It's a crap game in any case....

[Gob]

We just completed another regular season of NFL football. Now let’s see if we can make it the last such season ever played. In its current state, professional football is immoral and we as a society should end its existence.

I imagine some fans of American football felt their hackles rise upon reading that. “Immoral” is a strong word, impossible to type from anywhere other than the saddle of a very tall horse, which isn’t the most comfortable seat for me.

I ate foie gras with Christmas dinner last week and enjoyed it immensely. I know that its production involves torturing ducks, which I think is wrong. In eating it, I am putting my own pleasure over the wellbeing of another living creature.

So I don’t take the moral high ground lightly. But I value human life more than avian life, so I will continue to scold those of you who put the pleasure you derive from watching football (and in so doing, paying money to the NFL, propagating its immoral practices) above the wellbeing of the players you’re watching play.

The damage football players suffer need not be debated at this point. The new Will Smith movie, Concussion, is based on one of the many books detailing the mountain of scientific evidence proving that the sport shortens lives. Efforts to make it safer with better equipment will not work, because the damage happens inside the players’ skulls, when the brain sloshes around and smashes against its bone casing. It’s the speed and power with which players ram their helmeted heads into other players that’s the problem. The game as it is played today kills the people who play it, period.

I have been arguing about this a lot over the past year with my friend Todd, who is a football fan and also a good person, I believe. Todd’s defense of professional football is based on the notion of freedom: NFL players are adults, he says, and they should be free to do whatever they want with their bodies, including destroy them by playing a game for which they get paid a lot of money. Todd brings up my individualistic positions on abortion (pro-choice) and drug use (legalize it) and assisted suicide (same) in his efforts to sway me. These are pretty good arguments. Is there inconsistency in my calling for an end to the NFL?


But I approach the issue from the other side: it’s not the players who I am calling immoral. The onus is on us, the fans (and, more directly, the team owners) who pay the players to hurt themselves for our enjoyment. Huge amounts of money, let-your-parents-retire-and-set-up-the-next-generation-of-your-family-to-go-to-college money, “make him an offer he can’t refuse” money. The money is there, so if one 20-year-old does muster up the sense to say no, there’ll be 20 others waiting in line to say yes. Football fans are like Roman citizens cheering as gladiators fight to the death in the Colosseum. NFL team owners, who make money from the spectacle, are more on a level with Leonardo DiCaprio in Django Unchained.

Todd counters that we pay lots of people in lots of other professions for the risks they take, the danger they put their bodies in. Ice road truckers, halibut fishermen, fire jumpers, underwater oil rig welders, police officers. Should we outlaw all these professions? There’s risk involved in just about anything, if you look for it. At a certain point, society would crumble.

The difference here, I would say, is in the “for our entertainment” part. That’s where the NFL tips into immorality. (Like eating foie gras.) We don’t need to watch football – we choose to – and everything we get out of it is non-essential. It is a luxury. It satisfies something deep inside us: bloodlust, that same inclination that causes backups at accident scenes and the popularity of videos of lunchroom brawls posted on World Star Hip Hop. We watch an airborne human body get absolutely pummeled by another airborne body, helmet first, and we can hear the crunch of the bones – we can feel the crunch of bones. “Owwww,” we say. That’s gotta hurt!” And we reach for the remote control and hit the rewind button.

We should be more honest about how ugly and shameful our bloodlust is (and about how natural it is, too, and how inherent to the human condition), and we should try to channel our need for catharsis in this regard into forms of entertainment that don’t leave real broken bodies their wake. Violent movies, I would argue, are far more easily defensible on moral grounds, as are gangsta rap and first-person shooter video games.

