Mutiny on the NFL:Bounty
Revelations surrounding “bounty programs” in the NFL, where players and coaches provide teammates with financial incentives to make game-changing plays or injure opposing players, have elicited broad public disgust; at least for the intent-to-harm part of the equation.
Killing people aside, I typically love performance-based incentives – anything that provides real-time sticks and carrots to help govern decisions and encourage performance. My company generally does a good job of rewarding performance, fortunately, but some days it would be a nice stimulus if my boss would drop by and say, “Hey, I’ll give you fifty bucks if you send me that report by 3pm!”
DJ Gallo writing for ESPN makes an amusing – though not altogether unreasonable – argument that performance-based compensation should be encouraged broadly throughout the league: “Instead of punishing the Saints and opening up a can of worms that might force the NFL to punish every team in the sport, the league should instead embrace bounties.” He then outlines how the lines between real football and fantasy football are getting hazier by the weekend and suggests allowing fans to get in on the action, too.
It’s not difficult to imagine how these bounty programs can give birth to corruption and distorting forces that change the way the game is played. Ultimately, you start to have capital flows making on-the-field decisions, like whether to pass or run or even fumble. It’s like having an infinite number of bosses, each of which exercises control in proportion to the size of her wallet.
It wouldn’t take long before the emergence of negative incentives, such as side betting against positive incentives or as under-the-table payoffs for dives. In short, if officially expanded beyond the locker room, the system would go haywire in no time. Performance-based incentives are only effective if either a) there’s only one agent providing incentives; or b) everyone providing incentives generally agrees on the strategy and objectives. In such a plutocracy, the “coach” would quickly become just another engaged spectator, or a marginal investor, and his players could effectively mutiny. Capt. Bligh would not be pleased.
Wait a minute. Is this really so horrible? Isn’t there another spectator sport that already works this way? A game where hidden influencers provide players financial incentives to behave in certain ways, including attacking opponents, and the players must make decisions to ensure the largest possible return on investment for their shareholders?
We’re willing to permit capital flows — from anywhere and nowhere — to influence government and its players’ behaviors. Why not allow open-game on, you know, games?
Honestly, I get so infuriated about brain damage in hockey and football, both sports I’ve enjoyed watching in the long past. Very few things in life are absolute moral no-brainers, and yet this is one: if allowing people to destroy themselves for your entertainment is not wrong, then nothing is. I mean, all sports have risk: but head injury, as far as we can tell, is not a “risk” in football even without stupid bonuses like this: it is a certainty, and it does horrific things to the players. If you’re a football or hockey nut, I may like you — but I have no respect for you; you are morally empty.
— Kieselguhr Kid · Mar 5, 07:55 PM · #
Morally empty? Wow.
Gerald Ford and Rush Limbaugh both played football, and while they may be (have been) a bit on the dim side they were better than the average leftwinger who is now trying to shove his morality down other people’s throats.
Maybe they sacrificed a few brain functions for the glory of football, but is that any worse than the Clinton defenders who knowingly sacrificed their intellectual integrity in order to defend corruption? In all cases it was a permanent sacrifice. People accepted permanent damage for the greater glory of their cause.
Maybe you should be a little less absolutist in your moral judgments.
— The Reticulator · Mar 5, 10:28 PM · #
I wouldn’t go so far as “morally empty,” but I see Kieselguhr’s point. We tolerate, even encourage, levels of violence in football that would be considered grotesque off the field.
I’d like to believe that the game could be played in a more constructive, healthy and wholesome environment, divorced of gladiator culture, but I’m not optimistic.
Does that make me a lefty? Has football become a “right-wing” game? Maybe we should ask Hank Williams Jr.
— walker · Mar 5, 11:09 PM · #
Reticulator, how many brain damaged individuals have you known? I know quite a few. And remember — we do this not for any cause higher than our own entertainment. If it is not wrong, then nothing is wrong. Boxing, hockey, football: these are bestial.
Your invocation of Ford and Limbaugh misses it. I’m not judging the players: I’ve no doubt you can pay people to do anything to themselves. I’m judging the fans.
— Kieselguhr Kid · Mar 5, 11:15 PM · #
Walker misses it also. It’s not about “levels of violence.” It’s about effect. If you got broken legs — which might be more spectacularly violent — instead of brain damage, the spectators would be more morally defensible.
