Let's make it crystal clear up front that I love football - love it, love it, love it. Love the Pro's, love College ball, heck, I even check my local newspaper to see how my high school team in South Dakota is doing each week. My "glory days" as a high school football player were some of the best times of my teenage years. Great memories and great competition and great character building.
So now we see all over the news the Bullying issue in Miami involving Richie Incognito and Jonathan Martin. What's a Football-crazed nation to think or do?
So there's no doubt, I'm not condoning bullying. What Incognito did is despicable - he's an ass and has always been an ass throughout his career. You don't have to look very deep into his football history to see that he's a thug on the field and now it appears he's a thug off the field. What Martin did is understandable too - no one should have to put up with the crap he did in that locker room. Maybe he should've stood up to Incognito. Might've got his ass kicked but stood up the same. Maybe he felt he shouldn't have to stand up for himself. Either way, he did what he think was right.
But here's my rub on the situation. As I watch all the talking heads on ESPN and the mainstream media yammer on and on about how bullying and hazing in the NFL needs to stop, about how cruel this is, and about the terrible culture that exists in the NFL, it occurs to me how hypocritical all this talk is.
Hypocritical in the sense that football, by it's very nature, is a very physical, violent game. Hypocritical in the sense that millions of fans cheer every weekend for violent hits. Violence that we EXPECT from our football players. So it's OK for these same players to be very violent people playing a very violent game on the weekends but somehow it's not OK when that same violent streak is displayed Monday through Friday. We expect these players to turn off the very switch that makes them successful on the field when they are off the field.
Unfortunately, most players aren't wired that way. Either the switch is On or it's Off and it's difficult to flip back and forth between the two. So while we all agree that Incognito went waaaaaaay over the cliff on this, it's the indignation these "experts" are displaying that has me shaking my head.
Football is having a serious branding issue these days. Former players are killing themselves on a fairly regular basis, they are being thrown in jail for all sorts of serious crimes and now we have an instance where rookie hazing got out of hand. And that's the issue people are suddenly focused on.
Maybe we should spend more time worrying about how to keep players from turning their brains into mush. Maybe we should spend more time eliminating the thugs from the game that beat their girlfriends, deal drugs, or even kill others during the off-season. Maybe we need to demand owners, coaches, and team veterans to do a better job of self-policing their workplace.
Let's turn our indignation to the areas it really needs to be. While bullying is an important issue, I would rather focus on bullying among youngsters and let the big, bad entitled football players work it out themselves. Of all the things Jonathan Martin signed up for when he signed his first NFL contract, being the victim of an A-hole bully like Incognito shouldn't be one of them. Incognito needs to stand down and Martin needs to stand up. And the rest of America needs to worry about how we keep football from extinction in the next 10 years.
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