Out Of Hand

I think maybe I ought to call it quits on this whole writing thing.  I'm obviously wading around in the shallow end of the talent pool.  They say brevity is the soul of wit, but to adhere so closely to that axiom while simultaneously expressing the views of millions in a single tweet ... well, Brandon Spikes is clearly a superior wordsmith to this humble author.  After last night's debacle of a Patriots/Ravens game capped yet another comically horrible Sunday of scab NFL officiating, the Pats' linebacker managed to capture the feelings of players, coaches, media, and fans in just 137 eloquent characters:

"Can someone please tell these f****** zebras foot locker called and they're needed Back at work !!!! #BreakingPoint"

Breaking point, indeed.  You hear that, Roger Goodell?  The guys on the field are tired of it.  They are tired of milling around for five minutes, their muscles tightening up as their concept of flow and game pace disintegrates, while these pathetic officials parse out what exactly the hell just happened.  They are tired of obvious penalties being missed and phantom ones being called, and then walked off for arbitrary and incorrect amounts of yardage.  Mostly, they are tired of this game they play and love being warped into something uncertain, unrecognizable, and unpleasant.  Spikes wasn't the only one to violate the NFL's Gestapo "don't criticize the officials" edict, either.  Several other players, either obliquely or flat-out, voiced their increasing displeasure with the shoddy refereeing.  Which is fine so long as it remains that way.  They'll shoot off at the mouth or on their Twitter accounts and you'll fine them for it and life will go on.  But what happens when and if "breaking point" becomes something more than a Twitter hashtag? 

In 2004, I watched in horrified fascination as Ron Artest charged into the stands of The Palace at Aubrun Hills and punched a fan, the result of a game-long buildup of tension and frustration and a beer launched from the stands that showered Artest as he lay on the scorer's table.  It was one of the most appalling moments in sports history, and it did significant damage to the NBA, lending credence to every "thug" stereotype that, for whatever reason, people still bandy about today.  Now, Ron Artest is a certifiable crazy person, and it's a fair bet that most players in both the NBA and NFL would never, ever, do something legitimately violent no matter what the provocation.  But that was one bad game and a cup of beer.  Extrapolate the frustrations the players feel now, compounded game after game after game, then couple that with the mental and physical toll of an NFL season.  Is it so hard to imagine a player in week 15, his body aching and his nerves shot, fed up with too many bad calls and longer-than-necessary games, finally snapping?  If this situation doesn't get fixed, sooner or later a scab ref is going to blow a big call in a crucial game, and someone on the field is going to haul off and deck him for it.  Then where will your precious "integrity of the game" be?    

If the players are about ready to lose it, the coaches aren't far behind.  Bill Belichick was the one who actually grabbed an official at the end of the game yesterday, but it could easily have been any of the other coaches whose teams suffered under the incompetence of the scab refs.  If, for instance, the Vikings had lost yesterday, Leslie Frazier could have waylaid official Ken Roan for those two (TWO!!!) illegal challenges he went ahead and granted to Jim Harbaugh's 49ers.  Truthfully, it could have been every coach in the league, because all of them had egregiously horrible calls go against their teams at one point or another.  I'm no Belichick fan, and I even feel like yesterday was a little bit of karmic payback for every 50/50 call the Pats have gotten over the past decade.  And yeah, grabbing an official, especially when the league issued a perfectly clear warning about such behavior, was not the brightest move.  That being said, the man wanted to know whether the game deciding play was going to be reviewed, and the officials ignored him.  They were told by the league to walk away whenever they were being hassled, even if that hassle was a simple inquiry as to the process which determined the outcome of a game against a division rival.  To my way of thinking, Belichick didn't go far enough.  He should have cornered the guy and demanded an explanation.  If Roger Goodell doesn't want the refs questioned, he should bring back refs that no one (most of the time) needs to question.  Frankly, I don't care anymore about "respecting" the officials, who have done nothing to deserve it.  They have no mandate or authority whatsoever.  Understand, I don't blame them; they were simply unprepared to cope with the game at the highest level, but the league is clearly uninterested in policing them, and somebody's got to.  Bill Belichick will probably be fined and possibly be suspended, but he was entirely justified.  This isn't the last time something like this will happen, either.  If Jim Schwartz can get this worked up over a handshake, Lord only knows how furious he'll be over a bogus pass interference call. 

