At what cost, football?

The NFL looks to return to a new normal this season. But at what cost? What should these athletes and their families be willing to accept?

I remember the exact moment I caught “the sickness,” as so many describe it. That deep love and passion for a sport that consumes me on a daily basis.

I was nine years old, and it was my first actual Pop Warner football game. I was a proud member of the Waltham Devil Dogs’ “D” team, wearing number 20, and starting at left tailback. We were playing Wakefield, one of our rivals in the Middlesex County league. On our first offensive possession, and actually our first play for scrimmage, “25 Quick” was the call. A simple off-tackle dive play for me aiming straight ahead between the left tackle and the left guard.

I remember taking the handoff, “bursting” through the hole as quickly as my little nine-year old legs could carry me. I remember hitting the linebacker, and spinning away from him, and continuing downfield. It was, in my mind, the greatest five-yard run in football history.

I was hooked.

Thirteen years later I would walk off a football field in uniform for the final time, after the Wesleyan Cardinals defeated in-state rivals Trinity College 49-35. Thirteen years of blood, sweat and tears given to this sport. While my final collegiate season was not what I imagined the first time I stepped on campus, I walked off the field with my head held high, having scored on a two-point conversion in the game, and gave a game ball to my mom. I’ll never forget that moment.

I’ve written before that football has been the one constant in my life, and a constant that opened more doors for me than I will ever be able to describe. It put me on a path to law school, and when I failed at practicing law, it gave me a second career. A new life, one that probably saved my previous one.

I love this sport with every fiber of my being. I owe so much to it.

Football asks a lot of its fans, and to a lesser degree those who cover it professionally. We watch players we love endure hardships, endure life-altering injuries, and worse. We wonder about their safety. We see college players often exploited by system. A system that yes, gives them opportunities, but also profits mightily off of those opportunities.

But as fans, or writers, we accept these faults, these harsh realities, because at its core this is a beautiful game.

Recently an old clip of Bill Belichick surfaced, where perhaps the greatest coach of all time talked about players celebrating:

The more and more I thought about this clip, the more and more I thought about why people love this sport, whether they played it themselves or never even picked up a football. Because we recognized what Belichick speaks to here, the work that goes into that moment. When a linebacker breaks through the offensive line and forces a fumble in a Super Bowl, think about everything it took to put that player in that moment. We realize that, the blood, the sweat, the tears, the weights, and we almost celebrate with them.

That’s why the draft is such a well-watched event each year, because we see the next crop of athletes realizing their dreams, and we recognize the effort and the sacrifice that put them in that moment.

But there is more to this game that we love. We love the matchups, the schemes, the personalities, the thrilling moments that each single game can provide. There is so much about this sport to love and I am thankful every day that I get to cover it. I would do it for free.

I hope and pray I get to do it this fall.

But at what cost, football, this fall?

Perhaps the first domino to fall fell this week, with the news that the Ivy League was canceling fall sports. At the start of the COVID-19 closures in the spring was, again, the Ivy League, as they were the first big sports entity to cancel games, including their post-season basketball tournament. Soon other entities, including professional sports, followed suit.

Professional sports are trying to come back. Major league baseball is trying to come back. The NHL and NBA are trying to come back and finish their seasons. The WNBA is resuming operations. Overseas, both the English Premier League and the Bundesliga in Germany are back, and incredibly the EPL announced on July 5th that after conducting COVID-19 tests of 1,973 players and club officials, zero positive cases were found. There is hope that, using the EPL and other foreign sports leagues as a model, that the NFL along with the rest of the professional leagues in the states, can get back to business.

We can hope.

But what risks are we willing to accept as the leagues, including the NFL, come back?

Living life is about, at some level, accepting risk. When my children were younger they watched “Transformers: Rescue Bots,” a spinoff Transformers show about the fictional island of Griffin Rock, and a group of Autobots designed to carryout rescue missions. Technology plays a huge role on Griffin Rock, and in one episode Dr. Ezra Green believes he has a way to keep the inhabitants of the island completely safe from harm: A computer program named “Vigil.” Eventually the program becomes sentient, and believes the only way to keep everyone safe is to put everyone to sleep.

Clearly that is no way to live.

