Why I Hate Football

For five minutes and thirteen seconds yesterday, the Oregon Ducks looked like they could do no wrong. Moved the ball practically at will, scored an easy 39 yard touchdown on 4th and 3; added a two-point conversion when they caught the Wildcats napping at the line of scrimmage, then intercepted a pass, ran a clever reverse that took them down to the 3 yard line, and looked ready to score again when the ball caroomed off of receiver Derrick Jones' shoulder pad and Arizona safety Nate Ness made an athletic interception and ran the ball back to nearly midfield. 90 seconds later the Wildcats scored a touchdown of their own to pull within a point. Oregon got the ball back on the kick-off, and had driven down to the Arizona 15 when with six minutes and six seconds left in the first quarter, Heisman Trophy candidate Oregon Quarterback Dennis Dixon tried to plant his left foot, felt his injured left knee give out beneath him, and was out for the game, and probably the season, and quite possibly the rest of his football "career." The Ducks kicked a field goal to bring their score to 11, but from that moment forward it was pretty much all-Wildcats for the next 45 minutes, until the Ducks finally managed to score another touchdown midway through the 4th quarter. Too little, too late. Arizona prevails 34-24, and Oregon's hopes of a national championship evaporate in the dry desert air.

I don't really "hate" football; actually, I played football as a kid, and it has certainly given me plenty of pleasure and entertainment over the years. But there is also an awful lot about football that I really don't care for very much, and crippling knee and head and spinal cord injuries are three of them. Football is basically a wargame - the fundamental idea is to "dominate the front line down in the trenches and gain ground" - but what I really hate is the way that football also trivializes the idea of combat, and contributes to thinking of war itself as a sport. Every war has casualties, no matter how safe or stylized we may try to make it. The problem is not that we need better equipment. The problem is fundamental to the nature of the activity itself.

For every kid who ever gets a chance to "play on Sundays" and pull down the big bucks (for an average of only 3 years), there are hundreds of thousands who play at the college, High School, and even pee-wee level, not to mention all the informal "sandlot" games that take place any time a handful of kids get together to toss around the pigskin. In 2006 there was one direct fatality related to football, and an additional 16 "indirect" deaths due to things like heat stroke or other heart-related problems, 4 of which were children as young as 11 and 12. Since 2001 there have been a total of 27 direct fatalities. Approximately 180,000 kids visit the emergency room each year with a football related injury. Statistically, 20% of the kids who participate in youth sports will suffer some sort of injury, and one in four will be considered "serious." That's an awful big price to pay just to give grown-ups an excuse to drink and gamble on Sunday afternoons.

Professional football in particular (and don't kid yourself: with the exception of the small detail that they don't actually bother to pay the players, NCAA Division I college football is "professional" in every sense of the word) is little more than a televised spectacle: 21st century America's answer to the gladiatorial contests of the Roman Collesium. It is an unapologetic celebration of competition itself; and what happens during the game is often only incidental to the real competitive struggle between big corporate organizations -- to acquire and train the right players, put in place the most effective coaching staff, develop the right "game plan," and (of course) "execute" that plan down on the field. And yet often the outcome of games often just boils down to which team can cause one of the opposition's key players to "go down" with an injury, and thus "knock them out of the game."

And then of course, there are the steroids.

I sure wish I could find in one convenient place reliable statistics of how many concussions, spinal cord injuries, torn ligiments, heat stroke episodes and the like actually occur over the course of a single football season. It seems like they keep track of everything else, so why can't I Google that? I would also like to know how many adults (like me) are still limping around decades later because of something that happened to them out on the gridiron. I think if we could just see this information, all laid out in black and white, we would be horrified. But enough of my rant. Let's just hope that Harvard beats Yale tomorrow....