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Sports

Why Football Doesn't Matter, by Not John Harbaugh

By trying to explain why football matters, an NFL coach manages to make the best argument imaginable for why it doesn't matter.

John Harbaugh, coach of the Baltimore Ravens, wrote a column for the team's website entitled "Why Football Matters." It's ridiculous. So we had to give it the FJM treatment.

The game of football is under attack.

It is important to establish a siege mentality from the get-go. We are not here to make friends. We are here to wage a vague culture war on behalf of a…sport. The most popular American sport, to be exact.

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Football is hard. It's tough. It demands discipline. It teaches obedience. It builds character.

Football provides young men with all the benefits of a dog training class.

Read More: The Latest NFL Stadium Mess, or Old Man Yells At Cloud

Football is a metaphor for life.

Incidentally, this is what John Harbaugh's life looks like:

"Sleeping at the office is about maximizing my time. I can get more done if I eliminate time I'd spend driving home. Plus, if I come home too late, chances are I'll wake up my wife."

When people do the It's A Metaphor For Life bit, what they really mean is that the thing *is* their life, and that they lack perspective on the world because all their waking hours since they were 10 have been spent around that thing. It's easy to believe football is a metaphor for life when you don't know any other life, which is fine for John Harbaugh, but keep in mind that he's an NFL coach, someone with a job as far removed from real life as any American profession.

TFW you see your main dude, but he doesn't think football matters. Image via Jason Bridge-USA TODAY Sports

It shows him what it means to sacrifice. It teaches him the importance of doing his job well. We learn to put others first, to be part of something bigger than ourselves. And we learn to lift our teammates—and ourselves—up together.

You can't be a good, successful person unless you've rammed your body into something you didn't want to ram your body into dozens of times for years on end.

Football has faced challenges like this before.

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In 1905, there were 19 player deaths and at least 137 serious injuries. Many of these occurred at the high school and college levels. Major colleges said they were going to drop football because the game had become too violent.

That's when President Teddy Roosevelt stepped in to call a meeting with coaches and athletic advisers from Harvard, Princeton and Yale. He wanted to find a way to make the game safer. They made significant changes, introducing new rules like the forward pass and the wide receiver position. Those changes turned football more into the game we know it as today.

We made progress. Rules changed. Society evolved. The game advanced.

As much as I dig getting a history lesson from a football coach, these few paragraphs are riddled with inaccuracies. I wrote about this exact period in football history for Deadspin a few years back, which involved spending months combing through old newspaper articles in the National Archives. Short version: 19 deaths is an estimated figure. We really don't know how many people died, since medical science and historical records were so imperfect at the time. Some of the deaths were truly brutal, but others were due to minor infections that spread because of poor medical resources in rural areas.

The 1905 meeting between Teddy Roosevelt and the coaches from Harvard, Princeton, and Yale didn't do a fucking thing. It was a PR stunt. The only thing that came of the meeting was a press release in which the coaches promised to abide by the already-codified laws of the game, which were generally ignored during actual play. Five weeks later, during a Yale-Harvard game, a Yale defender drop-kicked Harvard player Francis Burr on a punt return after Burr called for a fair catch. No penalty was called. That same day, three people died in other games across the country. To this day, it is a football tradition to issue press releases saying one thing, and then literally drop-kick the shit out of them immediately afterwards.

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The 1906 rule changes didn't actually make the game safer, but they did impact people's perceptions of the game. Like the Roosevelt White House meeting, they were public relations efforts to silence critics, including the universities threatening to cancel their football programs.

The "Teddy Saved Football" narrative is classic hero worshipping without any historical support. More people died in 1906 playing football than under the old rules in 1905. The game became safer as medical resources and knowledge improved; no one on Mt. Rushmore had much to do with it.

Teddy Roosevelt didn't save football, but he did do plenty of other terrible shit. Image via WikiMedia Commons

Anyway, Harbaugh is not one of those anti-vaxxer science deniers. He agrees football needs to get safer and that concussions are a problem. His proposed changes:

We have to continue to get players in better helmets.

See my colleague Patrick Hruby's excellent article on why better helmets almost certainly can't stop head injuries.

We have to teach tackling the right way, and that starts at the NFL level.

See my colleague Patrick Hruby's other excellent article on why safe tackling initiatives are bullshit marketing ploys and will also, almost certainly, not stop head injuries.

That's why high school football—and particularly high school coaches—play such a vital role in our society.

