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A few days before Thanksgiving, Grantland’s Bill Barnwell wrote a column that, at first glance, looks like an ode to America’s favorite sport. The piece, entitled “Together, We Appreciate Football,” primarily consists of Barnwell fawning over a magnificent catch by Giants receiver Odell Beckham Jr. However, the opening paragraph includes the line, “If you’re a fan with a conscience, the moral and ethical question of whether football is something humans should do has weighed on you this year more than it ever has before.”
This sentiment comes after a year of relentless bad press for football and the NFL, from the videos of Ray Rice beating his then-fiancé in a casino elevator, to the parallel domestic abuse cases of Greg Hardy and Ray McDonald, to the almost season-long suspension of Adrian Peterson (the best running back in the league) for hitting his children, to the questions about whether the sport itself–either through brain damage or training–somehow made these men violent. After all this, and years of revelations about the neurological impact of concussions, numerous stories of retired players suffering from degenerative cognitive disorders, and a few cases of suicide, homicide, or both, Barnwell’s observation almost goes without saying.
But despite the rash of stories covering darker aspects of the sport, these points virtually never appear in articles about the game itself, which are far more numerous. In the words of Chuck Klosterman, love of football and concern about the harm it inflicts are “like two complicated people standing next to each other at a cocktail party, refusing to make eye contact.” But there are signs in the media and among journalists that the barrier between coverage of football and coverage of its consequences is becoming harder to maintain.
The numbers further show the dissonance between love of the sport and concern for what it does to players: Though reporting on concussions and brain damage, notably that of The New York Times‘ Alan Schwarz, has received ample attention (leading to a variety of rule changes and a lawsuit by former players against the NFL), a 2013 poll found that only 14 percent of fans thought that the connection between concussions and lasting brain damage made the sport “less enjoyable” to watch. And according to Aaron Wilson, who writes about the Ravens for The Baltimore Sun, the paper isn’t “getting clicks” on Ray Rice stories anymore. “For Ravens fans, he’s off the roster, he’ll never play for them again, and it’s just a bad episode in team history and they don’t want to hear about it at all,” Wilson says.
Then again, a recent Bloomberg poll found that 50 percent of responders wouldn’t want their sons to play football. Klosterman predicted that this cognitive dissonance will persist into perpetuity.
But now, many football writers appear to be grappling with sincere doubt about the morality of the sport they describe and analyze for a living. As The Sun’s Wilson told me, “Sometimes I feel like I’m a small cog in a machine and, whether it’s right or wrong, I’m just along for the ride because this is what I cover.” Evan Woodbery, who writes about the Saints for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, speculates that “everybody associated with football,” whether media members or team staff, is confronted by the question: “Maybe 50 years from now, are our grandchildren going to judge us because we were aiding and abetting a gladiator bloodsport?”
Despite these comments, Steve Almond, who wrote a book published earlier this year about the moral failings of football and the culture surrounding it, complains that the media generally stops short of publicly challenging the game’s fundamental nature. “Even though there’s lots of handwringing in the media right now, lots of outraged moralizing about football’s corruption, it’s inevitably channeled into outrage against ‘the league’ or ‘the culture of the players,’ or somebody like Ray Rice,” Almond said in an interview. “The final step that the media will never take,” he believes, is to call out fans for “taking part in a system that’s corrupt.”
But columns like Bill Barnwell’s in Grantland–or a September column in Monday Morning Quarterback, a Sports Illustrated blog devoted to analysis of games and players, that asked “Should we still like football?”–show that commentary on football’s moral status is starting to make its way into spaces traditionally occupied by commentary on the sport itself.
Furthermore, an episode involving ESPN fantasy commentator Matthew Berry paradoxically reveals a lot about how the paradigm is shifting. This past September, shortly after the Ravens cut Ray Rice, Berry opined on Twitter as to which Ravens running back would ultimately replace him, leading some people to accuse him of trivializing domestic violence. A little over a week later, Berry responded with a muddled column expressing his misgivings about his job, but concluding with a renewed proclamation of the nobility of his mission. “I am going to continue to try to be a distraction,” he declared. “An oasis away from Ray Rice and Greg Hardy and Ray McDonald and whoever is next. Because these days, we need that more than ever.”
Before the recent spate of tragedy and scandal, Berry’s idea that fantasy football coverage is a necessary diversion from coverage of real football players would have made no sense. And previously, almost nobody would have thought to rebuke a football pundit for discussing the impact of a football player’s actions on his team, because the media treated a football player’s performance on the field as by far his most important contribution.
Indeed, once upon a time, reporting on anything to do with football that risked inhibiting a fan base’s enjoyment of its team was a dangerous endeavor. In 1986, Dale Hansen of Dallas’ WFAA network broke the news that Southern Methodist University was paying players to play, an infringement of NCAA rules that got the school’s football program suspended for the entire 1987 season and part of 1988. During his reporting, network management “threw up roadblock, after roadblock, after roadblock,” forcing him to verify and re-verify his facts far beyond the normal factchecking protocol, Hansen told me. Once they finally did broadcast the story, Hansen said he got death threats, including “a big black bird” sent to his office in a box, its neck mangled and a note pinned to its chest, reading “Hey Hansen youre next.”
Hansen thinks that, today, reporting such a story would still cause him to get “crucified” by fans. But he doesn’t think his network would obstruct the reporting process this time around. Whereas once the prevailing attitude about football scandals was, “if I don’t report it, nobody else is going to anyway,” today, Hansen says, it’s, “I have to report it, because if I don’t, somebody else will.”
Hansen attributes this trend partly to social media, but it’s also due to a sort of middle step between positive game coverage and more complex fare: stories about how the dangers of football affect performance on the field. That was the thrust of the groundbreaking work on player brain damage a couple years back, and it’s how criticism of football originally moved into the mainstream. Because watching any game entails watching men exchange blows, the effect of the violence is fundamentally inseparable from the sport. For instance, Patrick Hruby, a contributing editor for VICE Sports, says that learning the science of head injuries dissolved for him the illusion that the game’s ferocity was “consequence-free.” He says, “If the fireworks show is over and there’s someone on the ground blown in half, that’s disgusting and appalling. It’s no longer like, ‘Explosions are great.'” Like Almond, Hruby no longer watches or follows football.
By the same token, Ben Shpigel, the Jets beat writer for The New York Times, says he is “much more cognizant” of how hits can cause brain damage now than he was a few years ago. While he says he says he “has a hard time” using the word ‘moral’ in relation to football, this awareness might sometimes temper his word choice. “I think there’s a difference between glorifying something and saying what happened,” Shpigel says.
Within the game, though, delivering a powerful hit truly is praiseworthy; the harder the hit by the defensive player, the more likely the offensive player is to drop the ball. And a player who is able to contribute despite injury is, all else being equal, a more valuable asset to his team than one with a lower pain tolerance. In fact, the reason that objections to football are so irrepressible is that the many of the qualities that make players good at it are the same things that make the sport morally dubious.
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