NCAA Enforcement & Dilemmas of Self-Regulation

The recent mistakes the NCAA made in its Miami investigation called forth a predictable firestorm from the media mavens who make a career out of attacking the NCAA. I think it is overblown and think we should examine the Miami case in a wider context of the issues facing any self-governing professional association. This means we can admit the mistakes but also see why they occur, how they can be corrected. This approach does not require NCAA conspiracy or corruption. The report that NCAA commissioned from an outside law firm does a good job assessing the legal and institutional issues. The report reveals the NCAA as a reasonably competent, harried and generally effective self-governing group.

The wedding of sports and universities occurred as a philosophical plan and historical accident. 19^th century universities saw athletics as a natural extension of a classical education. Student athletes ran the early college teams. Very quickly teams took on outsize importance for alumni and school identity. By the 1870s teams were hiring ringers and nonstudents to play. Football ended up such a violent and important sport that when 13 athletes died in one year, President Roosevelt threatened national intervention. Colleges resorted to the classic American solution of a self-governing association to oversee sports. The NCAA grew slowly and awkwardly into a membership association with 1066 members trying to control the unwieldy and volatile world they inherited, spend money on, benefit from and barely control.

Self-regulating membership associations like the NCAA establish jurisdictional control over standards, membership and accreditation. Engineering, social work, medicine, law, construction and thousands of American enterprises depend upon professionals setting standards for membership and enforcing their existence.

The irony is that the media seldom worries about when doctors kill patients or or engineers design flawed buildings. The stakes in these self-governing professions are far higher than sports but largely ignored. These associations have elaborate systems of self-governance to ensure competent performance and reasonable competition. Professional associations police their own and have investigative and adjudicative procedures for sanctions.

American self-governing professionalism developed as a counterpoint to government control. Education remains no different with colleges subject to review by certifying professional organizations. When professional regulation fails, decisions may end up in the courts or before legislatures.

My point is the NCAA successes and failures are not unusual and reflect normal American practice with voluntary associations setting and enforcing standards.

Successful self-regulation requires member organizations internalize regulated standards. Most professional institutions will have inside compliance staff to help avoid pitfalls and keep standards. In major cases, the organizations might call in outside counsel or compliance experts.

The NCAA reflects this practice where local college compliance staffs work daily with central NCAA enforcement staff. As a professional association NCAA members have strong “affirmative obligations” to internally police and self-report violations.

 The reality of NCAA compliance, then, occurs in hundreds of weekly interactions between colleges and the NCAA staff. College compliance staff self-report, discuss and negotiate over thousands of major and minor issues to prevent, anticipate or creatively solve rules’ challenges. This quotidian reality of compliance and consultation works reasonable well.

The NCAA makes its fair of mistakes. I have direct experience of how UW and NCAA lost a major case against Rick Neuheisel when the NCAA forgot to follow new protocols. They are not perfect, but not fundamentally different from most self-regulating associations hampered by lack of subpoena power and facing incentives to hide information.

The report by Cadwalader Taft report on the NCAA performance in the Miami case exposes a reasonably competent and committed professionals. The report highlights the tensions between field investigation and internal legal accountability. The mistakes reflect the strain between the push to get the information and the legal constraints upon any investigation.

The NCAA faces the same problem all nongovernmental self-regulating groups face—not having subpoena power. Its members legislate rules, and members accept an affirmative obligation to report violations and cooperate with investigations. The vast majority of schools honor this obligation. Affirmative obligation and mutual trust are fundamental to self-governing professional associations such as the NCAA.

However, people lie.

Let me repeat, people lie, withhold information and misdirect.

People with high career stakes have incentives to lie. Miami coaches lied, mislead or withheld. Ohio State lied. North Carolina lied. Florida State lied. Michigan mislead. USC withheld and mislead. Head coaches claim convenient ignorance of the activities of their assistant coaches. New NCAA laws impose absolute accountability on head coaches so they could not slough off responsibility on assistants while benefitting from cheating.

The Miami report reveals that the NCAA investigators often piggy-back on other investigations to maximize capacity to get information. The NCAA investigators have limited budgets and need standard bureaucratic approval. Doubling up extends budgets and helps the NCAA get information they cannot find for lack of subpoena power.

All professional associations double up with formal investigations if they can. The Miami report explained that the NCAA had strong internal limitations upon how it can acquire information. Investigators are prohibited from sting operations or lying to elicit testimony. These are court-sanctioned activities but report makes clear that the NCAA takes limits seriously.

