On Jay Cutler, in Six Brief Acts

I. It is time we come to some sort of cultural consensus that Deion Sanders is not a trustworthy source about anything.

II. It is hypocritical, if you believe that head injuries are a serious problem in the NFL, to judge someone's fitness for play based on outward appearances. Many people who have concussions don't look like they've had concussions, but this doesn't mean they should be sent back into a football game. It's true, Jay Cutler's problem was not his head but his knee, and it's true Jay Cutler didn't look hurt, but neither did LaDainian Tomlinson a few years back in that playoff loss,** and this did not seem to reflect on his legacy at all, largely because Tomlinson is a likeable guy who's run for many, many yards.

III. I believe Jason Whitlock is a provocative and entertaining columnist, but I think this is one of the more regrettable pieces of his career. "Right or wrong," Whitlock writes, "the culture dictates that you inject yourself with whatever is necessary to play." But isn't that what got us into this mess in the first place? Isn't that the same ethos that permitted coaches to overrule doctors, and the players themselves to feel that confessing to serious injury was somehow a sign of weakness? Isn't that the whole reason head injuries are threatening the very nature of football? If it's true that, as Cutler says, the team doctors would not allow him back into the game in the second half, isn't that, in fact, a sign of cultural progress? "Yeah," Whitlock says, "we were naive, stupid and probably exploited." So why is no one saying that Cutler's decision was a sign of maturity? Why is no one commending Cutler--and more importantly, the Bears team doctors--for refusing to conform to a code that is exploitative and (in certain cases) virtually inhuman?

IV. Of course, it is rather easy to have a knee-jerk reaction to Jay Cutler. He looks like an entitled malcontent*, and Rick Reilly tells us he is an entitled malcontent, though I'd like to think that Reilly was making a larger point in that column, which is that Cutler may refuse to play into some facile media narrative about him, but that this does not necessarily say anything about his actual character. The question is whether we are willing to judge someone based on surface impressions. I found myself perplexed as to why Cutler seemed mute and despondent on the bench during that game, but is it possible that A.) He was depressed about his inability to play football effectively, and B.) That he is simply not a Sis Boom Bah kind of guy?

V. Speaking of Sis Boom Bah kind of guys, didn't we just spend the past several years lambasting Brett Favre for his seeming aptitude in manipulating mass media in his favor? Wasn't our primary issue with Favre that he seemed capable of tremendous deception, that he portrayed himself as a team-first kind of dude while simultaneously looking out for himself at every turn? Favre spent two decades manipulating his image, and while we cannot question his toughness, we can question his relative intelligence. Because A.) Who knows if Brett Favre will be able to walk at the age of 50? B.) Who knows if any of his records will still stand? And C.) Who knows if his legacy will be as one of the five greatest quarterbacks in NFL history or as an aging redneck who so yearned to be loved that he couldn't help but share his private parts with the world? In that sense, isn't there something to be said for Jay Cutler's refusal to engage in building a false mythology?

VI. Or maybe the problem is that the NFL is not the NFL without all those layers of exploitation.

*I once had a boss at a terrible job I worked in my late 20s discipline me for "rolling my eyes" too often during meetings. In this case, she was actually right: I not only disliked the job, I disrespected her completely, and my face could not help but betray my true feelings. I'm not saying it's morally right for Jay Cutler to be dismissive of a media corps that is trying to do a job; but I do think there is an inherent shallowness to the game played between reporters and athletes (just as there was an inherent shallowness to the game that boss expected me to play while in that office), and I don't blame them for being skeptical.
**At one point, I actually thought to myself, "Why doesn't Cutler walk back to the locker room to at least pretend that his knee is being scoped? Why doesn't he walk with a more pronounced limp? Why doesn't he grimace every so often?" And then I realized that this is an incredibly shallow way to think.

On Ben Roethlisberger, Dandy Don, North Dallas Forty, and Primal Urges

I wrote this piece for GQ.com.

"Two years ago in the snow in Pittsburgh, he threw two touchdowns in the fourth period to win by a single point. That night he checked into the hospital with a fractured jaw. There wasn't a pass he couldn't throw, a team he couldn't beat, a pain he couldn't endure, or a woman he couldn't fuck, given the right time and combination of pieces."—Peter Gent, North Dallas Forty
 
Near the beginning of the most brutal game of the most overtly violent season in the history of the National Football League, Ben Roethlisberger broke his nose. You could see it happen, because after being sacked by an angry swarm of Baltimore Raven defenders, Roethlisberger tore off his helmet and a rivulet of blood cascaded from his crooked proboscis. Weaving toward the sideline, a towel pressed to his nostrils, Roethlisberger looked a little like DeNiro playing Jake LaMotta, punch drunk and vacant, limping along on a badly injured foot that appeared to have been mummified by the trainers before the game.

