Is It Ethical to Be a Football Fan? - The New York Times

What role does football play in your life? Are you concerned about the danger the sport poses to its players?

Do you play or watch football? Have you ever felt conflicted about it?

Is your opinion of the sport swayed by data that football damages players’ brains? Are you able to reconcile the host of controversies surrounding football with its status as a source of excitement and community?

In an episode of The Argument, “American Football: Our Problematic Unifier,” the podcast host Jane Coaston debates this question with her guests, Kevin Clark, who continues to watch football, and Steve Almond, who gave it up.

Is Being a Football Fan Unethical?

Football is giving players brain damage. Is it time to stop watching?

In these excerpts from the episode’s transcript, Ms. Coaston, Mr. Clark and Mr. Almond lay out how they feel about the ethics of watching football. You can hear these excerpts by listening up to 12:23 in the podcast.

Ms. Coaston describes herself as a conflicted fan:

I grew up a Cincinnati Bengals fan by way of my dad. Every Sunday, we’d watch games together, and every Sunday, I’d get more and more invested in the game. The Bengals were terrible when I was growing up, historically, awfully, brutally terrible. But I didn’t care. I loved the game. At the University of Michigan, I was one of more than 100,000 fans that filled the stadium during football season. Go blue. Some of the best moments of my whole life happened in that stadium, watching that team.

But as much as I love to watch the game, truly, absolutely love it, football doesn’t always make it easy to love. Because for all the strategy and gymnastics, you’re watching men get brutally hit multiple times over in the span of hours.

Mr. Almond says he grew up a fan, but later changed his position:

People try to say, well, football has a concussion problem or a violence problem. Football has a physics and physiology problem. The game, as it is played right now in this incredibly lucrative football industrial complex, is simply so dangerous that by the NFL’s own accounting, up to a third of their players, their actuaries estimate, are going to wind up with chronic traumatic encephalopathy or some form of brain damage. And there’s no other workplace in America where we would tolerate that. We wouldn’t tolerate it even in the military. We wouldn’t tolerate it in an Amazon warehouse. But because it’s within the sanctum of this remarkably entertaining and unifying game — I mean, you guys are all talking about the sense of community that you felt and connectedness to family members, to community. That is what football is. It’s a place of refuge for people in a culture that’s incredibly fragmented.

Mr. Clark still watches, with hope that the game will get safer:

There’s so many things that kind of make me a little bit queasy about the game. But I continue on. I mean, I think that there’s obviously huge problems with the game, but it can be saved. It can be made safer. When everybody’s safe, when it can be made safer, when you hear the stories about 1980s football or even early 2000s football — I remember talking to a player named Channing Crowder with the Dolphins when I was really young. And we did an interview. And he said he thinks he gets a concussion every single game. That really wouldn’t fly now. There are actual independent doctors on the sidelines. The hitting is different. The rules are different. There’s a little more protections for the players. I am hugely skeptical of any sort of “progress,” quote unquote, made in the league to make things better or safer. But I will say, as a whole, the game has gotten better for players as far as that goes. It will never be fully safe, but it has gotten safer. And it can continue to get safer. There are very easy guidelines that teams and doctors and players can follow that will make it better every day.

Students, read the entire transcript or listen to the entire episode, then tell us:

• Are you a football fan? What teams do you follow? Have you ever played?

• Do you think it is ethical to be a football fan? Why or why not? Even if you are a fan, what are some of the concerns you’ve heard about the sport? Do you agree with them?

• All three guests in the episode talk about how football has helped them feel connected to other people. Has football, or any other sport, ever made you feel this way?

• Later in the episode, Mr. Almond says that “the reason that we won’t quit the N.F.L. is because we accrue none of the risk. The reason people quit smoking is because they were the ones getting cancer.” Do you think this is a fair comparison? Why or why not?

• Mr. Clark believes that the game can get safer. Do you agree? Why or why not? What changes would you like to see?

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Want more writing prompts? You can find all of our questions in our Student Opinion column. Teachers, check out this guide to learn how you can incorporate them into your classroom.

Students 13 and older in the United States and Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.

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