But many football fans avoid confronting this central aspect of the game. They’ll say they enjoy it more for the strategic acumen displayed by the best coaches (try to find the name of New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick written anywhere without the precedent descriptor “genius”. It’s not easy.) Or they’ll mention its display of core American values like teamwork, discipline and individual sacrifice for a greater good. For how a well-thought-out, well-executed gameplan can neutralize a physical advantage one team holds over another, and how on “any given Sunday” an underdog can buck the odds and win. It’s a metaphor for war, it’s a metaphor for life, etc, like all sports we like to watch. I’m all right with that. I love a good metaphor like the way I love my own mom.

Here is where something Todd said in one of our arguments carries the day, I think: “The real solution is to go back to the time when players didn’t wear helmets,” he said, surprising me. “It’s weird, it’s counterintuitive. But no helmets, no headfirst collisions. They just couldn’t do it – they’d be knocked unconscious and wouldn’t be able to play any more. No headfirst collisions, no brain damage. It would actually make the game much safer.”

This is right, I think. And I’m not the only one. “Football helmets are creating more problems than they solve,” wrote the Sporting News’s Tadd Haislop a couple of months ago. Even the co-chairman of the NFL’s own health and safety advisory committee, Dr John York, told the BBC that he can envision a helmetless future for the NFL. “Can I see a time without helmets? Yes,” York said, noting that it would require wholesale changes in the way the game is played. “It’s not around the corner, but I can see it.”

Football without helmets would be more like rugby, or even the “powder puff” flag-football version popular with young women at American high schools and colleges than the brutal NFL incarnation of the sport.

Would football fans still watch? Enough of them to support the $7.24bn-per-year industry the NFL has become? It would be an interesting experiment to try, to see if Americans are as enamored with the strategic aspects of the game as the intelligentsia claim to be.

It would not, however, be a fiscally sound gamble. Shortly after making his comments to the BBC about envisioning a helmetless future for the NFL, Dr York “clarified” his statement for CBS News: “The co-chairman of the NFL’s health and safety advisory committee believes that helmets in American football are part of the culture and tradition and doesn’t foresee an NFL where helmets aren’t being used.”

Which leaves us with one moral option: illegalize it, the whole operation.

[Lord Jim]

It's a crap game

No, this is a crap game:

[Bicycle Bill]

Just thought I'd mention, Gob, that basketball was originally looking down on as a "non-contact sport".  Sure has gotten a lot different from when I was in school.

And then there's something called "footy" — Australian-rules football.  We used to see here in the USA when ESPN was an up-and-coming sports network that didn't have giga-millions to spend on right for the NFL, NBA, NHL, and NASTYCAR.  Now there was/is a violent game!!  In fact, when they gave the scores — like "Collinwood: 16,12; Port Adelaide: 18,5" I thought they were reporting dead and wounded.

-"BB"-

[MajGenl.Meade]

Baseball - another crap game, like football and basketball.

When he's president, DT should ban all collegiate profiting from sports programs - no more TV contracts and no paid admission. No athletic scholarships. Then a whole raft of schools would find good reasons to stop the wholesale madness of maintaining costly programs - football would be dropped like a hot potato and the NFL would become marginalized. Easy

Let's see Hillary try that one! Let's get real football as the number 1 sport in the USA with cricket at #3! What's #2? Why it's crap and we already know which three sports occupy that position

[Lord Jim]

Baseball - another crap game, like football and basketball.

No, they're not crap games, that's just the way they play them in Cleveland...

Though in fairness, the Cleveland LeBron's are off to a good start...

[rubato]

Baseball - another crap game, like football and basketball.

When he's president, DT should ban all collegiate profiting from sports programs - no more TV contracts and no paid admission. No athletic scholarships. Then a whole raft of schools would find good reasons to stop the wholesale madness of maintaining costly programs - football would be dropped like a hot potato and the NFL would become marginalized. Easy

Let's see Hillary try that one! Let's get real football as the number 1 sport in the USA with cricket at #3! What's #2? Why it's crap and we already know which three sports occupy that position

Did you pay someone to take the citizenship test for you? You could have stayed in the UK where they are all crap second-rate sports. I've proven this before, but in any given year there are 8-10 baseball pitchers who throw harder than all of the fastest "bowlers" in cricket history.

