Is it OK to Watch Football?

When I was in sixth grade, my close friend from Wisconsin introduced me to football. He had been a Packer fan his whole life and I had never been exposed to the sport before. He began by showing me highlights from Aaron Rogers 2014 MVP season (see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Av0hCIi0us). I remember being amazed at the beauty of the plays and this experience was what initiated my obsession with football. I watched football very regularly from the seventh grade up and through high and I even tried to play football in high school. I say tried because while I was on the team, I was concussed early on and had to stop playing as a result. However, in eleventh grade, as I was becoming more committed to my faith, I reconsidered whether I should watch football and I concluded that I shouldn’t. My motivation for this decision was that it seemed that violence was an intrinsic aspect of the sport and so rendered the sport intrinsically disordered. This idea was also supported by new research showing a connection between playing football and CTE (see here: https://www.bu.edu/articles/2017/cte-former-nfl-players/). 


I have recently reconsidered these considerations and I have begun to doubt my original conclusions. I no longer think that the tackling which is essential to football constitutes violence. The reason being that violence requires that one uses force with the intention to harm another, but this is not essential to football. To make this clear, let’s compare football to boxing, specifically prizefighting. At this level of boxing, there are a few ways to win: 1. to knock the opponent out 2. to win on points 3. to beat the other person to the point where they cannot continue to fight. With regard to the second way, “points are awarded based on four criteria: effective aggression, defense, ring generalship, and clean punches” (see here: https://www.legendsboxing.com/post/how-is-boxing-scored#:~:text=These%20points%20are%20awarded%20based,variations%20depending%20on%20the%20outcome.). Given this, all of these routes to victory require violence as they require fighters to intentionally harm their opponent. This is not the case in football as tackling a player to prevent them from moving downfield does not require one to intentionally harm the opposing player.


With regard to the concern about CTE and head injuries, football does need to be changed to prevent these conditions, but these changes do not seem to require that football be fundamentally changed. For starters, the NFL has already made some rule changes to prevent such injuries from occurring such as making it illegal to use one’s head in a tackle and being much more strict about concussion protocol (see here: https://operations.nfl.com/the-rules/rules-changes/health-safety-rules-changes/#:~:text=The%20blindside%20block%20is%20eliminated,to%20his%20own%20end%20line.). Another point is that the 2017 study I cited above does only deal with players from earlier eras in football, like the 1970s and 1980s, where there was significantly less awareness around head injuries and equipment was much more primitive. Furthermore, the number of former NFL players who have neurological disorders later in life, such as dementia and Parkinsons, while higher than athletes from other professional sports, is still relatively small. One study to sport this is a Harvard study which compared the mortality rates of former NFL and MLB players (see here: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/nfl-players-die-at-higher-rates-than-mlb-players-but-heart-risks-loom-large-for-both-sports/#:~:text=The%20difference%20translates%20into%20a,conditions%2C%20compared%20with%20MLB%20players., https://www.clearvuehealth.com/b/baseball-vs-football-health/). In this study, the rate of former NFL players dying from neurodegenerative diseases was 2.8%, while the rate of former MLB players dying from neurodegenerative diseases was 1.7%. Among football players, the primary cause of death was actually cardiovascular disease and this most commonly afflicted offensive and defensive linemen. This, however, is not necessarily because of the fact that they played football, but is more likely attributed to the fact that bigger men are more likely to have cardiovascular disease.


There is certainly more to discuss here, but I think this provides some reason for thinking that participating in football is morally permissible.

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