Will asks: "Are you ready for some football? First, however, are you ready for some autopsies?"
As that season prepares to invade and occupy us once again — even as I type this, its bulky troops are training to the point of apoplexy in this heat — I find myself pleased to contemplate George Will’s Sunday column. After describing several recent suicides by former NFL players, two of whom shot themselves in the chest so as to preserve their damaged brains for study, he shared this thought:
Football is bigger than ever, in several senses. Bear Bryant’s 1966 undefeated Alabama team had only 19 players who weighed more than 200 pounds. The heaviest weighed 223. The linemen averaged 194. The quarterback weighed 177. Today, many high school teams are much bigger. In 1980, only three NFL players weighed 300 or more pounds. In 2011, according to pro-football-reference.com, there were 352, including three 350-pounders. Thirty-one of the NFL’s 32 offensive lines averaged more than 300.
Various unsurprising studies indicate high early mortality rates among linemen resulting from cardiovascular disease. For all players who play five or more years, life expectancy is less than 60; for linemen it is much less…
Will is so good at disdain, I particularly appreciate his taking on football.
Another good bit:
In the NFL, especially, football is increasingly a spectacle, a game surrounded by manufactured frenzy, on the grass and in the increasingly unpleasant ambiance of the fans in the stands. Football on the field is a three-hour adrenaline-and-testosterone bath. For all its occasional elegance and beauty, it is basically violence for, among other purposes, inflicting intimidating pain. (Seau said his job was “to inflict pain on my opponent and have him quit.”) The New Orleans Saints’ “bounty” system of cash payments to players who knocked opposing players out of games crossed a line distinguishing the essence of the game from the perversion of it. This is, however, an increasingly faint line.
Not that America will pay attention.
Speaking of which… an answering column — more of a rant, really — has already appeared in The Washington Times, headlined “Preserve football and cancel George Will’s column.” Conveniently, it is accompanied by this perfect illustration of what Will described as “the increasingly unpleasant ambiance of the fans in the stands.” The rant calls into question Will’s characterization of football fans as “a tribe not known for savoring nuance.” But who can look upon that photo and doubt that description?
Yes, many good and sensible people, including some I love and respect, look forward to the coming season. I just hope they will read this column and think about it. They, at least — unlike the people in that photo — are still reachable, I hope.
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It’s a shame this most wonderful of all sporting events has such a dangerous side to it. Perhaps some radical changes to the rules are needed. But football really is the greatest of all spectactor sporting events. I’ll go one better than that, it’s THE greatest spectator event period. And that would include movies, concerts and even wrestle mania.
Gosh bud, whoda thunk that 300 pound men repeatedly running and slamming into each other would cause bodily harm. Maybe if we pay these athletes multi-million dollar contracts for powder-puff rules football things will change. Until then, I think they should be able to steroid up so we can see guys running 3 second 40-yard dashes, vertical jumps of 60 inches, throw punches that’ll literally take a person’s head off, bench press 2000 pounds, etc… We aren’t paying these people billion dollar contracts for their brains.
Wow. I just noticed that I had failed to provide a link to that column replying to Will’s. So I went back and did so, and instead of skimming it the way I did before, I actually took time to READ it.
Wow. Calling it a “rant” was kind.
Let’s just take one gigantic flaw in it. The entire thrust of the piece is that Will is wrong to be trying to “ban” football. This writer goes on and on about it, repeatedly asserting that Will has called for the game to be banned, something that apparently makes Will a “liberal” and other awful things. Which is another error we could explore, but let’s stick with the first one.
George will does not at any time in his column call for football to be banned. In fact, at the end, at the point when someone who wanted the game banned would issue a ringing call to that effect, what he says is this: “After 18 people died playing football in 1905, even President Theodore Roosevelt, who loved war and gore generally, flinched and forced some rules changes. Today, however, the problem is not the rules; it is the fiction that football can be fixed and still resemble the game fans relish.”
That is in fact the closest he comes to saying the game should be banned, and he clearly does not do so. A person may INFER from that ending that the only thing to do would be to ban it — that would make perfect sense. But Will doesn’t go there.
What he does is a characteristically George Will thing. If Will has a maddening habit, it’s that his columns so often lack conclusions or prescriptions. He shines light, sometimes confusing, contradictory light (although not in this case) upon something, but he seldom arrives at a point at which he says, “and therefore we should do this.” The fact that he doesn’t is related to the fact that he is a conservative.