If any cricketer was good enough to hit a major-league fastball he would have already signed and increased his income by 10-fold.

Cricket is for weak sisters who couldn't even get a minor-league contract.



yrs,
rubato

[Lord Jim]

Well, when he's right, he's right...

[Long Run]

Decades ago, like when some of us put our puny bodies in harm's way, football was more like rugby. The blocking and tackling technique was more about leading with a shoulder, and wrapping arms about the body/legs to tackle. As helmet cushioning improved, ironically, the helmet became more of a tool to lead in transforming the sport into more of a collision exercise. Bit by bit, they are changing the rules to try to return the sport to a less dangerous past time. Of course, over a 100 years ago, Teddy Roosevelt was warning the sport would be banned for its excessive violence unless it adopted radical safety reforms.

[Big RR]

LR--I think it's also a change in what penalties the referees will call; spearing has always been unnecessary roughness and prohibited leading with the helmet; so far as I know this rule has not been changed, but the NFL refs only enforce it when an unprotected player is targeted.

While helmet technology has changed the game, I also thing the size of the players has made tackling more difficult without a collision. Even in the 70s, most halfbacks weren't anywhere near the size of current running backs or wide receivers, making them much more difficult to take down.

[Sean]

Did you pay someone to take the citizenship test for you? You could have stayed in the UK where they are all crap second-rate sports. I've proven this before, but in any given year there are 8-10 baseball pitchers who throw harder than all of the fastest "bowlers" in cricket history.

If any cricketer was good enough to hit a major-league fastball he would have already signed and increased his income by 10-fold.

Cricket is for weak sisters who couldn't even get a minor-league contract.



yrs,
rubato

Not all sports require brute force, some require actual skill.

[dales]

Yeah, like baseball.

[Sean]

I'm not saying it doesn't dales... just that Rooby seems to think that cricket is a lesser sport for the simple reason that they don't bowl the ball as fast as they do in baseball. Just a little ejumacashun for him...

[dales]

I know, Sean.

btw: Nice to see you around, I've been away from here for quit some time.

[Sean]

You and me both mate... good to see you too.

[Gob]

I'm not saying it doesn't dales... just that Rooby seems to think that cricket is a lesser sport for the simple reason that they don't bowl the ball as fast as they do in baseball. Just a little ejumacashun for him...

Aspergers boy wouldn't know that some cricketers, very adept and valued ones, are lauded for their skills at bowling very slowly. That it's not just about brute speed. But there again, the things he doesn't know would fill many books.

[rubato]

Baseball also has pitches which are slower, knuckleballs, curveballs, sliders &c but it has a greater range of skill and velocity than your child's game. Proven by the fact that no cricketer has ever made it in MLB (where the salaries are 10x higher).


yrs,
rubato

[Gob]

That's irrelevant and pointless, just like you, and proves nothing you stupid arse!

[Gob]

BTW Baseball pitches in normal play, vary from 60 mph (knuckleball) to 95 mph (fastball.) In cricket between 45 mph (spin) to 95 mph (pace)

[Sean]

Baseball also has pitches which are slower, knuckleballs, curveballs, sliders &c but it has a greater range of skill and velocity than your child's game. Proven by the fact that no cricketer has ever made it in MLB (where the salaries are 10x higher).


yrs,
rubato

Nup, you haven't proven anything! You're talking about cricket... a game you know next to nothing about as if you are some kind of authority on it. This makes you look like an idiot.

[dgs49]

Aside from the monumental commercial benefits of football - and these cannot be denied - the main reason why American Football is a beneficial thing is that it provides an activity that is RELATIVELY harmless (to the general population) for people who would in many cases be doing anti-social things. If the Emperor banned football, the violent crime rate would double overnight.