— Kieselguhr Kid · Mar 5, 11:17 PM · #
I don’t see how being physically crippled is categorically better or worse than being mentally crippled. It’s all terrible.
— walker · Mar 5, 11:21 PM · #
No, walker, they aren’t comparable; that’s a bizarrely ignorant comment.
It’s a non-comparison. My wife sustained severe brain damage; it constrains what she can do in ways that only the most terrible physical damage could. But there’s other things: the loss of memory, the loss of self, of memory, of past. You can read heartbreaking obituaries of players: the competent, outgoing businessman who becomes a loopy guy who can’t brush his own teeth unless his wife leaves memoranda that look like official NFL memos telling him to do so, and many others. Physical injury may limit what you can do, but mental injury — decades after my wife is still finding out her limitations.
And the effects on others are terrible. I know a sergeant who, after being too close to an explosion, suffered a head trauma (and no other significant injury), and can’t make new memories. His daughter was I think seven when it happened. She’s a teenager now. He’s home, and “well,” but doesn’t recognize her. It’s hell on them, and his wife has pointed this out a lot: it’s worse than losing your legs or something, but less recognizable. This is the kind of thing we do to football and hockey players. Because it entertains.
The Reticulator surprises me too. From a libertarian standpoint I’d think this stuff is completely nuts — because the guy who takes the payment for brain damage, is no longer the guy who bears the cost. Brain damage — even “mild” — is a horror; you can’t compare it to a broken leg or arm.
— Kieselguhr Kid · Mar 5, 11:36 PM · #
God, that’s horrible. I momentarily blanked on the name John Mackey up there. Although I could have mentioned Derek Boogard, or many others — or the growing mound of research showing how even “non-concussion” injuries damage young people’s abilities long-term, or how vastly underreported concussions appear to be….
— Kieselguhr Kid · Mar 5, 11:41 PM · #
I’m trying to explain, Walker — I find what you said there just plain weird. Try this:
Suppose you lose an eye in an accident. Terrible, right? Suddenly you’re half-blind and disfigured.
Well, my wife was in the hospital for a very long time after a basilar skull fracture. It turns out she suffered complete right-side, plus peripheral, “visual neglect.” It’s not uncommon for that kind of injury but usually you’re so lucky to be alive the docs don’t really test for it, so for months after she was out of the hospital she was blind over most of her visual field — but she didn’t know it and nobody else did/ She just kept getting bruised down her right side going through doors, and if we were talking and I was on her right she’d get anxious and unhappy and ask me to change sides, and so on. Now as it turns out she’s a Ph.D. physicist who was working in a great neuro lab at the time, so she finally figured it out, called her doctor — after getting run down by a biker she couldn’t see and freaking out over the possiblity she’d hit her head — got tested, and had the diagnosis confirmed. This phenomenon is a little hard to explain and for now I’ll just say — much of what we call “vision” isn’t your eyes, it’s your brain. Remember, the visual world in front of you has two big “holes” in it — blind spots, that you can easily demonstrate you have — but you can’t make yourself see them: your own brain fills in that part of your world, fictionalizes its content, and you operate on that. So when I knock out half — literally half, for her it was everything on her right side, an eye injury can’t do that! — of your world, your brain just colors it in: even when you know it isn’t real, you can’t make yourself “see” the unreality.
Over a decade later, my wife — who’s been through a lot worse, amazingly — can’t remember whole weeks of her life around her accident: she just has a before, and an after when she can’t do some things.
The many soldiers I know with brain injury have similar issues. Football players have similar issues.
Brain injury is worse than physical injury because it fundamentally changes your reality. It takes away even your ability to know how that reality has changed. It surely changes personality and character in ways that have you question yourself forever.
And, football spectators are morally bankrupt.
— Kieselguhr Kid · Mar 5, 11:55 PM · #
Kieselguhr, I don’t think anyone here means to trivialize your experiences – it must be spectacularly difficult at times. I think as you view this discussion through that particular lens, you seem to be getting worked up over perceived slights. Acknowledging the difficulties of injuries both physical and mental that can come out of these sports does not trivialize your personal experiences but only speaks to the possibility that someone else out there could feel equally devastated as the result of a physical injury.
