Dear NFL: You are making it hard to be a fan

The BBQ Pit
1

Dear NFL,

I adore your product. I know some do not, but they don’t understand that it’s not just brute force at play, goons playing kill the guy with the ball. At its best, professional football has the intelligence of a chess match played with 11 pieces per side, all of whom have to do their job correctly for success. It’s the ultimate team sport in an era where one pitcher or one power forward or one gifted goalie can make marginal teams great.

I have followed it religiously since my father taught me the game. I have so many good memories tied to the game and to my team. I swilled Gatorade when the Giants won their first Super Bowl and still get chills seeing that sign in the crowd “Dad, our dreams came true,” because my dad instilled in me a love for the game and that team. He’s gone now, but I watch games with my wife who barely knew what a football was but now is as passionate a fan as you can find.

But I have some problems here. And it goes beyond the stuff that makes me wary of all sporting endeavors professional - the crass commercialization, the way they all price out the common fan, the horrible things some fans do to other fans.

In the new book League Of Denial, the facts that the NFL used their influence to embrace pseudoscience on par with creationists and climate change deniers and those who claimed smoking just wasn’t so bad in order to deflect responsibility or even awareness that players were suffering long-term health problems due to concussions.

How can I, an avowed hater of bullshit science, continue to support the league?

But it got even worse with the situation in Miami. For those not in the know, an offensive lineman named Jonathan Martin was bullied and threatened and had racial threats tossed at him by his own lineman teammate Richie Incognito. After the former guy left the team and revealed the stuff he had to go through, the Dolphins suspended the latter.

This is a horrible situation. But it’s being made worse by the same kind of “blame the victim” mentality that happens when people say that girl shouldn’t have worn that dress or been in that bar. In this case, people in the league are saying he should have been a man.

From a Sports Illustrated story:

Even a solid defensive player on my favorite team had to open his mouth and leave me shaking my head.

Is it any wonder that there’s not a single gay player to come out while playing? If someone cannot defend himself from the kind of abuses that Incognito heaped upon his teammate for being, what, black? An easy target? Soft? What happens when the guy in the other locker is gay and open?

My love for the NFL has made it almost impossible for me to leave you. I know that you bank on that, that we still continue to follow you even during strikes and poor officiating and scandals involving players and coaches and how you force bankrupt municipalities to pay for your new stadiums under the threat or moving to a city who will write a larger check.

I can’t see me leaving you. But really, you’re making it tougher every time.

With sadness,
JSLE

2

Prize-fighting. My father was a lightweight fighter in his youth. I even trained some as a child, lacking only strength, speed and coordination. Love heavyweight boxing, I weep that the technology wasn’t available to really capture the fierce grace and beauty of Ali in his prime.

But its wrong. Its just flat wrong, paying people to beat the crap out of each other. I used to talk myself into it, hell, its on TV anyway, won’t get any better if I watch it or not, MAN! did you see that uppercut…!

What was that, a few years back, some major hitter in the NFL was dying of a brain disease maybe brought on by the constant injuries? They asked him if he would do it again, knowing what would happen and he said yes, because there was no rush in the world like a hundred thousand people cheering at you. Can we actually do anything about that, or is that something about testosterone poisoning we just have to accept?

Also, it would be good if some of the more polite teams, the ones that aren’t so pushy and obnoxious about it would win a Super Bowl once in a while. No one in particular comes to mind, of course, just a general observation.

3

JSLE,

I feel your pain. The situation in Miami is not easily understood but it plays into this whole thing of bullying and the real effect it has on people.

A bully is someone who senses a weakness in a person and exploits it for their own twisted satisfaction. The bully has insecurities that he/she disguises by bullying others.

The problem in sports is that the system can reward people who are emotionally immature. Incognito may become the poster boy for that syndrome. How stupid can you be? The guy he was bullying was a teammate. A mature person would have recognized Martin’s weakness and mentored him for the good of the team. Then everybody wins. Instead, a mental midget like Incognito exploits it to cover up for his own insecurities.