The NCAA internal process worked to a point. The investigator Mr. Ameen Najeer found third parties would not talk with him and hit upon what he regarded as an ingenious solution. He could double up on depositions taken by Mr. Shapiro’s defense lawyer over bankruptcy.

Mr. Najeer reported the idea to his superiors. They discussed it with the Executive Vice President Jim Isch to get authorization for budgets. The need for budgetary approval flows through the report emphasizing the NCAA like everyone else has resource limits and accountability issues. The compliance leaders also sought legal clearance.

This request for a legal opinion should reinforce confidence in the internal process and integrity. The head lawyer mentioned two basic issues. First, the use of outside counsel required approval and reporting to legal office. Second, the legal counsel argued that Najeer’s approach violated internal rules. Counsel opinion nixed the approach. The investigator’s superiors supported this and refused the request.

Up to this point the organization functioned on point. Najeer, however, developed a “work around,” but did not inform his superiors nor get budget authorization. This meant that Perez did conduct depositions for bankruptcy that she shared with the Najeer. This information helped shaped the NCAA bill of charges.

The report correctly faults the internal leadership for not following up on the investigator’s actions and not monitoring more tightly. When the NCAA discovered what Najeer had done, it eliminated the “tainted” information, notified Miami and revised the charges.

The report illuminates how hard investigations are without subpoena and when people with affirmative obligations choose to lie and withhold. We should not forget, that Miami President Shalala’s protestations aside, Miami has created a failed athletic culture with three major implosions in 15 years. The report makes clear how vital confidentiality remains during an investigation.

Good self-regulation requires internal legitimacy, affirmative obligations to cooperate, a responsible rule making process, and strong compliance and consulting programs. These need to be reinforced by a system of investigation and adjudication that is both professional, legally accountable and adjudicators that possess peer legitimacy and expertise but also have some claim to impartiality and fairness.

I think the NCAA process is basically intact and responsible especially in its daily work. It’s major investigations reveal the need for a more professionalized and accountable investigative arm. Moreover, the NCAA faces serious issues with excessive rule making as well as issues of how to ensure consistency across decisions made by the compliance committees. This is not conspiracy or corruption, it is the reality of self-regulation.

Gladiators, Rome and American Football

Football starts again. College and high school games launch this weekend and millions will watch and enjoy the proud, violent and compelling American sport. In the frenzied discussions of the game, commentators and fans alike will talk about the modern American gladiators, the American football player. I think this is a mistake. Just as I do not believe they should be called warriors, they should definitely not be called gladiators, and here is why.

Grappling to make sense of the suicide of football legend Junior Seau, Takeo Spikes, a fourteen-year NFL veteran, spoke of modern football players as gladiators. “We are so prideful in the way people view us as modern-day gladiators, how tough we are, how we can fight through anything and keep it all inside.”

Spikes described being a gladiator as a way to manage the internal and external pain. Football players grind it out for pride, career and money. They know that when they stop, someone else will immediately take their place. They are expendable, just like gladiators.

I was thinking about this image of football players when I recently wandered through the ancient Roman Coliseum. I was struck by how familiar it felt. Inside arches hovered over concourses similar to any modern stadium. You could see where the hawkers sold their wares and food. The cool stone kept out the heat. If the glorious marble facade had remained and gleamed in the Roman sun, it could have been any modern football stadium like Cowboy Stadium.

Outside I would have found ticket scalpers and huge crowds jostling to get in. Inside the ticket sections would segregate by wealth and class except for the section set aside for the Vestal Virgins. The wide oval track swept the arena. The ruins revealed the labyrinth beneath the stadium for special effects and to house the exotic animals used in hunter games.

Every city of the Roman Empire had its own amphitheater and games. The games represented the pulsing heart of the Roman Empire’s self-image as a martial society. The games displayed courage, bravery, physical toughness and martial skill in battles to the death. The spectators carried a powerful voice in whether gladiators would live/die after their battles.

The gladius remained the standard Roman military sword for four hundred years. Their title derived from the symbol of Roman conquest underlined the symbolic seriousness of the games. Gladiators epitomized the martial soul of Rome and fought for life and death, just as every Roman army and soldier had.

A gladiator could fight and lose, but if he fought with skill and courage, the crowd often saved him. In fact the gladiator owners preferred that gladiators live to fight another day and save their investment in their slaves.

