EARLY IN THE 2022 NFL season, I watched as the Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa suffered a second head injury in the span of five days. Although the NFL would not admit the first of those was a concussion, it was painfully clear that Tagovailoa suffered serious brain trauma.
In that moment, I felt the culmination of years’ worth of fretting over the sport I loved and its relationship to head injuries. I determined then and there on a Thursday night that I would quit the NFL. Why? The NFL is violent — and Christians are called to peace.
The league is unrepentant and unaccountable in its abuse of the brains and bodies of its players, and no amount of reform can change that. I am convicted that if I am to love my neighbors — if I am to love God — then I must resist the NFL.
Frankly, though, this task feels impossible. I joke that I spent my second day alive watching Super Bowl XXXI and, until my sophomore year of college, I was on the fast track to coach football professionally. Spend 30 seconds looking around, and I guarantee you’ll find some product that sponsors or advertises with the NFL. The league is a behemoth — its power and scale make it unavoidable. In fact, some of my tax dollars pay for the military flyovers at NFL games.
The ubiquity of the league reveals an important dialectic at play in personal action to resist any large power structure. First, we must acknowledge that isolated, individual acts will not change the world — it takes a community to create systemic change.
This first fact often scares people off from resistance that may seem purely symbolic. And many have rightly decried the burden being shifted from powerful corporations onto the backs (and brains) of individuals. Make no mistake: The NFL and its team owners, who exploit their workers and destroy their bodies in the process, are most responsible for the harm they cause.
But we must acknowledge that systemic change will not happen without the commitment of communities. Individual acts of resistance can — properly understood — build morale and fortify our commitments to pursuing this deeper transformation. In some cases, they provide opportunities to share our commitment with others and inspire converts. The point of our resistance isn’t to achieve a perfect abstention and become morally pure; the point is to collaborate with God in material change toward justice.
Through this tension we reveal truth: We can practice our resistance to the NFL (or Amazon, or the U.S. military) without expecting perfection, knowing that small acts disciple us toward sustainable, systemic changes while deepening our faith.
Understanding the issue
THE NFL DOES what it does because it can, because we keep watching and giving them our money. Between Tagovailoa’s first and second injury, the NFL announced that it would replace the Pro Bowl with a “skills competition” and flag football event. This was the culmination of years of hemming and hawing over the beleaguered all-star game. Football fans largely felt bittersweet about the news — flag football is no replacement for 22-man tackle, but the Pro Bowl had become glorified two-hand touch in recent years.
Why did the Pro Bowl get canceled? There are boundless theories — the game wasn’t competitive, many players didn’t show up, those who did put in minimal effort to avoid injury, owners didn’t like risking player health. None of these are correct: The game was canceled because fans largely stopped watching. Last year’s Pro Bowl drew 6.69 million viewers — the league averaged 17.1 million for regular season games.
The league stops when people stop watching. Where the money goes, so goes the league. And while fully refraining from anything NFL is nearly impossible, every time you choose not to watch a football game, it sends a message.
Taking small steps
MY BIGGEST FEAR when making the decision to quit was sustainability. You might have this fear too. Maybe you don’t want to dishonor your friends by quitting fantasy football midseason. Maybe you don’t want to stop attending your church’s Super Bowl party.
That’s okay; you can find avenues for resistance, and you can build a pathway out. Start by quitting Thursday night games, which force players to play on shortened rest. You can block NFL accounts on social media, cutting down on highlights you see. You can stop giving the league free advertising by ceasing to buy — or wear — hats and jerseys. Find what seems challenging but possible and start with that. Any withdrawal is better than no withdrawal.
In 2014, the NFL admitted in court that it expects about a third of players to develop brain diseases — and at younger ages than the general population. It’s easy to look at the data around brain trauma and football and wonder how anyone could participate in the sport. Even more worrisome, the players know it too.
“You can make all the rules you want to make the game as safe as you possibly can, but there’s an inherent risk and danger with the game of football,” Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow told sports podcast host Colin Cowherd shortly after Tagovailoa’s head injury. “That’s part of the game, I think. Part of what we signed up for. You’re going to have head injuries.”
A decade ago, I had my first serious conversation about brain injuries from football. My friend was kind and genuine, acknowledging how important football was (and is) to me. The commitment I’m making now has been years in the making. The best practices of Christian nonviolence are built by patiently cultivating empathy and compassion, not self-righteousness or personal ego. The NFL was not built overnight, nor will it be dismantled that quickly. Patience with others (and ourselves) will help us build a sustainable practice.
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