Out Of Bounds

As if all the domestic abuse scandals in the NFL weren't bad enough, the town of Sayreville, New Jersey is the center of a hazing scandal involving the football team at Sayreville War Memorial High School.  Seven students on the team were suspended after prosecutors in Middlesex County charged them with crimes that included sexual assault of their younger teammates.  The principal canceled the rest of the football season, which is a severe blow to a school whose football team won the New Jersey State Interscholastic Athletic Association's Central Jersey Group IV title three years in a row (2010, 2011 and 2012).

This is to be expected in a sport known for encouraging a killer-instinct, take-no-prisoners mentality.  More often than not, football players expend their tremendously pent-up energy off the field as well as on, acting out very aggressive behavior at the wrong time, and someone - even a fellow player - ends up being on the receiving end of it.  I have long advocated that we should dispense of varsity athletics at the college level; now I think we should do the same in high school.  No other nation places as much emphasis on scholastic sports as the United States, and it's showing in our literacy rates.

Right. We're not going to get rid of varsity football or professional football.  Despite the embarrassing moments American football has sustained of late, this form of sanitized rugby remains the American game.  To be against football or the NFL is considered more un-American than to have been against the Iraq War - even Ed Schultz, a former football player, extols in the virtues and the value of the game.  Football, with its symbolic references to territorial acquisition and military might (Robert Downey, Jr.'s character in the 1986 movie Back To School, Derek Lutz, said it was "in fact a crypto-fascist metaphor for nuclear war"), defines what America is, for worse and for even worse.

But, like Ellen Goodman,  I longeth not for the Super Bowl.