When Doug Flutie addressed the campus on Tuesday night as part of Tufts' Lecture Series, he discussed several of his experiences as a quarterback in the Canadian Football League. One of them in particular stands out. He talked about a play in which he tried to twist out of the grasp of an opposing defensive end, spun around to his blind side and turned directly into a brutal helmet-to-helmet hit laid on him by another defender that split his own helmet in two.
Who knows what that hit might have cost him.
Over the course of the past two summers, sports headlines were dominated by opinions on where Brett Favre would end up, if he would stay retired, if he was the biggest jackass the world had ever seen, etc. I, like most people, had conflicting views on the matter, although mine didn't involve charges of arrogance or amorality.
One part of me said, "Well, he's almost 40 now, so he should be entitled to spend his remaining 15 years of life doing whatever he damn well pleases." The other part of me thought he should be spending those 15 years with his wife and daughters.
Although there are a number of divergent opinions, many sources say that the average life expectancy of an NFL quarterback is 55 years, about 20 years below the American average. A research finding often cited by NFL analysts shows that every time a quarterback takes a sack, his life expectancy decreases by about a month. The fact that David Carr has not yet passed away makes me question the medical validity of that discovery, but it is certainly a frightening notion nonetheless.
Quarterbacks, though, are not the only football players whose livelihood doubles as a slow form of suicide. In fact, while the suggestion that every sack takes a month off of a quarterback's life gives us a concrete and possibly sadistic way to determine how much longer he has to live, no reports suggest that their 55-year expected life span is different from players at any other position.
These statistics are by no means 100-percent reliable. Even if they were, I'm not sure how many players would trade in their careers and the opportunity to fulfill their childhood dreams for the chance to live an extra 20 years or so. That does not mean, though, that the NFL should not do everything in its power to try to lengthen the lives of its players or, at the very least, decrease the intense and even crippling pain that those players are often subjected to. After all, it's the players that make the NFL a $7 billion industry.
But this is where the NFL comes up short. In the past several years, its post-career medical plan has been disregarded as woefully inadequate by a whole host of retired players, particularly those that played in earlier decades and who weren't exactly making an average base salary of $990,000. And although current players may be better able to pay for their own health care when they hang up their cleats than their elder peers, they will still receive about the same amount of help from the NFL: in other words, no help at all.
The NFL, for its part, continues to insist upon the generosity of its program. And it might be easier to side with the league if only one or two players were lobbying for increased assistance. But when the matter comes before Congress, and when almost every retired player derides the NFL's claims that its efforts are more than sufficient, it becomes obvious that a serious problem exists. It seems that the NFL milks its players for all they're worth before indifferently casting them into a painful retirement. And whether those players live to be 45 or 105, that's just wrong.
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Rory Parks is a senior majoring in international relations and Spanish. He can be reached at Rory.Parks@tufts.edu.
