The Gnawing Conscience about Violent Sports

I will not be a hypocrite: I have enjoyed sports at the professional and college level, though that difference between amateur and pro is rapidly disintegrating through NIL’s. Football season, for collegians and pros, officially begins this week. I enjoy playing pools on ESPN’s College Pick ‘Em and Pigskin Pick’ Em on NFL games. I love the challenge of picking upsets and arranging selections by confidence. The entries are free and there is a cash reward for the season’s best score. I finished 703,443rd in my ESPN NFL season last year, so I can’t go anywhere but up in 2026. Strangely, I only watch two or three games per year on TV—but I catch the highlights and recaps. To a point, as I will explain.
 
WHAT BOTHERS ME, ETHICALLY
 
That said, there are many things that trouble me about football. For most of my adult life I felt that college players were shortchanged academically and undercompensated for their contributions to the fiscal health of their schools. I thought the NIL agreement in 2021 might help this situation; instead, it has contributed to further competitive and coaching chaos, as college coaches must become negotiators or “general managers” as well as winning sideline play callers.
 
When possibly the best college football coach of my lifetime, the devout Catholic Nick Saban, retired from the University of Alabama in 2024, sports analyst Clay Travis may have come closest to the actual reason: “Nick Saban recognized that the big Texas schools were going to have way more money than Alabama was and [Saban] was starting to get outbid for players near the end of his tenure… Alabama can’t pay more than Texas and Texas A&M, and Ohio State and Michigan. It’s much more even in an NIL era where most players…are going to go to the school that pays them the most money, not to the coach who they like the best. It’s a business decision.”
 
I am also disturbed when public taxpayer dollars, which are sorely needed in health and human services, are devoted to the funding of new luxury football stadiums. I have been a Buffalo Bills fan [Buffalo is my hometown] since the team’s formation in 1960, and I would celebrate seeing Josh Allen holding the Lombardi trophy at the end of the 2026 Super Bowl. But the Bills open their season in a brand-new facility, Highmark Stadium. I was curious about how it was funded, and after some AI research the budget seemed to boil down to this:
 
PUBLIC MONIES:
 
State of New York $600 million [including some funds from seized Seneca Nation casino assets]
 
Erie County {City of Buffalo and suburbs]: $250 million
 
OTHER CONTRIBUTORS:
 
Bills owners (Terry & Kim Pegula): ~$350 million
 
NFL: $200 million loan (with owners required to match)
 
Personal seat licenses: $263 million from fans
 
Consider that under the best of all circumstances the Bills, should they make the Superbowl in 2026, would have played at Highmark Stadium eleven times over five months. The stadium would be vacant for the next seven months. It has no roof, unlike several other NFL cold weather teams.
 
BUT ABOVE THAT…
 
There is the very nature of football as a sport: body to body contact from toe to, most dangerously, the head itself. In 1949 professional football switched from leather helmets to hard plastic. Leather was somewhat more forgiving; molded plastic made the helmet both an offensive and a defensive weapon. In 1960 Philadelphia Eagles linebacker Chuck Bednarik tackled New York Giants’ star runner [and later, ABC Sports commentator] Frank Gifford with such force that Gifford sustained a concussion which sidelined him for eighteen months and caused a lingering lethal brain injury that would not be diagnosed until his autopsy in 2015.
 
Bednarik was not penalized on or off the field. He was within the rules; the psychology of the game is about intimidation and control. Twelve years later a second incident at a pre-season game between the Oakland Raiders, then coached by young John Madden, and the New England Patriots, created another bout of controversy about violence and hitting. The Patriots’ all-star receiver Darryl Stingley engaged with the Raiders’ Jack Tatum in a collision that left Stingley a quadriplegic. Tatum had a reputation as a “headhunter”, but he was not penalized or fined for this incident. Analysis of the play showed that Stingley’s helmet speared Tatum’s shoulder pad. The force of Stingley’s helmet broke multiple bones in his own spine.  
 
The game changer in football-related medicine occurred in 2002 when Dr. Bennet Omalu met Pittsburgh Steeler center [hiker/blocker] "Iron Mike" Webster, whose blocking abilities were instrumental in Pittsburgh’s winning four Super bowls during his years with the team. The meeting occurred in the Allegheny County Morgue in Pittsburgh. Webster had died of a heart attack, and Omalu performed his autopsy. Webster’s erratic behavior after retiring from football was at least generally known and Terry Bradshaw, among others, tried to help Webster, who at the end was living in his car. This period is chronicled in the film Concussion [2015] where actor David Morse portrayed Webster’s declining years, and Will Smith played Dr. Omalu.
 
The Nigerian-born pathologist knew nothing about American football and noted later that it was the condition of Webster’s entire body—particularly head scarring--that led him to the thesis that the player’s brain might have been compromised. Omalu conducted an exhaustive autopsy of the brain and identified a build-up of Tau Protein, a marker discovered in 1975 as indicative of dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease. The condition of tau buildup by head injury is known as Chronic Traumatic Encephalotomy or CTE, and the condition can only be identified through autopsy. For a full description of CTE, see the Mayo Clinic report here. Soon researchers from the University of Pittsburgh, among other sites, came to appreciate that CTE was a condition of multiple hits to the head accumulated over a period of time. CTE took multiple forms: some cases presented in the 20’s and 30’s, and others in later life. Webster died at 50. Aaron Hernandez of the New England Patriots killed himself while serving time on a murder charge; he was 27 and his autopsy revealed CTE.
 
With lawsuits from former NFL players or their surviving families becoming more numerous and public, the NFL finally agreed to settlements on the principle that CTE was a work-related injury. But aside from a “concussion protocol” or waiting period after a hard hit to the head during a game, few other steps have been taken to make the game safer. There are high school boys on my street who head off to daily practice for Friday night games. I wonder what they, or their parents, know about CTE or the multitude of other injuries that frequent the sport of football.
 
AND FINALLY…
 
I am no saint here. I used to watch a lot of TV football—pro and college—till I got much older and decided it really didn’t matter whether Southern Methodist covered the spread against New Mexico State. Whether it is age or a gnawing conscience, I have a fine library of books for Saturday and Sunday afternoons.
 
I do still follow Indy Car and NASCAR [stock car racing] from a distance. I watch the Indy 500 and the Daytona 500. In fact, for about a decade Margaret and I attended February’s Daytona Race [stock car’s Superbowl]. We were sitting near the fourth turn in 2001 when the sport’s reigning driver, Dale Earnhardt Sr, steered into the wall almost in front of us and was killed instantly on the last lap. After that I gradually lost my taste.
 
I do several pools when college basketball’s “March Madness” rolls around, One of my sports heroes is Pat Summit, the University of Tennessee women’s basketball coach who started her career in the 1970’s when varsity women’s teams washed their own jerseys and slept in sleeping bags on the road. Her premature death to Alzheimer’s Disease saddened me. I wonder what she would have thought about the direction of the WNBA, the recent women’s counterpart to the men’s NBA.
 
If you are a student of theology and looking for a doctoral dissertation and/or career specialty, think about sports morality and the ethics of risk for money. Heck, the subject would even make for a lively religious ed evening.