Gladiators were slaves. Businessmen owned them. Gladiators attended schools for years before they were allowed to compete and graduated to different levels of competition. People rooted for their schools or colors as much as individual gladiators. In desperate times units of gladiators fought as soldiers.

The sport was built on slaves, outcasts, criminals—a person could be sentenced to the games—or barbarians from the provinces. The underclasses provided the recruitment pool. Gladiators could gain wealth but they started at the bottom and used the violence of the games to escape.

Roman citizens were not allowed to be gladiators. To “volunteer” for the arena, citizens gave up their rights and took on aspects of an indentured servant.

Successful gladiators could be amply rewarded. They were treated as celebrities. Gladiators were feted and recognized on the streets. Artists drew them and created statues of them. Their images appeared on jewelry. Some drawings emphasized their scars and wounds to glorify their toughness. Groupies hung around them.

I remember a line from a novel, “where there is blood, there is money.” The speaker was commenting how blood sports always attracted audiences even when they were illegal. Football hovers on the edge of this. Every recent defense of football begins with “football is a violent and dangerous sport.” Correct. 

Most of football’s blood, however, flows from internal injuries, but seldom on field death.

Modern Americans worship football as a metaphor for their martial past and future. Battle imagery saturates media coverage of the games. Many football games begin with flyovers of military aircraft.

The American empire centers its metaphorical identity as solidly in football as the Romans did in gladiators.

Despite this symbolic similarity, football players are not gladiators. Remember, Romans gloried in gladiators’ willingness to kill each other as entertainment. Romans gorged on the violence, bravery and slaughter of the games.

Americans also confuse sport and entertainment with their identity. But football is not mortal combat. It is certainly not even resemble war with its ritualized resets for each play.

Football does have schools and training. It thrives on colors and loyal following. Only the elite of the elite survive to play college or professional football. But players do not really risk death on the field. Most know that they will suffer injuries but can barely envision the later life crippled by accumulated leg, knee and back injuries. Modern football players also have the option of an education to carve out a different life when they leave football. Roman Gladiators seldom lived beyond 35, and the vast majority died in their twenties. They remained slaves at the end of their brief careers. American football players have a different, slower physical fate awaiting them.

We don't want football players to be gladiators for another reason. Modern historians believe the games represented an assertion of Roman superiority over the barbarians, slaves and underclass. After all they slay each to entertain jaded Romans.

The contestants were NOT ROMAN CITIZENS. Desperation and lack of freedom drove most gladiators. The Romans in the stands could feel a clear superiority gladiators who died for them, even if they admired the skill. As the gladiators would salute, "Ave, Imperator, morituri te salutant" (we who are about to die salute you). 

Gladiators risked life and health to entertain the Roman masses. They risked life and health to prove to the masses that the Romans were superior to them. They risked life and health to enact values that masses no longer possessed but believed their society did.

My friend and mentor Hubert Locke hates football. He believes the young minority males who make up the majority of football players are reduced to being American gladiators. Hubert sees no glory or joy, only the assertion of class superiority and the loss of talent and energy that could be devoted to better aims for those young men. He views football and its glittering circus as a false dream for the poor and dispossessed to find a way out risking their bodies to entertain the masses. Part of what he says is correct.

As Rome declined, the game grew uglier and meaner. The games died out because the society could not afford to support them or the giant arenas. Then, of course, the barbarians conquered Rome.

The Failure of Informed Consent and the Football Brain Trauma Debate

The new football season looms before us. Olympic memories linger, but the countdown to football dominates sports radio and ESPN. Fans and media cannot wait for the game and the carnage. But before we jump in to enjoy the sport, let’s remember the shadow that hangs over every football player and game as well as our support of it.

Football can kill the soul of players.

Junior Seau, a NFL icon, shot himself in the chest in May. He joins three former professional football players who committed suicide in the last two years. Several were diagnosed after the fact with mental illness caused by brain damage related from repetitive head trauma. Seau’s brain has also been diagnosed as suffering from CSE a progressive disease resulting from repeated head trauma. It contributed to his erratic behavior and suicide.

Football kills the soul by destroying brain functioning. The brain suffers from the generation of webs of plaque in the brain that destroy neural communication and processing. These plaque entanglements seem to be caused by repetitive head injuries, mainly traumatic concussions. Repetitive impact alone may also do as much damage in creating the nodes of tau proteins that anchor these tangles. The tangles lock up neurons and disrupt the brain’s neural ability to communicate and sustain a bioelectrical balance.

