Just an absolutely putrid take.
Too often when we watch sports, we like to pretend we are watching some sort of real-life drama play out in an intimate, instructional way. It’s not just that we’re watching the most elite athletes fiercely competing with each other in contests that often ultimately come down to luck. There’s got to be more to it than that!
And of course there is. These athletes and coaches are just regular people, as flawed and unknowable as any of us. We should be interested in them and what they believe in and care about.
What we should avoid doing, always, is taking a situation we’re not actually close to and extrapolating it out into some sort of broad referendum on a group of worker-athletes who, despite their popularity, are so often burdened with negative stereotypes.
Yet here’s ESPN’s Booger McFarland, saying some of the dumbest stuff you’ll hear to a gigantic television audience:
“Often times young players, especially — I’m gonna go ahead — especially young African-American players, because they make up 70 percent of this league — they come into this league and ask themselves the wrong thing. They come into the league saying not ‘How can I be a better player?’ They don’t say ‘how can I be a better teammate?’ They don’t say ‘how can I be a better person; how can get my organization over the hump?’
“Here’s what they come in saying. They come in saying ‘How can I build my brand better? How can I build my social media following better? How can I work out on Instagram and show everybody that I’m ready to go, but when I get to the game, I don’t perform?”
“Dwayne Haskins unfortunately is not the first case that I’ve seen like this. And it won’t be the last. And it bothers me because a lot of it is the young African-American player. They come in and they don’t take this as a business. It is still a game to them. …
“I saw a quarterback do it. I saw JaMarcus Russell do it. The No. 1 pick in the draft, they gave him $40 million, and he threw it down the damn drain because he didn’t take it seriously.”
McFarland has already doubled down on this nonsense, in case you were wondering.
Where to even begin?
Dwayne Haskins, the 15th pick in the 2019 NFL draft who was recently cut by the Washington Football Team, isn’t even close to being the prime example of a top prospect supposedly partying his career away. That’d be Johnny Manziel, who is white.
There’s nothing suggesting he lost his career by trying to build his brand; he was tagged in some photos showing him partying in an a way that is inadvisable during a pandemic. Young, wealthy, famous athletes have partied for as long as they have existed — extending all the way back to the decades upon decades when the top pro leagues wouldn’t even allow Black athletes to participate. The Cowboys dynasty of the 1990s was renowned for partying.
There’s no evidence, whatsoever, that a large portion of the league’s Black majority fails in any substantial way to focus on football, as McFarland claims. Quite the contrary. Each year a few hundred Black players enter the league and become key contributors. Some grow into veterans. Others don’t, for a variety of reasons but the primary one being that the NFL is a physical grind unlike anything else and churns through bodies.
If athletes are supposed to treat the NFL as a business, like Booger says, what’s wrong with building their brand? That’s smart business! That’s focusing on creating something potentially lasting for the future. Most of them are going to get only a few seasons, and it’s not like the team they play for or the league itself is going to go to great lengths to help them out after their usefulness on the field has expired. They should build a brand, and building a brand shouldn’t be interpreted as not also caring about football (it’s quite possible to do both.)
The JaMarcus Russell comparison comes out of nowhere, seemingly related simply because Russell was also a Black person drafted high in the draft to play QB who ultimately did not work out. Social media was in its infancy when Russell was playing — he joined Twitter in 2010, his last year in the NFL — so that wasn’t a factor. We’ll never know the full extent of what went wrong with Russell, but he’s said the pressure of being the No. 1 pick got to him and was arrested for possession of codeine after being cut. Mental health and drug dependency probably had as much to do with him faltering as failing to “take it seriously” did.
I know absolutely nothing about Dwayne Haskins as a person and know even less about the inner workings of the Redskins and how culpable Haskins is for the end of his career in Washington. By his own admission he failed in certain ways, and we should absolutely continue to report on what happened and try to learn from it.
But pretending this is an indictment of Black players across the league is pandering gibberish. It’s the sort of thing football people love to say to each other, thinking they sound hardened and wise. Instead they sound like men who were indoctrinated into a bankrupt culture without even realizing it.
Let’s talk about the situations Haskins was put into in his young football career. He was recruited by Urban Meyer, who eventually left Ohio State amid a scandal caused when he failed to properly handle domestic abuse allegations against an assistant coach. After he left Florida years earlier, reports surfaced about Meyer coddling star players. This is not the sort of mentorship that “makes boys into men” or whatever the Football Establishment would have you believe.
Haskins was then drafted by Washington, the NFL’s most despicable franchise.
Yes, it’s fair to point out the ways in which Haskins bungled his chance, but not without this background as context. Many people and institutions failed him along the way.
It is completely unfair — and only bolsters damaging, racist stereotypes — to pretend Haskins is a symptom of a larger issue.
