The NFL Media's Hypocrisy Never Quits

Last night, the Buffalo Bill played their AFC East rivals the Miami Dolphins, who they proceeded to wallop. Up until the middle of the third quarter, the storyline was Bills QB Josh Allen’s ability to play mistake-free football, the stoutness of a depleted Bills defense, and especially the poor play of divisive Miami quarterback Tua Tagovailoa. That changed, though, when Tagovailoa lowered his helmet and hit Bills safety Damar Hamlin, causing Tagovailoa to suffer a frightening concussion, complete with fencing posture. This would be scary regardless, but is particularly worrisome for Tua, who has suffered two other known NFL concussions and had what was declared to be a “back injury” by the Dolphins that many suspected of being a concussion. It was a scary moment and many people are understandably questioning whether Tagovailoa will or should play again.

This morning, I watched some of my usual football YouTube channels, as I usually do the morning after a big game, then went on my morning walk. I tried listening to a couple NFL podcasts as I did so. I found that several of these channels and podcasts had responded to what happened by refusing to cover the football elements of the game last night. That is, they didn’t do their usual thing and go over the Xs and Os of the game, talk about the AFC pecking order, discuss whether Mike McDaniel is all style and no substance…. No shop talk. And they said that they wouldn’t do that because it would somehow be offensive given the gravity of Tua Tagovailoa’s injury. It’s “not about that” right now; to discuss football as football in this context would be disrespectful.

To which my question would be… how does that work, exactly? Because it sure doesn’t seem to be based on some sort of consistent moral principle.

Last week, a cornerback on the Buccaneers named Zylon McCollum suffered a concussion against the Washington Commanders. Yet these NFL pundits who are refusing to comment on last night’s game, as a game, happily covered that game as a game. So what’s the principle? Does McCollum not count? Why? Because he’s a backup defensive back and Tua’s a star quarterback? That doesn’t seem to work, morally, when the whole idea here is that the human being is what really matters in this situation. It’s fair to point out that Tagovailoa has a repetitive concussion problem and that makes it scarier. But lots of players in the NFL have repetitive concussion problems! Zylon McCollum isn’t exactly a household name, so I don’t know if he does. But there are dozens of concussions during an NFL season, and a lot of them happen to players repetitively, and yet this “rule” that we shouldn’t cover games when there’s a scary concussion obviously didn’t apply to those games last year. I can go back and check their content and see that they happily covered games with serious injuries, including conclusion. A second-string guard being concussed doesn’t get these podcasters and YouTubers turning up their noses and saying “No, I’m not going to cover that game out of respect,” and that feels pretty fucked up.

Yes, of course, I understand emotionally why a big play and a scary hit involving a star player on prime time gets people more worked up. But no one would say that the brightness of the lights or the stature of the star should influence how much we care about player health. My point here is not that we shouldn’t care about the human being that is Tua Tagovailoa. My point is that if we’re caring about NFL players as human beings, the whole rotten show is indefensible. Of course we should do whatever possible to make NFL football safer. But football cannot be made safe. Giant men launching themselves at each other at high speeds will never be made safe. Damar Hamlin, who was on the other side of the hit that concussed Tua, died on the field and had to be brought back to life because of the effect of a hit to his chest. And if the moral reasoning is that there’s something immoral about celebrating a game where human beings get seriously injured, then football is immoral all the time, every game.

Of course the hypocrisy is deeper and more general. I’ve heard a lot of my least-favorite phrase in these situations, “this is bigger than football.” Because when a player gets hurt, it’s apparently necessary to remind the world that the lives of these athletes are more important than the outcomes of their games. But football players are compromising their health in extreme and terrible ways all the time. Players are concussed all the time! And concussions, while worrisome, are hardly the sum of the problem. Watch the NFL’s Hall of Fame ceremonies sometime; watching these men who were once some of the most graceful athletes in the world hobbling around, often before they’ve reached the age of 50, will fill you with sorrow. So I’ve gotta ask: if player safety is bigger than football, how can you support the existence of football? If “this is bigger than football,” if you really and truly believe that, shouldn’t you advocate for the dissolution of the NFL and the criminalization of the amateur game? Or is it only “bigger than football” when the lights are bright and everybody is paying attention?

Here’s an essential point: all of the research suggests that the big hits, as bad as they can be, are not the bigger problem. The bigger problem is the accumulation of small collisions over time. Those are the completely ordinary football plays that happen over and over and over again. Linemen on either side of the ball are colliding their helmets together dozens and dozens of times a game. Even if you made it two-hand touch, line play would be producing long-term injury, even as we acknowledge that there’s various kinds of uncertainty about CTE. Jim McMahon was a quarterback, generally one of the positions that receives the least amount of down-to-down abuse. And yet his physical and mental condition today is heartbreaking, as is true for so many of these guys. Again: if it’s bigger than football, then it has to be bigger than football all the time. And if we accept that, then there’s no conclusion other than to say that football should be banned, and barring that those of us who care about the players should stop watching.

Of course, I do still watch. Turns out I don’t have the courage of my convictions. Just like I still eat meat even though I have come to understand that doing so is immoral. (No, I’m not interested in debating that.) I watch the NFL and I enjoy it and every time a game ends I feel like I just bought some conflict diamonds. There is, famously, no ethical living under capitalism, no way to escape the endless moral entanglements of living under a government and in an economy. We’re all hypocrites, especially me. You have to muddle through and decide which things you consume are so immoral that you can’t consume them anymore. But please, spare me the bleating about what’s “bigger than football” hours after you were rooting for giant men to slam their heads together hundreds of times in a row. And don’t tell me that what you care about is the health of the players when that concern is so selective, based on the stardom of the player. It’s unseemly. I used to be into the UFC, and I stopped, for a variety of reasons; the whole thing is so relentlessly sordid and Dana White such a clearly toxic figure that I couldn’t stomach it anymore. But I’ll give this to the combat sports people: they almost never engage in the petty hypocrisy inherent to saying “this is bigger than football, we gotta stop these concussions, now pass the popcorn.” They don’t go into the theatrics about safety before watching guys launch haymakers at each other’s heads. And I think there’s something perversely noble in that refusal.

There’s no ethical way to enjoy football. So either stop watching or acknowledge your complicity.