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football
Your Designated Sports Break From Trumpalooza
Here are eight topics currently lost in the sauce to take our minds and emotions off the Trump-backed whale. Then it’s time to get back in the game and face down the bullies.
May 10, 2025
If the overwhelming deluge from the Trumpian firehose of lies, threats, incompetency, illegal actions, and surreality is sweeping you off your feet, driving you to bedridden depression, leaving you passive and breathlessly unable to mount a response, much less resistance, please get into the huddle, take a time-out, and listen up to your Jock Culture coach. (That’s me, of course!)
You need some distraction.
Have you noticed lately how few sports stories are making their way to the top of the news beams? That’s because sports—once upon a time our most reliable source of outrage; speculation; cultish behavior; and lessons in domination, smackdown intimidation, and faux masculinity—has been replaced by a remarkable series of presidential half-time horror shows. It’s now all Trumpiana all the time.
Sports, after all, initially evolved as a bastion of fair play, and even its sometimes questionable interpretations of class and honor are hardly major aspects of Trumpiana.
We need to get back to sports. So here are eight topics currently lost in the sauce to take our minds and emotions off the Trump-backed whale. Of course, since only he truly sells in this numbed media moment of ours, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that we’ll need sports stories with Trumpian subtexts.
Number One: How did some high school athletes suddenly get so rich? There are million-dollar quarterbacks lining up at the NIL pay window waiting to start their freshman year in college. In case you don’t already know it, NIL stands for name, image, and likeness—from which sports gear companies, universities, and the college sports ruling body, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), have traditionally profited enormously, even though those athletes were prohibited from benefiting commercially. But in 2021, a series of state court judgements led to a unanimous Supreme Court decision that lifted the ban and it was suddenly pay-off time for “student-athletes.”
It all seems fair enough, although the new system is evolving with shady deals in which colleges and their boosters help organize “collectives” to recruit teenage high school athletes with the promise of booty that ranges from extra shoes to millions of dollars.
The top 20 money-making college athletes are bona fide millionaires, while the average starting pay-off for the top 100 is $583,000. University of Colorado quarterback Shedeur Sanders, son of the former National Football League star Deion Sanders, leads the list with an estimated $4.7 million.
The Transfer Portal
Boosting the growing transactional nature of “amateur” sports is the newly installed “transfer portal,” a computerized system that makes it easier for college athletes to switch schools without having to sit out a season. Money may well change hands there, too.
So far, the Trumpsters have seemed more than okay with all this, but there could be a future glitch. While the current major beneficiaries are the expectables—football and basketball players—let’s welcome crowd-pleasing gymnast Sam Phillips, the first University of Nebraska athlete to come out as gay, now performing at the University of Illinois. Could this turn out to be a rainbow flag for the homophobic Trumpniks? Will they say nil to NIL (at least if it goes to the “wrong” people)? Stay tuned.
Number Two: Even though they’re a microscopic percentage of the varsity athletic population, transgender jocks have been getting an inordinate amount of attention lately, most of it grimly malevolent.
President Donald Trump’s order barring transgender girls and women from playing on women’s teams at federally funded educational institutions, even if followed, will have little effect on overall sports participation. Symbolically, of course, as The Nation sports editor Dave Zirin points out,
Diverse teams can help communities and families stop seeing marginalized people as an “other” and start seeing them as part of the same whole. Sports at its best can challenge the hate constantly generated by the right-wing media machine.
There are certainly reasonable arguments against situations in which trans athletes might physically overwhelm cis-athletes, but the climate is simply too charged right now for a reasonable discussion. This may just have to wait for Trump to be cut from the team.
Number Three: When I started writing about sports in the late 1950s, two of the premier American ones were boxing (the sweet science) and thoroughbred horse racing (the sport of kings). Both were romanticized, distinctly corrupt enterprises run by oligarchs and gangsters on the backs of poor boys and animals. They did well when they produced superstars (Muhammad Ali or Secretariat) but faded in the 21st century. Since then, football and mixed martial arts have provided more reliably entertaining violence, while state lotteries supplanted parimutuel betting as a way to tantalize the desperate with pie-in-the-sky jackpots. Pro wrestling (if you consider it a sport at all) is the only athletic entertainment that comes to mind as more truly Trumpish.