I would say that doctors play a vital role in our society. Nurses, firemen, and (some) police officers play vital roles in our society. Grown-ass men who shout at teenagers to run into each other as hard and fast as they can, knowing full well that it is an insanely dangerous thing to do and that they themselves will not have to do it—this seems less vital to our society.

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We know this because no other society in the world has high school football coaches.

Our football coaches are on the front lines of the battle for the hearts and minds of the young men in our society.

WAR FOR YOUNG MEN! What the hell does this even mean? Are football coaches fighting Snapchat and Instagram for the attention of young men? What if our noble, strong, tough boys play soccer?!

/vomits into my pickup truck bed, which is 10 feet long but I mostly use to carry my dog and display my collection of Pissing Calvin decals.

The culture war is on and we see it every day.

Oh my god. He's going to do it. He's going to quote Glenn Beck. I can feel it.

These young men are more vulnerable than ever.

Well, there were those times when there was a law to force them to go to war against their will. But no, you're totally right, this is worse.

How many youth and high school coaches serve as a father figure to their players? How many mothers look to the coaches of their son's football team as the last best hope to show their son what it means to become a man—a real man? More than we'll ever know.

"Coach Harbaugh, you are the closest thing to a father little Johnny ever had."

"DAMN SCHOOLS WON'T HIT THE KIDS LIKE THEY OUGHTA."

Two men who have life figured out. Photo via Derick E. Hingle-USA TODAY Sports

Coaches teach our young people the lessons of life that very often they learn from no one else.

I'm growing increasingly concerned he actually believes this.

Coaches have the kind of influence in our schools, and with our young people, that is difficult to come by.

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If only there were other role models in a boy's life. Teachers? Guidance counselors? Older siblings? Other sports coaches? Religious figures? Actual fathers? Sadly, these do not exist. Only football coaches can be role models. This is a hard truth.

My dad also says all the time that it just takes one person to believe in a young man or young woman to change their lives. I couldn't agree more.

Dude, your dad is a football coach. Anyway, the one person who believes in a young person doesn't have to be a football coach. In fact, for the majority of American children who don't play football, it often isn't. This is also true of the women in the country who basically aren't allowed to play football. And most of them turn out just fine.

This is worth dwelling on for a moment: Harbaugh's whole thesis is that football is an indispensable institution for American society as a theater of maturation, but it also ignores half of American society: women. His worldview is inherently sexist, and therefore wrong.

Our culture teaches us to judge an activity by how it's going to make us feel right now. But football doesn't work that way.

Yeah, you're right! So let's judge football on how it makes us feel later:

"Wesley Walker says he is in constant pain, can't sleep without medication and has suffered so much nerve damage and muscle loss that he needs help to remove the cap from a bottle of water."

"In the survey, players said they are still affected by injuries to their knees (70 percent), lower back (67 percent), shoulders (65 percent), neck (56 percent) and head (49 percent)."

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"They go through this incredibly traumatic period, really, of job loss where they are no longer making millions of dollars, they no longer have the camaraderie of the locker room," Davies said, "and they're really just out there with very little guidance as to where they should be going and how they should be coping with all this."

"If I had it to do all over again, knowing what I know now, there's no way I would do this," Walker said of football. "Not feeling this way."

"During my football career, I dislocated my shoulder multiple times, separated both shoulders, broke my tibia, broke a rib, broke my fingers, tore my medial collateral ligament in my right knee, tore my groin off the bone, tore my hamstring off the bone twice. I had bone chips in my elbow, bone chips in my ankle, concussions, sub-concussions, countless muscle strains, labral tears in either hip, cumulative trauma in the lower spine, sciatic nerve damage, achilles tendinitis, plantar fasciitis in both feet, blisters—oh the blisters! My neck is bad. My clavicles are misaligned. I probably have brain damage."

I could go on. But you were saying: deferred gratification.

The game challenges and pushes us. It's often uncomfortable. It requires us to be at our best.

Isn't that what we want in our society?

This is supposed to be a rhetorical question, but I earnestly answer "no." I want members of our society to think about the consequences of their actions, learn from mistakes, and live happy, fulfilling lives grounded in generosity of spirit and empathy for other humans. But hey, that's just me.

Millions of young men have learned lessons in football that they could only learn through playing this game. Football has saved lives.

It has also killed people and ruined countless lives, and Harbaugh gives absolutely no reason why "football matters" in some way that other, safer organized sports—or any other human interaction—do not already replicate.

This has been a fine argument for why football absolutely doesn't matter.