And then there are the fans.  Staying with the Baltimore/New England game, last night featured a full minute of this from the crowd at M & T Bank Stadium.  If you've ever been at a sporting event where the home team was the victim of a dubious officiating call, then you know there are graduated levels of fan reaction:

1. Scattered boos: A called third strike or a questionable off sides penalty, etc. in non-crucial situations.  Low-level disgruntlement and general homerism.  

2. Scattered boos + profanity and epithets aimed at the official in question: An iffy call in a more critical situation, or in a game against a traditional rival.  Your team got seriously hosed.  Mere boos aren't enough and you need to lob some invective and shockingly specific sentiments at the people responsible.

3. Coordinated chants in the spirit of the game.  Sometimes, you need to call out an official for a particularly atrocious penalty, but you do this acknowledging that these things happen to every team from time to time.  As such, you perform a spirited (yet ultimately fueled by bleak and grudging humor) group rendition of either: the rhythmic "REF YOU SUCK" chant, or the sing-song  "BUUUUULLSH****T!" chant (the latter of which is sung to the interval of a doorbell ringing, a minor third.  Just sing it out in your head like a doorbell and you'll know what I mean.)  This is designed to voice your frustration while alleviating any real anger through collective release and the understanding that everyone else in the arena is upset too. 

4. Soccer Hooliganism/Last night.  Listen to that audio again.  Those fans aren't commiserating with one another; there's no wink-wink, it's-all-part-of-the-game joyous indignation in that sound.  That's a minute-plus of "BULL-SH*T!!!!" chanted fervently and with a primal edge.  There is real malice behind it; a pathological sense of anger and indignation.  This is mob mentality, and it's scary stuff, and the league should be worried about it.  Can you imagine if last night's game had been played in, oh, say, Philly?  Yeah, that would have gone well.  This is the kind of thing that is one step away from a drunk fan rushing onto the field and assaulting a referee.

All of which doesn't even mention the gamblers.  A pissed-off fan is nothing compared to a guy who bets a few grand on Dallas covering the spread and then must watch that money evaporate into the ether via a bad officiating call that negates a touchdown.  Mark my words, there is at least one person out there who routinely lays heavy timber on the outcomes of NFL games who might become unhinged after a few weeks of this abject nonsense screwing with his cash flow.  Will this push them to do something drastic?  I'd like to think otherwise, but I wouldn't bet on it.

#BreakingPoint.  It's not just the tag line to an isolated tweet, it's a brief and accurate summation of how everyone involved with the NFL who isn't an owner or league official feels today.  As Jackie MacMullan wrote earlier today: "Enough.  Enough, enough, enough."

Just as I was finishing this post up, the Monday night Packers/Seahawks game was also decided on a horrific call.  Seattle's Golden Tate just "caught" a last-second touchdown heave to give the Seahwaks the win.  Problem: Packers' safety M.D. Jennings clearly came down with the ball.  The review, which the officials saw from multiple angles, somehow failed to overturn the obviously erroneous call.  (Not only did Green Bay make the interception, but Tate clearly commited offensive pass interference on the replay.)  Everything is in disarray.  Tirico and Gruden are sitting here killing the refs, who for some reason are still trying to figure out if an extra point needs to be kicked.  The Packers, rightfully disgusted by this whole travesty, have left the field, as have most of the officials who now seem disinterested in the whole affair.  Oh, wait, here come the Packers, putting eleven men on the field for the extra point, dutifully playing out the end of this farce.  This is horrible.  I feel dirty even watching it, but it's a morbidly appropriate end to this pathetic weekend.  

The difficulty is that, like millions of Americans, I'm still watching.  Steve Young told us last week, in no uncertain terms, what we instinctively knew but didn't really want to hear or believe: that so long as our eyes are on the TV and our wallets are emptying for RG3 jerseys, the NFL could care less about any of this.  Sadly, he was not wrong.  They don't care.  At all.  