Horse racing is barely hanging on, mostly thanks to influential rich folks (including Arab oligarchs) who own and breed the best horses and the rentable state governments that provide subsidies for the sport. Boxing and horse racing seem to exist mostly to offer some of the saddest sights in sports: punch-drunk former prizefighters without pensions or health coverage and drug-abused horses killed on the track after breaking down in a race. Putting down both sports would be merciful.
The Spread
Number Four: Sixty-odd years ago, at Madison Square Garden, covering my first pro basketball game, I was mystified when the crowd began cheering for the visiting team. At least theoretically, these were, after all, rabid New York Knicks fans.
“Don’t they want their team to win?” I asked the seasoned reporter sitting next to me in the press box.
“It’s the spread,” he replied all too casually.
That was the beginning of the end of whatever innocence I had when it came to big-time commercial sports.
As that seasoned reporter, visibly amused by my naiveté, then explained, the point spread is the predicted margin of victory by the favored team in any given game. If the bookies have established that the favorite is expected to win by, say, 10 points, you could bet on the underdog to lose by less than 10, and be a winner. On the night of my tutorial, those in the audience who bet against the spread could have had a double victory, since the Knicks actually won the game, while their opponents lost by fewer points than predicted and so won the spread.
In those days, except in Las Vegas, sports betting was illegal and considered a threat to the game. Most legitimate newspapers avoided any mention of odds, and the professional leagues they covered inveighed against gambling as an existential danger. In highly publicized examples, they punished players caught betting, even stars, not to mention retired superstars working as greeters for gambling casinos.
At the same time, the sports world constantly flirted with gambling, offering odds disguised as informed predictions and, for a dozen years, a gambler, Jimmy (The Greek) Snyder, was featured on a TV football show until he was fired for claiming that Black athletes excelled because of how they had been bred during slavery (and that the only jobs left for whites in sports were as coaches).
All such hypocritical righteousness seems quaint in these Trumpalooza days as professional leagues, including the National Football League, promote their “official” gambling sites, while betting on games is acknowledged as an intrinsic element of fandom (as, in truth, it always has been). No gambling, no sports. Bet on it!
The Summer Games
Number Five: In March, President Trump established the 2026 FIFA World Cup Task Force, made up of the usual suspects (Pam Bondi, Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, Kristi Noem, Kash Patel, and Marco Rubio), perhaps to reassure his followers that the gang will indeed all be there when soccer’s major event is held in the United States, especially should the Trumpunks decide to use a classic soccer match to lure immigrants to an abduction party.
Meanwhile, this country seems like an ever less welcoming place for the rest of the world’s favorite sport. As Washington Post columnist Sally Jenkins has pointed out, the United States may be anything but a safe haven for international athletes (not to speak of so many Americans). After all, should some foreigner get a little too fast or strong, maybe he or she could be checked for drugs, chromosomes, or challenging thoughts, and sent to a maximum security locker room.
And while we’re worrying (all too justifiably) about the World Cup next year, don’t forget that the U.S. will be hosting the 2028 Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles.
Number Six: The New York Yankees are growing hair. When the team played for owner George Steinbrenner, self-ordained as “The Boss,” a blustering, narcissistic bully and liar who was considered a mentor to the young Donald Trump, no moustaches, beards, or hair below the collar were allowed. The son of a shipping magnate from Cleveland, Steinbrenner postured as a standard-bearer for masculine American values. Why did working-class guys buy that?
As a New York Times sportswriter covering Steinbrenner, I was bewildered walking on the street with him when construction workers and cabbies hailed him warmly as a man of the people. They loved the way he bossed those jocks around. In retrospect, it was a portent of the authoritarian cultism around Trump—the urge for people who feel weak or marginalized to embrace a tyrant.
George’s son, Hank, a milder man who avoids the spotlight, runs the team now. His decision this year to allow Yankee players to grow hair where they pleased was generally applauded. Still, maybe George wasn’t as bad as I once imagined. After all, he had only one felony conviction compared to his mentoree’s 34. Steinbrenner’s involved illegal contributions to Richard Nixon’s presidential election campaign and, yes, President Ronald Reagan pardoned him.
The Draft
Number Seven: The opening of the NFL season is months away, but the recent draft of rookie players cracked through Trump’s curtain of sound for a day or so, reinforcing pro football as America’s 21st-century pastime. The biggest newsflash was that Shadeur Sanders, the $4-million-dollar NIL player, wasn’t taken in the first round. Football executives evidently found him too brash and self-promoting, possibly overrated, and too… dare I say it?… Trumpish.