A great team athlete makes everyone around him look good. A guy like Incognito is what they call a “cancer in the locker room”. Look what he’s done now to the Dolphin team. Now they haven’t lost one player, they have lost two. Good work, Cog.

There’s a lot to be learned from this. Hopefully, good will come out of it. Maybe Martin didn’t belong in the NFL environment but you can’t fault him for going with his talent. Martin is a victim, not an accomplice. Sports and teams should develop talent, not crush it.

4

go watch soccer you pussies

5

Yea, soccer is such a tough sport. Touch a player with a feather and they fall down. Such manly men.

6

I really don’t want this thread to be a referendum on which sports are better. I appreciate all at Leeds at all levels, but to be honest, soccer bores the shit out of me.

7

I dated a guy, briefly in the 90’s, who was an arena-ball player. The stuff he told me that they did and said to each other was appalling. I just can’t get behind any sport that supports mutual treatment like that, whether it’s the opposing team or not, on the field or not. Not to mention the whole role model bullshit and paying ridiculous salaries to felons. I just don’t think the pool of potential talent is really all that small. Higher standards should be expected. Is it that much to ask that professional athletes also be good citizens?

8

I’m on board with the OP, but for the life of me, I really don’t get how one can be bullied into paying for a 15K road trip to Vegas.

I mean, come on!

9

Go watch soccer? That’s where the players stand on the field appalled by the savagery of the fans.

10

I’ve watched enough football at all levels, and still do, that I can be fairly accused of hypocricy, but I’ve long thought that the sport is a net loss for our culture, given its penchant (as it seems to) for celebrating oafishness. Given that, I guess the only thing that surprises me about the Martin-Incognito deal is that the Dolphins actually did something about it.

11

I used to transcribe reports for a doctor that did workman’s comp cases and read all kinds of horrible shit like guys in jewelry factories coughing up blood from the chemicals they inhale and then getting fired when they called in sick. All for minimum wage. I feel like sports is a lightning rod for criticism because it’s high profile, and it’s just entertainment, but really how important is jewelry manufacture to the well being of mankind. There are a ton of shitty jobs in the world that are killing people more predictably and methodically and for a lot less money than the occasional professional athlete horror story. I’d much rather take my chances on a few seasons in the NFL for six figures a year than spend fifty years in a coal mine.

12

Hell, nobody spends fifty years in a coal mine! Few make it past twenty or thirty at most.

13

Yeah, the only good news here is that the fans are overwhelmingly supporting Martin and not celebrating Incognito’s oafishness. In the past, fan reactions might have sounded more some of the quotes in the OP. Combine that with the progress that the NFL has made with regards to safety over the last few years (largely due to parents and courts) and the sport is actually moving pretty well in the right direction, imo.

14

The thing I don’t like the most about the coverage of the Martin story is the use of the term bullying. It’s not bullying, it’s harassment and a hostile work environment and would (or at least should) be an instant HR complaint and/or lawsuit for any of us.

15

Not defending Incognito here at all - the cretin should never be allowed in an NFL locker room ever again - but:

Rookies on every single one of the NFL squads will usually be stuck with a big team dinner bill, and that goes even more if you’re a high draft pick. And yes, these team dinners can run $10-30,000. (Each team handles it differently - some teams, rookies all pitch in and the bonus babies pay more, other teams the rookies have to take turns footing the bill, etc).

In addition, teams have various ‘fines’ that usually go into a collective kitty used for a team trip at the end of the season. I used to work on chartered flights for several of the pro football and baseball teams, and rookies were fined for all sorts of things. Everything I saw was all in jest, and at no point did i see anything that looked even remotely close to ‘bullying’ or harassment. And fines were petty cash stuff - $20 maybe $50. Fined for things like forgetting to bring a deck of cards for the flight, or not putting out stuff in front of everyone’s locker pre-flight, stuff like that.

By all accounts it appears Martin didn’t pay for one of the big team dinners he was supposed to cover (don’t know if it was one big dinner or if he didn’t pitch in for multiple dinners). So he had to put up money that went to the end-of-season trip.

