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[Sports Fandom] Is the NFL evil y/y?
Atomika
Live fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered User regular
Live fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered User regular
Do you watch sports?
Should you watch sports?
Is there a certain way in which sports should be watched?
Is the industry of sports too far corrupted to become salvageable?
First, some data.
- Funding for pro sports stadiums are, on average, 70% paid for by taxpayers. The proceeds from the stadium almost wholly go to the team owners, and there are no legal obligations to reimburse their host cities.
- Cliff Lee pitched the equivalent of 24 full games last year and was paid $25 million. The city of Philadelphia has a teacher shortage of 1500, of which Lee alone could pay the median salary for 450 of them.
- Several independent studies (as well as league-financed studies) concluded that playing contact sports such as football can lead to irreparable brain damage and dementia. The NCAA and NFL has done virtually nothing to address this.
- Professional athletes are up to 55% more likely to commit domestic violence than the national average.
- The NCAA restricts students' academic opportunities by limiting their available class schedule.
- The NCAA and the universities wholly profit from their students' athletic acheivments, but only 19% of NCAA athletes receive full scholarships; almost 50% receive no scholarship at all.
- NFL commissioner Roger Godell's salary last year was tenfold greater than the entirety of the NFL's charitable donations for the year; the NFL does not pay taxes because it is listed for tax purposes as a charity.
I just can't watch anymore.
I just can't.
Should you watch sports?
Is there a certain way in which sports should be watched?
Is the industry of sports too far corrupted to become salvageable?
First, some data.
- Funding for pro sports stadiums are, on average, 70% paid for by taxpayers. The proceeds from the stadium almost wholly go to the team owners, and there are no legal obligations to reimburse their host cities.
- Cliff Lee pitched the equivalent of 24 full games last year and was paid $25 million. The city of Philadelphia has a teacher shortage of 1500, of which Lee alone could pay the median salary for 450 of them.
- Several independent studies (as well as league-financed studies) concluded that playing contact sports such as football can lead to irreparable brain damage and dementia. The NCAA and NFL has done virtually nothing to address this.
- Professional athletes are up to 55% more likely to commit domestic violence than the national average.
- The NCAA restricts students' academic opportunities by limiting their available class schedule.
- The NCAA and the universities wholly profit from their students' athletic acheivments, but only 19% of NCAA athletes receive full scholarships; almost 50% receive no scholarship at all.
- NFL commissioner Roger Godell's salary last year was tenfold greater than the entirety of the NFL's charitable donations for the year; the NFL does not pay taxes because it is listed for tax purposes as a charity.
I just can't watch anymore.
I just can't.
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The Giants have always been my team, and I enjoy watching them play.
Hearing more awful shit on almost a weekly basis about how fucked the league is has put a damper on my enjoyment of the sport, to the point where I have only watched half of one game thus far this season.
I'm kind of checking out at the moment, and it is in large part because of the fact that you just can't ignore how terrible the league is for the players long-term health and financial security, for the people hurt by the bad players off the field that the league protects, by the communities that get financially fucked...
Just nope.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
maybe i'm streaming terrible dj right now if i am its here
Domestic violence is a tough one. It's a societal - not sports specific problem. Prosecution is the best bet, but focusing on sports and ignoring other industries seems problematic.
Injuries are my biggest concern, and I think the league's negligence in this area, especially concussions, is on a par with Big Tobacco covering up health risks. Some risk of injury in inherent and acceptable in any activity - athletic or not - but the concussion risks with sports is to the point that OSHA should be stepping in as they would with any dangerous injury.
I would be pissed if my city spent hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on a stadium, but at the same time I'm a voter...so my choices have a direct impact on that. Elected officials making these agreements against the public's wishes and immediately leave their post to get big $$$ front office jobs should be prosecuted for bribery / conspiracy / something. There is a legitimate argument that sports bring a lot of revenue - tax revenue, business revenue, etc into areas...I don't know how much the 'anchor' effect makes up for other costs, but I'm not entirely opposed to it in theory.
NCAA is awful and horrible and terrible. Professional sports are a business and should be recognized and treated as such. If it's not acceptable for GM to do (whatever), it shouldn't be acceptable for a sports league to do it either.
Most of the problems with Professional Sports seem to be more problems that are endemic in big business...just more people watch ESPN and feel a connection to the players so these things get more attention.