I’ve never forgotten that the first time I met Donald Trump, as a CBS “Sunday Morning” correspondent in the 1980s, he lied to me about pro football. He owned a pro team back then, the New Jersey Generals of the United States Football League (USFL), which played during the NFL’s offseason. Many people thought the USFL was a conspiracy to force the NFL into a merger or to get several of its teams into the league. That would have been important to Trump, then still a minor-league real-estate magnate from Queens, pushing his dream of making it into the major leagues, the New York City market.
When I interviewed him about that, he swore such a merger wasn’t on his mind. Later that week, he emerged as the principal plaintiff in an antitrust suit against the NFL. It was the kind of early lesson that people like me didn’t learn. We were too smart for that buffoon, right?
Number Eight: Maybe the best that can be said about the “manosphere,” that trendy Trumpian hodge-podge of websites, podcasts, online forums, and blogs promoting misogyny and the false masculinity of “bro culture,” is the relatively small role sports seems to play in it. Sports, after all, initially evolved as a bastion of fair play, and even its sometimes questionable interpretations of class and honor are hardly major aspects of Trumpiana.
Early on, the president touted himself as a good high school baseball player, but when his further posturing as a championship superstar was mostly ignored, he seemed to lose interest in promoting his athleticism, except in bed.
The anti-feminism of Trump’s base has always been predicated on the understanding that once women achieved equality, much less equity with men, the game would be over for the mediocre male. And yet current laments about boys and men losing out to women in educational and employment competition obscure the fact that men, particularly white men, still rule the roost. Trumpy attacks on liberals often emphasize their womanly “weakness.” The tough-talking handmaids in the president’s cabinet are borderline cartoonish.
As it turns out, one of the most consistent opponents of Trumpian anti-feminism is 60-year-old former football player and long-time activist Jackson Katz. He’s sounded his particular call to action in a book, Every Man: Why Violence Against Women Is a Men’s Issue.
He recently told Ammar Kalia of The Guardian: “We can’t tell boys that bullying is bad and then equally reward bullies like Trump in power. There’s a lot of fear in the face of a right-wing populist government, but we need men to loudly oppose him, otherwise real people will be harmed. We’re living in a different world now, and it’s urgent.”
It’s urgent indeed, and this has been enough of a distraction. So, suit up and get your game face on. Do something. Donald Trump is beatable if you keep your eye on the ball and don’t pull your punches.
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Israel Bombs the Beautiful Game—and So Much More—in Gaza
As the Olympic Torch arrives in Paris later this month to open the Summer Games, let’s remember the flames outside the soccer pitch at the Al-Awda School in Khan Younis
Jul 14, 2024
Israel struck just outside a school in Gaza on Tuesday, killing at least 29 people sheltering there and injuring dozens more. The moment the bomb exploded was captured on video by someone recording a youth soccer game in the Al-Awda school courtyard. The soccer ball was midair when the bomb exploded. The New York Times, using Reuters footage, identified the munition as a 250-pound GBU-39 guided bomb, manufactured by Boeing and supplied by the United States. The video, broadcast by Al Jazeera, captured the chaos following the explosion and the carnage outside the school, with dead bodies and injured people bleeding on the ground, unattended amidst the rubble.
Attack survivor Asmaa Qudeih recounted the horror:
“We were sitting safely in the afternoon, somewhat settled. Suddenly, a missile was fired…The schools were overcrowded with people, and the street was full, too. Suddenly, a missile hit and destroyed the whole place. There were bodies and body parts. Bodies flew. Body parts flew in the air. I don’t know how to describe it. I can’t.”
In addition to those at the soccer game, many others were reportedly clustered around a wifi hotspot, accessing the internet. Seeking connection to the outside world while trapped in the besieged ghetto of Gaza, they were annihilated.
The Al-Awda school massacre, as it has become known, occurred as Israel’s assault on Gaza enters its tenth month, and almost ten years to the day since four young boys in Gaza were killed by an Israeli bomb while they played soccer on the beach, on July 16th, 2014.
Tyler Hicks, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist with the New York Times, witnessed that attack. He described it, speaking on the Democracy Now! news hour:
My hotel room overlooks the beach…I heard a loud explosion, a big crack right outside the window. I immediately looked outside…I could just see one child running away from that into the open sand. I knew that there was a strong possibility that there would be injuries or even deaths because of this, and I quickly started to grab my cameras, my protective flak jacket, when another second explosion happened outside about 30 seconds after the first one. When I looked back out, that very boy that I had seen running was then lifeless, killed on the beach in the open, and along with three other boys who were playing with him.
