On Sunday afternoons, the TV was on.
There was my dad — beer in hand, tuned to CBS or FOX, watching the weekend’s NFL games.
My father loved football. I didn’t. But, then again, I was probably around 7 or 8 years old, and football interested me just as much as filing for tax returns did.
“You’ll like it when you get older,” my father told me.
I remember that conversation so vividly, partly because it came true. Football became my favorite sport growing up. I was instilled with a love for the Miami Dolphins and the Miami Hurricanes, and a deep-rooted hatred for the New York Jets. The goddamn New York Jets.
But now I hate all of it.
Now, NFL football is boring. Things have changed about the sport, and while I’m tempted to say it’s just me, that these are the consequences of growing older and developing different interests, of growing more cynical and more suspicious and less easily entertained by the things that used to interest me, there are certain undeniable facts about the NFL that are impossible to ignore.
It’s dangerous. It’s irresponsible. And with every passing year, it only seems to grow more so.
Yet, it has never been more popular.
Football players are larger, stronger, faster and quicker than they have ever been. And that goes with every sport — baseball, soccer, hockey, basketball. It’s evolution. There’s a running joke in sports circles that, if there existed a time machine and one could take back Kevin Durant or LeBron James and place them on a 1920s basketball court, onlookers would certainly burn them at the stake for witchcraft.
And nowhere is that more evident than in football, a sport where stronger athletes translates to more powerful hits and more gruesome injuries.
Every time I see a thudding collision or a blindside tackle, or a brief pause in a game because a stretcher has to be wheeled out onto a field to carry off an unconscious player, I can’t help but think how it will affect that person’s life 10 or 20 years from now. Over the last decade, scientists have discovered CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy), a disease which slowly degenerates the brain and is likely caused by concussions or too many blows to the head.
In a well publicized story, a 2015 Boston University research group studied the brains of 91 deceased former NFL players. Eighty-seven of them had CTE.
This is nothing new.
And the NFL is doing nothing. Which makes sense. They are a business with business interests. They’re in it for the money.
It’s why they continue to play Thursday Night Football, a practice in barbarism that takes the most gruesome aspects of the sport — little rest (both teams play the game on three days of rest instead of the usual six) and injuries (often teams shoot up players with painkillers to march their sore bodies out on the field, turning them into a numb bulk of muscle) — and turns them into our entertainment.
But is it really entertainment when many of the games are either boring or blowouts (the average margin of victory in this season’s playoffs has been about 14.4 points) and grown men are crippling their bodies?
And yes, I hear the counter argument. These players get paid millions of dollars. They signed up for this. They knew what they were getting into.
But, in fact, a vast majority of the players don’t want Thursday Night Football. All-Pro Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman wrote a column in December for the Players’ Tribune, a media outlet for athletes to express themselves instead of indirectly through reporters, explaining why Thursday Night Football is cruel and horrific, and why almost every player in the NFL wants it out of their lives.
The funny thing is, to most of you, this is obvious. We’re supporting a dangerous sport, whose members have a shortened life expectancy, whose employers care little for their personal health and safety, and whose quality of product has severely diminished because of it.
So, what to do?
Eliminate Thursday Night games. Insert more bye weeks, giving each team two or three weeks off during the season to rest instead of just one. Shorten the preseason from four to two games, shorten the regular season from 16 to 14 or even to 12 games.
Yes, this means less football for all of us. But, in the end, the players will be healthier, lives could be saved and, selfishly, the quality of entertainment that we receive each week will be much better, as the most athletic people on the planet will actually receive time for their bodies to heal before they recklessly ram into each other for the sake of our fandom.
Until that happens, I don’t see why I’ll ever be tempted to sit down for three hours to watch a diminished, primitive product every Sunday.
Ian Cohen is a sports writer. His column appears on Tuesdays. Contact him at icohen@alligator.org, and follow him on Twitter @icohenb.
Atlanta Falcons wide receiver Julio Jones (11) runs into Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman (25) as Jones scores a touchdown during the first half of an NFL football NFC divisional playoff game, Saturday, Jan. 14, 2017, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/David Goldman)