Basically this. Yeah, there are alot of things that aren't cool with pro sports, but those issues also aren't allright in alot of different companies in completely different industries as well. Boycotting [insert sports league here] because of [insert social issue here] is a perfectly fine ideal to act on, but at the same time [insert social issue here] will also very likely be a problem in [insert pretty much any other industry here]. And you can't go around boycotting everything unless you are willing to live in the mountains all by yourself. Watching football doesn't inherently make you a bad person and a supporter of domestic violence or whatever, but you just need to be aware of the corporate-speak they use and try to not fall for the positive BS they are spewing as well.
When John Oliver did that "Here's how disgustingly corrupt FIFA is" bit before the World Cup, he at least ended it by basically saying "I know that FIFA is cartoonishly evil and really bad for alot of people, but despite all this, I am still really excited for the World Cup". Does that point make him out to be a bad person? Maybe, he enables that behaviour to a very small degree by watching, but at the same time, we are humans and we need to have ways to relax and enjoy our lives for our own mental well being. If we decided to not indulge in things that weren't good for everyone for all times, then we would probably all be very unhappy alot of the time because we wouldn't really ever get to do anything fun.
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I agree with most of the rest of the stuff in the OP, though.
Eh fine with this. Sports is a major revenue generating industry and I'm not really going to complain about that going to labor.
"Virtually nothing" isn't really fair or accurate. And studies also show that playing sports has more positive influences on overall health, life expectancy, wealth and overall well being. NFL players also live longer than other men for instance, especially accounting for socioeconomic and racial background. Going to need a citation on that because the research I've seen refutes it.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/the-rate-of-domestic-violence-arrests-among-nfl-players/
This is pretty BS. Most athletic departments at universities lose money, and in those sports that are profitable most players receive scholarships.
Its pretty easy to find more than 5 million in annual donations explicitly from the NFL and this doesn't count individual team's donations. The NFL shouldn't be non-profit but this isn't a true statement to base that on.
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I don't have the time here at work to get into your other rebuttals, but specifically here, what's your point?
Point 1- Saying they restrict academic opportunities is nonsense. If they're a scholarship athlete they have far more academic opportunities than not attending a university/college. If they are not, then its unlikely their academic opportunities are being disrupted in any substantial way, and if they are its not more than being part of a dance group, theater company, acapella group, political party, frat/sorority, etc.
Point 2 - Saying the universities/NCAA "wholly profit" implies profit.
If you're not talking specifically about athletics but football your scholarship statistics will fall apart. And if college football players were paid (as I think they should be) you'd then either complain about their exorbitant salaries or that the universities were taking too much of the profit.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
As a former NCAA athlete, both of these points are bullshit.
My biggest problem with sports are the publicly funded stadiums. It is even worse that teams can turn around and blackout games in stadiums that the public built. The recent Cobb County Braves' stadium has tons of shady shit going into its approval.
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Have sports organizations ever done that without government assistance?
You should go read up on the Northwestern football team's appeal to the NLRB.
Last time I looked into it, there really wasn't. Most economists say that A) the vast majority (like 95+%) of gate/concession/etc revenue is from the local area and B ) people are just spending money that they would already be spending on entertainment anyway. When a positive effect can be found, it is almost always dwarfed by the tax concessions or funding given up to get the stadium in the first place.
As someone who works at a University, funding/profits for Athletics cannot be used in the fashion you are proposing in public institutions as it is almost entirely foundation based income. As such, the only way a public institution could use that money would be on 1) capital improvements (with a ton of hurdles) or 2) putting the money back into the athletics program it came from (typically through advertising). Putting that money towards scholarships would violate numerous national laws about player compensation, accreditation, and coercion laws.
Most universities push their sports programs so much not because they make money for the institution directly, but because they make money for the institution by ensuring student credit hour generation via advertising the school to potential students. At my institution our head football coach makes about 2 million a year, which is approximately the operations budget of about 40 teachers at median professor salary (which I'm estimating at 50k, with most tenure professors (about 30% of all faculty) making twice that and most instructors (70% of faculty) making more closely to 33k-45k). That could go towards funding a huge increase in professors, true!
But after our record setting football season last year, we got such a boost in alumni donations and student interest that we are increasing our entire faculty population by 6% (which is much, much more than 40 at an institution our size (60k students)). We also were able to create a new fund for students running into financial aid problems in their final semester to help pay for their last 9-15 credit hours based upon need, just from school budgetary expansion.
Athletics is a gamble, but it is one that ultimately helps a school more often than not. Unfortunately, budgetary laws are messy and complicated (and are so for very, very good reasons). The athletics income is far from one of the things to criticize about athletics programs.
Now, the televised profits are almost exclusively kept by the league the players play in, which is bogus on many levels.