In July 2012 over 3000 former players consolidated their law suit claiming the NFL “deliberately and fraudulently” withheld and discouraged knowledge about the damage football was doing to the brains of football players. The law suit reflects accumulating knowledge about the cognitive impacts of injury as well as a widespread and belated recognition that while football is a violent and dangerous game, its damage lay far deeper and more sinister than destroyed knees, brutalized ACLs, wrecked shoulders and crippled players late middle age.

I have written about this often. I talked of Achilles Revenge where athletes choose to risk their health for glory and wealth in exchange for physical pain. The brain trauma goes beyond physical pain. The neural damage undermines judgment and manufactures erratic emotional responses. Players can suffer from dementia, chronic traumatic encephalopathy. CTE induces depression, loss of memory, unpredictable emotional swings and aberrant decision-making. Player’s emotional and judgmental resources erode. The more we know the more we understand the issues may be underreported.

This erosion of judgment, emotional stability and resilience combines with the normal physical pain and status loss retired players face. The loss of their locker room camaraderie and support compounds this isolation. Roman Oben a 12-year veteran puts it this way, “they spend the rest of their lives being shadows of who they were at 25.”

The result?

The rash of suicides by retired football players augments the compelling evidence that a significant percentage of football players may struggle with declining cognitive limits and depression in rates beyond the regular population. After Jay Easterling killed himself with a handgun, his wife Mary Ann commented, “He felt like his brain was falling off…He was losing control. He couldn’t remember things from five minutes ago.” Earlier Dave Duerson had shot himself in the chest to preserve his brain for further study.

No other sport spawns this level of suicide. Sometimes suicide can be contagious as a way out of the emotional and spiritual pain of watching your personality slip away and losing control of all you value. No one knows how many ex-players struggle with mental illness induced by the brain trauma. No one knows the causal pathways. No one knows much about it because the NFL worked hard to discredit any research in this area.

The country will not outlaw football. Many present and former players resent efforts to mitigate the violence and long-term harm. They represent the classic commitment psychology of someone who has invested in the trauma and identity of the sport. They experience this as a form of initiation for them and the sport. If they did it, so should the young players. A number of players and commentators have already attacked the new NFL contract that places strict limits upon the level of contact in camp to protect the long-term welfare of players. They bitterly complain that drawing down the level of violence limits the ability of young players to demonstrate their toughness and beat out veterans. Others just say, “I’d do it all again.” So the players’ law suit focuses upon informing players and not regulating the game.

This solution flows from the  free choice defense. The players and league want to ensure that the new draftees have adequate information about the threats. The players can make “informed” choice.

Let’s look at what this informed consent might look like. We have to ask a person to make a decision to risk potential loss of their personality when they are 22 years old. We need to remember that human begins tend to overestimate catastrophic consequences but underestimate small losses. People also tend to be over optimistic in their own projections about how they will avoid statistical dangers to themselves. The informed negotiation leading to the brain trauma deal might look like this:

Drafted Player (DP)

“I have a chance to live my dream. I got drafted! This is incredible.”

Advisor/Agent (AA)

“Fantastic. Now we can negotiate with the teams to get you're a contract that matches your slot.”

RP    “How soon can we start?”

AA   “I meet with the team in two days, but before I begin we need to talk about something that a recent settlement with the league mandates.”

DP    “Got it. What’s up?”

AA   “Well, I need to alert you to the fact that football can be dangerous to your health. Here is a list of the dangers. I also have a video you can watch.”

DP    “Come on man. Of course I know that. I have three surgeries to prove it. This is news?  Football is a violent and dangerous game, I know that.”

AA   “Well I need you to read this disclaimer and check the part of about brain trauma, dementia and compromised judgment.”

DP    “Yeah, I’ll read it, but I know this stuff. I’m not afraid of this. My bonus will cover it all. Besides, this stuff is a hundred years in the future.”

AA   “Well actually, it’s about 20 to 30 years in the future, but you are right, most of these injuries start to impact you in your late forties. Sadly Chris Henry suffered it when he was 26. I also want to remind you that we may need to set aside some funds for this just in case from your signing bonus or your first year.”