Ayman Mohyeldin, today an MSNBC anchor, also witnessed the killing of the boys. He said he had been kicking a soccer ball with them just moments before. NBC responded to Ayman’s compelling reporting on the attack by pulling him out of Gaza.
Panic as Israeli strike hits near Gaza school playgroundwww.youtube.com
In May, Gaza native Badr Alzaharna published an essay on the website of The International Platform on Sport and Development, about the importance in Gaza of soccer, or football as it is known everywhere outside the United States.
“For Gaza’s young and old, football is more than just a game. It has long been a beacon of unity, peace, and hope for thousands of people in Gaza, transcending the protracted struggles we face. Just like fans around the world, we are dedicated followers of the most ‘beautiful game,’ cheering on our favorite teams and players,” Badr wrote.
He invoked the phrase “The Beautiful Game,” popularized by the late, great Brazilian soccer legend, Pelé,
“Playing football was not merely a pastime, but a lifeline for thousands of youth, providing solace amidst chaos, friendships in loneliness, relief in the face of anxiety, and always a goal to look forward to…Football was an interlude to the pain, a brief distraction from the sounds of bombardment stuck in our heads from previous wars.”
Half of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million Palestinians is under the age of 18. Those born in 2006 or after have lived their entire lives under Israel’s brutal siege of Gaza, described as the worlds’ largest open-air prison.
While the World Court deliberates on South Africa’s charge that Israel is perpetrating a genocide in Gaza, those million or so children trapped under Israel’s constant bombardment need food, water, education, and, yes, the recreation and community afforded by activities like soccer. Most of them have known only scarcity, occupation and war throughout their short lives.
This week, as Gaza ceasefire talks drag on in Doha, Qatar, Israel ordered the complete evacuation of Gaza City, which Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem called “absolute madness,” adding, “based on Israel’s actions, it appears that it intends to continue fighting indefinitely, sowing destruction, and killing masses of people for the foreseeable future.”
As the finals for both the COPA America and Euro Cup finals take place today, let’s remember the flames outside the soccer pitch at the Al-Awda School in Khan Younis, and the children playing the Beautiful Game in Gaza, amidst the ugliness of war.
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Damar Hamlin and the Super Bowl's Big Hit
Tonight's the big game, but can we even watch any longer? I'm not sure that I can.
Feb 12, 2023
The echoes still linger from that national sigh of relief last month when Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin, slammed into cardiac arrest during a game on January 2nd, was declared out of danger. It was a justified sigh. A vibrant young life had been spared.
But was that really what the nation was relieved about? If football fans had been so invested in the health and safety of the players, why were some 23.8 million of them watching that game in the first place?
By now, everybody should be aware of the incremental deadly damage inflicted on players’ brains in any game, so why will 200 million or more of us be watching the Super Bowl tonight?
That may be one of those unanswerable “Why do fools fall in love?” questions, but just thinking about it seems like a worthwhile exercise in everyday sociology. So here are my questions in response: Is it because we’ve evolved into people indifferent to the pain of others? Or maybe because many of us, as part of an evolutionary survival response, are hardwired to enjoy violence?
And while I’m at it, let me ask you one other question: Should we do something about it — like cancelling football?
Jacked Up
I think most of those who saw the Hamlin hit and heard the news about his recovery were sighing with relief not for him but for themselves, given the guilty pleasure of watching someone “jacked up” — an old ESPN phrase all but banned these days but still descriptive of one of football’s major thrills and horrors. I doubt anyone was rooting for an actual kill shot. Still, I suspect that, however unwittingly, many viewers were longing for the sensation that might accompany one, followed quickly by the usual cathartic release of a player lurching back onto his feet and being helped off the field, while giving his teammates a thumbs-up. (I’m okay, bros, so you’re okay, too!)
But is everyone really okay, especially us spectators? And what, if anything, happens next? A day after the Hamlin hit, a talk-show host asked me what I thought might result from Americans’ viewing the prospect of death in such an up-close-and-personal fashion on their favorite TV show.
Just more talk, I replied, and then added, perhaps a little too quickly and glibly, “Ask me again after the next school shooting.”