One final incident worth noting.  We have heard for the better part of two seasons about how player safety is paramount.  If you make illegal hits, if you endanger your fellow players, the consequences will be steep and swift.  The players' health matters; the integrity of the game is oh so very, very important.  This is what we've been told.  And yet.  Yesterday Oakland receiver Darrius Heyward-Bey ran a crossing route through the end zone and got absolutely, illegally speared by Steelers safety Ryan Mundy as he attempted to haul in a pass.  On the replay, Heyward-Bey was clearly unconscious before he even hit the turf.  He was immobilized and rushed to the hospital, from whence he was released today with a concussion and a strained neck. 

No flag was thrown on the play, nor have we heard anything from the league about fining or suspending Mundy.

To reprise that Baltimore crowd last night: BULLSH*T!!!!          

Junior Seau, CTE, and Football's Obligation To Reinvent Itself.

Can we skip the recriminations for a moment?  If the NFL has willfully ignored evidence, dragged its feat, or engaged in cover-ups out of a misguided need for self-preservation, that will surely come out in one of the many class-action law suits currently filed by former players.  The courts will hear the cases, and damages will be paid.  Hopefully, to the extent that they can make reparations, the NFL will do its utmost without combat or complaint.  What (allegedly) happened as regards the league's reactions to mounting medical evidence linking Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy to football was reprehensible, but soap-boxing about it now surely won't change a damned thing.  The question is: where do we go from here?  Because I don't think any reasonable person can ignore any longer the litany of tragedies mounting at Roger Goodell's door. 

Junior Seau was found dead yesterday.  San Diego police are investigating the case as a suicide.  It doesn't take an enormous cognitive leap to put the increasingly disturbing pieces of this puzzle together.  Dave Duerson.  Ray Easterling.  We don't yet have access to the medical examiner's report, obviously, but I'll bet anything that when they autopsy Seau's brain, they're going to find the abnormally high buildup of tau protein consistent with CTE.*  We have to consider the scales sufficiently tipped at this point, right?  Attention must be paid.  And we can start with this: fines, suspensions, and other penalties handed out by the league for hard hits or bounty systems or what have you are entirely, pathetically insufficient to address the problem. 

*A list of CTE-related symptoms, per Boston University's Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy: memory loss, confusion, impaired judgment, impulse control problems, aggression, depression, and, eventually, progressive dementia.  Sounds like a perfect cocktail of things that might cause someone to take their own life, doesn't it?  (If you scroll to the very bottom of the page in that above link, there's a jump to a PDF of the BUCSTE's comprehensive review of athlete-related CTE cases.  Admittedly, I didn't really comprehend most of the medical terminology, but suffice it to say: CTE sounds truly awful; it makes the most outlandish things you've ever seen on an episode of "House" look like a common cold.)

A few years ago, as the correlation between CTE and football was becoming more pronounced, equipment manufacturer Riddell, in conjunction with medical researchers investigating CTE, created HITS (Helmet Impact Telemetry System).  These are essentially normal football helmets equipped with a network of sensors that relay data on the force and concentration of impact.  A study conducted with those sensors found that many players sustained concussion-level impacts of 90 to 100g's, the equivalent of running head-first into a brick wall at 20 miles per hour.  (Though not every impact was at that level, each player AVERAGED 650 impacts per season.)  This study wasn't done on NFL players, by the way.  It wasn't even done on an elite college program.  High schoolers were the ones causing the damage.  If 17-year-old kids are capable of inflicting that magnitude of trauma, imagine what a 325-pounder with a sub-4.8 forty time can do.  You don't need a medical degree to understand the ramifications, just a basic grasp of physics.  Mass x Acceleration = Force.  You have a surfeit of all three in an NFL game.

And the concussions aren't even close to the entire story.  The increasingly apparent reality is that the big, vicious hits the league has been so public about eliminating from the NFL are a part, but by no means all, of the issue here.  Neuropathological findings show that repeated sub-concussive impacts can be every bit as detrimental to the human brain as a concussion-inducing, helmet-to-helmet hit. 