DP    “Look, this is stupid. I am 23. I will be fine and besides I owe it to my mom and friends to take care of them. I promised my mom a new house, and I want her out of where she lives. Man, I suffered for this, and I want my return. She deserves this. I can take care of the stuff later. I’ve got a lot of money. Right now, just get the money so I can take care of my family.”

AA   “I just want to be clear. Football is dangerous and brutal and violent. We both know that.  Well, the court settlement does give you the option of talking to some guys, watching videos or going to a panel to talk about how to think about these injuries and prepare for it.”

DP   “I know what I’m getting into. I have the scars on my knee and shoulder to prove it. Besides I’m a lineman, and I’ve never had a concussion so I’m not that worried about it.”

AA   “Well some doctors think it’s not about concussions, but it about repetition. A number of players have had serious brain issues without any real concussions.”

DP   “Ok, OK. I’ll think about it. But I’ll take the risk. This is my one shot, my one chance. Football is what got me here. I owe it to myself and to my family. Besides I’ve read the interviews. Most of the guys say they’d do it all again even if they have sore knees.”

AA   “Well, OK. But remember you have been duly notified as required by the terms of the court settlement.”

DP    “By the way, what do the guys who have suffered brain damage say about how they are handling it.”

AA   “Well it’s kind of hard to figure out.”

DP    “What?”

AA  “Well. You know for some of the guys. Well, you know. Well, it’s like this.”

DP    “What are you getting to? Come on, spit it out.”

AA   “Well. A lot of them are not compos mentis.”

DP    “Come on. I’ve got a degree, but I did not take French.”

AA   “Well they aren’t really all the able to talk about how they are doing. You see, well. You see. Well a couple are living with tubes in their throats and respirators. Some of them are not all that stable or coherent all the time.”

DP    “This is getting a little weird.”

AA   “Look I’m trying to help. Think of it this way. You get wealth, privilege, fun and status for awhile.”

DP    “Yeah. I know. That’s the whole point of this.”

AA   “Well the other side is. You potentially give them your soul.”

DP    “This is a little metaphysical man, are you sure you are OK?”

AA   “I just want you to know. Their wives do most of the talking.”

DP    “Well I read about some other guys who were big names like Seau and Easterboork who were struggling with this. What did they say?”

AA   “Well, they can’t say much. They committed suicide.”

DRP   “Your’e shitten me, man. Look man, this is getting us nowhere. What do you expect me to do, go manage a car rental office?    ---         This won’t happen to me. Let’s make this happen.”

So much for informed consent changing decisions of players.

Every one of us entering a career embarks on a path that will change us. We seldom know what our future self will look like when we enter a job world. Sometimes we discover that our path is destroying what we value in ourselves, and we change jobs or change careers. Sometimes ten years down the road we look in the mirror and no longer recognize the person we have become. 

Throughout our life we negotiate over the person we are and the person we are becoming. None of us really knows how we will end up, but we do know that the person we become will be is shaped by the work we do. No different with football, but the impact can be  a little more severe.

No person easily or rationally risks his or her personality and capacity to be a human decision maker. The core of our humanity lies in our ability to feel, think and shape our life; it depends upon our brain working. The stealthy soul death brought on the brain trauma induced by impacts condemn players to a living death, far beyond their imagination.

Expecting informed individual choice option to address the brain damage threat is an illusion. It makes as much sense as the older argument that coal miners made a free choice to enter the mines and accept black lung disease compared to unemployment. The solutions remain similar. The sport and unions need to continue aggressive and continued research and interventions to minimize the long-term damage. The other path should involve joint contributions to a fund to support later life victims of the brain damage and soul loss that no one should have to bargain away.

The odds are that individual players will not build up a fund. Mary Ann Easterling, whose husband committed suicide, summed it up, "I'd also like to see the NFL take care of the players that do have symptoms or could possibly have symptoms."

The league and union need to do this. It is the least they can do for the sentence that some players will consign themselves to.

Remember Football; Remember Race;: Review of Remember Titans

Football season begins. Years ago, football, especially college football, displaced baseball as the center of American sport obsession. It also became the locus for narratives America tells itself about itself through movies,

With the start of college football, I want to remember an iconic football movie central to America's sense of itself and its story about race relations, human relations and what sport can accomplish. In my ethics classes for our intercollegiate athletic program, students regularly use Remember the Titans as one of their iconic film movies. Why?

