Gregg Easterbrook: Tunnel vision

ESPN columnist Gregg Easterbrook has written a variety of books, but with so much focus now on the Feb. 1 Super Bowl, we spoke about his recent book on football, The King of Sports (Thomas Dunne, 2013).

Let’s start with something basic: the size of Super Bowl players. Increasing at a remarkable level. The average offensive lineman on the 1972 Miami Dolphins, the NFL’s only perfect team, weighed 260 pounds. The average offensive lineman on last year’s Washington Post All-Met Team—high-school students—was 310 pounds. To have the national sport be one that celebrates weight gain, in a nation with a childhood obesity epidemic, can’t be the world’s best thing.

If the 1966 Green Bay Packers, one of the great professional teams, played the worst team in the current NFL, the Oakland Raiders, would the Green Bay players lose by 50 points? Oh, they would. The game would be over at halftime, just because of the increase in size and strength of players.

Talking about gargantuan size: What about the cost of NFL venues, with taxpayers usually paying most of it? Every NFL ownership group has a net worth of at least a billion dollars, yet taxpayers pay most of the cost of stadia, which in most cases are either exempt from local property taxes or given dramatically reduced rates. Why should these guys get even a penny in subsidies? It’s a very profitable business. The NFL rolls in money, $10 billion this year. It will be 11-12 billion next year.

‘The NFL is not even remotely similar to free enterprise. It’s publicly subsidized and protected from competition. … It’s allowed to behave in ways antithetical to market competition.’

Patrick Henry students here learn about the virtues of a free enterprise system, but this sounds like crony capitalism, or welfare for the affluent. The arguments for free enterprise are tremendous, but the NFL is not even remotely similar to free enterprise. It’s publicly subsidized and protected from competition. Imagine what Apple or General Motors would pay to have an antitrust waiver like the NFL has! It’s allowed to behave in ways antithetical to market competition. Maybe that made sense half a century ago; it sure doesn’t make sense today.

Who’s willing to do something about that? The politician who stands up to the NFL interest group will get blamed for making the football team leave the city.

What about all the football concussions that we hear about? Nobody wants an NFL player to get hurt. I certainly don’t. But there’s only 2,000 of them, and they’re adults who knowingly assume a risk in return for being very highly compensated. As regards the NFL, that’s totally true, but 99 percent of football players are not NFL players. Three million at the youth and high-school level—that’s where almost all of football is played.

Children assuming the risk … The law does not allow children to assume risk in the way that it allows adults. I played high-school and college football, both my boys played in high school, one of them played in college: Under the right environment, football can be a great experience, but they’re never going to get anything tangible from it, and that’s where the concussion crisis is, because 50,000-60,000 concussions occur each year in youth and high-school football.

So will we move away from NFL socialism and youth football riskiness? You need some larger sense of national resolve. A little more than a hundred years ago, football was on the verge of being outlawed. Football at that time was much more brutal than today’s, in part because the equipment was different, but also because you were allowed to punch people in the face. Football games concluded with broken limbs, broken noses.

Nineteen deaths in 1905 during games … Yes. A lot of state legislatures wanted to outlaw football. At that time the academic scandal concerned ringers, guys who were actually professionals would be paid to put on the uniforms of college teams and play. Teddy Roosevelt brought the leaders of the football establishment to the White House, twisted their arms, and said, “You got to clean up this sport. You have to have actual students, and you’ve got to change the game so people stop dying.”

And football changed. Cleaning up football, it turned out, made it far more popular than it had been before.

We don’t have ringers today, but most of the big college football factories don’t take seriously the “student” part of student-athlete. You start The King of Sports, though, with an exception: Virginia Tech. The book is mainly about what’s wrong with football and how it needs to be reformed, but I didn’t want to just be a naysayer: I wanted to show that football could be done in an ethical manner. Virginia Tech had a winning record for 20 straight years, and the program is structured to make sure kids are actually in class and actually graduate.

You write about the little structural things that communicate the importance of studying, like the Friday night dinners. Every Friday night before a game coaches and players go to the nicest steakhouse in the area of Blacksburg, Va., and the players are called up to pick steaks by the order of their grade point averages. The player with the highest GPA gets the first steak and so on down the line—it doesn’t matter who the star players are. That has two effects: Players with good GPAs get the best steaks, but the process also makes sure that everybody on the team knows how their teammates are doing in class. When teammates realize the last five guys coming up are barely hanging on, they rally around those guys and try to help them get their schoolwork done. Anybody could duplicate that model, and of course most big college programs don’t.

You mention another nice touch, involving names carved in the walls of a tunnel. Players run through an old tunnel cut from local limestone to go on the field. I ran through it with the team several times; it would bring chills to the spine of the most jaded person. Carved into the wall of the tunnel are the names of former players who graduated: Not who played, who graduated. So a lot of their stars, like Michael Vick, DeAngelo Hall, don’t have their names on that wall. Vick still hasn’t graduated, but DeAngelo Hall came back for several years to finish his credits because he wanted his name on the wall. That’s not a bad incentive.

There’s been a lot of discussion over the past year about whether college football players should be paid or not. There’s increasingly a sense that it’s unfair for players to generate millions of dollars for a college but not get anything in return. I think it is unfair, but what they should get in return is a diploma.

You propose that students should receive six-year scholarships. Yes, so once their NCAA eligibility has been expired, then they’ve got one more year at campus to fix their degrees, fix their credits, and actually graduate. The odds of even a football factory player ever taking a snap in the NFL are 30-1. By far most of them never play. So once the dream of being drafted is over, they should go back to college and earn a degree.