Peter King is at the NFL owners meetings tracking down owners and coaches alike to talk football and “all the concussion stuff.” Today MMQB released a short video of Harbaugh and King discussing the future of football, which you can view here, and Harbaugh has a positively Trumpian dialectic style.
If you haven’t read the Washington Post‘s transcript of its editorial board meeting with The Donald, you should. It’s one of the only instances where reporters have pressed Trump with a direct line of inquiry and not fallen for his shenanigans. In response, Trump puts on a performance in bullshit artistry we haven’t seen in a long time. Rather than answer the very straightforward questions he was asked, say, on race, Trump launches into anecdotes of things he’s read or heard, on wholly unrelated topics. When they try to steer the discussion back on the rails, Trump is undeterred. I’m a builder, he says, so racism doesn’t matter if he builds a new Baltimore or something. I don’t even know.
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This is a classic bullshitter’s tact, used by folks who have the social skills and unearned confidence to speak loudly in front of large crowds, but lack the intelligence or curiosity to learn enough to actually say anything of consequence. It’s also used by the smarter ones to pull an end around on a question they simply don’t want to answer. Which brings us back to John Harbaugh and Peter King.
King sticks a microphone in Harbaugh’s face and asks a very Peter King question:
“Do you fear at all for the future of football when you see all the concussion stuff happening now?”
It’s a fair enough question, as we learn more about “all the concussion stuff” and what it does to people who play football for a very long time. This is scary stuff. The answer is even scarier, though, so Harbaugh goes off the rails.
“The concussion stuff, if you look at it historically, the injury issues have been addressed throughout the years. I mean, technology, it’s come a long way. This thing [picking up his iPhone] I learned yesterday, this is, what, 5,000 times more powerful than the computer that sent Neil Armstrong to the moon, right? We’re gonna figure out how to protect our players in an ever better way all the time.”
OK, so that’s not a good answer. There isn’t much evidence that “technology,” for all of Moore’s Law marvelousness, has reduced head trauma in football, or to what extent technology can negate human physiology. It’s like he doesn’t even want to say the word concussion, and when he hears himself regurgitate King’s phrase, he quickly corrects himself to “injury issues”—nice and vague—and then we are quite literally off to the vast nothingness of space. But I know what you’re thinking. Who gives a shit, right? It’s just some worthless coach-speak answer to a worthless question. That’s partly true, but as the interview wound down and he finished marveling at Neil Armstrong’s moon computer, Harbaugh launched into the most well worn of football tropes, hitting all the bullet points there: football is important and its future is bright because high school football turns boys into men, saving single mothers and the country in the process, all points he has previously made in his “Why Football Matters” open letter.
The follow-up question?
“What are you running for?”
King’s response to a meandering, deflective, non-response was praise. Like with Trump and this election season, it is increasingly frustrating to see (mostly) men in positions of power just spew bullshit at us while the likes of Peter King and any number of the debate moderators, cable news hosts, and reporters who have gotten an opportunity to speak with these people treat their questions like free association rather than important inquiries that demand serious thought.
So many reporters and moderators seem content to let Trump hoist himself by his own petard, but he simply doesn’t care. He just keeps on trucking with his bullet points catered to the most base Americans, and it’s been wildly successful for him. The same goes for damn near everyone involved in football. Concussions and player health in general is the topic of the decade. Access to people in power has never been greater. And we have nothing to show for it.
The discussion just looms over everything like a cloud, but never gets addressed. Part of that is the pending lawsuit and settlement, and generally, the NFL has no interest in honestly discussing these issues because the future of the sport does depend on it. Many fans of the game also have no interest in discussing these issues, but many of us do. As someone who loves the sport, just be straight with me. Tell me your honest-to-God plan for how you’re addressing an issue, not CYA sound bytes. You can’t force someone to talk about something they don’t want to, but it sometimes feels like no one is even trying.