— Kate · Mar 6, 12:00 AM · #
Kieselguhr, thanks for sharing that — I can’t image the depth of those challenges. As Kate put nicely, I’m in no way trying to diminish or marginalize the costs or pains of mental injury. All I mean to say is that physical injuries can be really tough, too, and is reason enough to discourage its causes.
— walker · Mar 6, 12:08 AM · #
Your invocation of Ford and Limbaugh misses it. I’m not judging the players: I’ve no doubt you can pay people to do anything to themselves. I’m judging the fans.
My wife is the main football fan in our family. We sometimes go to one college game a year – as a birthday treat for her. I enjoy watching, too, but except for that one game I don’t arrange my schedule around it like she does. I’ll be sure to tell her that she’s morally bankrupt.
I’d rather go bicycling than watch football. She tells me that I should wear my helmet so she doesn’t have to spend the rest of our days wiping the drool from my chin. I usually wear one, though went without for a few years of the Clinton/Bush administration as a protest against the Nazi-safety mania. She is nice enough to come and pick me up after long rides whether or not I wear a helmet. (Except she won’t miss a MSU Spartans football game to pick me up. On those occasions I’m on my own.)
I guess we’re just a couple of moral degenerates.
— The Reticulator · Mar 6, 03:16 AM · #
I didn’t answer the question about how many brain damaged people I’ve known. I haven’t really kept track. I’ve known people with severe Parkinson’s, but the suspected cause has usually been something other than athletics. I’ve also known older people with other types of dementia and have tried my best to visit with them.
As to the leftwingers who sacrificed brain function in order to support the Clintons, I am completely serious. I don’t have any measurements, of course, but I would support government-funded research into the phenomenon. They played dumb in order to defend the Clintons, and they suffered permanent impairment because of it, as far as I can tell. Doesn’t mean I would have outlawed their behavior, or outlawed the watching of politics as a spectator sport.
— The Reticulator · Mar 6, 03:25 AM · #
No, Kate, Walker, that’s kind of you, but I’m not feeling personally attacked in the least; I shared my wife’s experience because it’s the best way I can to try to illustrate is all. She is a physics prof out of MIT with great kids; she doesn’t need a whole lot of pity, an I’m not trying to get it for her! Inasmuch as I “take it personally” it’s more to do with all those soldiers and the odd lack of awareness people have about their brain injuries.
If my tone sounds aggrieved, it is because this thing horrifies me and has for years; it seems to me the thirst for football, hockey, boxing is more bestial and yes, more morally degenerate than slavery. And as with that perversion, yeah, a LOT of people did it, and that masked that evil. But it’s still wrong. And it makes my skin crawl. Check out the NPR story on this scandal where the fucker paying the bounties talks about how he has his kids play faster, harder, meaner. That’s child abuse, and it’s happening on a vast scale.
Regarding types of injuries: I’ve spent a lot of time in military hospitals and I know you’re wrong. I’ve sat with soldiers burned over most of their bodies and/or missing limbs, and I’ve sat with soldiers with brain injuries. Not to trivialize the former but the latter are orders of magnitude worse. They’re worse for the soldier, whose identity and memories have been taken from him in many cases. And they’re infinitely worse for the families, who don’t understand the person that’s been returned to them nor what might happen to him. A physical injury is a fact: you know what limits it imposes, you know what to do to make it better or to accommodate it. A brain injury is much more nebulous, and you don’t know what’ll hapen (adding to the “my wife needs no pity” — some of her senses have not recovered but her vision is pretty good — got so years later — and they let her drive, which she does: docs say it’s a miracle, and we often hold that out to families of the brain-injured, that the course of the injury is a total mystery and some get better.)
Reticulator knows people with dementia. OK: we’re giving 45-year-olds dementia. Read John Mackey’s obit. Check out life expectancies of football players, as opposed to the general population. And we do this to them not because of an economic model or security fears or deep-seated racial hatred: we do this to people because it’s more entertaining than Two and a Half Men.
I generally respect Retic’s thinking and it’s a mark of how entrenched this thing is that his thinking here is contemptuously dumb even before the Clinton thing. Cycling or mountain climbing or soccer or whatever has a risk of brain injury. But check out the medical literature: loss of brain function to the football or hockey player is not a risk, it’s a certainty, and we’re only just beginning to appreciate the consequences. It is not a hazard of the activity; it is the activity.
