a whole. But I *DO* have a problem with player-initiated abuse being swept under, and that *DOES* happen more at schools than in society at large (at least when adjusted for economics-of-origin). Not as much as the ONE IN FIVE screamers would claim, but still more often and, much more often– MUCH more often– the players are shielded form the consequences.
The NFL is silly, it is sometimes unethical, and Baddell needs replaced ASAP. But the NCAA is at least as corrupt as FIFA’s worst moments. It’s not only often unethical, it is frequently immoral and destructive to the purposes of education and athletics.
I wish that weren’t the case. I love football, I’d love another day of it, and I’d love to be able to get invested in future NFL players, and know what to expect. But I get Dave’s point: I looked at it with a critical eye, and I’ve drawn a line. It’s entirely possible the NFL will cross my line (though that will be more difficult, both because of the degree of my love for the NFL, and because the purpose of the NFL vs. the purpose of the NCAA), and if that day comes, I’ll walk away until/unless it changes. But for now? I know exactly why I love the NFL, warts and all. I’d just love it more without Baddell, or its current NFLPA leadership.
Le poopoo news meme
The effects of CTE……..ingored and becoming
now that’s funny
ingored and becomming
Also who’s instead of whose.
As a Chiefs fan, I spent a lot of that afternoon hating football.
It didn’t take long for me to love it again.
Honestly couldn’t agree more. On top of the many villanous actions of the league I’m also a fan of on of the worst franchises in the history of the sport. Between the two it can become pretty damn painful to want to watch every Sunday. It’s strange, every terrible loss this team has, every Hail Mary, blown call, poorly timed turnover, late game collapse people will always say “I’m done with this team” or the whole league in general. Yet they always come back, even though they know that the team nor the league are changing anytime soon. For me, it’s because for every few terrible gut wrenching endings, there’s always that one or two games of the year that remind me of why I love the sport. Even though I’ll never see a championship and probably not even a playoff win for a very long time I’ll always enjoy the game.
Hello from the future! Still applicable today with Watson, the Dolphins, and Commanders (the future team name of Danny Snyder’s team) doing all sorts of garbage.