Remember the scene. America grapples with desegregation; war occurs in the streets, people die in the south, riots hit the cities. No one knows how the court ordered experience of integration will work. A few think of how the military has managed integration after being ordered. It shines as one example, imperfect, but real, where a relentless meritocracy and insistent commitment to common goals plus facing a common enemy united races in ways no where else in American society.

No whites wanted Alexandria, Virginia desegregated. A white enclave accustomed to sport dominance, its pride and joy school suddenly had to desgregate. Now I will go with the movie, not the history, for we know this story through the movie.

Remember the Titans hinges around the political spoils decision of the Alexandria School Board to appoint  black Herman Boone, Denzel Washington,  coach of its football team, the Titans. To do so they pushed aside a well loved and successful coach  Bill Yoast, Will Paton. Later we discover after rock throwing and fights, that the Board has declared that if Boone loses one game, they will replace him.

My point focuses upon its lesson about bringing together races; a very football, American, military lesson. Coach Boone exemplifies old school football and reminds me of my Fort Polk drill instructor. He launches a boot camp taking the team away from the chaos of the city to Gettysburg College for practice. When the white and black players get on separate busses, he stops them and in front of horrified parents demands that they sit on defense and offense buses regardless of race.

When the players self segregate he requires them to room with each other and learn and recite facts about each other publically. He subjects them to brutal debilitating two a days, sometimes three adays. Players vomiting; heat stroke hovers. Coach  Yoast warns against treating them badly, but Boone persists in his Bear Bryant imitation. Players suffer together; they hate the coach and hate each other. But slowly, uncertainly, survival and shared suffering bring them together as a team, even if it is against their crazed coach.

The crux lies in old school coaching, high demands, relentless pushing, humiliation and the promise of success. Boone is not an upbeat positive modern coach; he pounces on failure; humiliates players publically and exacts reprisal to motivate. Failure results in pain. "We will be perfect in every aspect of the game. You drop a pass, you run a mile. You miss a blocking assignment, you run a mile. You fumble the football, and I will break my foot off in your John Brown hind parts and then you will run a mile. Perfection. Let's go to work." 

The players struggle to survive and learn new systems. Like all football practices, violent competition competes with cooperation. Players fight, push shove because the stakes are high--they want to start--and the means are violent. Coaches have to manage it constantly and when the team grows, its own leaders will break up the fights and focus the anger on playing.

A midnight run leads the team to Gettysburg battlefield. Exhausted, lost, angery, Boone reminds them of the pain and loss of the battle. A battle they are still fighting on the team. "You listen, and you take a lesson from the dead. If we don't come together right now on this hallowed ground, we too will be destroyed, just like they were. I don't care if you like each other of not, but you will respect each other. And maybe... I don't know, maybe we'll learn to play this game like men." 

Behind the entire approach lies Machiavelli's maxim that common danger, common enemies will build common community across barriers.  The team must develop a commitment to perfection beyond its commitments to self, clan or race. For Boone success lies in the ability of players to see each other as companions in the quest for perfection and victory.

The whole approach depends upon absolute clarity that he plays the best talent, not by race. Football players are used to abusive coaches, not a good thing, but they will live with it because they believe it prepares them for the game. They will live with it if they believe the best players play.

Boone's ultimate success and credibility lies in his race blind assessment. He knows race pervades everything but must prove to the players that he plays by merit. It lies in the fact that he replaces a black player with a white player or a white player with a black player because of talent despite the mutual race based anger of the parents. When Paton asks him to take it easy, Boone replies with a rooted lesson that drives him and this dream of racial reconciliation, "Now I may be a mean cuss. But I'm the same mean cuss with everybody out there on that football field. The world don't give a damn about how sensitive these kids are, especially the young black kids. You ain't doin' these kids a favor by patronizing them. You're crippling them; You're crippling them for life."

The other side lies in the inability of this unity borne of shared suffering and common commitment to carry over into school and society. There simmering hatred and resentment and rejection in bars remain the norm. Playing together creates a possiblity for themselves, for the society, but does not transform it. But the players, for a moment, discover that black and white united in a common cause based upon  merit can come together. The same lesson as the military, the lesson of football and sport. It is real but isolated; bars, houses, parents, girlfriends reject the bond they have formed.

Coach Boone, who throws up before the first game, reminds himself, "it's only a game but I love it." Good to remember but we Americans take our games very very seriously as avatars of our identity and community, as morality tales of our own hopes, failure successes and as remembrances of times and moments of sorrow or triumph.

