Mental health for athletes matters — let’s have the right discussion

This is a very tough discussion.

The mental health of college football players and collegiate athletes in general is something to take very seriously. When athletes, people who have worked and trained and sacrificed in order to play competitive sports at a high level, are unable to play sports, that leaves a considerable void in their lives. When young people are unable to do something in which they have invested a lot of time and energy, the possibility of depression or frustration — natural human emotions — turning into mental health concerns is real.

Let’s be very clear here: It is normal and natural to be depressed in the face of a bad situation such as the pandemic and the economic collapse this country is going through. Human beings need to be angry at things which merit anger; mental health is not found in the absence of negative emotions.

Mental health problems can emerge in all sorts of ways, and they are not reflections of deficient character or morality. Mental health problems are diseases which need treatment. They are not manifestations of deficient virtue.

Can bad practices be part of mental health problems? Of course. However, mental health robs people of their true selves. The brutal and ruthless forces and pressures of life — magnified and amplified in a crisis such as the one we are living through — crash down upon people.

Those who suffer from mental health problems are victims, not careless individuals who in any way CHOSE their own fate or the problems associated with it. Let’s be clear on that.

So, as we move forward — and as we return to a discussion of mental health among college athletes in general and college football players in particular — let’s consider the reportage and the back-channel discussions floating through the college football industry on this Friday:

That report about young people contemplating suicide is very serious business. We can make the simple point that a lot of college football players come from very rough and impoverished backgrounds, and that leaving the structure of a football program could be difficult for them. We can also make the point that while college football players are different from other young people in that an athlete’s life brings with it unique pressures and responsibilities, they are still ultimately young human beings. They are not supermen with special powers.

They are just as vulnerable to mental health concerns as any other young person. They are not uniquely at risk, but they are not uniquely exempt, either.

This discussion of mental health among college football players — if they don’t play games or, at the very least, if they don’t have the structure of the football program to lean on — is a very tricky conversation.

We shouldn’t immediately dismiss what coaches are saying about the mental health risks which exist for their players, because players certainly were (are) looking forward to playing football. Not having football could sting, and we need to be there to comfort players and help them through a fall without football. That is certainly a real need which should not be dismissed or downplayed.

However:

When a coach says players need football, that could easily get twisted into the kind of discussion which is all too familiar in college sports: “A player needs football to provide what nothing else in life can give him.”

That is — more or less — the rationale Tom Osborne of Nebraska used to justify keeping Lawrence Phillips on the Huskers in the mid-1990s, when the content of Phillips’ behavior merited dismissal from the team. Phillips wasn’t the only player on the mid-1990s Huskers whose behavior merited dismissal, but Doctor Tom used the “football as family” line to prop up the idea that the sport was an answer to life’s problems.

That can’t be the main reason we go forward with football.

In fact, coaches arguing for the need to play football as a mental health rescue service — while not a terrible thing to do (it’s actually okay to do so) — need to be much clearer and more aggressive in their advocacy here. They need to make sure their athletes get fully guaranteed health care plus hazard pay, if they are coaching athletes in the Big 12, SEC, ACC, and the other conferences which still want to play football. If a coach is merely advocating for playing football while not advocating for those other protections and benefits, it’s disingenuous at best and exploitative at worst.

Coaches — who certainly have power, especially the elite ones in the sport — can also apply political pressure on their members of Congress to deliver aid to states and relief checks to the parents of these college football players who might be in danger of sliding downward into mental health-related difficulties. If coaches are ONLY trying to save football and not save anything else, they’re not being part of the solution.

If we want to have a mental health discussion in college football, by all means, let’s have it… but let’s have it RESPONSIBLY.