Roethlisberger came back into the game, of course, because this is what Ben Roethlisberger does. If Tom Brady is the epitome of quarterbacking grace, and Peyton Manning is the prototype of quarterbacking subtetly and misdirection, Roethlisberger is the quarterback who epitomizes the brutality of his chosen profession.
 

Read More http://www.gq.com/sports/profiles/201012/ben-roethlisberger-nfl-pittsburgh-steelers#ixzz17XYkLg3P

On Facemasks

So in the past three days we've reinforced a pair of truisms: 1.) Football (even terrible football, involving quarterbacks who once mocked me at pizza parlors while I was visibly drunk on Sambuca in college)* is the most popular sport in America, and 2.) Football is at a serious crossroads. "Isn't hitting hard part of football?" asks the Baltimore Sun's Kevin Van Valkenberg, in a blog post defending the defenders who are perpetrating violent hits that once went unnoticed. And he's right, of course, but I still see no way in which football can survive without undertaking some fundamental changes in the way it's played, or the way it looks. There's no more rationalizing these issues. So today, Joe Paterno advanced an idea that seems like a punchline to an octogenarian joke: Eliminate the facemask. He's not the first person to advance this idea; the idea behind it is that there's no better way to deter a defender than to ensure that a head-first hit will result in a severely deviated septum.

It's one of those ideas that won't ever be accepted by the mainstream; it sounds too counterintuitive, and it would look too strange, and my guess is the player's association wouldn't exactly be thrilled by the prospects of significant dental work displacing concussions. But maybe the best way to move the game forward is to drag it back in time.

*And can I just say, Kerry Collins now has more passing yards than Jim Kelly, Donovan McNabb, Phil Simms, Steve Young, Y.A. Tittle and Troy Aikman. If he had won the 2000 Super Bowl with the Giants, and then made the Super Bowl with the 2008 Titans, he would be a borderline Hall of Famer. As it is, he has to be considered as the most unnoticed decent-to-very good quarterback of the past fifteen years.

On the Impending Demise of the NFL. Or Not.

There are times when the National Football League scares me a little.

Don't get me wrong. I will watch any football game, anywhere, at any time of day. And while my preference tends toward college football, I am a heterosexual American male between the ages of 18 and 64, and therefore understand it is my civic duty to spend Sunday afternoons in the fall obsessively checking the Jacksonville Jaguars injury report on NFL.com, because I have paid one hundred dollars for the privilege of choosing an imaginary team of players whose results are dictated by an arbitrary scoring system, and whose ups and downs somehow manage to dictate my daily mood.* Given that the NFL is perhaps the most universally popular corporate entity in our nation's history, it's hard to imagine it ever not being such. This is one reason it scares me: The NFL is so unbelievably huge, so obscenely powerful, so dynamically slick, that it seems like we are only two decades from being separated into classes based on our knowledge of the Tampa 2 defense. 

But then I wonder whether perhaps I am exaggerating a little. I wonder if perhaps this moment, right now, is the most popular the NFL will ever be. I am wondering if we are witnessing the zenith of the Roman empire. I am wondering if this could be the NFL's last season as the most dominant sports cabal on the planet. I am wondering if in ten years, Super Bowl officials will be begging Superchunk to play their halftime show.

Most likely, I'm being crazy**. But, as Mike Freeman points out here, the NFL is facing a tumultuous offseason. A lockout appears imminent. Ticket prices are through the (domed) roof. Dissent is growing. These are all major factors, but this is not what scares me most about the NFL, either; what scares me most about the NFL was made manifestly clear while watching the Eagles-Packers game on Sunday afternoon.

There was a period during that game when it seemed like someone was getting hurt on every play. Out went the Eagles' quarterback, Kevin Kolb. Out went the Packers' running back, Ryan Grant. And out went the Eagles linebacker, Stewart Bradley, who stood up after a hit, walked three steps, and then drunkenly tumbled to the grass. Clearly, he had a concussion, and while the NFL insists its getting serious about concussions--and while I have no reason not to believe them--there is a moment like this in every NFL game, a moment when you sit on your couch, watching your 56-inch high-definition three-dimensional televisual device, and you think to yourself, It is inherently inhuman for men to collide like this. And then DeSean Jackson makes a one-handed catch behind his back, and you forget all about it. But it's there, and it's most apparent on Sundays, and it's getting to be harder and harder to forget.

