NFL

Ethics Hero: Dallas Cowboys Back-up Quarterback-For-A-Day Jon Kitna

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments
Quarterback Kitna, soon to be risking his brain for his high school.

Quarterback Kitna, soon to be risking his brain for his high school.

The Dallas Cowboys raised eyebrows in the sports world last week by making the desperation move of signing NFL veteran-turned-high school math teacher Jon Kitna, 41, to briefly abandon his retirement to help solve their quarterback crisis against the Philadelphia Eagles today. Since retiring from the Cowboys, Kitna, who played quarterback for 15 seasons with four NFL teams, has been teaching math and coaching football at Lincoln High School in his native Tacoma, Washington. Kitna, who retired after the 2011 season, will earn about $53,000 for the day’s work, which, the Cowboys hope, will consist of sitting on the sidelines as insurance against its replacement for Tony Romo, Kyle Orton, being injured like Romo was last week.

Now Kitna has announced that he will be donating his entire NFL check to the high school.

Yes, it’s true: Kitna is well-set financially, like most former pro athletes of recent vintage and long tenure. He is estimated to have about 12 million dollars as his nest egg. Nevertheless, this is a generous and unexpected act of generosity.

Now let’s all hope he doesn’t have to go onto the field, take a snap, get a concussion, and end up mentally disabled for the rest of his life.

For that is the risk he is being paid to take.

________________________________

Pointer: Daily Caller

Facts and Graphic: Dallas News

Ethics Alarms attempts to give proper attribution and credit to all sources of facts, analysis and other assistance that go into its blog posts. If you are aware of one I missed, or believe your own work or property was used in any way without proper attribution, please contact me, Jack Marshall, at  jamproethics@verizon.net.

Ethics Dunce: Dallas Cowboys Wide Receiver Dez Bryant

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Bryant quits

The NFL appears to be having a collective values breakdown. First the Miami Dolphins lose two players in an alleged bullying scandal, and last Sunday, star Cowboy wide receiver Dez Bryant walked off the field with more than a minute left to play in the game. After Dallas quarterback Tony Romo threw the last of his two second-half interceptions to virtually ensure a humiliating come-back defeat at the hands of the Green Bay Packers, cameras followed Bryant as he left his team for the locker room with 1:21 remaining on the clock. Later, he apologized and explained his actions by tweeting:

“I walked back to the locker room because I was emotional…it had nothing to do with my teammates we had it…We fought and didn’t finish”

Oh. What?

That’s no explanation. To reporters, he said that he didn’t want the cameras catching him crying. On the professionalism scale, this is minus 1000. He’s emotional? So what? Suck it up! He doesn’t like to lose? Who does? He couldn’t take it any more? Tough—he’s paid to take it, and damn well too. Continue reading →

Don’t Blame The Lawyers: The Ethical, Unethical, NFL Settlement

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments
Watch your heads!

Watch your heads!

When is a $765 million dollar law suit settlement “chump change”?  This is when, reading the reactions to the NFL’s announcement last week of its agreement with former players who sued the league over crippling  concussion injuries sustained while playing professional football:

  • It is inadequate when half of that will be ladled out over seventeen years, and all of it will be reduced by the lawyer’s fees, to be determined but unlikely to be less than a third.  That means that each former player (or his heirs and family) will get, at most, $114, 000 or so.
  • It is inadequate when the league paying the damages will split the payment among its 32 franchises, making each responsible for paying $24 million over 20 years, which comes to about $1.2 million a year. Remember that projected NFL revenues this season are $10 billion, and the NFL gets more than $40 billion on top of that through 2022, thanks to media rights.

In other words, chump change.

Or, if you prefer, “I gave my brain, mind and health to the NFL, and all I got was this lousy settlement.” Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: “Johnny Football”—True, But Now What? Maybe Hollywood Had The Solution

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments
You don't know this actress, do you? There's a reason...

You don’t know this actress, do you? There’s a reason…

Texas A&M Aggies quarterback Johnny Manziel, a.k.a “Johnny Football,” ended last year by winning the 2012 Heisman Trophy, the first freshman ever to do so. He has spent the first 8 months of this year showing that he is an immature, arrogant kid with a dangerously inflated ego, with no sense of his obligations as a widely admired elite athlete, and little expertise in how to conduct himself responsibly and ethically.

