Football Asks Me to Make Moral Compromises. I Love It Anyway.

American football is, to me, the most beautiful sport on earth. Every play is a high-level chess maneuver, performed by some of the most physically adept people alive. The intricacies of the game, the decision making, the coordinated dance of it all: It’s truly gorgeous. And at the professional level, football almost hums with the sound of its own excitement. There are moments in the midst of a great game when I think I’m lucky even to be able to watch it. It’s no wonder to me that football is the most popular spectator sport in America.

But the N.F.L. itself is another story. The practices of the most profitable sports league globally can be so mercenary and even degrading to players — the people that the entire sport relies on — that I often find myself disgusted by it.

The league has mishandled allegations of sexual harassment and assault across multiple teams. It can appear to rely on nepotism when hiring new coaching talent. And it has failed to diversify its head coaching ranks enough. (Only four head coaches out of 32 are Black.)

The N.F.L. draft, which starts later this month, is another example of what bothers me about the league. Players who are at least three years out of high school can enter it if they’ve used up all of their college eligibility. During the monthslong process leading up to the multiday draft itself, these players are (literally) weighed, measured and judged — in some ways that make sense for the sport and in others that are ethically questionable at best and reprehensible at worst.

First, there’s the N.F.L. scouting combine, where players perform various physical tests (like the 40-yard dash) in front of a gaggle of executives and coaches, as well as a television audience. This kind of evaluation, of course, makes sense. If you want to play in the N.F.L., you need to be physically capable of doing so.

As with any job, there are interviews. But in the N.F.L., there’s a history of players being asked degrading and inappropriate questions. In 2018, the then-L.S.U. running back Derrius Guice was asked, “I heard your mom sells herself — how do you feel about that?” And he was far from alone. The former Dallas Cowboys receiver Dez Bryant was asked if his mother was a sex worker during the 2010 draft. In the past decade, players have also been asked about their sexual orientation with questions like, “Do you like men?”

The scope and invasiveness of requests made of N.F.L. prospects are unique, Michael McCann, a professor at the University of New Hampshire Franklin Pierce School of Law and a legal writer at Sportico, told me. “There’s nothing like it in typical professions, as far as I know,” he said.

When I interviewed for my job at The Times, I did not fear being asked about my sexual orientation or if my mother was a prostitute. Doing the former would violate federal employment law (and doing the latter would be baffling, to say the least). Setting aside why anyone would want to ask these questions, how is it possible that the N.F.L. can get away with doing so?

In theory, prospective players could sue the league, but bringing a lawsuit against a potential employer is not a good way to get hired. If your entire life is about reaching the N.F.L., you can’t exactly look elsewhere.

In January, the league did announce that it was cracking down on “disrespectful, inappropriate, or unprofessional” questions asked of players during the draft process. Teams that are found to have asked bigoted questions of potential draftees could be forced to forfeit a draft pick and face a fine of at least $150,000.

N.F.L. hopefuls are physically vulnerable, too. Whatever protections are available to players in the league, thanks to the Collective Bargaining Agreement, don’t cover prospective players. As McCann told me, “Prospective players have no one at the bargaining table.”

Of course, none of us get health benefits when we’re applying for a job. But few of us have to participate in tryouts that put us at risk of serious injury. Michigan linebacker David Ojabo tore his Achilles’ tendon during a pro day showcase for N.F.L. scouts this year. He’s still expected to be a high draft pick, but the situation is obviously tenuous for anyone who gets hurt during the process.

And for Ojabo and other prospects, there’s no going back. Unlike the N.B.A., which gives players who explore the draft the option of returning to college, the N.F.L. is inflexible. If you declare for the draft, that’s the end of your college football career.

And because players can’t enter the draft until they’re three years out of high school, they’re at greater risk of career-ending injuries before they’ve earned any money. No other major professional sport has such a strict rule for entering the league. As the N.F.L. writer Mike Florio argued in 2015, the three-year rule “makes the league complicit in the exploitation of college football players, ensuring that they have no choice but to spend three years playing for (mostly) free.”

In 2003, the former Ohio State star Maurice Clarett tried to challenge this rule in court, arguing that he lost out on millions of dollars because he couldn’t enter the draft until 2005. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled against him in 2004.

But what if everything works out, and you achieve your lifelong dream of playing in the N.F.L.? Even then, your career is largely out of your control. N.F.L. players are many things. But they are also often entirely expendable. The average career lasts about three years, and contracts aren’t always guaranteed — meaning that a player could sign a four-year contract, get dropped from the team after a year and not be paid for the remaining three years of the contract.

N.F.L. teams decide who gets drafted and where they go. Players who could have been successful with one franchise might fail with another and never get another shot. As Kevin Clark, a reporter who covers the N.F.L. for The Ringer, told me, “Geography is destiny in the N.F.L.” Would Patrick Mahomes be a household name if he’d been drafted by the moribund New York Jets? Probably not.

Another dirty secret is that N.F.L. teams aren’t actually all that interested in winning; even bad teams can rake in billions of dollars. “So many of these franchises are treating this as, ‘You know what? We’re gonna make some money,’” Clark told me. “It would surprise fan bases how many teams are not making, in a given year, winning their priority.”

Not this fan. My hometown team, the Cincinnati Bengals, was awful for decades. But they were still profitable (with a stadium paid for mostly by taxpayers), so they had no need to make the kind of dramatic changes that might have made the team good. In fact, teams benefit in some ways by being terrible. The worst team in the N.F.L. generally gets the number-one pick in the following year’s draft. (That’s how the Bengals landed quarterback Joe Burrow in 2020.)

So why do I root for a team that doesn’t care and that seemingly started winning because it was rewarded for not caring? Why, then, should I care? I don’t have a good answer.

And yes, I’m aware that the sport itself, the sport I love, is one in which players, from junior high kids to the pros, are damaging their brains. I am cheering in the stands while they are risking early onset Parkinson’s, dementia, chronic traumatic encephalopathy (C.T.E.) and other neurological illnesses that could make their postfootball lives painful, difficult and sometimes unlivable.

And yet, football is still what I think about in April when other people are headed to baseball games. I watch the draft almost every year, shouting in excitement — similar to the way you might react if you found out that your kid got engaged — when a player from Michigan, my alma mater, gets chosen. It makes me happy, even though I know the game is making many other people miserable.

I am not normally this morally flexible. I have stopped watching television shows that make me feel even remotely icky inside. And I am not typically tolerant of institutions that don’t treat their employees well. I’m not proud of the compromises I make for football, and I’m not sure I understand how I’m able to make them.