It's impossible to imagine an America without the mythology of professional football, without mud and dirt and helmets colliding and bodies sprawled in the grass. Then again, forty-five years ago, Don Draper's entire evening hinged on the results of a heavyweight fight. That seems like as much a relic of the Mad Men era as the notion of smoking during pregnancy, another pastime that doctors declared too unhealthy for humans to practice.

*All of which is to say--without delving into the most boring topic any American male can ever bring up--that my fantasy team is absolutely horrible. This is what happens when you attempt to choose your roster via IPhone from a wedding reception.

**Superchunk would never play halftime.

(Photo: AP)

On the Evolution of Football

I've said this before, but it bears repeating: I love football, and I don't imagine my opinion will change anytime soon. And yet I also know--and I've known for quite some time--that every time I watch a football game, I am essentially throwing my wholehearted support behind an act of barbarism. Football is brutal, and football tears men to pieces, and that is one reason why we love it, and I could get onto some extended meditation about the marginalization of masculinity in modern society and how it relates to the selection of the All-Madden squad, but I won't, because that's not my point. My point is that it's never been more confusing to be a football fan, and if you're not convinced, take a few minutes to read Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker piece about the parallels between football and dogfighting; even if you don't buy completely into his thesis, it would be delusional to admit that he doesn't have a pretty solid point here.

Gladwell summarizes what you already know, if you've read pretty much any publication in America these past few years: That all those posthumous studies are essentially proving what we all suspected--football actually destroys your brain. So how are we supposed to get around that? We can build a better helmet, but we're still dealing with collisions that occur with the force of a three-car collision on the Schuykill Expressway.* We can ban tackling altogether, which probably makes the most sense intellectually, but would essentially neuter the game and trigger the emotional destruction of millions of Americans like me. So somehow we have to find a middle ground; somehow, we have to find a way to allow the game itself to subtly evolve to the point where the intricate strategies and formations and techniques of the game itself come to overshadow the brute violence. Somehow we have to find a way to make violence a secondary element of football. That's not an easy thing to do, but you could argue that it's already happening: Look at the NFL in the 1960's compared with the NFL today. A couple of years ago, I interviewed Conrad Dobler, the "dirtiest player in the league" in the 1970's, an offensive lineman for the Cardinals who engaged in unspeakable acts of violence in the name of self-preservation. Many of Dobler's tactics are now blatantly illegal, and so the game itself has cleaned up; the problem is that the players themselves have evolved, too, so that they are bigger and stronger and faster than they've ever been.**

So that's where we find ourselves. I think football is at a true crossroads. We're faced with a moment when the game itself seems to be embracing its own evolution, stretching out to the edges of the field, to three- and four-receiver sets, to the Wildcat, to a game of finesse and strategy. And I think those who oversee it are trying to encourage it in that direction, and it's not always going to seem very smooth. We are in an adjustment period. I have no scientific proof here, but I think I've seen more questionable pass interference calls this year than I've ever seen before; I presume that's partly because teams are throwing more than they ever have, but also because we're trying to facilitate evolution by streamlining the physicality, by eliminating any unnecessary contact, by muting the brutality. And yes, it does seem that any marginally late hit, or any blow anywhere near the vicinity of a player's head evokes a personal foul call; this, too, seems extreme (and occasionally ridiculous) within the moment, and will no doubt evoke accusations that game is already neutering itself--and Arkansas fans have a legitimate argument on both these counts during Saturday's loss to Florida--but maybe this is just how it has to be. It seems like a short-term annoyance, but it is a long-term necessity. For football to survive, it has to evolve.

*Which is, unquestionably, the most frightening highway on which I've ever traveled. I remember all the locals I knew used to call it the "Surekill Expressway," yet another example of the inherent coarseness of Philadelphians.
**In my new book (available for pre-order today!), I write a section about William "Refrigerator" Perry, who was, in his time, considered a shining example of American gluttony. The Fridge, of course, weighed approximately 300 pounds; this weekend, during Penn State's game against Minnesota, I learned of Jeff Wills, an offensive tackle for the Gophers, who is 6-feet, 7 inches tall, and weighs 365 pounds. In other words, there are no longer appliances large enough to serve as appropriate nicknames.

(Photo: Bill Frakes/SI/Getty)