Can Football Fans Watch With a Clear Conscience?

Football’s defenders draw from several realms—social, physical, and psychological—to build a strong case for the sport.

From high school to the NFL, football brings people together.

Football strengthens community, bucking the American pursuit of loneliness as technology privatizes experience. In small towns in the Midwest and South, restaurants and movie theaters close as patrons turn out in force for Friday night games. On Saturday afternoons, enthusiastic alumnae deepen their identities as Spartans, Wolverines, Warhawks, and Razorbacks. And pro football helps entire regions understand their connection on Mondays, Thursdays, and Sundays.

Football also inspires shared fidelity across cultural and political divides. When fans root for their team, they root together. There is nothing quite like the feeling of belonging as a hundred thousand voices cheer in unison. Fans may share little else and still bask in the civic pride that follows a winning season.

Football Trains Teamwork

In this violent and risky game, teams depend upon tight teamwork. Weakness at a single position will mark the distance between victory and defeat and vitality and injury.

On offense, the star quarterbacks and standout receivers depend upon the stalwart linemen to protect them. As defensive linemen invade, their pressure narrows the opportunity to run and pass. Then, too, putting the larger external issues aside, race and class and religious divisions matter not much to the meritocracy that prevails on the field. Players call their squads a brotherhood. And stadiums and sports taverns fill with diverse and companionable salt-and-pepper audiences during the spectacles.

Teamwork is a kind of mind-reading, especially plain in the embodied deep understanding of passer and receiver. The quarterback does not throw the ball to the receiver; he throws the ball to the point he knows the receiver soon will be.

Football Delivers Psychological Dividends: Bravery, Resilience, Adaptability

As for the mental and psychological aspects of the game, the dividends are easy to list.

It’s an old-fashioned thought, but playing football trains bravery while demanding it. Fending off a snarling middle linebacker who outweighs you by 50 pounds (my own experience) leaves one less easily intimidated. As minor injuries accumulate across a season—jammed fingers, turf toes, shin splints, sore wrists and knees—playing football also steels the player against pain. In this connection, coaches intone reliable, if timeworn, phrases. When the going gets tough, they will say, the tough get going. We didn’t come to play with our food, they say. Or as a coach once told me with a demonic grin, “Football is the closest thing to combat; enjoy it while you’re alive.”

The game teaches resilience, too, especially when a player must shake off defeat behind him as another game looms. And not least of its virtues, the game teaches adaptability.

Football players learn to improvise. My favorite quarterback vaulted over the Kansas City cornerback in an uproarious and inspiring and unforgettable moment. Then, too, even more basically, the very oblate shape of the ball causes it to bounce favorably or unfavorably, filling the game with randomness and surprise. Fumbles and interceptions can be game changers. Always on the knife edge of the unintended, football delivers a lifelong lesson about living with the consequences of chance.

I could go on in this conventional vein. But the case against football seems equally strong, as criticism unfolds in the same social, physical, and mental dimensions. And here the story gets interesting.

The Case Against Football

If football fosters bravery and camaraderie, the game also protects bullies. Sheer size and great strength contribute to this. But the flip side of ability and drive on the field may translate to arrogance and belligerence off it. Everyday social navigation requires compromise and conciliation. Playing football entails and celebrates aggression. We await the spectacular hit. We read, far too often, of domestic violence and assault perpetrated by college and pro athletes.

It is not easy to say whether brutality arises from the widespread use of performance-enhancing drugs that lead to emotional dysregulation or whether the violence of the game itself sets a tone

Source: Photo courtesy Christine Eberle, Mural Artwork, Buffalo N.Y, Adam Zyglis.

More certain is the layering of factors that distance play from playfulness. And here note the vast sums at stake (between $7-$9 billion per annum), the costs of adulation to young men, the professionalization, the foreshortened tenure of players (now down to between three and five years), and the proximity of career-ending injury. Or worse.

Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy

Of all serious football injuries, head injury garners most attention. Concussion is commonplace; “subconcussion” nearly universal. The longer players play, the more head trauma they experience.

Researchers calculate that college players accumulate 14,000 subconcussive hits during a four-year career. Routine and repeated head injury contributes to the development of disruptive tangled protein threads in players’ brains. Neurodegenerative symptoms ensue—rage and loss of impulse control, depression, dementia, and Alzheimer’s disease.

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A 2017 study at Boston University School of Medicine concluded that, on autopsy, 110 of 111 former NFL players’ donated brains showed signs of CTE. Players living with CTE symptoms include Bret Favre, Jim McMahon, Tony Dorsett, Joe DeLamielleure, Daryl Talley, Bernie Kosar, Tim Greene, and O.J. Simpson. In 2010, sportscaster Bob Costas concluded, “America’s most popular sport is a fundamentally dangerous game where the risk of catastrophic injury is not incidental, it is significant.”

Haunting Moral Questions

Still, Americans love their thrilling game. In fact, fewer Americans vote in presidential elections than those who will watch this year’s Super Bowl. If the hometown team makes it this season, I’ll be one of them. But cheering together won’t let us off the moral hook. Yes, the NFL is trying to make the game safer. Yes, players (many from deprived backgrounds) are well compensated. Yes, players play voluntarily while knowing the risks. And yes, players entertain us spectators massively.

But the moral questions we easily ask about watching other blood sports also apply to football. Are we justified in taking pleasure in a spectacle that guarantees injury? Does instant replay desensitize us to violence? Are impoverished players truly free to choose not to play? Do buying tickets and watching TV commercials make us complicit? Do the social, physical, and psychological benefits outweigh the social, physical, and psychological costs?

We are right to be haunted by these questions.