Personal accountability is on the players. Recognizing our role as a society in the glorification and funding of the sport is part of accountability too.
But keep telling yourself this is all the sissification of America while young men who don't even have fully-developed decision making centers of the brain opt to try to make millions while drastically impacting their long-term health and most of the time ending up out of the league within 3 years. Whatever helps our role in this feel better for you.
I watch the sport but I feel like a hypocrite sometimes. I would support all rule changes up to and including turning it onto flag football because I have a goddamn conscience.
Flag football? As stated previously, I would absolutely endorse improved safety equipment and elimination of meaningless contact through rule evolution, but there is no way I support a variant of football without contact. At that point, it is basketball with more players rather than football and not worth watching. Consent is my only concern, which requires a degree of understanding of the risk, and this has been a tort concept for hundreds of years. If an individual consents to play with a reasonable understanding of the risks of the sport, then I believe a competency to contract standard for jocks akin to people with mental health issues is entirely inappropriate.
You can take away the market (and you would with flag football), and you leave, I suspect, many of these souls with few possibilities in life (see college admission processes and academic performance, that is excused because of athletic success). Those, and I suspect there are many, who found their way out of difficult and potentially short lives due to prowess will have no other options. If this altered reality left them in that environment, and they die a victim of criminal activity or as a criminal, is life better for them? Read
The Blind Side if your heart is too heavy while watching the sport. The non-Disneyized version of that story tells a very gritty story of what the sport does, in the positive sense.
It isn't a lack of conscience that causes me to reason as such. People who have never served a day in the military may laud decisions to send troops to war, and lament the dead, but the reality is a number 10+ times more of the soldiers and sailors sent to war will live lives with serious physical disabilities and far more with suffer psychological damage (there are veterans courts now to deal with the high percentage of drug and mental health issues in criminal courts following combat tours), and the news talks little of that inconvenient consequence. People generally tend to be blissfully ignorant of those lifetime effects, apparently believing the war ends for the soldiers when the troops come home, or somehow believing the occasional news story is the exception rather than the rule. Far from it, but this evidence is often not politically expedient and gets little press. If you really want to know the truth of these effects, the information is out there and has been for a long time. The same is true of contact sports. The military is unfortunately a necessity in this world, and for the last 4 decades or so everyone volunteers with at least a generalized understanding of what that agreement implies. We signed up for it, and many do so at the same age as those involved in the sport. Do we raise the age for enlistment? Mandate no football before the age of 18, when the participants are a little less ignorant or have the risk component of their psyche more evolved? What arbitrary age do you set, since maturity is an individual concept and can be attained at a much earlier or later age in life?
If you feel these poor souls were duped into a violent sport, who likely enjoyed a high school and college experience far different and arguably better than you or me (I loved football in high school, but was far from a star athlete) as a star athlete, and earned a salary in three years that may be 20 or 30 times the
national norm, then take away the sport and ask how high the percentage suffering greater personal and physical effects from life itself might be. How many in life would trade their very souls for a few moments in the spotlight? If that is a high number, and I suspect it is, then how do you weigh the percentage suffering effects against those who got the very benefit of the sport they bargained for?
I feel sympathy for the percentage realizing the long-term effects of the sport. But I never feel guilty watching the sport because it is not defined solely by the tragic cases. There are tons of success stories, and you frequently hear the stories that "football saved my life" from people with few prospects in childhood. One hit changed Darryl Stingley's life physically forever. Yet he lived, and I never heard him wish he had never played the sport. This
article on Stingley from 2007 is informative, as it describes why football has its audience and suggests its future if you remove the contact aspect of the game.
Or this quote, from a New York Times
article on Stingley from the man himself:
“The dream from which Darryl Stingley does not like to awaken is one in which he is a football player again. He says he is suited up for the game. He stands in the stadium runway. ‘The dream always ended at the point when I’m going out on the field and ready to play,’ he says. ‘But it never goes beyond that.’ ”
“I have relived that moment over and over again. I was 26 years old at the time and I remember thinking, What’s going to happen to me? If I live, what am I going to be like? And then there were all those whys, whys, whys.”
I would argue what Stingley suffered eclipses what this current injury movement describes for the most part. The man would never move on his own again at age 26. Was he ignorant at the time in dreaming to return to the field? Did he need the help of the general public to save him from the terrible fate he would suffer? He had every reason to hate the sport after his injury, but didn't. The dream isn't of walking into a board room, or firing up the grill at McDonald's, or simply walking again as a normal JAG citizen. It is of playing football again.
The shame, in my opinion, is of the NFL and its reluctance to help retirees. There is no doubt in my mind that a fund should have been created by the NFL, not the NFLPA, for all former players to tend to medical care, and to provide a modest retirement payment in the event these players are irresponsible with career earnings. There is enough money in the billions earned every year to do that. I wonder how many of these physical issues would have been made public if that were the case, and the NFL paid and took care of the players who made the game what it is? This recent injury settlement smacks of a late attempt to do just that, and falls far short of what it should be.
