It’s Time To Get Rid of Football

It’s just a game. But could we live without it anymore?

A year ago I joined my child’s middle school’s Parent Teacher Organization (PTO) because I wanted to learn more about how the school and school district functioned.

Boy, did I learn?

I learned that our school and our students and educators have a lot of needs. Kids need backpacks, calculators, winter clothing, and snacks. Teachers need support from the administration in a sometimes difficult learning environment. Parents need some level of communication to understand the very basics of what is going on in schools that they rarely enter (except for after-school activities, if so).

I also learned that it’s insanely hard and it takes a lot of work to do fundraising within a community and to raise even $5,000 through a fun run event, which is one of the main things our PTO does.

What I did not expect to learn, but did, when our superintendent visited one of our meetings to provide an update on the district, was that the district “only” needed to raise $1.7 million more dollars to complete its football stadium renovation — on top of the 1.3 million dollars it had already raised.

All of a sudden it felt very foolish to be wasting my time to beg local businesses for pledges to get the PTO to a grand funding total of five grand for educational enrichment.

The joke around my house is that I dated my (now) husband so my brother would have someone to talk college football with.

This is mostly a joke, but there’s some truth in it. In my twenties, I lived with my brother, with whom I get along quite well, and with whom I always have plenty to talk about. But there is no doubt that when my husband-to-be hung out with us on the weekends, he and my brother could talk about college football in a way that I have never been able to.

Mostly because I have never cared one iota about college football.

I grew up in a region where it was expected that you would be a Packers fan. And I was. I even enjoyed the years in the 1980s when they were terrible. I enjoyed watching the game (with that same brother) that cemented the saying “after further review, the Bears still suck” in popular culture. I enjoyed watching Brett Favre’s unbelievable physical stamina for the game and the excitement of his and the team’s many last-minute victories. I even enjoyed the Aaron Rodgers years which were characterized by quiet but extreme competence.

Now my boys watch the Packers, and it’s fine. But I largely don’t watch with them, because I mostly just don’t have it in me anymore to care much whether they win or lose.

I’m done with football.

I’m not here to insult football or its players. I know it’s a game with a lot of history and tradition and it’s enmeshed in many family and friend relationships. I’ve also never thought football players were overpaid. It’s a hard job and I think they deserve every penny they get.

But as I age and become increasingly tired of trying to make a living and raise kids and care for elderly parents and prepare for whatever pandemic or climate change hell is coming next, I find I care a lot less about entertainment.

I don’t mean to belittle football when I say “It’s just a game.”

I just mean what I say. Football is a game. It is a contest between a few specialized athletes following a few specialized rules, resulting in an outcome that won’t determine the fate of anyone or anything outside the people working in the industry or those with gambling interests.

So you’ll have to forgive me when I’m a little frustrated that nearly every single communication from my school district, every local news site, and most national news sites and Twitter feeds are all about football (and sports) headlines. At this moment half of the top stories listed on the website for my local newspaper concern college football, college basketball, and NFL football.

It’s not been a slow news month. Some of those headlines should probably have to do with something else.

But don’t just take my word for it. A few years back a favorite author of mine, Steve Almond, published a small but appropriately hard-hitting book titled Against Football: One Fan’s Reluctant Manifesto (2014).

One of the most interesting things about the book is that Almond himself is a long-time football fan who engaged in most of his bonding with the rest of his family through football and their other interests in sports. He is forthright about what the game means to him and how he still wants to watch and enjoy it. However, there are a few facts that keep intruding on his desire to just plop down at any sports bar and watch multiple football games to take his mind off the real world. These are some of the most shocking (that I didn’t know before reading the book):

• Football can be very hard on football players’ bodies. Studies have found their bodies often show a more advanced age than their chronological age, and they also are prone to a dementia-like condition known as Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy.
• Football is a business that primarily enriches its team owners. Taxpayers fund the construction of stadiums, and the team owners collect the profits from the games played in those facilities. (“Seven of every ten dollars spent to build CenturyLink Field in Seattle came from the taxpayers of Washington State, $390 million total. The owner, Paul Allen, pays the state $1 million per year in ‘rent’ and collects most of the $200 million generated.”) The NFL is also tax-exempt as an organization. It did not pay taxes on the majority of the $18 BILLION dollars it made in 2022.
• Almond makes the point that we don’t want to ask any awkward questions about racial inequality and football, like why “watching young African-Americans in tight pants engage in mock combat has become our most profitable form of entertainment.” In a 2022 article, Almond referred to a legal case brought against the NFL by one of its employees; the filing stated that its “32 owners — none of whom are Black — profit substantially from the labor” of NFL players, 70% of whom are Black.”

Football is not a sport my kids will be built for, and I have zero attachment to the football teams of any of my alma maters. I respect the work athletes put into their sports, but for the most part, I don’t follow any sports or teams anymore.

If we’re being honest, I haven’t felt the same about football since I had to index a book about college football, more than a decade ago. That book was titled Scoreboard, Baby: A Story of College Football, Crime, and Complicity, and was about the 2001 University of Washington football team, and team members’ involvement in violent rape and property crimes. Many of the players who were charged with crimes were investigated and sentenced extremely leniently (if at all) because nobody wanted to “mess up” an athlete’s future.

Nobody seemed nearly as worried about their victims’ futures.

That bothered me, and it still does. And it makes football seem more like a corporate organization that is only interested in increasing its revenues at any cost. We deal with enough such corporations in our daily lives. I don’t need to sit down and watch a similarly extractive and destructive organization for my entertainment.

At the end of the day, football is a game. A fixed (for the owners) and unhealthy (for the players) game.

But I also fear it’s a game America can’t and won’t live without, no matter what it costs.