These lower-level impacts can't be regulated through rule changes or alleviated with safer equipment, either.  They are the type of thing sustained routinely on every play by linemen smashing into each other.  Snap after snap, season after season, brains are experiencing these impacts throughout the perfectly normal course of perfectly normal games.  CTE, in other words, is not a rare, anomalous condition brought about by involvement in a handful of overly-brutal plays over a career.  It is, and pardon the unfortunate accuracy of the phrase, the cost of doing business in the NFL.

I am not going to moralize about society's collective need to experience vicarious violence or how or why that feeds the several-billion-dollar industry that is the NFL.  I believe our love of football is more an occupation of negative space than anything else.  After all, something has to be our "National Pastime."  Basketball is "too black" for much of what is still a latently racist America.  Baseball never really recovered from the strike year and PEDs, and is "too slow" for the hyperspeed consumption age we now inhabit.  Hockey was never in the running.  The NFL seized upon the fast-waning appeal of baseball's sepia-toned nostalgia, increased televised football's production value by a rather large factorial, and stepped into the premier slot of America's entertainment affections.  I think the violence inherent in the game is a tertiary element, not the main draw, and I don't want to hear about our baser, barbaric natures or however the armchair sociology crowd is parsing this.  Even if they're right, It's simply not important right now.

I will, however, preach a little in an apologetic (and, I confess, totally hypocritical) fashion about something else.  I love football.  We all do.  And we don't want to see it change.  Shameful though that sentiment may be in light of everything we know about what it does to the players, we still feel that way because we've watched this game for the entirety of our lives.  But that's not important anymore, either.  How many more brains need to be autopsied?  How many more ex-players need to be found with self-inflicted gunshot wounds?  In the wake of Junior Seau's death, as has happened in the past, the NFL might trot out some league-appointed medical experts to say something along the lines of "there is as yet no definitive evidence linking CTE to football and blah blah blah etc."  While they may technically be sorta-kinda-right as regards the definition of empirical scientific proof, if those people are doctors, they will at least violate the spirit of the Hippocratic Oath with such claims.  Only a fool (or a well-compensated mouthpiece) could stand up and deny this stuff with a straight face anymore.


I know the NFL probably isn't going anywhere anytime soon.  Plenty of people will still watch the games no matter how often we see the awful consequences played out.  I am ashamed to say that I will probably be among them.  (Of course, we haven't even touched on what all this might mean for college football, but that's for another day).  The point is that we need to start a serious, all-encompassing reevaluation of how football is played at all levels.  I'm all for trying to salvage some iteration of the sport, and I believe there are enough smart, creative people out there to make that possible.  In any case the league will make infinite changes before they abandon the game altogether.  There's far too much money at stake.  But let's stop pretending that moving the kickoff lines, fining rough hits, and engineering new safety equipment is going to fix the problem.  We can still have football, but some fundamental aspects of the game need to be altered. 

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.  Continuing to allow exceptionally large, ridiculously fast, impossibly strong men to run into one another at high velocity and ignoring or "wishing away" the damage done to their brains in the process falls pretty neatly into that category.  We can love football, but we need to be open to any and all necessary rule changes to ameliorate the ravages of CTE.  Otherwise we're a society full of wackjobs.  Otherwise, we are insane.  We may be slow on the uptake and resistant to change, especially where football is concerned, but I have to hope we're better than that.  

The Schism Of The Saints

There have been intimations and half-whispers for a few years now. Certain dark things were hinted at that were essentially impossible to verify without firsthand access and knowledge. As a Falcons fan, I would have been only too happy to sneer and jive at the Saints if I thought they were playing dirty pool, but I simply didn't believe it. Truth be told, I didn't want to believe it, and I suspect that much of the rest of the league and the public felt the same.