The lesson of football for live and race and America? This is not the fairy tale of Blind Side, but it involves a deeper level of conflict that football admits it cannot resolve in society at large. But the story remains--groups of persons of wildly diverse backgrounds and race will have conflict and anger. They will carry it with them into life and to each other. This will not be abolished. Neither will the racist structures of society go away because of football.

BUT. A common goal and a common enemy can bring them together. Moral competition for excellence and a relentless leader can demand that race be superceded by merit, but he or she must be utterly transparent in their demands and discipline and merit based promotion. Finally, intense badgering almost brutal physical demands coupled with intellectual demands can mold people together in common pain and suffering. Through shared pain comes unity and  the possibility of excellence and glory at the other end. Competition metamorphosizes into combat.

Remembering the Titans means remembering that race matters in America. It means to remember that it has not gone away. It also remembers and reminds that common pursuit of excellence, perfection, in Coach Boone's words, can bring people together across race. But this is not easy and takes constant effort by coach and player and maybe some day by society.

Force, Violence & Football

On the first day of college football season at the end of a humiliating loss to Boise State, Oregon running back LeGarrette Blount, still in helmet and pads, punched a bare headed Bryon Hout. You can see it on U-Tube. Prior to that Blount had attacked his own players and later had to be restrained by police from attacking heckling fans.

All athletics requires controlled force. Football moves force into controlled violence. The sport demands athletes unleash physical force that can do significant harm to individuals. Players wear body armor and must follow exacting rules to minimize that harm. Football players must walk a fine line of disciplined violence. The force that all athletes require moves into violence when the force can cause damage to opponents, not just overcome them. Football players are warranted to hit, tackle, forearm, block, butt and physically engage other humans in ways that off the field would get them arrested for assault.

The violence of the game represents controlled force to move other players in directions or stop them from performing their assigned tasks. It requires immense strength of mind and character to develop and channel the coiled violence that lives in all good football players. If you have ever been on the sidelines of a football game you become aware of the speed, size and sophistication that accelerates the force and unleashes the violence of player to player collisions.

LaGarrette Blount's attack on Byron Hout exposed the violence that underlies the game. It felt naked. Blount still had his helmet on, but Hout was bareheaded.It felt unfair since the violence is controlled and designed to be force and the helmets are vital to protect players from the violence on each other. It's an incessant press upon everyone that can easily incite people to sheer violent actions out of the rules that prescribe limitations and intent to their actions. Two years ago a coach of the New York Giants literally stepped onto the field to trip a player while sideline incidents of coaches attacking players are not unheard of.

In his apology Blount got it right, "I lost my head." All athletics depends upon the head forging character and decision to control the physical forces and emotions required of the sport. Blount lost his head and discipline and attacked an unprepared opponent outside of the rules and without the protection of his helmet.

Blount losing it against his own teammates, Hout and the fans played into another reality and stereotype. A violent black man assaulted not only fellow black players but a white unprotected opponent. We know that the majority of high profile football players are recruited from harsh backgrounds where young minority males use football as their way out. Their discipline and commitment provide the means to claw out of environments most of the middle class white spectators cannot imagine. The young men are raised in an environment saturated in violence and must transcend it to get a college scholarship. The paradox is they get out by learning to master and deploy their own internal rage in a sport that depends upon that swirling vortex of energy.

Good coaches and team cultures figure out how to integrate this violence into a self discipline controlled deployment of force for an end. The control must be both modeled by the coaches, pervade the culture of the team and be internalized by the players to make it work. It is also critical for the players to understand how to accept and internally master their own anger and motives that can fuel the force but spill over into violence. A first year drafted player at his first camp was taken aback by the fights that broke out on the field during the intensity of practice. He commented upon how the intensity of the practice trained him to figure out how to master and deploy the force. "The game of football is violent. Some teams embrace it, and some teams don't. We're one of the teams that embrace it...we're always trying to be on that edge, pushing it as far as we can without being overboard...It's usually the intensity not the violence that leads to the fights during practice." 

Blount's breakdown strips naked not only the violent structure of the sport but also reminds us that the colleges and professional teams harness and exploit that internal explosive force inside the young men. They exploit it.

Blount has been justly suspended from playing for the rest of the season. But Oregon is letting him keep his scholarship and practice with the team. The team benefitted from the coiled violence within him, now they should help him deal with it.

(Photo courtesy ESPN)