Every Badgers football season it’s the same. The student section fills up slowly for each game and older fans grumble about it. Players and coaches plead with them to get there on time. There are often even angry letters to the editor.
First, if you’re one of those people who actually gets upset because students show up late to watch a football game, then you should fall to your knees and thank providence that your life is so good that this is what qualifies as a problem. Alternatively, you might ask yourself if there’s enough going on in your life.
But I think the students have it right. Obviously, they’ve spent Saturday morning in the library and they need to be pulled away from their studies to get to the game. They enjoy a couple of quarters of the game, they “Jump Around,” and then they return to the library to work deep into the evening. Maybe they’ll get out for a beer just before bar time. Just one.
You might not buy this explanation, but the alternative — and probably more accurate — reason is just as good. The students have put football in perspective. It’s not a life or death struggle for control of the universe. It’s just another form of entertainment. The experience is more about singing “Build Me Up Buttercup” and exchanging a certain raucous cheer than it is about the game itself.
That’s a healthy way to look at the whole thing and those who take all this too seriously need to lighten up.
Well, let me amend that. We should lighten up about the significance of a game, but we should take much more seriously the impact of that game on the young men who play it for our entertainment.
To coincide with the start of football season the Wisconsin State Journal ran an excellent four-part series on football and brain injuries by reporter Jason Galloway. He reported that while much of the emphasis has been on concussion protocols, recent studies suggest that the real danger is in the thousands of subconcussive hits that a player sustains over several seasons of football. In other words, the problem isn’t so much in a few massive hits that get a lot of attention, but in the very nature of the game on every play.
There does not appear to be any way to take head trauma out of the game and keep it the same game — and the same money machine — that it is. And we haven’t even mentioned the other 20,000 total reported injuries in the course of a college football season or the Big Ten player from Maryland who died from heat exhaustion after an off-season workout last spring. In fact, more than 30 college players have died that way in the last couple of decades.
The NCAA and the Big Ten want us to believe that something is being done about concussions, never mind the other carnage and never mind that much of the brain damage seems to happen from the head banging on the average play where no concussion takes place.
Galloway quoted former UW standout Chris Borland, who retired after only one season from a promising and lucrative NFL career because of his concerns about head injuries. “I actually view active players as a really vulnerable population,” Borland said. “I think often times they’re getting their information from administration and doctors that stand to benefit to the tune of tens of millions of dollars by the game. I think that’s where we see euphemisms like, ‘Safer than ever,’ and vague notions of safer tackling, whatever that means. I made 400-something tackles at Wisconsin and never discovered how to do it safely. Those are company lines. It’s PR.”
And Borland’s comments are exactly the kind of publicity that the NCAA, which would not even talk to Galloway, does not want. There are millions of dollars at stake here in NCAA officials’ salaries, athletic department officials’ and coaches’ salaries, TV and radio contracts, apparel company deals, stadium vending companies, and a lot more.
So, it’s not all that surprising to me that in this liberal town consumed with the goal of social justice there hasn’t been a lot of community concern raised about Badgers football. In fact, from what I could tell, the State Journal series did not create much of a stir. We just don’t want to deal with the cultural and economic implications if UW football were to decline or disappear.
But UW students are famous for confronting society with uncomfortable truths. They’re already showing us a healthy approach to football by showing up late to the games. They might do even more for social justice when they stop showing up at all.
Dave Cieslewicz is the former mayor of Madison. He blogs as Citizen Dave at isthmus.com.