A brief and incomplete sampling of his exploits:

  • In January, following his team’s  A&M’s Cotton Bowl win over Oklahoma, he visited the Winstar Casino in Oklahoma for some late-night gambling. He tweeted a photo with friends, waving money around. When the photo went viral on the web, sparking criticism, Manziel tweeted, “Nothing illegal about being 18+ in a casino and winning money…KEEP HATING!”
  • In March, Manziel was frustrated after throwing an interception during a spring football scrimmage, so he shoved aside a graduate assistant who happened to be in his way.
  • He was photographed with a fake tattoo of Texas A&M’s archrival Texas Longhorns, infuriating the fanatic fans of the Aggies. Continue reading →

On The NFL Player’s Slur, The MSNBC Journalist’s Lie, Words, Conduct, Reason And Proportion

/ Jack Marshall / 60 Comments
If Riley Cooper were black, of course, then he would be "cool."

If Riley Cooper were black, of course, then he would be “cool.”

There are words, there are thoughts, and there is conduct. Thoughts are not unethical.  Conduct can be unethical. Words can be considered conduct when they are intended to have, or do have, material and measurable direct effects. Verbal abuse is conduct. Using a rude, vulgar or hateful word may not be verbal abuse.

Although the NFL and his team, the Philadelphia Eagles have every right, and some good reasons, to punish, suspend or even terminate Riley Cooper because a video reveals the Eagles player as saying, “I will jump that fence and fight every nigger here!” at a Kenny Chesney concert, I don’t see any conduct there, just words. He did not direct the racial slur at any individual, and there is no evidence that it was intended to harm or intimidate any African-Americans. He did not intend for the outburst to be publicized of communicated to anyone but the friends he said it to. On a pure  just punishment for harm intended or achieved basis, it is ridiculous for Cooper to be facing the loss of millions and his athletic career because he uttered a single racial slur that was captured on a video. It cannot be defended logically or as a reasonable position. Using one racial slur in that setting doesn’t prove that Cooper is a racist. It doesn’t prove hate. Even if it did, hate is not illegal or even unethical until the hater acts on it in an unethical way. And a word is just a word. We don’t, or shouldn’t, fear mere words in a rational American society. We shouldn’t have taboos, or people who “cannnot be named,” like in the Harry Potter books. The ease and certitude with which otherwise intelligent people capable of making judgments involving proportion and common sense blithely go along with the batty idea that uttering a word, only uttering it and nothing more, should result in devastating consequences, is frightening. It is a per se unethical position, because it is unfair, and incompetent, because it is essentially crazy.

Having said that, I can understand why, since so many people are irrational about words, why the NFL or the Philadelphia Eagles, as a business decision, may decide that they don’t want Cooper associated with them any more. That is a rational choice, and may even be the best choice. That is not the same as saying that he deserves that result. If the bulk of NFL fans are fanatically politically correct, then the NFL and its teams cannot afford to ignore that. Sorry Riley. Continue reading →

Not Jackie Robinson, Not Even Shannon Faukner: Lauren Silberman Flunks The Traiblazer Test

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments
"Okay, now I kick this funny-shaped brown thingee where, again?"

“Okay, now I kick this funny-shaped brown thingee where, again?”

Call it the trailblazer’s duty. If your objective is to be a trailblazer and break through the obstacle of prejudice in an elite field, your efforts, even if not successful, had better not make the obstacle greater. The epitome of trailblazing excellence is Jackie Robinson, shattering major league baseball’s apartheid  by simultaneously becoming the game’s first black player in decades, and also one of its greatest players of all time. The bottom of the barrel in the trailblazing pantheon is probably Shannon Faulkner, who waged a high-profile legal battle to become the first female cadet at the Citadel, only to enter the school physically and mentally unprepared for the challenge, resulting in an embarrassing failure and rapid withdrawal.

Lauren Silberman, the first female to try out for the National Football League made Faulkner look good. Continue reading →

Sending in the Kids To Swim With “Jaws”: Roger Goodell, Mayor of Amity

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Jaws-boy

One of the most disturbing moments in “Jaws,” at least for me, is the scene where the mayor of Amity island, whom we know is  in possession of strong evidence that a Great White shark is cruising the waters of his town’s beaches looking for snacks, persuades an elderly couple to take their grandchildren into the surf to show everyone else on the beach that the water is safe. The scene leapt immediately to mind yesterday morning, when NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, in a Super Bowl Sunday interview on “Face the Nation,” emphatically told CBS’s Bob Shieffer that unlike President Obama, he would unhesitatingly allow his son to play football. I’m sure he would, too. After all, Mayor Larry Vaughn (Murray Hamilton) sent his own kids into the Amity surf.