It's the publicly funded stadiums, tax concessions, and primarily for me, the psychological discomfort I have of rooting for men to break their bodies and minds. Was a diehard Hawks fan for a while, but the cognitive dissonance between the reality and the spectacle are too much to get over anymore.
I suppose this is at least marginally better in that the stadium has always been owned by the province, so its not like they were giving the money directly to a sports team owner. The two teams that play there, the Whitecaps of MLS and the Lions of the CFL are tenants.
Oddly, we refurbished the stadium after we used it to host the 2010 Olympics opening and closing ceremonies, instead of before, which would have made more sense.
Also, the NCAA is bizzare to me, college sports are not really a thing that the general public gives a crap about in Canada.
*toss*
And NCAA reform to take away that element isn't that hard. Generous stipend + tuition for extended periods so they can get whatever degree they want after eligibility is expired.
Injuries, especially head injuries, are the major reason to not watch/buy/etc as far as I'm concerned. The physical stuff I think the risks are relatively well understood, though the pressure to get on the field ASAP is pretty awful. Head injuries though, it seems like the NFL in particular knew far more about them and didn't tell anyone and we didn't (don't) understand the risks of repeated head trauma.
I respectfully disagree with the first point. The fact that something is possible or allowed shouldn't be a tacit approval for that behavior. Sure, if I leave my door unlocked and someone comes in and jacks my shit, I'm definitely naive, but let's not act like it's the moral equivalent to the thief's behavior. And sports fandom does not lean rational in many cases, hence why I'd argue it is a moral problem, even if it's permitted by the masses in some instances.
In regards your point about player consent, is that really all people care about with that? So there's no qualms about watching and cheering as dudes inflict lasting harm on each other simply because they've chosen to be there? The huge number of players who go through incredible amounts of of pain (and thus painkillers) just to get on the field for our entertainment completely turns me off. Sure, you're not exactly complicit in the damage as an observer, but I'm really surprised how few people even blink twice at how many guys get gruesomely injured every week. The body count is insane.
Switching out the NFL for FIFA doesn't seem like the greatest solution.
You are right. They are the draw. People come to the stadiums and turn on the TVs to watch them compete, and they should see a good slice of the money their athleticism generates.
The problem is that the truly high salaries, at least in the NFL, find their ways into the players who can afford to have longer careers because the position they play has little physical risk associated with it.
A linebacker who sees 2-4 seasons max before having to muster out because his body can't take the abuse any more is getting paid in the low 6 figures usually.
Now, before you talk about how that is still a huge amount of money... they have basically peaked in their career at 22, are retired by 26-27, and have the rest of their life (possibly with debilitating long-term injury) to make that money last.
Meanwhile, the QB who gets hit anywhere from 0-5 times a game total (as opposed to 4-20 times per drive) can play for well over a decade and make millions per year.
I see a flaw with this in particular.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
Hell, I work in IT with a retired pro wrestler.
I get the abuse issue making someone uncomfortable with attending or watching a sports game, but the salary one makes no sense. Literally no industry in the United States has completely equitable compensation and I'm not sure that it makes much sense to protest the NFL for Johnny Fourth String only making twice what I'll make in my lifetime over ten years than four-five times as much.
at the risk of starting off pedantically, this isn't data.
Where did you get this number? I did a quick google and was able to find an Atlantic article that says "Judith Grant Long, a Harvard University professor of urban planning, calculates that league-wide, 70 percent of the capital cost of NFL stadiums has been provided by taxpayers, not NFL owners", and that's a lot different than "70% paid for by taxpayers". Is the face amount of muni bonds being thrown into the soup?
Is this the source?
http://www.amazon.com/Public-Private-Partnerships-Facilities-Routledge-Management/dp/0415806933
This is true for every top tier entertainer. LA would be a goddamn utopian paradise, if A list celebrities donated their salaries to the public good. Instead, it's Los Angeles. *spit*
Source?
The NFL is listed as not for profit, which is not synonymous with charity. To my knowledge none of the member teams are and combined they donate quite a bit more than to actual charities.
NFL doesn't make money so the non profit stuff is a little whatever.
Also...
NFL players Inc is the for profit subsidiary that primarily focuses on the marketing.
This is ultimately the only thing that actually matters in this discussion. All the talk about such and such a stat is a bunch of parlour tricks, pretending that the veracity of said statements would actually have much of any bearing on people watching sports.
I think ultimately sports are deeply cultural and for most people the rest is just so much white noise.