It’s perhaps the -only- part of the story that makes even a modicum of sense. You can argue whether it’s appropriate or not, and there are stories from Miami suggesting things went well beyond just team dinners (I think the quote I saw was ‘rookies were being used as personal AMTs’), but at least in the NFL, -all- NFL players on ALL teams go through something like this their rookie year; I don’t know that in this specific case Martin was being singled out.

16

snip

[quote=“DragonAsh, post:15, topic:673199”]

Not defending Incognito here at all - the cretin should never be allowed in an NFL locker room ever again -
QUOTE]

I guess I’m shocked that people ARE shocked by the Martin/Incognito revelations. Even non-contact competitive sporting events are frequently brutal behind the scenes. Gymnastics, ice skating etc leap to mind.

Throw in sanctioned violence and you get a gang culture where the ability to intimidate is prized and a weak link is going to get hammered on and either strengthen from the annealing or break. Not condoning the culture, just pointing out this is not an isolated event, nor one just a minority of particpants are involved in.

17

…snerk…

18

I’d like to see the NFL step in and say enough is enough. No more expensive dinners, no initiation bullshit. But to some degree I think many workplaces have their share of bullying. Coworkers can be vicious motherfuckers no matter what the business.

19

Not defending Incognito here at all - the cretin should never be allowed in an NFL locker room ever again - but:

Rookies on every single one of the NFL squads will usually be stuck with a big team dinner bill, and that goes even more if you’re a high draft pick. And yes, these team dinners can run $10-30,000. (Each team handles it differently - some teams, rookies all pitch in and the bonus babies pay more, other teams the rookies have to take turns footing the bill, etc).

In addition, teams have various ‘fines’ that usually go into a collective kitty used for a team trip at the end of the season. I used to work on chartered flights for several of the pro football and baseball teams, and rookies were fined for all sorts of things. Everything I saw was all in jest, and at no point did i see anything that looked even remotely close to ‘bullying’ or harassment. And fines were petty cash stuff - $20 maybe $50. Fined for things like forgetting to bring a deck of cards for the flight, or not putting out stuff in front of everyone’s locker pre-flight, stuff like that.

By all accounts it appears Martin didn’t pay for one of the big team dinners he was supposed to cover (don’t know if it was one big dinner or if he didn’t pitch in for multiple dinners). So he had to put up money that went to the end-of-season trip.

It’s perhaps the -only- part of the story that makes even a modicum of sense. You can argue whether it’s appropriate or not, and there are stories from Miami suggesting things went well beyond just team dinners (I think the quote I saw was ‘rookies were being used as personal AMTs’), but at least in the NFL, -all- NFL players on ALL teams go through something like this their rookie year; I don’t know that in this specific case Martin was being singled out.

I’ve seen kinda the same thing in the corporate world as well, it should be noted (albeit on a much smaller scale) - the new hire guy (someone coming in at a fairly senior level) is kind of ‘expected’ to pick up a round of drinks, etc. But really,the way it usually works is the junior staff (usually on lower salaries) pay less at company outings while the senior guys foot more of the bill.

20

From the Miami Herald:

*"The source characterized Dolphins veterans using younger players as ATMs to finance their nightlife whims. These older players have been caught up in the fast-paced Miami lifestyle without the burden of having to pay for it, the source continued.

Multiple sources plugged into the organization agree that it’s happening in Miami — but it’s not just a Dolphins issue: It happens league-wide, and organizations and the players’ union know all about it. They simply don’t care, another source said."*

http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/11/04/3729152/incognito-dolphins-push-back-against.html#storylink=cpy

Sounds like older players are going beyond hazing into extortion territory. Not that I’m a big football fan or have enormous sympathy for big-time athletes who were coddled up through college and suddenly have to face being at the bottom of the totem pole - but how does this stuff contribute to “team unity”?

“At this level, you’re a man. You’re not a little boy. You’re not a freshman in college. You’re a man.”

Harassing rookies and young players is not “manly” - it’s a juvenile clinging to frat values.