Like his role model, Mayor Vaughn, Goodell has a terrible problem, as well as a conflict of interest. He is paid to do what is in the best interests of the National Football League, and admitting that the game the league plays and the way it play it kills or mains a significant number of its players would be seen by his employers as a breach of duty. So despite mounting evidence that every single NFL player is putting his brain, health, and life at grave risk by allowing the relentless head trauma that is an unavoidable part of the game, Goodell feels he must claim otherwise, which, assuming he is basically a good man (I was never sure about Larry Vaughn), means he must convince himself that what he says is true. This led Goodell to make a series of statements yesterday that will haunt him some day as much as Mayor Vaughn’s infamous interview quote on the day the little Kintner boy (above) became chum: “I’m pleased and happy to repeat the news that we have, in fact, caught and killed a large predator that supposedly injured some bathers. But, as you see, it’s a beautiful day, the beaches are open and people are having a wonderful time. Amity, as you know, means friendship.” Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: The Murderer On The Sidelines

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments
Support the man, not the drunk-driving killer, who also happened to BE the man. Right?

Support the man, not the drunk-driving killer, who also happened to BE the man. Right?

Eight days after he was locked up for manslaughter as a result of being drunk at the wheel in a car accident that took the life of a team mate, Dallas Cowboys player Josh Brent was allowed on the sidelines with his team during its game against the Philadelphia Eagles.  Brent’s teammates had requested that he be present to show their support, and apparently this had the blessing of Jerry Brown’s mother, whose deceased son was the victim in the crash.

ESPN commentator Dan Graziano took to his keyboard to pronounce the Cowboys public embrace of a player charged with killing someone while driving drunk misguided and wrong: Continue reading →

The Replacement Ref and the Conflicted Debate Moderator: How We Become Ethically Stupid

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Note to NFL: Don’t hire Gwen Ifill as a replacement referee.

Poor Brian Stropolo was only behaving like a respected national journalist on the political scene; why didn’t it work?

Stropolo, on the crew of NFL replacement refs (that’s scab refs, if you belong to the NFL refs union, which is currecly locked out) was assigned to yesterday’s New Orleans Saints-Carolina game. He was suddenly pulled from the assignment by the league on  Sunday morning, when it came to the NFL’s attention that he had represented himself on his Facebook page as an enthusiastic Saints fan, even appearing on his page in a Saints uniform.

Imagine if Stropolo had made a controversial game-changing call that handed the game to his beloved Saints!  But then, it was up to Stropolo and the league  to imagine it long before any inappropriate game assignment was made. For Stropolo not to notify the league of his web-wide admission of pro-Saints bias when he was assigned to referee a Saints game shows a complete absence of ethics training, instincts and sensitivity. How could this not occur to him? How could the NFL not have a vetting process for refs that would discover team allegiances? Where is the Code of Conduct to remind clueless referees about the “appearance of impropriety,”and the importance of preserving the NFL’s integrity by avoiding any suspicion that referees are tilting games in the direction of teams they root for in their off days? Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Sportswriter Jason Reid

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

I really don’t care how bad you feel, Jason.

In designating national sportswriter Jason Reid an Ethics Dunce because of his sensitive, thoughtful, brave but ultimately unethical column this morning, I don’t intend to suggest that his ethical failing is unusual, or noteworthy for any reason other than the fact that it is universal.

Sometimes we are all like Jason Reid, I think. We all engage in conduct that we suspect is wrong, but we enjoy it. Gradually, truth breaks through our denial and we cannot avoid the conclusion that the conduct is wrong; still, despite the fact that we do not believe human beings should willfully do wrong, we persist in the conduct.

Because we enjoy it.

Reid’s column is titled “Seay’s Death Forces Uncomfortable Questions For Football Fans,” referring to the recent suicide death of former NFL star Junior Seau, the second suicide of a former pro football star in recent weeks. The uncomfortable question is the same one I raised on Ethics Alarms in November of 2009, which tells you how many NFL fans read ethics blogs. I wrote then,

“Simply put, it is wrong to pay money to persuade people to permanently damage themselves for our entertainment. No fight fan can watch Muhammad Ali today, recalling his nimble wit and amusing patter, and not feel complicity in his current near-mute condition, the result of being induced to box after his skills were eroded by time. When we know, and players know, that playing football in the NFL is going to lead to premature dementia for a significant number of players who will accept the risk if the money is right, can we ethically continue to provide that money?”

Sportswriters don’t read ethics blogs either, so in May of 2012, Reid has decided that this and related questions need asking. So he writes.. Continue reading →