The very criticisms we see of the NFL, for instance, all rest on this idea that the NFL, a business, represents a esteemed part of our cultural landscape that should adhere to some level of moral respectability. For no discernible reason beyond the fact that america fucking loves football and sees it as a cultural touchstone of sorts. And thus the purveyors of that most hallowed sport must accept that their place comes with some sort of moral responsibility.
Even the constellation of
does not seem unique to [sports], if we expand each of those points out to a level of generality. Curious if I am missing something that makes [sports] unique. If not, that's fine. Just wondering if I am missing something that makes [sports] exceptionally awful.
I would argue that the things that separate sports from, say, corporate practices or whathaveyou, is the level in which professional and collegiate sports are utterly superfluous as a required part of society and the economy, and as well, the level in which they're ingrained in and dictate to our educational systems.
I'd like to respond to your points from an odd perspective. I don't really care for sports at all. However:
- Funding for pro sports stadiums are, on average, 70% paid for by taxpayers. The proceeds from the stadium almost wholly go to the team owners, and there are no legal obligations to reimburse their host cities.
- Cliff Lee pitched the equivalent of 24 full games last year and was paid $25 million. The city of Philadelphia has a teacher shortage of 1500, of which Lee alone could pay the median salary for 450 of them.
These points go together.
Firstly, while this may not always be the case, people vote to fund things like new stadiums or upkeep costs on existing stadiums. So, its not like they arent given the chance to deny it. In cleveland recently they continued a sin tax that was paying for exisiting upkeep so they could keep the browns stadium up to standards. I did not vote for it, but it passed anyway.
Next, do not compare the number of teachers you could pay to a single persons paycheck. they dont have anything to do with the sports discussion specifically because you could say the same about any high paid person, and this kind of socialist discussion isnt going to get us anywhere.
- Several independent studies (as well as league-financed studies) concluded that playing contact sports such as football can lead to irreparable brain damage and dementia. The NCAA and NFL has done virtually nothing to address this.
Yes. and I ask you this. Just how STUPID does a person have to be to think that wanting to play football is going to be a completely injury free profession. A person isnt forced into playing football. This isnt a draft. they choose to do this. For a football player not to expect any kind of lasting injury, is equivilent to a rugby/hockey player expecting to have a nice smile the rest of his life. You cannot address stupidity. people want to play, people want to watch people play. unless you ban the entire sport, this isnt something for the NFL/NCAA to fix.
- Professional athletes are up to 55% more likely to commit domestic violence than the national average.
While im not arguing the point, and do not defend anyone who does this at all, dont you get the feeling that the numbers are skewed by the fact that professional athletes, like celebreties, have the camera on them pretty much 24/7, so the numbers may be higher, only because they get caught more often?
- The NCAA restricts students' academic opportunities by limiting their available class schedule.
- The NCAA and the universities wholly profit from their students' athletic acheivments, but only 19% of NCAA athletes receive full scholarships; almost 50% receive no scholarship at all.
It's difficult to think that the available class schedule thing isnt mostly by choice of the student. people with a 'free ride' expect (rightly or wrongly) that the degree doesnt matter. you really should enter college sports with the view 'either im going to college for sports as a career or im going to college to learn'. It's really unrealistic to think the two can co-exist.
As for the scholarship...these numbers are likely including people who are just not good enough to warrant the investment of a scholarship.
- NFL commissioner Roger Godell's salary last year was tenfold greater than the entirety of the NFL's charitable donations for the year; the NFL does not pay taxes because it is listed for tax purposes as a charity.
I think your political leanings are factoring into this topic. You could say the same thing about Obama or Bidens charitable donations. The dont pay taxes thing is a viable complaint, but its not just sports...GE managed not to pay a cent of taxes dispite billions in profit. That needs fixing, but both sides of the fence need to give on that.
Now that ive disputed your points with my opinions, I dont like sports either, and what i think is dangerous is the hive mindset and the pedistals we put famous players and coaches on. People are actually still defending Ray Rice after seeing the video. People still defended Paterno when he had multiple children talking about how he raped them. They wanted to keep his statue up, they burned cars and rioted. They wanted to believe him more then anything else. same with Micheal Jackson. They shouldnt get a pass from the law just because of celebrity.
Like, I know I started this thread under the imperative of discussing the morality regarding the patronage of sports, but since you mostly agree with my final assertion (sports = bad!ahrg!), I don't feel terribly inclined to refute the several fallacious points I find in your post. Unless you really want me to, because, brother, your points are not sound.
I'm inclined to agree in some sense, but at the same time sport has been as ubiquitous in human culture as music or dancing or art. I'm trying to think of any culture that hasn't / doesn't have some form of athletic competition and am coming up blank. I'd have to argue that in an abstract sense, sport is as much a part of the human condition as language or tool use.