— Kieselguhr Kid · Mar 6, 07:33 AM · #
Retic, I’m not some nanny stater trying to keep people from taking risks — my problem, again, is the spectators not the players. I have a moral problem, as I should, as everyone should, with your wife paying people to destroy themselves — not their backs or legs (although, sure, that happens) but their identities – for her entertainment. Yeah: it’s evil, and “degenerate,” or, what is?
— Kieselguhr Kid · Mar 6, 07:40 AM · #
Well said, Kid. You’re absolutely right about the uniqueness of a brain injury. A physical disability happens to your body, but a brain injury is an injury to the self. And it’s certainly an issue of moral concern to fund the business of creating those injuries for entertainment and profit. I would add boxing and MMA to your list, which I think could all go under the heading of “bloodsports.”
Has Reticulator ever been more ridiculous than he is in this thread? I think this is truly a new low. And I’m the one TAS tried to ban? Amazing.
— Chet · Mar 6, 09:44 AM · #
Look, it disturbs me no end that I’m agreeing with Chet, who is a lowlife — stopped clock twice I day I guess.
But think about it this way, Walker — a soldier comes in with legs blown off or something. I can use reconstructive surgery or prosthetics and tell him what he has to do to get back to, let’s say, 80%. A prospective employer can size up his injuries and give hima means to support himself. Or a footballer at the beginning of a career suffers a hip fracture and can’t play anymore but pockets whatever money or fame or scholarships he’s gotten. Now contrast with a minor, common brain injury — like frontal lobe damage that leaves you immature, capricious, vindictive, emotionally distant. Unable to hold a job, nasty to your loved ones. Again: look at John Mackey’s obit in the Washington Post, say.
Losing your ability to make short term memory is a minuscule injury to your brain, relative to what losing your legs is to your body. But I know what to do for the legless soldier. What do I do for the soldier whose family will grow more and more unrecognizable to him, while he never changes? I can’t even explain his problem to him!
— Kieselguhr Kid · Mar 6, 10:03 AM · #
I don’t disagree that mental injury presents unique symptoms/challenges that often are much more devastating than those of physical injury. Though every situation is relative, and for some people I suspect that major physical injuries are more taxing or devastating than “minor” mental ones. Or more to the point, I don’t always see mental and physical injury as being independent or mutually exclusive — the two can be closely related. But there is no debate that the brain is the (or one of the) most important organs in the human body, and as such, deserves heightened protection from unnecessary hazards.
— walker · Mar 6, 11:08 AM · #
Walker, that’s almost there but has some crucial flaws. First, we are talking about physical brain injury not “mental injury”; the former almost always includes some of the latter, but while psychic injury can range from the very mild to the crippling, brain injury is always troublesome. Second, for “often” you should think “almost always.”
It matters because otherwise you could read what I’m saying into a condemnation of all sport; runners, bikers, tennis players, whatever, all typically suffer long-term damage to knees or backs or what-have-you with perhaps accompanying pain. For some reason people always quote me the (false) statistic that cheerleading injuries are far more common than football ones: even if it were true, the comparison relies on a boneheaded equivalence of broken legs and arms or even maybe backs, with broken brains.
That’s particularly germane in the case of hockey, which I watched long after I turned from football, associating hockey injuries more with Orr’s shredded knees or missing teeth. It may be more recent that hockey seems to destroy brains and I suspect that you can play the game without that injury (whereas for football, probably not). On the other hand the NHL basically is fighting changes from a suspicion that the hockey fan won’t watch without the head violence, so the hockey fan may be, if this is possible, a worse human being than the football fan.
— Kieselguhr Kid · Mar 6, 11:57 AM · #
I should say also, Retic: I’ve biked from Boston to San Fran twice, and do centuries routinely. Usually I remember my helmet. But deliberately not wearing a helmet “as a protest” is, beyond question, the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of. Nobody registers the protest, and nobody risks anything but you — who risk everything. That’s just … wow.
— Kieselguhr Kid · Mar 6, 12:02 PM · #
Wow.
I hope you and your wife continue to recover from your injuries.
— Chet · Mar 6, 05:54 PM · #