Dan Bickley

azcentral sports

Science is the real American pastime. Now, it explains too much and makes us afraid of terrible things, like death without heaven, the arctic without glaciers and Sunday afternoons without football.

Maybe you can live without polar bears. I know people that would lose all zest for life without Chicago Bears. So, are you afraid?

That seems to be the central question facing the NFL, and the only thing separating the league from an unfathomable gold mine of profit and influence in the years ahead. And judging by comments from some of the league’s loudest voices this offseason, the league seems to be waging its own battle with science, with a new message in heavy circulation.

Our game is under attack.

Cardinals head coach Bruce Arians is leading the charge. He used the word “fools” to describe parents who won’t let their children play football. He later told a group of 130 high school coaches that the game was under attack and that moms are the ones succumbing to fear.

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For the first time in his dramatic ascent as a head coach, after countless press conferences peppered with cuss words, Arians has felt a public rebuke of comments gone viral. He knows the taste of shoe leather in his mouth. He isn’t alone.

Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said it was “absurd” to link football to head trauma and brain disease like CTE, telling reporters that there’s “no data that in any way creates a knowledge”; Colts owner Jim Irsay compared the risks of playing football to taking an aspirin, with the side effects varying for each individual; Danny Kanell, former NFL quarterback turned analyst, tweeted out that “the war on football is real”; and Ravens head coach John Harbaugh penned an essay on “Why Football Matters,” which began with the following words:

The game of football is under attack.

This is nauseating, folks. The NFL is not under attack. The NFL is in an era of enlightenment. We are learning through advances in science and technology what a most violent game does to the human brain and how data strongly suggests (but doesn’t prove) that football is linked to the onset of degenerative brain disease.

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So why are so many big names seemingly scoffing at the evidence?

Maybe it’s to marginalize what Jeff Miller, NFL senior vice president of health and safety policy, told a congressional committee on March 14, when he acknowledged there was “certainly” a link between football and degenerative brain disease. Oops.

Maybe it’s because old-school types like Arians and Harbaugh really believe America will be raising lesser men if we begin shielding children from football. Both coaches stressed that football gives a young man something he can find nowhere else in sports, a claim filled with both merit and arrogance.

Harbaugh wrote that “there’s practically no other place where a young man is held to a higher standard. Football is hard. It demands discipline. It teaches obedience. It builds character. Football is a metaphor for life.

“The game asks a young man to push himself further than he ever thought he could go. It literally challenges his physical courage. 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. These are rare lessons nowadays.”

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All of that might be true. But those lessons are not exclusive to football. It would be much wiser for NFL types to embrace the growing database of medical evidence, to actually get behind the science. And the parents who choose the side of safety and caution?

They are not fools.They are making difficult decisions with better information than ever before.

It’s about time we talk straight about football. Players love the game for the rush, the violence, the money and the glory. Coaches love the game for the rush, the money, the glory and the power they possess. We love the game because it’s full of drama and blood-lust and because it wraps all of our vices in a big, competitive bow.

Really, where else can you crack open a beer in a parking lot at 9:30 on a Sunday morning and have it deemed perfectly acceptable behavior? So we’re all complicit in this deal.

Americans know more about the dangers of football and are watching more than ever before. There are rogue waves but no rising tide of moral indignation, nothing that’s making us turn off the television in horror. And while some players are beginning to prematurely retire for reasons of self-preservation, the money in this sport will always guarantee a surplus of gladiators for decades to come. It's all good.

Just don’t tell me football is under attack. Science doesn’t attack. It educates. Big difference, and a skeptic might think the NFL is attempting to prey on our fear, sending us subliminal messages to help defend this egregious attack on the greatest game ever invented:

After all, if we let concussion alarmists take away football, what will we ever do with our Sunday afternoons?

Reach Bickley at dan.bickley@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-8253. Follow him at twitter.com/danbickley. Listen to “Bickley and Marotta,” weekdays from 12-2 p.m. on Arizona Sports 98.7 FM.