Again, although someone who IS prescription-oriented might decide that the game should be done away with after reading Will’s column, the column itself never says so. You might think that’s a thin objection, but my point is that Will does not deserve to be excoriated repeatedly for something he did not do, even if all you can say is that he did not QUITE do it. Will’s column certainly doesn’t deserve a paragraph such as this:
“Disliking football is still legal in this society. Failing to understand football is allowed. Trying to have it banned is unacceptable. This is still America, and we don’t ban things just because Barack Obama, Michael Bloomberg or George Will don’t like them. Football can and should be fixed. It is George Will that cannot be.”
Or this:
“Now George Will has become a leftist. Some people have developed serious injuries from playing football. Normal people want to figure out how to fix the problem. George Will says the problems cannot be fixed. Just ban football and be done with it.”
No, actually, he did NOT say that.
In fact, in FACT, while you may say Will implied it should be banned, he suggests much more strongly that maybe the marketplace will take care of it:
“Still, football has bigger long-term problems than lawsuits. Football is entertainment in which the audience is expected to delight in gladiatorial action that a growing portion of the audience knows may cause the players degenerative brain disease. Not even football fans, a tribe not known for savoring nuance, can forever block that fact from their excited brains.
“Furthermore, in this age of bubble-wrapped children, when parents put helmets on wee tricycle riders, many children are going to be steered away from youth football, diverting the flow of talent to the benefit of other sports.”
The ranter actually quoted from that passage, taking exception to the “savoring nuance” bit. Too bad he didn’t actually READ it.
I dunno Brad. It may very well be highly veiled but the impression is that George Will wants to ban it, at least the way it is played now. It is a bit frustrating trying to figure out EXACTLY what he wants to happen. But if his goal is to have the market take care of it he’s seriously deluded. There is just too much money and passion for that to happen.
Exactly. It is quite often “a bit frustrating trying to figure out EXACTLY what he wants to happen.” That’s part of the Will style, and if you want to get ticked off at him for something, that would be a place to start.
To accuse him of coming out and saying something like that is to fail to understand Will.
And I don’t think he thinks the marketplace will take care of it, any more than he thinks there’s any chance of banning the game. I’m just saying he suggested the former at least as strongly as he did the latter.
This is the Washington Times you’re talking about, after all. No surprise that it’s a little over the top in its rant.
I do think he thinks the marketplace will take care of it because he said as much on This Week when George Stephanopolis asked him about it. At least he repeated something very similar to the quote above about parents who go overboard with helmets for their children, etc. and that he thought there would in essence be a revolt when those sorts of parents get wind of the data.
My impression listening to him was he thought the market would take care of it, though he again, didn’t actually say that.
But I disagree with him if that is what he thinks. Those parents may keep their kids from playing, but they still want to watch it. They’ll still buy tickets and jerseys and watch it on TV, so the marketplace will decide to keep on letting it happen.
“the increasingly unpleasant ambiance of the fans in the stands.”
We’re not talking about a production of “Death of a Salesman” in football pads.
Get excited. And for goodness sakes, don’t shush people at a football game.
As for the people in your photo, it looks like they’re having fun to me. They’re not hurting anyone. It’s called having enthusiasm and having fun. Way to be judgmental and smug. I bet at least one of them is in Rotary.
The Freakonomics guys did a podcast on this same subject several years ago. They argued that by improving equipment to make the game safer, the game has actually become more dangerous. Professional players are doing things with their bodies they would not have attempted years ago. Younger players emulate the actions they see pros taking, but their equipment is of lesser quality. Each year for the last several years one or more high school players have died as a result of injuries sustained on the field. Even more players have died as a result of heat stroke or undetected heart conditions.
The market will not correct the problem anytime soon–far too much money is at stake. Maybe a rule with a sort of “mass cap” similar to the salary cap the teams operate under now would help. Reduce the total mass of the teams each year until players reach a size that is as safe as possible with the equipment available. Make penalties for infractions that can lead to injury (head-to-head contact, spearing) real penalties–make the player miss a game or two. Better yest, take a cue from hockey and make him sit out a number of plays and make his team play with a lesser number of players. Fines don’t get anybody’s attention.