But what risks are we willing to accept for life to proceed as normal? Particularly when it comes to sports, and football. A game we all love. But what risks are we willing to see these players – and their families – endure? Along with their coaches, and the staffs, and trainers, and everything that goes into getting a football team ready to play on Sunday?

Yes, there are distinctions to be made between the pro and the college game. NFL players have the benefit of a union to protect them, and fight for their rights. Without the benefits of a union in place, college players are left in the hands of the institutions themselves.

We are seeing potential cracks in the college game. This week conferences such as the Big Ten announce a move to conference-only games, and expectations are high that the Pac-12 will soon follow suit. More worrisome, however, for those hoping to see a college season in the fall are comments like these from Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren in an appearance on the Big Ten Network: “One thing we have to realize that this is not a fait accompli that we’re gonna have sports in the fall,” Warren said. “We may not have sports in the fall. We may not have a college football season in the Big Ten.”

Or this from Paul Finebaum, the unofficial commissioner of the SEC:

Then there is the professional game.

The NFL is working towards protocols for the return of football, and to that end they released this week a memo with updated game-day protocols. Among the items listed were restrictions on media access, conditions on travel to stadiums on game days, and fan access to the field during games. But what caught the attention of players, fans and media members alike was the restriction on post-game handshakes and jersey swaps:

Now, the idea behind such a restriction might be sound. If you want to control the spread of COVID-19 then eliminating unnecessary potential exposures is a wise decision.

But re-read that sentence.

Ultimately we may decide that professional football is necessary this fall. Yet what are the costs we are willing to endure to see that happen? The costs we are willing to accept? As cases rise in the south and the west, and the death rates are starting to rise as well, we cannot help but wonder about the decisions that are being made as society tries to return to normal.

It is true that for the vast majority of those who contract COVID-19, it is not a fatal diagnosis. But what we do not yet understand are the lasting effects of this condition on those who make a recovery. There is evidence of permanent lung damage in survivors, which has lead to a condition termed post-COVID fibrosis. A 20-year old COVID-19 survivor in Chicago required a lung transplant as a result of this condition, and there have two other such cases, one in China and the other in Italy. There is also evidence of problems with the kidneys, the liver, and the heart.

Most troubling for our current analysis might be this: The emerging evidence of neurological impacts to patients who contract COVID-19. A doctor in Strasbourg University Hospital in France had this to say about her COVID-19 patients: “They were extremely agitated, and many had neurological problems – mainly confusion and delirium. We are used to having some patients in the ICU who are agitated and require sedation, but this was completely abnormal. It has been very scary, especially because many of the people we treated were very young – many in their 30s and 40s, even an 18-year-old.”

In a report published in the New England Journal of Medicine that doctor, Julie Helms, along with several of her colleagues produced a study of their findings. That was added to the nearly 300 studies worldwide which have found a “prevalance of neurological abnormalities in COVID-19 patients, including mild symptoms like headaches, loss of smell and tingling sensations, up to more severe outcomes such as aphasia (inability to speak), strokes and seizures.”

Adding potential neurological changes to the list of problems facing those who contract COVID-19 – even those who make a “full recovery” – seems to create a different layer of problems when one considers a return to football.

Professional football players accept the risks associated with playing the sport, and are compensated extremely well for doing so, although much more could be done to take care of the players once their playing days are over. But the difference is this: The athlete does not come home with a broken leg and potentially transmit that condition to a spouse, a parent, or a child. Nor do they potentially transmit that condition to a member of the coaching staff, the training staff, or the front office.

Couple that with the fact that we still do not know the potential long-term effects of this disease with any specificity.

We all want football back in the fall, but there are serious questions facing the league and its players are we hope for that outcome. The issue with post-game jersey swaps might have been the quintessential “let’s get on Twitter and dunk on something that seems stupid” moment, but underlying that was the fact that there are so many things that need to be thought through before this game can return.

Thankfully, from the NFL’s perspective, they enjoy the benefit of “going last.” As outlined earlier, other leagues are returning to action. By the time fall rolls around, the NFL will have data from the other sports leagues to guide them in terms of what works, and what might not. What protocols are necessary, and what are not. But learning from those efforts, and putting those steps in place, are going to take time. Given that it is mid-July, and training camps are set to start in a few weeks, how much time does the league have?

This game asks so much of its players already. What more should it ask, and what more should we be willing to ask, of them?

What other costs should they endure?