Why the NFL Draft Makes Me Think Twice About My Love For Football

A fan turns his NFL 2015 Drift cap backward as he watches the crowd in the first round of the 2015 NFL Draft, Thursday, April 30, 2015, in Chicago. (John Starks/Daily Herald via AP)
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Football is back on the clock. The 2015 NFL Draft began Thursday evening in Chicago with 32 teams preparing the future of their franchises. The seven rounds will bring 256 young men into an industry worth billions of dollars and, in turn, these teams are hoping their draft selections will yield a winning season.

I’m watching to see who my team selects with their (late) first round pick, hoping Jaelen Strong (a clutch wide receiver from my alma mater Arizona State) gets a first-round paycheck and rooting for other Pac-12 players like Oregon quarterback Marcus Mariota. The draft is supposed to be about the promise of the future and the hopes for what a new crop of well-compensated players can do for your team. It’s a new chapter for so many, but the future is weighing on my optimism and hopefulness. I am having a crisis of conscience.

Supporting football is supporting a sport that has actively ignored critical health warnings for their players, glorifies aggression and harmful forms of masculinity, belittles women and excuses criminal activity if you are a good enough athlete. It’s an industry that scrounges money from communities through tax dollars to build their stadiums when the teams are more than financially capable of building it without subsidy.

My relationship to football has always been complicated. I grew up in a transplant family in a state with no professional franchise but whose residents treated the state’s Big 10 team like gods. My high school’s football talent pool shifted from state championship contenders to bleacher-clearing bad depending on the year. But I learned the basics of the game—the positions, the rules, how 15 minutes can actually mean 40 minutes—while sitting on cold metal bleachers on Nebraska Friday nights while wearing my marching band uniform.

When I arrived at Arizona State, the alma mater of most of my family, I was already a devout Sun Devils fan. But after a few games at Sun Devil Stadium, I learned I prefer the comfort of an air-conditioned living room to the blazing Arizona fall. Then my family finally moved to Texas and adopted the Cowboys as our team. As I read about the Cowboys’ plans for the draft, I couldn’t feel more conflicted.

Football weighs on my conscience because of what both the college football complex and the NFL represents.

First, there’s a purposeful dismissal of critical medical problems. The PBS Frontline documentary, “League of Denial,” and more-than-400-page book of the same name, details the NFL’s efforts to stave off panic of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE. According to the documentary, CTE is a progressive neuro-degenerative disease that mimics the effects of Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. It can happen from those big hits that bring stadiums into deafening roars and, even more frightening, it can happen from repeated smaller (or micro) concussions that a player sustains during normal play. Scientists have found evidence of the disease in high school footballers and professionals alike. The evidence is so overwhelmingly bad that a 24-year-old linebacker, Chris Borland, retired after only one season with the San Francisco 49ers. He decided to prioritize his health over his bank account.

This week, the New York Times put the devastating human cost of football-related concussions on the section’s front page. Seriously, read the story (and ready the tissues).

Then there’s the sports’ eager forgiveness of violence against women—something the Cowboys are very guilty of, something college football is guilty of. And don’t even try to convince me that the NFL’s Superbowl ad against domestic assault atones for decades of turning a blind eye. Football’s culture of aggression has made me wince again and again.

How can I continue to be actively invested in the future of this sport?

I’m not the only one asking these questions. In Against Football: One Fan’s Reluctant Manifesto, best-selling author Steve Almond wrote about his struggle as a lifelong fan to see football for what it was. He hoped his book would “honor the ethical complexities and the allure of the game. I’m trying to see football for what it truly is.” The Oakland Raiders fan takes what we can no longer ignore about the sport and puts it on display with almost paternal disappointment. The sport that helped him connect with his family, friends and other fans has betrayed him.

I, too, wrestle with these problems because football reform is not going to be changed by non-fans, people who don’t understand the adrenaline rush of watching a perfect spiral sail straight into the receiver’s hands. The NFL is a capitalist empire. Football, both professional and college, will be changed by the people who are spending their hard-earned dollars on tickets, merchandise, cable packages and channels and people who are enrolling their sons (and sometimes daughters) into programs across the country as young as five.

Following my sudden move to New York, I missed Texas–I missed the larger-than-life attitude, the food and, surprisingly, seeing Cowboys fans everywhere. But as I watch the circus around the NHL and NBA playoff games, I’m wondering if what I really miss is simply connecting. After all, even something as non-active as the draft brings fans together.

Still, I’m not absolved of my sins because I know and understand the risks these men choose to undertake at such a young age. I do not earn a reprieve because I don’t cheer along with bell-ringing hits. I am still an active participant in a culture that glorifies violence and dismisses criminal activity in exchange for herculean physical activity. It’s time to re-evaluate my allegiance to football and decide if I can keep that Cowboy pin on my coat’s lapel–or not.

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