I heard a reproving grunt, but there was no time left to unpack that remark. Now, weeks later, it seems obvious to me what I meant. As with mass shootings, whose aftermaths are similarly riveting to TV viewers — by the time you read this, there will have been more than 50 of them since Hamlin went down that day — nothing meaningful is ever proposed to truly diminish the violence.
And I do wonder what erosion of the spirit takes place when nothing is done time after time after time, whether we’re talking about those never-ending all-American slaughters (and the guns that go with them in the most weaponized country on the planet) or football’s endlessly commercialized brutality. I also can’t help wondering what normal has come to mean to us? Little surprise, then, that the war in Ukraine is beginning to seem like a distant geopolitical video game rather than an immense human tragedy.
Whatever righteous chatter went on after the Hamlin hit, it mostly had to do with chastising the sportscasters of that Monday Night Football game between the Bills and the Cincinnati Bengals because they kept wondering aloud whether it would resume or be rescheduled. Granted, they weren’t exactly sensitive to the immediate crisis, but beating up on those particular barkers seems unfair. After all, what message has the National Football League (NFL) ever broadcast other than the game über alles, whether it came to assassinations or brain injuries?
It took NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell an hour even to announce that he was postponing that game (which was, in fact, never resumed). By that time, it seemed obvious that the players and coaches had made their own decisions: they were too gutted to keep playing.
Turning Point?
I’ve also wondered if that specter of sudden death could become a turning point in the history of what’s arguably America’s most popular and perilous pastime. Might it serve as a “wake-up call” that could lead the game toward safer conditions or, as we head into the latest Super Bowl, will it simply confirm three already existing lines of thought: that we accept football as inherently dangerous; that its danger actually enhances its reality as more than a game (and the thrill of it all); and that we need to embrace that danger or risk the loss of football’s importance in a society in which so many men increasingly feel they’re losing ground to women?
The obvious fact that few women play on male high school or college teams and none in the NFL is critically important to its allure. Count on one thing: there will be female Seal team snipers before a woman will be allowed to take a televised Hamlin hit on a football field.
That the Hamlin hit itself was not spectacular only added to the aftershock. In fact, it looked all too routine. The 24-year-old safety had just positioned himself to stop Tee Higgins, the Bengals ball carrier, when Higgins ran into him, ramming his helmet into Hamlin’s chest. That hard hit, doctors have since speculated, triggered commotio cordis, a rare event in which the heartbeat cycle is knocked off rhythm. Oddly enough, such a result would be more likely in baseball or lacrosse if a struck ball directly impacted someone’s chest wall. Commotio cordis can indeed be fatal in rare cases if the blow lands precisely in the vulnerable instant between heartbeats, which is what seems to have happened here.
Hamlin fell backward, got up, then collapsed like a broken toy.
Medical personnel quickly swarmed onto the field and started administering CPR. His Bills teammates and then the Bengals, too, began to close ranks, embrace, hold hands, pray, even cry. They knew it was serious and were undoubtedly reminded that it could have happened to any of them. It surely brought their worst fears to the surface, the ones they normally are in denial about.
As Sally Jenkins of the Washington Postpointed out soon after that hit, such violence is, in fact, baked into the game in a way that’s almost too routine to pay much attention to most of the time. As she vividly described it:
“You want to feel what NFL players do on an average play? Run full speed into a wall mirror.
“And while you’re lying on your back trying to regain your senses, consider the following math problem: Two large NFL players, who cover 40 yards in less than 4.5 seconds, collide, causing each to decelerate to zero. Roughly how much force do they — their skin, their bones, and their organs — endure on just a single such play?”
The college and professional players willing to endure such regular pain and damage for love and/or money, understand that possible injury or even death underpins the very reality of football. In fact, in some gruesome fashion, that’s what makes football seem authentic. It transforms players into valiant avatars of manhood instead of glorified stuntmen or, as in most sports other than the martial arts, merely entertainers who might still get hurt if they didn’t watch out.
Does Football Equal Manhood?
In fact, that very connection of football to manhood, whether you’re talking about the toxic masculinity critics decry after every varsity-related rape allegation or the mythical traditional heroism trumpeted by the sport’s boosters, has been critical to its success. The NFL sells the sport as a symbolic, vicarious version of warfare, something particularly significant for a male population that no longer faces obligatory military service (at a time when that same military has become at least slightly more welcoming to women). And don’t forget the way the sport helps contain the nuclear energy of millions of teenage boys. The image of them running loose through the slums and small towns of America has surely helped facilitate the approval of so many high-school football budgets. In later years, those tamed youths never seem to lose their sentimental attachment to the father figures who taught them obedience to authority and the supposed values of inflicting and absorbing pain on the field.
