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Comment by alistproducer2 | Hacker News Reader

Historians will look back at American Football as our analog to the Roman's gladiatorial games. A lot of people don't realize that during the Imperial era of Rome fights to the death had become uncommon.[0] The games were watched in an arena and primarily sold hard-hitting violence between members of the lower castes of society and sometimes people got killed or horribly maimed....sound familiar? I stopped watching American football last year once I could no longer consciously watch men destroy themselves for money and the amusement of a country that largely despises/fears them in any other setting.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladiator#Victory_and_defeat

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Honestly (as a former football player) I find this opinion to reek of pseudo-academic snobbery. You know why football is such a popular sport? Because people love football. More importantly, people love playing football. I understand that not everyone sees the appeal of the sport and it's their right to have their own preferences. But to simply dismiss the passionate pursuits of hundreds of thousands of players across the globe as some engineered gladiator battle by the upper class is absurd. There was football before there was television. If the NFL shut down tomorrow and televised broadcasts were banned, there would still be football. You can condemn the exploitation of players' health in the NFL without creating these gross overgeneralizations of the sport.

Moreover I think it's offensive to imply football is this caste regime as if the rich people are watching the poor people play. Football pervades all income levels. Your rich prep high schools still have a football team. Ivy league schools still have football teams. If anything it is an equalizer because your rich suburban prep school guy lines up next to a dude that grew up in the inner city all the same. And their standing in the team, along with compensation, will be dependent on their performance as opposed to race or economic background. Where else in society is there this level of parity?

I'm not really accosting the sport itself - which I played as well and have always enjoyed. The NCAA and the NFL are the primary targets of my ire as at least the NFL has long known about this and has only begun to pay lip service to fixing what it can because of public scrutiny. So based on that, yes rich old white guys paying young poor (mostly black) guys to go brain themselves for America's entertainment does feel like en exploitative "caste regime" as you put it.

So this exact thought has crossed my mind on several occasions in regards to the NFL and NCAA. There's something about the optics of the rich white sports owner looking down from their box office as teams of mostly African American men smash each other to bits. That being said, just because something creates a visual analogy of a caste system, it doesn't mean that the actual workings of that system are in fact, caste-like.

First, NCAA and NFL is composed of a range of races and economic backgrounds. Your third-generation legacy QB is getting sacked all the same as your QB from the projects. And the rich white patrons don't care either way.

Fact #1: Most NFL players are black. Fact #2: Most NFL owners are white.

Does this speak more about systemic issues at the player level, or the owner level? I'd say the owner level. There is no lack of white athletes trying to make it into college and pro ball. I don't think recruiters are recruiting a disproportionately high amount of black players compared to white players because they want to spare the white race from long-term injuries. They're just picking the best athletes. In contrast, it's easy to explain why there are less black NFL team owners.

Secondly, I'm a bit confused as to why "poor" seems to be equated with "black" in your scenario. Yeah, we can easily look at NCAA players on TV and visually confirm that over 50% are black. But how do you know what percentage of players is poor? There are lots of poor rural white kids in the NCAA. There are lots of suburban middle class black kids. And by the time you're playing in the NFL, no one is poor.

There's a big difference between cheering on people killing each other and a popular sport remaining popular after the long term consequences became known.

Most of the time, they didn't kill eachother.

I don't feel like you read my comment before posting.....

why do people take issue with highly paid nfl players getting injured doing something they enjoy, but have no problem with military members getting killed and maimed for 20k/year? some people are just more violent/aggressive than others, football provides a relatively peaceful outlet for that.

There is a lot of money going into TBI research for the military. I think DOD is one of the biggest funders. No trying to mask the issue like the NFL (that I'm aware of).

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