Football has never been good. There has never been a time at which football, a game dependent on both incredible skill and irredeemable violence, has been good. Don't think that football has not always been a violent game full of terrible people. It has been, and is, and will likely always be.
Joe Namath was a "lovable rogue" only because we did not have First Take back then, and because Colin Cowherd would have set him on ritualistic fire. Every football superstar you can think of has likely done something that would offend your most cherished beliefs. The great secret of all of history is that everything has always been kind of bad but slowly, painfully, it gets better. That is true in football as well. We just have the unique privilege of knowing exactly how completely terrible it is.
Former Dallas Cowboys wide receiver Lance Rentzel once exposed himself to a 10-year-old girl, an incident which The Harvard Crimson took in relative stride in 1973 when they published a review of his autobiography. The review contains this passage, regarding his initiation into Oklahoma football in 1962:
The season ended with the notorious "O" club initiation, a ritual for all first-year varsity lettermen. The initiates were ordered to crawl backward for fifty yards with "grapes up our asses," forced to drink menstrual fluid, and constantly shocked with battery-powered cattle prods. Coaches observed these activities to ensure that the proceedings "didn't get too sadistic."
That was 52 years ago. We were not good people then, and we are not good people now.
When I was a toddler, my hometown team, the Cincinnati Bengals, played in the Super Bowl. My sister remembers being sick with a cold during the Bengals' AFC Championship game against the Bills and my dad becoming so excited about an interception that he jumped over the couch she was lying on. She does not remember that two weeks later, the night before the biggest game in the history of the franchise, the Bengals star fullback went on a cocaine binge in his hotel room. The New York Times story written about that game mentions the incident, phrasing it as another challenge the Bengals faced but couldn't quite overcome. "''His absence hurt us in the sense we had plays planned for him,'" Bengals coach Sam Wyche said.
We were not good people then, and we are not good people now.
This game has never been good. It's been intriguing and exciting and brutal and depressing and occasionally boring (damn you, AFC North), but it's never been "good." It's never been a paragon of virtue. It's never been a font of whatever it is you want your kids to be. It just hasn't.
The difference is that now we know. We know exactly what we're getting into with this thing called "football."
We know that the NFL is either, at best, completely incompetent or, at worst, hilariously corrupt. We know that this game slowly breaks its players. We know that the NFL administration is far more interested in expanding into international markets than it is into protecting its employees or their families. We know that this is bigger than any team or division - this is an NFL-wide problem.
We know that college football uses its players and the players sometimes use their positions as college football players to do some stupid, evil shit and then the colleges they play for find a way to get them out of it, like it's an episode of "Saved by the Bell" and Mr. Belding's going to just look the other way this time, Zack Morris.
So what do we do now?
I don't know. If something has never been good, I'm not sure if we should ever expect it to become good. I think that the overlords of football have more pressure on them than ever to make the game and its players appear to be good. I think that we now know too much about the game to ignore its faults but love it too much to give it up completely, and we will thus grumble and protest until something happens so that the NFL bottom-line ticker on ESPN stops being so damned depressing.
If football cannot be good, maybe the best we can hope for is that it's better. That players aren't killing themselves or their loved ones, or getting arrested, or narrowly avoiding getting arrested. That team owners and coaches aren't so craven as to expect that fans will just move past incidents of violence, domestic or otherwise, because hey, we've got a big game coming up this weekend. That the leagues themselves, whether professional or college, will be less, well, stupid.
Good might be a bridge too far for football. But better isn't.