You’ve quit tobacco and probably should quit alcohol. Now, as the Super Bowl looms, is it time to turn your back on football?
Such feelings were evident among the millions of fans who followed Hamlin into intensive care and thrilled to his first reported words to his doctors when he regained consciousness (written because he was intubated): “Did we win?” And they were no less satisfied when he could again speak to his teammates, even if from his hospital bed. “Love you, boys,” was what he said — the perfect words for the hero of the story. It was a week before he could be moved from Cincinnati back to a hospital in Buffalo, nine days before he could go home with internal damage that will require a long rehab. In the weeks that followed, his popularity became monetized and his personal charity, which reportedly had raised only modest thousands of dollars, soared into the millions in a few weeks.
Too bad that money wasn’t for him. Like many players who get seriously injured in their first years in the NFL, Hamlin’s contract undoubtedly isn’t set up to cover long-term benefits or a pension, which means he may be way underinsured for what could lie ahead.
The Inspirational Narrative
Damar Hamlin had been a fringe second-year player on the Bills who blossomed when he suddenly replaced an injured starter. His emergence coincided with the team’s spectacular season. It ended three weeks after that hit with the spectral presence of Hamlin waving and making a heart with his hands from a snow-dusted luxury box window as the Bengals beat the Bills in the playoffs, sinking their Super Bowl dreams.
Nevertheless, the narrative remained inspirational, focusing on the NFL’s quick medical response and Hamlin’s “miraculous” recovery.
As the Nation‘s Dave Zirin noted in his Edge of Sports column, however, this is anything but
“a feel-good story. It should be an opportunity to discuss how players are often treated as expendable extensions of equipment and not as human beings. It should be an opportunity to debate the sport of football itself and whether it is safe for human beings to participate in it… Instead, they want us to discuss how inspirational Damar Hamlin is for his teammates and for fans across the country. But a near-death experience should never be seen as joyous, and it is a revelation of the NFL’s nihilism that this is the product they are expectorating back at us.”
Okay, so where do we go from here? Has the time finally come to make a choice, as you should have done with your other indulgences? You’ve quit tobacco and probably should quit alcohol. Now, as the Super Bowl looms, is it time to turn your back on football? Or would you prefer to “man up” and leave any qualms about its violence in the dust of (all too recent) history. Will you embrace it as who you are and what you want?
I know which way I’m heading — I’ve been heading there for a long while. In all honesty, I think there’s no middle way, no way to keep watching the game as a witness with reservations or to pretend to be a concerned sociologist rather than one of its enthusiasts. Sorry, it really is time to either get over it or get out.
These will, of course, be individual decisions because there’s simply too much money involved in the sport to expect positive public-health decisions by the government (local, state, or federal). After all, entire cities are held hostage by stadium deals; international media companies are under contract for years to come; and the interlocking business and personal relationships of several dozen billionaire Republican team owners rule the roost. Perhaps the most telling proof of football’s long-term power is the way it’s made its financial peace with the gambling industry. Sixty years ago, several of the league’s biggest stars were suspended simply for betting on games. How quaint that now seems, as the NFL has bedded down with that industry to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.
So, calls for the banning of football would be a distinctly quixotic gesture designed to make us feel righteous and nothing more. Skip it. Even demanding radical reform by softening the game through rule tweaking to turn it into the equivalent of flag or touch football is now unimaginable. Besides, the NFL is ahead of you on that. In its support for the no-tackle game of flag football lies the same capitalist foresight that alcohol and tobacco brands showed when investing in the marijuana industry.
But all is not lost. If we’ve learned anything from football, it’s that trying harder, playing hurt, and never giving up is the essence of the sport. The game, they like to say, is never over till it’s over. Beyond turning your back on football, the single most significant thing you can do is to keep your kids from playing the game, not just to protect them but also to pinch off the pipeline of more fungible bodies, even as the far safer alternative of soccer waits on the sidelines. (Forty years ago, I wouldn’t allow my son to play high-school football and he’s still not happy about that. Tough.)
Otherwise, you can just accept the seeming consensus that football reflects American values of aggressive domination as surely as America refracts football into a model of muscular Christianity — and (as indeed I will) without significant shame or guilt enjoy the Super Bowl, sometimes a great game, but never one to die for.
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