We know that historically, corruption, cheating, and commercialization have almost always been intertwined in some way with athletic competition in one way or another.
Now, there are a number of problems in athletics that are present in virtually all aspects of society. Aside from the raw dollar amounts, I don't think a 'student athlete' is any more exploited than a grad student being an unpaid TA. Corruption and backroom deals exist everywhere. Every industry exploits their workers to some extent. Most every industry would utterly disregard employee safety unless they are legally required to or it cuts into their bottom line.
Some of the problems ARE unique to athletics, but most all of them are analogous to other problems. A linebacker or running back may be used up by the time they are thirty and have chronic problems the rest of their life. This isn't something special - quite a few laborers are so beat up they simply can't continue doing their job until they retire. Physical jobs - soldiers, firemen, police, etc are frequently injured during training or the course of their work and are forced to find other occupations. There are higher rates of domestic violence from blue collar employees than professional (although, who knows about that bias).
I really feel like the problems of athletics are just a microcosm of problems endemic in our society. Now, granted, I'm not defending athletics or individual leagues. The NCAA needs to be swatted hard in a variety of areas. The NFL needs to deal with the abuse problems - and the only thing analogous to their mishandling of the concussion issue is Big Tobacco. FIFA, the Olympic Committee, etc are corrupt as hell. There is way too much focus on athletics and not enough focus on academics from bottom to top. But singling out sports / athletics in general instead of identifying the individual problems and abuses - or disregarding athletics as superfluous to our society seems...well, wrong.
Unpaid PA's aren't in an industry that exploits their labor for the billions per year.
I dunno, higher education is a big industry - total student loan debt is well over a trillion dollars after all.
There are a lot of unpaid TAs. I'd agree that NCAA athletics exploits more per capita, but in aggregate I'd bet higher education is benefiting just as much for the TAs they exploit.
Besides, the point is that this exploitation isn't unique to athletics, but rather a systemic societal problem. Burning down the NCAA won't fix the other hundreds of places people are being exploited.
The student debt isn't made from TA's directly, though. Students need those loans to go to school, it's not like a sport that students play.
That may be true but with sports it's slightly different. University's are running their own unofficial NFL and unlike the actual NFL they're not paying their players a dime for their own work. This isn't job experience or a class, this is a job they're doing for free and they have no say in the matter if they want to get paid for their services, while everyone else in the organizations in that situation are earning money by the truck load.
It won't. That doesn't mean the trend should continue as it is by exploiting students for money.
Also in terms of schools benefiting from the unpaid labor of TAs vs athletes, no school gets massive alumni donations because their TAs had a really good year...
Sandusky. Paterno was guilty of his own sins, but it was one of his assistant coaches who was accused of raping children.
Sandusky's activities weren't a secret to the higher-ups. Paterno isn't as bad as Sandusky for doing those acts but knowing about them and covering them up made him a terrible human being.
This point has been dismissed several times throughout this thread (to summarize the counterarguments: "this is true for many rich people"; "the market sets the price"; "Communist!"), but I think those dismissals are not taking the context of the discussion into account. To say that Cliff Lee is paid $25 million per year while Philadelphia is missing at least the equivalent number of teachers (450) is another of way saying "society values Cliff Lee more than it values teachers." But the context of this statement is "Should we watch sports?"
Ie., Atomika is suggesting that we, on an individual level, comprise that "society" which "values"; and if we wish that to change in the aggregate, we must change it on the individual level. The allocation of resources is a zero-sum game, so the question is whether we should get our revealed preference (Cliff Lee is more important than teachers) to match our generally stated preference (teachers are more important than Cliff Lee). The only way to do that is by physically changing things--for example, by skipping buying a season ticket to Lee's team and instead donating that money to a teacher advocacy group or a political campaign on the issue.
The dismissals of the argument seem to me to be assuming certain conclusions ("society values these things the way it does") but not placing a judgment on those conclusions ("therefore we should allow it to function" or "therefore we should work to change society")--at least not one that comes with a coherent argument or justification. For example, the market also sets a price on sex slaves, health insurance, and cigarettes--should we accept those prices? Or should we combat, provide, tax, etc to change the relationship customers have to this market? What about the other way around, changing the customer relationships? (if the demand for sex slaves dries up, the price drops, and the practice ceases, right?)
I doubt that Atomika is specifically talking about teachers, either. Her implication is that sports is overvalued in general by society, and that perhaps it is our duty to correct this imbalance in order to free up those resources to be used in places where they may do more good.