In the name of sentimentality and the telling of great stories, it still seemed too soon after Katrina to contemplate leveling accusations at the team who played a crucial role in the healing of a broken city. It was difficult too, imagining a locker room that contained as nice and forthright a guy as Drew Brees could also contain something this sinister, even if the nastiness was on the other side of the ball. After a two-year investigation, though, speculation is no longer required, and incredulity is no longer an option. The Saints' defense, under the auspices of DC Gregg Williams and with the tacit approval of GM Mickey Loomis and head coach Sean Payton, operated a bounty payout system that rewarded players for inflicting injuries and/or knocking their fellow athletes out of games.

My first thought is that no one should be especially surprised by all this. Not just because rumors have been hovering around the Saints for a few seasons, but because this sort of thing is not exactly unheard of in the NFL. In this new era where "CTE" and "concussion" are watchwords and punishments for illegal hits are dealt swiftly and severely, it's easy to forget that not so long ago the league released yearly video compilations of its fiercest and most brutal hits for our rabid consumption. As long as the guy wasn't on our team (and sometimes even if he was), we got excited when somebody got jacked up good and proper. The visceral nature of impact, the audible crunch of large, strong people colliding at high velocity; these things were part of what made the game enjoyable viewing. It's not a particularly massive leap to conceive of teams dishing out some extra incentives for particularly nasty shots, especially if they removed a valuable opposing player from a game's equation. Now that the thinking about violent hits has turned so dramatically, this will likely (and hopefully) be the last example of a bounty system, but it's not close to the first. I know there has been evidence that Gregg Williams had a similar system in place when he was with the Washington Redskins in addition to the current charges, but he certainly didn't invent this particular wheel.* Which brings me to my second thought: New Orleans is about to pay the piper for 50 years of cultural lag in football.

The Saints are absolutely going to catch hell over this. They should, too, because running a bounty system at a time when we have indisputable evidence of the consequences of repeated impacts on a players' brain is terribly, inexcusably wrong. When the NFL drops the hammer on New Orleans, you can bet Roger Goodell is going to make the ultimate example out of the organization. Common speculations are setting the likely punishment at some combination of fines, suspensions, and lost draft picks. Truthfully, given the vendetta-like nature of Goodell's reactions towards hard-hitting offenders, it wouldn't surprise me one bit if he concocted some entirely different and more "angel of death"-esque penalty. Gregg Williams, Sean Payton, and the other implicated players and team officials could very well be looking for work shortly. The Saints might be rendered quasi-impotent as a franchise for the next few seasons by the financial and draft sanctions.** Which makes all the sense in the world on the surface. No one in their right mind would defend the indefensible, and financially backed malicious intent cannot be defended. The thing is that the Saints, like James Harrison before them, have the unfortunate distinction of being in the wrong place doing the wrong thing at the wrong time in the most conspicuous fashion imaginable.

At this point, the NFL's survival depends upon a total culture change. The class action lawsuits have started and they're not going to stop, and the league is striving mightily to distance itself from the ethos that gave birth to those lawsuits. The continued goodwill of public perception is largely dependent on that distance from the past. And in the name of projecting an image that is more refined and more attuned to the risks inherent in the game, the NFL is probably going to crucify the Saints, who so recently authored one of the league's great narratives; a narrative that is being ground into shards by these latest revelations. Because their backs are against the proverbial wall, the league will seek and implement the harshest punishment possible. It may very well be necessary as a deterrent to future teams and players engaging in reckless and dangerous side-games on the field. Heck, it may even be justified. I'm still not certain it will be entirely fair.

Insidious as their recent behavior has been, the Saints have been playing on the proverbial railroad tracks for a comparatively short amount of time. They're going to get hit by a train with a half-century head of steam because the league now must belatedly cover its tracks and adopt a different posture. We'll have to wait and see what the final verdict entails, but Roger Goodell could wind up committing his own version of unnecessary roughness.

*Remember the Eagles/Cowboys "Bounty Bowl" in 1989? At the time, Buddy Ryan's bounty on Dallas kicker Luis Zendejas wasn't considered foul play, it was just an extra-zesty dose of vitriol infused into an already heated rivalry.

** Forbes might need to revise that Most Miserable Sports Cities list if the Saints get punished into irrelevance and the Hornets continue exist in NBA-owned limbo.